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Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t
(pluralistic.net)
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers' work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute...
It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.
That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it's bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits -- in which case, I agree, but, well...
It's as relevant as we make it in our discussion, no? You brought up the theoretical noble intentions of the copyrights, so I felt compelled to mention their actual results.
I mean, it seems like you're reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I'm ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it's probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'd be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)
As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it's a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they're using to do it is called "copyright."
writer protection is not where copyright came from
The Berne Convention (Which the US only joined in 1989) is from 1886 and more concerned with author's rights than the typical american flavor, and was kickstarted by successful writers such as Victor Hugo, it's fundamentally commercial in nature but was at least partially sold/incepted has protecting a writer's labour:
Translated: "The law protects land, it protects the house of the proletarian who has sweat; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought (...)"
From the body of the convention, in some regards it does place the author higher than the publisher:
EDIT:
And contains from 1886 already the spirit of fair use.
None of that is its origin
I'm sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn't totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I'll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.
iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved "we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original," which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I'm not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs
also again I'm not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don't think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I'm not a libertarian. sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.
The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to "promote the progress of ... useful arts". Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law