#abolish copyright and ip

[melancholia-ennui]

Thinking about the enclosure of the mythical commons again. Fuck this shit for real

[novemberthewriter]

girl the fights ppl be having over fic re: monetization and copyright are soooooo weird like some ppl's entire M.O. is 'i can make money off other people's properties but it's exploitation for someone to make money off derivative work of my derivative work'

[echoesofdusk]

I do think abolishing copyright and IP laws is a noble goal, but we can talk about that once capitalism has been abolished

[weiszklee]

So, we don't care about protecting fair use anymore? Okay.

this reply kills me 😭

[my-life-is-pain]

I’m sorry but I don’t think copyright as a concept should be completely gotten rid of. Other forms of Ip maybe, but not copyright.

In my mind the issue with copyright law as it stands is that it’s been corrupted over decades from a way of protecting the artist to locking down franchises and media so that know one else can build on it expect the company that owns the copyright

The cause for this is that copyright duration is ridiculously long. If I remember correctly it’s the life of the author + way too much time added on to it.

All of the grey stuff and fair use shit happens because copyright lasts longer than it needs to and so we have go around it.

If copyright was reduced to like 2-5 years or something this becomes far less of a problem because we won’t need to go around copyright if it ends within a short period of time.

This is why I think patents are fine in my mind too, patents can expire. They expire for the same reason copyright is supposed to expire, so someone can’t just lock down the rights for essentially forever. Patents can be abused but imagine how much worse it could be if those patents basically didn’t expire.

Ultimately that’s my gripe with most forms of IP. That being that they functionally last forever. So instead of protecting creators, it’s just used as a way to lock down ideas. If they didn’t last essentially forever, this wouldn’t happen.

[toskarin]

i really dont know how to tell people that Copyright Laws Are Good, Actually. every time a company like disney or nintendo abuses copyright laws people always start talking about how copyright should be abolished, and in an ideal world, copyright laws wouldnt be necessary. but in the world we live in copyright laws are very much needed for creatives. while it's easy to be reactionairy when nintendo unfairly removes a fangame or disney threatens people over mickey mouse, people really need to understand that copyright laws are the only things stopping corporations and even other people from exploiting smaller ips. like, imagine if hasbro started making toys of your projects with no consent or contract or payment. that's what copyright laws are stopping

taking this in best possible faith, this is still an opinion completely unmoored from any material understanding of how IP works to the point where I can't take it seriously.

if hasbro started making toys out of my project without my consent, in the world we currently exist in, I would have little to no recourse simply because I could not win a court case against hasbro. they would drag it out and I would be in financial ruin long before I could achieve anything

if I made something similar to a hasbro property without infringing on their IP and they came down on me under the pretense that I had infringed, I would likely have to reach a settlement and shutter my project. it would not matter whether or not I was right

copyright does not protect you: it protects people who can afford to wield it

and making an assumption that you and I are more likely to be economic peers than not, we cannot afford to wield it

[good-fwiend-in-wome]

software is an objective proof that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with the modern age btw.

paintings, movies, and books never become obsolete. whatever current novel is hot will still be just as readable in decades when it becomes public domain, anyone with the knowhow can make a film projector.

software, on the other hand, specifically videogames, need active ongoing preservation; up to date emulators, storage, etc.

the people who say "um why are you emulating a console that is still on sale" fundamentally don't understand that preservation for games is an active process. if you wait until a console's lifetime is over to start doing this stuff tons of art will be lost, especially nowadays with digital storefronts that can take away your games, starting to make emulators and preserve games as soo as possible is crucial

nintendo's "case" (IANAL, but it's fucking bullshit) against yuzu was, as i understand it, based on the idea that since yuzu needed dumped parts of a real switch's OS, it was infringing on their IP. if we took this seriously and didn't allow bring-your-own-bios emulators until every part of a console's OS is in the public domain, then we might as well give up on emulation, because in decades by the time that's possible, all games will be lost and the tech will be so old that the amount of work to even start an emulator would be monumental

abolish IP.

[patricia-taxxon]

I know your critical of AI, but I have heard some defenders of it say that there is no way to curtail ai art without increasing copyright and IP law. I know you want copyright abolished so I was wondering how you felt about that arguement.

copyright law is not a bone that capitalism threw us, it serves capital, not artists. AI engines were beneficial to capital so they got more permission to plunder and reference than any human artist ever would, strengthening it will only allow capital to steal more from us. if you think the art world's copyright system should look like the state of copyright in the music industry then you're not a leftist.

