Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
grapheneos.social
grapheneos.social
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
"We" is doing a lot of work here. I realize that it's basically impossible for an entire population to have coherent motivations, but I support copyright because I think artists have the right to control what happens with their work and to sell it if they can. I believe that this right extends, like all rights, until the end of the author's life. I don't really care one bit about encouraging the production of new works.
which is too long, and also too short - what about authors who wrote finished their book on their deathbed? Then their rights are shorter than someone young - an unfair discrimination.
That's why age should be irrelevant. Copyright is useful, and should be granted. However, current copyright grants last far too long - age plus some years beyond. Not to mention corporations lobbying to increase the length right as some copyrights for some works are about to enter public domain.
Therefore, copyright should be granted for a single period and end - like patents. 20 years seems to be a good middle ground, but i could hear arguments for slightly longer or shorter.
I suggest to rather look at it under the angle whether estates should be able to inherit author’s identity (or some of it), to continue the will.
Which includes giving creators royalty rights that can be passed on to their heirs, so the elder author can finish their manuscript on their deathbed as a gift to their family.
NEVER have I argued for life+70 and I never will.
I know a few great works were published posthumously, but most of these were because somebody thought it was really important to share, not because it was a golden goose they wanted to start... milking.
And again, to be clear, since apparently people think I’m defending life+70. I am abso-fucking-lutely not.
I want 14+14 or raw 28 back.
Edit: oh apparently I do, thanks Kagi Assistant.
Otis Redding Died in a plane crash literally 3 days after recording a famous track and his family earned a LOT after his passing.
So, you could keep it to get your full X years (I like 20), or lease/sell and the work would enter the public domain sooner.
Anything below 5-10 years and you have literal starving authors. Anything less than 5 and you may as well abolish it altogether.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
the point of view was that they already aren't.
In what way is the system as it exists currently failing to encourage the creation of new works?
My point is that it doesn't need to do that. Copyright could still encourage creation of new works with a much shorter duration, without the downside of locking our culture up in monopolies for life + 70.
You could equally solve the issue by providing provisions for archival. Or a provision that requires a work to be freely available for sale.
The creator having a monopoly on the work seems to me to encourage the creation and sharing of work as intended.
I wouldn't say we have more "traditional" art that an author spends time creating with the vision of selling copies for years to come, than we did when copyright terms were shorter.
Is there a lot of fan art, yes, there's also massive amounts of original works as well. There is no lack of either.
Also, yes legislative bodies. But in eg USA that means a corp like Disney pays to draft the law and pays legislators to vote for it.
Abolishing the copyright or not is not that important if nothing is done in front of that to guarantee that every single human are granted unconditional access to decent life conditions.
I'd love to see it brought back down to that again.
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
inheritance has nothing to do with copyright. Financial assets are not monopolies. Copyright is only a valuable asset because of the granted monopoly on copying/distribution.
Therefore, to reduce the value copyright has (as it currently does seem to have too much), reducing the granted terms should be sufficient. Like patents, a good 20 years seems like a sufficiently long time to recover cost of production, while letting people who are currently alive to produce derivatives of it afterwards.
If I spend $20m on building a house or creating a computer game, why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not? I would have a monopoly on this specific building and on this specific creative work, but anyone is free to build/create anything else.
If J. Rowling created Harry Potter universe, why her family can't own it indefinitely? We somehow accept this notion for other assets, but treat copyright differently.
p.s. creative work is more valuable as it has something that money can't buy (authenticity, taste, sincerity, etc)
Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.
They do, some build to rent indefinitely or sell to other who rent out the property.
But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore?
For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.
Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright.
If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.
You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers.
Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.
What we need is a system that subsidizes the value created by the inventor, without any restrictions for the rest of society. Without any restrictions will allow every innovation to maximize the value that it is able to create. Currently an innovation can be hampered because the person who created that innovation is not the one best able to utilize that innovation.
