You want to look at the Supreme Court case "Eldred v. Ashcroft." Eldred challenged Congress for retroactively extending existing copyrights, for extending the patent protections on existing inventions could not possibly further arts and sciences. They also argued that if Congress had the power to continually extend existing copyrights by N years every N years, the Constitutional power of "for a limited time" had no meaning.
The Supreme Court's decision was a bunch of bullshit around "well, y'know, people live longer these days, and some creators are still alive who expected these to last their whole lives, and golly, coincidentally this really helps giant corporations."
Copyright has utterly failed to serve that purpose for a long time, and has been actively counterproductive.
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.
Could these "free passes" for AI training serve as a legal wedge to increase the scope of fair use in other cases? Pro-business selective enforcement sucks, but so long as model weights are being released and the public is benefiting then stubbornly insisting that overzealous copyright laws be enforced seems self-defeating.
Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc.
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.
> Without copyright, entire industries would've been dead a long time ago, including many movies, games, books, tv, music, etc.
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.
There's nothing preventing people from producing works and releasing them without copyright restriction. If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often.
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.
> If that were a more sustainable model, it would be happening far more often.
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.
That's not actually true. There's nothing stopping you from producing derivative works. Publishing and/or profiting from other people's work does have some restrictions though.
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.)
> 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.
> Yes, and none of those people are making a living at creating things.
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.
> the current system has allowed for a incredible flourishing of 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.
People do not put out their stuff. People get lured into contracts selling their IP to a shitty company that then publishes stuff, of course WITH copyright so they can make money while the artist doesnt
Yes, they can't, because there is no legally reliable way to do it (briefly, because the law really doesn't like the idea of property that doesn't have an owner, so if you try to place a work of yours in the public domain, what you're actually doing is making it abandoned property so anyone who wants to can claim they own it and restrict everyone else, including you, from using it). The best an author can do is to give a license that basically lets anyone do what they want with the work. Creative Commons has licenses that do that.
Copyright laws prevent piracy. It is interesting to live in a country with no enforced copyrights and EVERYTHING is pirated. I think it is easy to not know about that context and just see the stick side of copyright vis-a-vis big money corporations
Technically speaking, copyright laws create piracy as without them we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want without the approval from third parties and thus so-called piracy aka copyrigh infringement would not be a thing. Laws also hardly prevent sharing of copyrighted content, they only make it illegal.
> we would still have our free speech rights to share whatever we want
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.
So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.
Nobody cares anymore. We're sick of their rent seeking, of their perpetual monopolies on culture. Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it.
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."
Have you looked at who created these things by and large? For the most part, you have:
- aristocrats that were wealthy that didn't need to "work" to survive and put food on the table
- crafts people supported through the patronage of a rich person (or religious order) who deign to support your art
- (kinda modern world) national governments who want to support their national art often as a fear that other larger nations cultural influences will dwarf their
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.
> Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce?
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.
Spending 6 minutes of my life engaging in political discourse is a far swing from hundreds of individuals producing a movie that took millions of dollars to produce. Both are just as easily digitally repeatable, but the expensive content is likely way more beneficial to society as a whole. I am choosing to engage in this hobby because I receive the means to provide this content recreationally. I fail to see this scaling to anything of any real quality outside of some isolated instances. For instance, some video game enthusiasts are using the work of Bethesda to make a new game call fallout London. It's a knock off fallout game using the base code engine that Bethesda built for their commercial games. The game is exceptional in that it could actually achieve a mostly compatible level of a commercial product as long as you ignore that they're leveraging the engines and story which were developed by commercial interests. In the same time, 10's to hundreds of thousands of people are employed every year to produce video games for commercial reasons. Will they all stop making games if copyright was dead? No, but the vast majority would.
> Are you implying that these three pillars will be able to produce anywhere near the current amount of content we produce?
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.
If everyone could do it, it wouldn't be as big a deal - small western businesses would be on a more level playing field, since they would be almost as immune from being sued by big businesses as Chinese businesses are. As it is, small businesses aren't protected by patents (because a patent is a $10k+ ticket to a $100k+ lawsuit against a competitor with a $1M+ budget for lawyers) while still being bound by the restrictions of big business's patents. It's lose/lose.
