Lord of the rings will be under copyright til roughly 2050. I think Tolkien's estate has gotten more than enough money from that book and it's time to let other use the word hobbit without the threat of a lawsuit.
I expect it would not move the needle much. I support reduced copyright periods, though not in the specific way you do. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? The comment I replied to seemed to be advocating for total abolition of copyright law, and my comment is written to be interpreted in that context.
> To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.
What specifically are you talking about? Every author borrows from what came before. Copyright law doesn't even enter the picture in the vast majority of cases, because you generally don't have to copy to "build off of the culture [you] grew up in".
Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think less copyright will dissuade them.
> every author borrows
Borrows yes. But that has changed drastically in the last 100 years because of what has become the copyright system.
I’ll be long dead and gone before people can make and publish their own LOTR, or Star Wars, or whatever franchise they grew up with. Disney would be impossible to start given the current regulations, all those tales would be locked up, and we would all be worse for it.
Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.
Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.
Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.
Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile".
> Even if they are not enjoyable.
Huh?
> The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable
Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.
In reality most art is done because the artist has something to say, and the money they get from it is only motivating in as much as it enables the artist to do more art. So I would guess in a world without copyright protection we would just find other ways to pay artists and a very similar amount of art would be produced.
You can see an example of this e.g. in Iceland where the market is way to small for art aimed at the domestic market to make enough money solely by selling it (possible with music; rare with books; not possible with movies). Instead the state has an extensive “artist salary“ program, which pays artist regardless of how well the art they produce sells. Unsurprisingly Iceland produces a lot of art and has many working artists.
I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.
How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?
Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.
Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.
Open source actually demonstrates that copyright serves a purpose. There are still customers for non-open software, even when open alternatives exist, so the ability to monetize brings new offerings to the economy.
Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?
No copyright -> No GPL -> anyone can release their own close source version of open source software.
Why do you think GPL was create in the first place? We always had public domain you know.
Are we going the communist soviet union route where everything is decided by central committee?
Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.
Sure, those lines get muddy when you want to do it professionally, but that's a separate argument.
How do you create without capital? To make a film you need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, caterers, a director, scriptwriters. A world without professional creatives is so much poorer than the world we already have. Why would you give it up just for some vague notion of ideological purity.
Would you be able to create big-budget movies without said big budget? Of course not. I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better? It feels like you're conflating art creation with art business, but they are not the same thing.
>I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better?
If you legitimately believe something like 2001: A Space Odyssey would be as good with a budget of $10,000 then that just seems delusional.
The world you want is one in which the only people who can create things are people who are wealthy by other means, there is no pathway for a talented but poor kid to go from making home movies to working on films without IP laws. They must abandon their dreams and go work in the coal mines or whatever. It is dystopian.
I want the most amount of people possible to be able to work as professional creatives because it enriches my life and the lives of everyone in the country I live in.
You do realize people created and shared things long before copyright became a thing, right?
Like if we know formulation of drug then drug (+ any smaller modification - through AI) could be new formulation. That will break current Medical patent system.
For lots of online knowledge/blogs I guess it is true but even here I often read explainer blogs because AI casts everything in a certain narrative/tone that isn’t always appropriate.
Yet
As a teenager I used to proclaim that "you can't own bits, maaaan" all the time. I've since grown up. Intellectual property is essential to safeguarding intellectual work. I'm not saying this out of greed – I'm a vocal advocate for the free software movement. It, too, relies on a semi-sane framework of intellectual property. So do Hollywood studios. So do the makers of AI (well, since they're not actually sustainable at all currently, I guess you can say they don't rely on anything).
If you’re a pleb, stealing copyrighted materials will get you some nasty fines, lawsuits and criminal charges. If you’re a megacorp with unlimited buckets of cash, then there is no accountability.