One way to accomplish this is through an Innovation Prize Model while Patents and Copyrights be abolished. The way it would work is that once you've come up with some innovation, you have a choice. You can either keep it secret, or you can reveal the secret. If you reveal the secret, the government could grant you a 30 year bond based on the value of this innovation. The bond will have a minimum value, and if it's discovered within the 30 year window that the innovation is more valuable than previously suspected, value will be added to that bond. You would then have an option, to keep the bond for the 30 years, or you could sell a portion of this bond to others to instantly get cash. There could be a market for these that made it easy to trade and discover expected values.
It's clear from the dead-weight loss portion that overall value will be much higher than the existing scenario, so this payment will be much higher than any profits that copyright holders currently accrue.
The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.
The negative economic effects of monopolies stem from a lack of competition leading to insufficient supply, but there's no lack of competition or insufficient supply of copyrighted works. Even if copyright were indefinite like other property rights, it wouldn't stymie the supply of new works, but rather expand investment due to raising the future expected profit.
they are not fungible, unlike houses.
Also, if you could copy a house like you could copy digital goods (i would download a car), i am also going to claim that the "monopoly" on the house must also be shortened.
You would download a house or a car, but the people making new houses or cars would only offer them for download if they can charge enough for each copy to make back their original investment. So houses and cars could be expected to cost about as much as a movie ticket or book or game. That those are currently much cheaper is also an indication that competition is successfully working to drive down prices close to the cost of production.
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
I think this is an inversion of cause and effect.
See insulin prices difference in europe vs US
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
[1] https://www.swissmedic.ch/swissmedic/de/home/humanarzneimitt...
Of course we do. A lot of the foundational research happens at universities, funded with taxpayer money in the form of research grants.
> They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system.
Only partially. The pharma companies roughly know how much it cost them to get the compound past all the trial stages and how many compounds failed along the path. The usual method is that the rich nations pay for R&D amortization and poor countries pay at-cost for manufacture.
I wouldn't have much of a problem if China and India would just steal our stuff to benefit their own population - given the widespread poverty there, that's development aid.
But where I draw the line is when China and India undermine our own markets with copycats.
In China, copying a Thing is seen completely different (well, at least as far as I know, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt) - an appreciation that the original inventor of the Thing did something good. Getting copied is a symbol of honor.
Both worldviews are completely valid, but it's obvious IMHO that these two views cannot coexist in one single global capitalist economy framework.
Seems like we are coming up on a limit where if they put that much more money into R&D + marketing, then won't be able to afford the product anyway.
So this counterpoint is practically moot for all but the most wealthy people.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
I seem to remember a guy living in a cabin, writing manifestos, and mailing bombs to tech people and academics.
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Once we've set ourselves up as judge; jury; and executioner, the unintended consequences abound.
I think most people are in support of some financial incentives via protection, but 70 years is just insane.
It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.
A kid growing up obsessed with a franchise is unlikely to ever be permitted to create and sell derivative works within their lifetime.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h...
> There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
> Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."
We're there already, considering the cost of actually enforcing your rights, but it would be bizarre to codify that into law.
Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.
That's an americocentric view. Copyrights are shorter around the world. In fact, iirc, US has some of the longest ones.
Might want to check your facts mate.
However, I stand corrected because I was under impression they expired after 50 years in Europe, or less. Turns out the movies I had in mind were intentionally made available to public but this did not come as a result of copyright expiration.
My bad.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
This is madness.
> With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
Even then - who would buy it if they could just wait two years and read it for much less?
Personally, I'd still prefer a term of 10 years since it is psychologically more appealing and allows for the rarer cases where a work becomes popular well after its release. It would also be a better fit for music so it would avoid the complication of having different rules for different media types.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984: because the copyright was enforced to ensure the work was not altered. This is ++good.
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to originator/owner agency. I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this in this day and age ... information does want to be free, after all.
A public fingerprinting/attestation service would separate the two functions we care about: 1) letting creators monetise and control commercial exploitation for a limited time, and 2) giving everyone a reliable way to verify that a given copy matches a claimed original.
The second does not require a multi-generational monopoly, and I am not advocating for that. I do however believe that some social mechanism for ensuring the materials I care about land on my desk un-altered, is quite important.