Video games would actually be better of if the profit incentive was removed. Modern high-budget video games have become indistinguishable from slot machines that are optimized by literal psychologists to get you to waste as much of your money (and time) as possible without providing any meaningful experience. I'd rather see much fewer games created if what remains are games focused on having artistic and/or educational value rather than investment opportunities for wall street.
This is just your own sanctimony, go to a gamestop and ask people if they think we should have an IP regime where there is no gta or football games. What a ridiculous response.
This is a specious argument. It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright. Humans have been remixing each others' works for millions of years, and the artificial restriction on derivative work is actively destroying our collective culture. There should be thousands of professional works (books, movies, etc.) based on Lord Of The Rings by now, many of which would surpass the originals in quality given enough time, and we have been robbed of them. And Lord Of The Rings is an outlier in that it still remains culturally relevant despite its age; most works will remain copyrighted for far longer than their original audience was even alive, meaning that those millions of flowers never get their chance to bloom.
> It is impossible for us to gesture at the works of art that do not exist because of draconian copyright.
We can gesture at the tiniest tip of the iceberg by observing things that are regularly created in violation of copyright but not typically attacked and taken down until they get popular:
- Game modding, romhacks, fangames, remakes, and similar.
- Memes (often based on copyrighted content)
- Stage play adaptations of movies (without authorization
- Unofficial translations
- Machinima
- Speedruns, Let's Play videos, and streams (very often taken down)
- Music remixes and sampling
- Video mashups
- Fan edits/cuts, "Abridged" series
- Archiving and preservation of content that would otherwise be lost
There are several other publishers who regularly go after gameplay footage of people playing their games. It's not as visible, because it's hard to notice the absence of a thing.
This is all true, and in a vacuum I agree with it. There's a pretty core problem with these kinds of assertions, though: people have to make rent. Never have I seen a substantiative, pass-the-sniff-test argument for how to make practical this system when your authors and your artists need to eat in a system of modern capital.
So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
> What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
Top priority: UBI, together with a world in which there's so much surplus productivity that things can survive and thrive without having "how does this make huge amounts of money" as its top priority to optimize for.
Apart from that: Conventions/concerts/festivals (tickets to a unique live event with a crowd of other fans), merchandise (pay for a physical object), patronage (pay for the ongoing creation of a thing), crowdfunding/Kickstarter (pay for a thing to come into existence that doesn't exist yet), brand/quality preference (many people prefer to support the original even if copies can be made), commissions (pay for unique work to be created for you), something akin to "venture funding", and the general premise that if a work spawns ten thousand spinoffs and a couple of them are incredible hits they're likely to direct some portion of their success back towards the work they build upon if that's generally looked upon favorably.
People have an incredible desire both to create and to enjoy the creations of others, and that's not going to stop. It is very likely that the concept of the $1B movie would disappear, and in trade we'd get the creation of far far more works.
> UBI, together with a world in which there's so much surplus productivity that things can survive and thrive without having "how does this make huge amounts of money" as its top priority to optimize for.
The poster didn't posit it as "how does this make huge amounts of money," they asked how copyright authors are supposed to pay their rent in your scenario. Your solution of course, has nothing to do with copyright policy.
Yeah, this is what I was expecting. I have no love for Disney et al but I think that this is dire (aside from UBI, which would be great but is fictional without a large-scale shift in American culture).
"Everybody else gets paid for the work they do; you get paid for things around the work you do, if you're lucky" is a way to expect creatives to live that, to put a point on it, always ends up being "for thee, but not for me". It's bad enough today--I think you described something worse.
The current model is "most people get paid for the work they do, but you get paid for people copying work you've already done", which already seems asymmetric. This would change the model to "people get paid for the work they do, and not paid again for copying work they've already done".
We converged on a system that protects the commercialization of copies because, in practice, "the first copy costs $X0,000" is not a viable way to pay your rent.
If we want art to be the province of the willfully destitute or the idle rich (and I do mean rich, the destruction of a functional middle class has compacted the available free time of huge swaths of society!), this is a good way to do it. I would rather other voices be included.
We converged on a system that makes copying illegal because that system was invented in an era when the only people who could copy were those with specialized equipment (e.g. printing presses). In that world, those who might do the copying were often larger than those whose works were being copied, and copyright had more potential to be "protective".
