But if you want to argue that copyright is counterproductive, I completely agree. That's an argument for reducing or eliminating it across the board, fairly, for everyone; it's not an argument for giving a free pass to AI training while still enforcing it on everyone else.
Just because their lobbies tend to push the boundary of copyright into the absurd doesn't mean these industries aren't worth saving. There should be actually respectful lawmakers who seek for a balance of public and commercial interests.
Citation needed. There are many ways to make money from producing content other than restricting how copies of it can be distributed. The owner should be able to choose copyright as a means of control, but that doesn't mean nobody would create any content at all without copyright as a means of control.
As it is now, especially in the creative fields (which I am most knowledgeable about), the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of creation, which you'd have to be pretty daft to deny.
Slapping 3 lines in LICENSE.TXT doesn’t override the Berne convention.
that's not the argument. The fact that there currently are restrictions on producing derivative works is the problem. You cannot produce a star wars story, without getting consent from disney. You cannot write a harry potter story, without consent from Rowling.
There's actually a huge and thriving community of people publishing derivative works, in a not-for-profit basis, on Archive of Our Own. (Among other places.)
Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things. That's why they are allowed by the copyright owners to do what they're doing--because it's not commercial. Try to actually sell a derivative work of something you don't own the copyright for and see how fast the big media companies come after you. You acknowledge that when you say there are "restrictions" (an understatement if I ever saw one) on profiting from other people's work (where "other people" here means the media companies, not the people who actually created the work).
It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen.
Again, not true. One of the most famous examples is likely Naomi Novik, who is a bestselling author, in addition to a prolific producer of derivative works published on AO3. Many other commercially successful authors publish derivative works on this platform as well.
> It is true that without our current copyright regime, the "industries" that produce Star Wars, Disney, etc. products would not exist in their current form. But does that mean works like those would not have been created? Does it mean we would have less of them? I strongly doubt it. What it would mean is that more of the profits from those works would go to the actual creative people instead of middlemen.
Speculate all you want about an alternative system, but you really don't know what would have happened, or what would happen moving forward.
Sorry, I meant they're not making a living at creating derivative works of copyrighted content. They can't, for the reasons you give. Nor can other people make a living creating derivative works of their commercially published work. That is an obvious barrier to creation.
No, the current system has allowed for an incredible flourishing of middlemen who don't create anything themselves but coerce creative people into agreements that give the middlemen virtually all the profits.
This is a false dichotomy. It's not "free speech" to copy someone else's video game and then sell it for your own profit. By "copy", in the old days that was literally copying the distribution CDs and providing a cracked keycode (it was not even a question of trademarks being close or what not. It's literally people taking the stuff, duplicating it, and selling it for their own profit. Eastern European mafia were greatly financed by this and ran this type of operation at industrial scale).
> Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal.
Yeah, that's the point. Without that, everything is bootlegged. Imagine video games - they get bootlegged. DVDs, all bootlegged. Clothing bootlegged. Whatever your business is - bootlegged. Zero copyright is not a utopia of free speech, it is people ripping everyone else off. Per lived experience, I'm just saying the other extreme is not a utopia.
Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences.
"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce?
How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect?
A modern equivalent would be famous YouTubers who all they do all day is "watch" other people's hard earned videos. The super lazy ones will not direct people to the original, don't provide meaningful commentary, just consumes the video as 'content' to feed their own audience and provides no value to the original creator. The position to kill copyright entirely would amplify this "just bypass the original source" to lower value of the original creator to zero.
Do you think the vast "amount of content we produce" is actually propped up by copyright? Have you ever heard of someone who started their career on YouTube due to copyright? On the contrary, how often have you heard of people stopping their YouTube career due to copyright, or explicitly limiting the content they create? I have only heard of cases of the latter. In fact, the latter partially happened to me.
> How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect?
You are making an assumption that people should reap (monetary) benefits for creating things. What you are ignoring is that the world where digital copies are effectively free is also the world where original works are insanely cheap as well. In this world, people create regardless of monetary gain.
To make this point: how much money did you make from this comment that you posted? It's covered by copyright, so surely you would not have created it if not for your own benefit.
Yes, and better quality content too as it doesn't need to be compromised as much to allow for commercial exploitation in the current model.
But these are also not the only ways to fund content. Patronage in particular does not need to be restricted to singular rich patrons but can be extended to any group of people that decide to come together to make something exist. This does already happen to some extend (e.g. Kickstarter) but is actually hobbled by copyright where the norm is that the creator retains all rights while individual contributors to the funding are restricted in how they are allowed to share the creation they helped realize.
> How in the world where digital copies are effectively free to copy and infinitum would a creator reap any benefits from that network effect?
By having fans willing to pay him to create new content.
- Big Corps that buy IP
- Patent Trolls
- Companies that fuck over artists
Of course, money is a huge motivator, but so is self-expression.