I, like you, through for a while that length was the problem, now I've poked around enough and known about enough actual examples where shorter length wouldn't have prevented the problems that happens with copyright. The content Sony had repeatedly removed from people's libraries was well within copyright term, shorter copyright wouldn't have saved it. What would have saved it is copyright scope that never extended to controlling access to copies already sold
But copyright covers a lot more than just the right to produce copies of a specific work. The monopoly on derivative works serves the public significantly less. IMO, this one should taper off pretty rapidly. Maybe 20 years as is, then another 20 where you lose the ability decide who can or can't use your work, but they still owe you royalties.
Then there's the clusterfuck that is software. With how rapidly the world around software changes, its protections should be substantially shorter. For derivative works of source code, I'd pitch skipping the complete monopoly step entirely. You get a decade or two where people using your software owe you royalties unless you say otherwise, then nothing.
And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.
Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.
Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.
Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
What small scale author receives license payments for anything they have authored from bug tech?
To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument.
The correct response to that is to fix the asymmetry, not blow the rights up entirely.
Quoth the OP:
> It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies.
Post Citizens United, you could say the same thing about free speech. Does the OP want to abolish that, too?
The fact that the wealthy (corporations and individuals), with massive teams of lawyers and propagandists, can often better take advantage of the rights I also enjoy is not a compelling reason for abolishing my rights.
Also it's big tech (MS, Amazon) that is against this more than anyone.
That said let's cut copyright back to 28 years.
While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game.
While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts.
While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents.
Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour?
I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
Maybe a while ago it was. It no longer accepts new papers since 2020 and there are much better alternatives available are this point (STC Nexus)
But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
One additional point, in response to your comment: public performance licences are for events or venues, not DJs.
So if you are DJing in club, you are covered. Indeed, there are even specific technologies that log what DJs are playing, built into DJ hardware, and report back to collective licensing bodies so that the rights holders in the tracks played and mixed are properly compensated.
However, my point was less about the intricacies of licensing, and more about the ability to play the music to people under a "blanket" licence. There is no equivalent licensing framework for releasing remixes as recordings.
You have no idea what you are talking about. If something’s technically possible, it doesn’t mean that it is possible in reality or that people haven’t tried what you propose.
But I’ll try to answer what I think you’re asking.
YouTube is a directly negotiated licence - ie it doesn’t fall under any of the statutory blankets, and is licensed territory by territory. Most rights holders are able to license for multiplied territories and often globally. But if soemthing was not licensed for a particular territory in which you were based you would not be able to watch the music video.
The recording and publishing need to be separately licensed by the record label and publisher(s), with the performance and mechanicals handled differently, and potentially flowing via a CMO or mechanical licensing society. The video will be provided by the record label - and they generally own the copyright in the video as a work for hire. If there are sample in the recording they will have been cleared by the label for both the recording and publishing. If there’s an interpolation of a song that will be negotiated and licensed with the publisher(s) or writers as a derivative work.
YouTube uses Content ID to identify the works being exploited, and uses that to account to rights holders.
Is that what you were asking?
I want dozens of them. And then I can play the one with the best reviews.
Of course, without copyright meaning that people have to pay for the games, the chances of those games being made is pretty slim.
The AI companies are the ones that want copyright gone.
It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us.
They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you.
At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.
See for example this article [1]
> unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.
> it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
>Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
How do you account for the industrial revolution under this framing, or the global dominance of the British Empire?
Its really hard to argue that 1710 onwards marked the downfall of Britain, given everything that happened in history after that.
In the context of copyright we are talking about books in that century. Shakespeare predates copyright. Though, we are not only talking fiction, but also non-fiction. It's no coincidence that British inventors of that time were on to wealthy side, for the poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
If the creation of copyright was so harmful to the nation, why was there no harm?
> poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
Thus the rise of circulating libraries in the 18th century, and the public (lending) library system in the 19th century. Especially after the establishment of mandatory education for children.
Most of the things that were invented after 1710 were pretty trivial. Things like the spinning jenny, the steam engine, water powered weaving, wrought iron, steam locomotion, the electric telegraph, the lightbulb, waterproof fabric, the hydraulic press, the telephone. Imagine what else could have been achieved if copyright didn't incentivise authors and publishers to disseminate knowledge by allowing them to sell books, magazines and news sheets.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
All these projects only took off because people were forced to contribute back. Want an example? Look at the state of opensource boot firmware on x86. The "open source" version heavily relies on proprietary firmware blobs and the only actual open source alternative had been heavily ridiculed for pursuing that goal and trading basically any significant compatibility for it.
