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The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2023
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@kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon My late congresscritter, Howard Coble, was responsible for that. A product of north-central North Carolina, he was nicknamed "The Congressman from Disney" in the district (and in Washington) because of all the water he carried for that corporation on IP matters.
@panamared27401 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Funfact: With very few exceptions like #StarWars, most of the big #Disney #IP is based off #PublicDomain content...
Which makes it even worse as they basically now squat that and prevent everyone from making good new works unless the few cases were their IP has also lapsed...
Which is hillarously good when it happens and someone times their release just right...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3E74j_xFtg
@kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Oh, I know. I did some reading on Coble and Disney in the late 1990s, and I was stunned to learn about how much stuff they were squatting on. But money talks loudly enough to drown out all other voices.
@panamared27401 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon which is why I want #IP like #Copyright to be limited just like #Patents are:
A fixed period of 10-25 years and that's it!
Anything else is a gross violation of social contract given the fact that noone can make content past their death, so 70 years postmortal IP protection can only serve corporations and license administrations and noone else.
@kkarhan @panamared27401 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon 25 years is a long ass time to turn ideas into cognitohazards you can't watch nor use in culture.
Any time at all is quite long for deciding you can choose what others may think and say.
#AbolishCopyright
@lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon i think it depends on type of content. Song, book, film? Whatever.
Software, though? IT moves so fast, and copyright can cripple interoperability so much, that perhaps for software, it should be much shorter.
@chucker @lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon The other factor with software copyrights is the issue of legacy software.
There's a lot of software out there in the world that's still in use, still under copyright, but no longer sold or supported by a vendor. In some cases, it might not even be clear who actually owns the copyright.
Sometimes it's for specialist equipment that's built using obsolete software. (Hello, OS/2 ATM machines.)
Sometimes it's for large enterprises that still use legacy VAX machines, token ring ethernet equipment, CP/M applications and Windows XP desktops.
Sometimes it's run by retro computing hobbyists who really loved the Atari ST or Speccy.
There's a good argument to be made that all abandonware should be released to the public domain. It would certainly make life a lot easier for many people.
@ajsadauskas @chucker @lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon The Software Preservation Network is working on this in the US, carving out exemptions for software preservation under the DMCA. https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/core-activities/law-policy/
@ajsadauskas @chucker @lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Share alike is better in many respects than PD. This is purely to make life easier, not for another round of making profits by adding some little modifications here and there.
@forthy @ajsadauskas @lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon maybe, but like any license, share alike only works if you continue a work’s copyright in perpetuity
@chucker @ajsadauskas @lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon This is work that still has copyright. When doing discussions with authors of abandoned work, they are much more willing to go for share alike than for PD.
Anyways, PD should have been share alike from start.
@chucker @kkarhan @panamared27401 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon I think that being unable to use nor remix music for years is far too long.
It doesn't remain broadly relevant for all that long in popular culture anyway. Before the internet that cycle was at the very most decade-long, now it has shrunk dramatically as information travels faster and more broadly.
Copyright also inherently assumes you have a right to control the minds of others, which I deem unconscionable.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon I think a lot of musicians (cf. R.E.M.) with sizable back catalogs to which they own the rights would disagree with you, and honestly, I don't know what the right answer is.
That said, if you would, please explain why you mean by "copyright also inherently assumes you have a right to control the minds of others." I'm not following.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Copyright inherently means you cannot replicate an idea you might have come across before in any way without licensing it (which is profoundly exclusionary due to the economic dynamics involved).
Given that human culture generally involves the sharing of stories and ideas, it turns all culture covered by copyright into cognitohazards that poison any attached material.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Much like patents it also fails to account for the concept of parallel invention, which is made worse by the general way humans assimilate patterns from stories and art with the distinct possibility of reusing some bit without even meaning to (hence the cognitohazard bit).
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon OK. So let's say there were no such thing as copyright law. How, then, would artists, writers, musicians, etc., make a living?
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon The same way any other creative labor is paid.
I certainly wouldn't write code for companies without fair remuneration.
Most other forms of creative work also lend themselves a bit better to crowdsourced patronage & merch than my own craft.