That system hasn't been updated for a world in which everyone can make perfect-fidelity copies or modifications at the touch of a key; on the contrary, it's been made stricter. And worse, per the story we're commenting on here, the much larger players who are mass-copying works largely by individuals or smaller entities have become effectively exempt from copyright, while copyright continues to restrict individuals and smaller entities, and the systems designed by those large players and trained on all those copied works are crowding individuals out of art and other creative endeavors.
I don't think the current system deserves valorizing, nor can it be credited as being intentionally designed to bring about most of the effects it currently serves.
I'm not suggesting that deleting copyright overnight will produce a perfect system, nor am I suggesting that it has zero positive effects. I'm suggesting that it's doing substantial harm and needs a massive overhaul, not minor tweaks.
Many of the funding models Josh listed are directpayment for creative work being done. If anything, in the current model creative work is often not paid directly (unless done as work for hire where the creative doesn't get to own their creation) but instead is a gamble that you can later on profit from the "intellectual property".
>So I'm asking genuinely: what's your plan? What's the A to B if you could pass a law tomorrow?
Patreon (or liberapay etc). Take a look at youtube: so many creators are actively saying "youtube doesn't pay the bills, if you like us then please support us on Patreon". Patreon works. Some of the time, at least - just like copyright. Also crowdsourcing (e.g. Kickstarter), which worked out well for games like FTL and Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Although, I personally don't believe copyright should be abolished - it just needs some amendments. It needs a duration amendment - not a flat duration (fast-fashion doesn't need even 5 years of copyright, but aerospace software regularly needs several decades just to break profitable), but either some duration-mechanism or a simple discrimination by industry.
Also, I think any sort of functional copyright (e.g. software copyright) ought to have an incentive or requirement to publish the functional bits - for instance, router firmware ought to require the source code in escrow (to be published once copyright duration expires) for any legal protections against reverse-engineering to be mounted. Unpublished source code is a trade secret, and should be treated as such.
Also, these discussions don't seem to mention fanfiction, which demonstrates plenty of people write good works without being professionally paid and without the protection of copyright.
How many subscribers on patreon are there because the creators provides pay-walled extra content? How many would remain if that pay-walled content would be mirrored directly by youtube or on youtube?
Crowdsourcing might work better, but how many would donate to a game where, instead of getting it cheaper as a kickstarter supporter, they could get free after it is released?
Copyright is not optimized for making sure artists and authors get enough to eat. It's optimized for people with a lot of money to make even more money by exploiting artists and authors.
I doubt there's a simple answer (I certainly don't have one), but the current system is not exactly a creators' utopia.
My own business model is to create Things That Don't Exist Yet. This (typically bespoke work) is actually the majority of work in any era I think. For me, copyright doesn't do much, it mostly gets in the way.
If you pass the law tomorrow -all else being equal- my profits would stay equal or go up somewhat.
Fashion is traditionally not copyrightable[1] , and the fashion industry is doing rather well.
Similarly our IT infrastructure is now built mostly on [a set of patches to the copyright system][2] called F/L/OSS that provided more freedom to authors and users, and lead to more innovation and proliferation of solutions.
So even just in the modern west, we can see thriving ecosystems where copyright is absent or adjusted; and where the outcomes are immediately visible on the street.
[1] Though a quick search shows that lawyers are making inroads.
That ship sailed long ago. While copyright can and is used at times to protect the "little guy", the law is written as it is in order to protect and further corporate interests.
The current manifestation of copyright is about rent-seeking, not promoting innovation and creativity. That it may also do so is entirely coincidental.
Also, if it wasn't about rent-seeking and preventing access to works, copyright wouldn't have to last for decades, many multiples of a work's useful commercial life. The fact that it does last this long shows that it's not about promoting innovation and creativity.
Copyright was invented by a cartel of noblemen, the British Stationer's Company, who, due to liberal reform, were going to lose their publishing monopoly. The implementation of copyright law as they helped pen allowed them to mostly continue their position while portraying it as "protecting the little guy".
Funny how both the rhetoric and intentions are the same after three hundred years.
Copyright’s purpose is a cudgel to be wielded to enrich the holder for, ideally, eternity. If “eternity” is threatened, you use proceeds from copyright to change copyright law to protect future proceeds.