Copyleft licenses make software basically self-regulating utilities. You can draw power from the grid and in return help finance it for everyone else, or you could build your own power plants.
You can draw excellent pre-made software and tooling from copylefted repositories and contribute back, helping to make the software even better for everyone else, or you could build all of it yourself. Or, you could put in the work to replace all major copyleft software with non-copyleft versions, eventually gaining the ability to pull up the ladder behind you.
Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
It's not their responsibility. For that part of the law, you need to get your lawyer involved. And your lawyer will probably tell you not to waste your money, because the way the DMCA was written makes it practically impossible to find enough proof to actually win.
I don't think the "internet is a series of pipes" politicians could've foreseen Youtube or TikTok, but had I believed that the authors of early internet legislation had that foresight, I would've accused the law of being intentionally written to lead to these implementations.
The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind.
What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.
What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations.
Did copyright helped against AI? Nope.
If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience.
Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
That's an argument for scrapping all laws because the mechanics of administrating them are unequal.
I'd prefer there to focus on making access to the law more equitable rather than simply scrapping legal protections.
There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
That's an argument for no laws at all.
There are murders so why make it illegal.....
The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space for a workable business model by limiting piracy.
I take your point there are other models - such as subscription - however not everyone is Charles Dickens and can turn out chapter by chapter on demand, and it those don't work for every genre.
> is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
Is is? Does it really matter I can't copy Disney films or books? Are we so lacking in creativity that it's not possible to create novel stories or characters?
I think too often IP and copyright are confused. If somebody had the rights to the wheel in perpetuity that's bad for innovation, but somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
The downsides of murder clearly outweigh the upsides. The fact that we're debating here shows that's not the case for copyright.
> ...somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
People want to adapt that mouse into their own works, as they have done with stories since stories started being told. They do so even if they know they're breaking the law. That alone should be reason to reconsider copyright.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and reusing facets of modern stories isn't somehow less creative than reusing old stories or reusing lived experiences. You can take the general story beats of a popular work, strip out all copyrightable elements, and end up with something wholly derivative. You can also build on a known work and end up with something that's fresh, creative, maybe something that engages readers/watchers/listeners of the base work in a way that nothing fully original could. Take Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; it clearly reuses another work's characters and setting, but it would be worse off without it.
The world Harry Potter universe clearly borrows heavily on past literature - whether that be tales of goblins and wizards or tales of boarding school.
So much so ( and the fact that she is very rich ) she has been sued multiple times for plagiarism - all of them failed.
Is it really beyond the wit of man to come up with something similarly new?
In terms of fan fiction - is it ok to do one, and promote it on the internet, that has incest themes or paedophilia? These potentially reflect back on the original - and surely the creator should have control here.
There is always the option of coming to an agreement with the original author - that's how films get made - but frankly there is an almost infinite creative space - I don't see why people's lack of creativity needs to be promoted above the rights of an existing creator.`
Note in the example you quote - JK Rowling has allowed the non-commercial publishing of that and other fan fiction - just blocked independent commercial exploitation. So in the case you made the existence of copyright didn't stop Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
What's stopping people from doing that now? The moment you sell something of any interest, you can be sure to find a copy of it free on the internet somewhere.
That's the key difference.
The fact that it's illegal limits large scale commercial exploitation, leaving enough room for legitimate distribution that pays the author.
With no copyright whatsoever, there would be a well-organized company with a better marketing department selling their version of your work, taking all the profit, and making it impossible to actually sell it yourself.
That's exactly what the AI companies are doing right now. Except they're not even selling your work in any kind of recognisable form.
We are too much used to copyright that fail to see how we would be better without.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
Software doesn't need any protection. People want protection.
Correct, people want protection for the hard labour they put into doing something good (writing software) for the world, and to not have it co-opted for individual profit over communal profit.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
Just because you choose copyleft (even weak copyleft like MPLv2) doesn't mean your project will succeed or be more popular. A lot of people (and especially a lot of companies) do prefer permissive over copyleft, and that's because they can built something proprietary on top, without being forced to give back. That's why they're ultra billionaire rich, and in comparison you're poor.