In any case, the value is with the labor, not the resulting work. Mostly only labor can lead to new works or improvements to old ones.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Your model for writing code implies that all code writers must be someone else's employee. But what if they want to be independent? How do those folks get paid?
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Well, that's where the crowdsourced patronage & merchandise models (among two typical options) come in.
Both unfortunately rely on popularity with an audience will & able to pay to really work.
They're hardly the only options, streamers have found corporate sponsors for example, but I couldn't call myself an expert in alternative monetization practices.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Having been a freelancer and independent contractor off and on for 45 years, I've looked into most of them, and in most cases, for them to "work" -- by which I mean provide a living -- the artist must still be protected by copyright law; otherwise, others could duplicate and sell his/her work as their own and receive money that otherwise would have gone to the creator.
what do you think of a hypothetical law that would allow reproduction and modification of work and selling it, but only at cost and one would have to include credit to the original author?
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon One would think the ease of attribution and finding out plagiarism on the internet would help mitigate that.
Credit/attribution remains essential.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Even with copyright law, plagiarism happens all the time, albeit usually on the personal level rather than the industrial level. Imagine how bad, and how industrialized, it would get if we had no copyright law.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon I think it might finally motivate people to participate in the indexing efforts I care about, since they're the only real way to mitigate that.
Currently other than archival nerds and data hoarders, barely anyone seems to care.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Your mileage may vary, but in my experience, particularly online, when people can get a copy of a particular work they want without paying the creator, that's what they do, if only because it's one less step.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Well yes, the notion of productivized digital works is an inevitable casualty (it never really made sense either, as Taxxon highlights in her videos).
Voluntary support remains.
On the software side of things, I'd most definitely welcome the death of proprietary software and productivized software.
It has led to an absolutely awful amount of corporate malware being normalized, among other atrocities.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon For reasons on which I'm not immediately clear, there seems to be a lot more of an appetite for that sharing approach in the coding community than in the musician community.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon I've noticed that too. I think it might relate to the difference in how usually it's seen as normal & necessary to hire us for labor rather than to buy (or license 😬) specific products/works ready-made.
With musicians having the rougher end of things there. Their labor is less commonly recognized.
And then of course malware, corporate or not, tends to have direct negative impacts on users or their victims.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon That's plausible.
indexing efforts? 👀
@salarua Stuff like MusicBrainz or the various boorus & iqdb/saucenao, for two examples that are mostly crowdsourced (whereas Google Images is very much a corporate-made tool that's also often much harder to use).
i'm gonna be totally honest, i forgot Musicbrainz existed lmao
but i do care about the preservation of our history and culture, and i'll make an effort to contribute to these archives/indexes once i'm less buried in college work. are there any other indexing efforts that need help at the moment?
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Also, the guy in the video says we should either ban copyright or severely shorten its length. Those are two VERY different things. I have to wonder whether severely shortening its length and streamlining the process for obtaining rights wouldn't solve most of the problems currently surrounding U.S. copyright while still allowing creative people a chance to make money.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon A more long-form and less idiosyncratic take that I mostly resonate with would be found linked here: https://mastodon.top/@lispi314/109918144425104762
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon OK, I'll take a look.
@lispi314 @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Agreed. My 2 cents is that it's a reasonable compromise, but I get that people may disagree.
@panamared27401 @lispi314 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Personally, I think that any number lower than lifetime + 70 years is an improvement.
Either way the system is just absurd.
@kkarhan @lispi314 @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon No argument here.
@kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Oh, I quite agree. Coble's hometown paper editorialized against the copyright changes Disney bought through him at the time, but nobody else listened. Coble certainly didn't.
i would add two additional stipulations to that: copyright restriction should not be automatic, and should be renewed every year. one would have to pay a fee for copyright restriction (without the fee, restrictions would default to a much more permissive CC BY-SA–like system) and the fee must be paid every year the restrictions are renewed
that way, eventually the cost of keeping the material restricted will outweigh the profits, and the license holders will stop paying. it automatically enters the more permissive set of restrictions, and it gains a new life among sharers and remixers