Software often wins because it's better. Copyleft favours the collective good, permissive favours the individual greed. In any case, all of these things require copyright law.
I like how you so easily dismiss my opinion by saying "it's probably because you suck" :-).
For my library, people explicitly complained about copyleft, saying "it comes with strings attached". They were pushing for permissive because it meant they could fork it for their proprietary startups.
For the other example that you conveniently ignored (Ardupilot vs PX4), it's also very clear that many companies choose PX4 because of the licence. I have heard a lot of "if you go for Ardupilot it's risky because GPLv3", and believe it or not, it has an impact on people's decision long before they can say whether PX4 or Ardupilot is better (spoiler: they are roughly equivalent).
> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law
I was merely asking them to elaborate on that, because IMHO, copyright law doesn't protect copyleft licences much (I mentioned people going for or rewriting permissive alternatives, which is now a whole lot easier with LLMs), and copyright is not protecting permissive licences at all.
I have been in companies that distributed hundreds of copyleft and permissive binaries without mentioning them. Copyright says that "in theory, it was illegal". In practice, nobody cares.
I see value in open source, but I don't think that copyright is the only thing protecting it.
That doesn't stop piracy at all so I think copyright is what prevents proliferation of piracy not secrecy.
> GrapheneOS is permissively licensed and is usable for building devices with an immutable root of trust. GPLv3 is deliberately incompatible with these kinds of locked down devices, unlike GPLv2 code such as the Linux kernel. This means GrapheneOS can't include GPLv3 code without forbidding use cases we want to support. GPLv3 is no problem for our own usage, but we don't want to forbid using GrapheneOS as a replacement for the Android Open Source Project in locked down devices.
They're not against GPLv3 and, but they explain why it's not suited for a project like GrapheneOS.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=In%20some%20cases,locked%...
We use GPLv2 licensing for substantial portions of our code beyond our Linux kernel changes. Vanadium is licensed as GPLv2. As long as copyright exists then there's a place for copyleft to counter it.
> probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors
That's a strange thing to claim about Proton and Cape. Those are the only companies we're aware of sending us any substantial monetary donations in the past couple years. It has several $10k donations from Proton and maybe around 10x that for Cape which sells phones with GrapheneOS for a $50 fee.
We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
> copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all
What does it protect it from? GPL is widely violated with minimal consequences. The main impact is that a lot of Android OEMs and similar companies release Linux kernel drivers as open source while the firmware and userspace drivers are closed source.
> Proprietary software can be kept secret
The source code can be kept secret but not the code running on the device. That can be reverse engineered and forked. If copyright was abolished, it would be legal to fork closed source software. That's becoming far easier to do from a technical perspective.
Where are the details about any arrangements with the Motorola partnership?
If you made a strong public commitment to making sure everything in GrapheneOS was strong copyleft, would they still partner with you?
(FWIW, I think it's great what you're doing with the project, but I want to see the work made indelible, and I personally believe copyleft would help with that, otherwise some big vendor can have their proprietary fork and us users lose out.)
From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)
I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.
I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
On the other hand, Disney's success is largely owed to public domain adaptations, and for a century, it did its best to shrink the public domain and expand copyright.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-histor...
They may have ignored patents too, but they build their work on copyright infringement.
Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.
Was it is a good thing and it was created by ignoring copyrights and therefore we shouldn't protect copyrights as an absolute because other good things can be created out of it, or is it a bad thing and is using that copyright to restrict others.
You can't have it both ways. My point was just that defense of Hollywood is a terrible example.
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the ML government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
s/ancap/marxist leninist/
>AnCap govenment
what?
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
They are a mixed economy overall, but the medical side of things is directly state owned or state funded.
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
That didn't happen overnight and was not done out of an immediate law change.
ps - If you're not aware that the offshoring was a legal change, you might want to read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_the_Unit...
Are you arguing that a lesser evil (compared to the evil of offshoring) is not evil? Is offshoring supposed to be relevant here? Why bring this up?
Any downsides?
It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.
It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
Why should authors be granted vastly larger IP protections than inventors?
Do movie companies or authors choose to make stuff because they'll be able to pick up more revenue 25 or 50 years from now? Seems unlikely. Both indiviudals and corporations are typically focused on the immediate future.
30 years doesn't seem very objectionable to me. That's about what it was in the US in the 1800's. From an author's PoV - yes, there probably are niches where an optimist could figure "I'll write one each year. Sales of each will be low - but if I can work up to having 30 of 'em in copyright, then the total royalties will let me live comfortably." And your "immediate future" argument seems to contradict how many people plan their careers and save for retirement.
Whereas that orphaned work you have never heard of could find a new audience.
I've considered artists lifetime or 20 years whichever is longer too.
A book which is long out of print, with ambiguous copyright status is.
The root problem is inequality. Copyright makes sense to allow authors to profit from their work. But it was warped to give more power to big corporations that own now works for more than a century. Everybody that was alive when some works were produced will be dead by the time that they are free.
LLMs shows what happens when you remove copyright. Websites are starving for visitors as LLMs copy/paste their contents and charge for it without giving anything back.
Split monopolies, improve working class conditions, and get politicians that work for - the now powerful - working class. Copyright can be fixed, but not until power is removed from the few and given back to the many.
I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
My observation is the opposite. Copyright was never as popular as it is now in the public discourse I have seen.
Now that the unpopular companies are against copyright, it is useful and more popular. (at least as long as the context is those companies)
(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.
(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.
(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.
If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.
Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.
It's a monopolistic practice because it essentially enforces that only a certain party might use intellectual property, even though you can't own a thought.
The only flaky part of the argument is that it is abused by wealthy, but when you look at the rate of patents corporations put out every day, the disproportionate copyright enforcements and the fact that these corporation lobby and historically have lobbied for stronger IP protection laws, you would agree.
Instead, shorten the length to 25 years or so. We simply need copyright to not be extreme. And zero years is still extreme.
Very well aligned with my beliefs not to mention it's one of if not the most private OS.
I think what doesn't work is a massive, blanket term applied across all works. The situation we have currently is a handful of extremely valuable works which get milked for decades and decades, and huge bulk of material which is left to rot into obscurity because it is untouchable under current copyright law.
I have experience of this with a project I run collating historic material on climbing and mountaineering: pre-internet a lot of the discourse happened in magazines, and this discourse is generally pretty hard to get your hands on. You need to track down physical copies of obscures mags that have been mouldering away in someone's attic for the last 40 years. If you talk to the authors of the content in these magazines, none of them are bothered about trying to make money of 500 words of copy they wrote 40 years ago, but because of the current massive copyright terms this stuff will not become public domain for 80-90 years in many cases, by which time I am sure finding physical copies of this material will be very difficult.
I would like to see a much more limited term by default (20 years from publication perhaps?) which still gives an author plenty of time to capitalise on their work. I think it should then be possible to renew your copyright claim (every 10 years say?) but at an increasingly high cost. £250 the first time, £500 second time, £1000 third time etc. This would mean the bulk of material would fall out of copyright on a much shorter timescale, while if you happen to have made something popular and you want to keep benefiting then you can up to a point.
All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.
Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.
So they silently also did the same thing.
With that, copyright in training went to shit.
Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
I'd never expected to see commercial entities with a lot of money and political/military connections depending on the weakening of copyright for survival.
For now, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
The "Abolish copyright!" and "Abolish intellectual property!" memes are quite old themselves. But those repeating them never explain how the world would work without copyrights. The meme has been repeated endlessly for the last thirty years but I haven't seen anyone present a vision for how things would work without copyrights; maybe I missed it
As it happens, we know how things would work without software copyright. We only have to look at hobbyist programming in the 1970's
For example, in a world without copyright law it's possible that
There would be no more Microsoft Windows or MacOS. Anyone could copy that software without risk of being sued
There would be no more enforceable "copyleft" licenses, e.g., GNU licenses. Online debates about open source software licenses and public domain software, e.g., SQLite, djb, would be pointless. "Your" software is now everyone's software and vice versa
There would be no more enforceable "website terms of service" because "your" website is now everyone's website and vice versa. Anyone can copy anything
Beyond software copyright, consider "your" submissions to www sites
"Your content" would now be everyone's content and vice versa. Anyone could copy anyone else's work without permission, including "big corporations"
For example, in the Mastodon terms of service, users grant the Mastodon GmbH company a license to use their content. Without copyright law, this license would not be necessary
https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/terms_of_service
But it would not be necessary for "big corporations" to obtain a license from users either
NB. The meme I'm referring to is not "modify copyright". It is "_abolish_ copyright". Quite a difference
In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.
I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.
This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication?
Or because I refuse to publish, but the publishers have a copy - I should lose the right to control my own work and the copyright falls and the publisher can just publish freely?
Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?
So in your hypothetical: you write the book and have a change of heart, I'll just copy it verbatim, slap my name on it and now I'm the author.
I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it.
For example if I buy a physical book, I own it. I'm free to sell it or give it away. Things like the DMCA and the switch from an ownership model to a rental model are more the problem.
ie does getting rid of copyright enable right to repair? Does getting rid of copyright suddenly stop a games company pulling software from your library that you 'bought'?
Wouldn't these companies just put all the restrictions directly into the purchase agreement?
This would be wildly unreasonable and totally unethical. Every picture taken by a photographer has to be available on the market immediately?
Think through the ethical implications of that.
> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,
If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
> Copyright does far more harm than good and should be abolished. It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies. It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright and to restrict people being able to use/repair/modify/backup their property. Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs.
I agree that copyright should be abolished, and have said such thing in the past, and other people have said such things too. These are some of the significant problems with it, but not necessarily the only problems. Even if there are some cases where it is beneficial, I think that they would generally work better if copyright were abolished and then such cases would become unnecessary.
Patents should also be abolished.
Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.
Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
That's a question I have: if you abolish copyright, does that mean that anyone is free to do what they please with leaked code?
So, which one is it?
Big Tech doesn't get to ignore copyright law just because they have deeper pockets.
I don't think that's going to suffice.
Neither for the people arguing the original point who want protection for what they are doing but don't want protection for the big players who just make big bucks and "shut everybody down whom they don't like".
Nor from a philosophical big picture POV. The little innovator needs protections. The big capitalist less so. It's why labor laws are more strict with bigger corps than small shops. And why higher incomes pay more taxes. (Well that's the idea. That they find ways to circumvent the idea is a different story.)
Maybe mock something people have actually said.
All owned by you and copyrighted by you, sublicensed to Y Combinator.
Your employer may have agreements in place where you assign copyright to them for any notes or code or other works you produce while at work. But if you draw a stick-figure picture in a notebook, that's your copyright.
The reason was to emphasize that I don't directly profiting from some work and may be considered biased (which is also wrong, but I'm simplifying again).
Copyright is not for some faceless megacorpos, though they do profit from it. Copyright is for us, regular tiny humansies, to defend against megacorpos.
To all naysayers - just do a mental experiment and imagine a world with any copyright whatsoever. Do you think Disney would be harmed elen a little bit then? Lol, they will simply enforce their own big daddy "threat of lawsuit" (yes, they will find a reason, there people whose profession is doing just that). But will a regular writer or programmer or painter have any defence then? Course no.
If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.
Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.
Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute.
I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way.
> waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.
So yes we don’t live in total anarchy but a lot depends on people being decent.
It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.
The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.
While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.
When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...
Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.
Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.
Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.
Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.
Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.
I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.
However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.
Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.
Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!
Indeed! There are nations and cultures such as China and India, where copying the work of your hero or mentor is an act of homage and honor, whether or not you give them credit!
This thread shows so much evidence of ignorance. If people do not know what copyright is, or how it works, perhaps it is rash to agree with any changes to it. And, changes to copyright are a matter of international treaties and conventions, so the world is more likely to capitulate to Greta Thunberg's demands, than agree at the U.N. to "Abolish Copyright".
Source: dream?
It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery.
If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.
Also, there could be an excemption for LLM training purposes.
From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.
And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?
For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.
Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.
Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere.
Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.