[txttletale]

I'm not really certain if totally abolishing IP would really help the working artist within the current capitalist system. Publishers would have no obligation to pay artists any kind of cut if they didn't need to negotiate the rights to republish a specific work. Artists-for-hire and the like would be able to freely distribute their works, but without the capital that is available to publishers, they would have little ability to make any kind of living off of it. Like, okay, maybe you are including abolishing capital when you say abolish IP but that's kinda burying the lede, isn't it?

not really! i'm pretty open about being a revolutionary communist -- 'abolish capital' is the implicit context for all my political positions.

& while i agree that totally abolishing IP law while leaving capitalism unchanged would not be all that much better, i do place a lot of value on the original creators being able to create things -- i find it difficult to believe that, for example, no game publisher or comic publisher would not see the obvious marketing value of distributing kurvitz' disco elysium 2 or publishing alan moore doing his own watchmen stuff, or that barring that that either of those projects would fail to explode on kickstarter.

that said, i have presented goals for what IP law 'should' look like under capitalism: instant entry into the public domain upon the death of the creator, outlaw work-for-hire, maximum IP sale duration of 10 years -- as well as direct legislative targets in the short term: rolling back the 1998 copyright extension act and the 1976 one to put US law back at lifespan+50 and implementing 'use-it-or-lose-it' provisions (already seeing niche use in the EU) which allow creators to file for reversion of copyright if the rightsholder isn't actively exploiting the IP

[kenobihater]

ironically enough, some people claim he stole his idea for the fountain from elsa von freytag-loringhoven. in my eyes that theory has been completely disproven due to those letters both being taken out of context and willfully mistranslated. but the fact that it could have been a stolen idea? what would that mean for the piece? would that mean it's not art? would that undo the influence it had on the art world for more than a century? theft does not negate art.

i personally don't like ai art, but i don't think that it's ontologically evil, or that it isn't art, because i believe anything can be art. the theft of living artists' work by these sites does make me uncomfortable, just as if duchamp stole the urinal from either freytag-loringhoven or from a pub, that would make him a bit of a dick. he'd still be an artist, though.

it’s awesome that we’re doomed to hear the same reactionary opinion that art is only art if the artist puts work into it for the rest of time

[tanadrin]

defenders of IP law talk about artists needing to maintain a living, and while it’s true, it fails to capture the vast amount of work-for-hire business in the arts, and the ways in which long after an artist is dead and their spouse and children are too, their works can form the nucleus of big media empires that exist solely to extract rents from an increasingly dessicated husk (here’s to you, lord of the rings)

it seems simultaneously true to me that

it’s hard to make a living as an artist (but then, it always has been)

functionally what a lot of IP law does is protect giant sprawling commercial franchises and disincentivize creativity, by focusing on maximizing predictable shareholder profit and thus pumping out endless sequels or adaptations of already-popular works into other media

a core element of what artists often want is recognition of their work, which is part of the package necessary for commercial success and just inherent to the psychology of creativity; but this is a social function for which property law is poorly suited

property law, which has its bases in the ownership of physical things and especially land, is a really weird tool to try to use to apply to bits

it’s hard to imagine straight-up abolishing IP law, as long as we want people to at least sometimes be able to devote time to creative tasks

but creativity is an inherent function of the human animal and it’s not like it would disappear overnight if we did abolish IP law--we were making art for millennia before IP law existed, after all. copyright was not necessary to incentivize the creation of the lascaux paintings, or the work of michelangelo

and i don’t have a solution to any of the contradictions in the current system, but i think it’s really interesting!

[askagamedev]

I've seen a few people on the internet who advocate for abolishing copyright laws (mainly when the topic of fan games are brought up). But in reality, what are the consequences if copyright and IP laws were to be abolished?

The purpose of IP law is to protect the creators of intellectual property. Without IP law protections, there is little to stop those with more money/resources from simply taking whatever good ideas from their creators and making their own version of the product without ever paying the original creator or giving them any credit for coming up with the idea.

IP law also protects creators' creative control over their own creations. Matt Furie, creator of Pepe the Frog, is using those laws in order to stop white supremacists from using his IP in their books and products. If IP laws were to be abolished, anyone would be free to use any IP for anything, including people whose ideals you probably hate.

A generally good rule of thumb is to consider what the proposed legal change is and how the worst people in the world could take advantage of that change if they were the ones utilizing it. We can't really legislate intent, only action. If you're ok with the results in the worst case scenario, by all means lobby for such change within the legal system.

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[skelkankaos]

I think citing your sources in an academic or educational setting is important for mostly practical reasons. if you wrote an essay or research paper and went "yeah i came up with all this /lie" or "i can't remember where I heard this" then you're 1. depriving people who are interested in learning more from getting the resources to do so and 2. making it wildly difficult to fact check your work

this is wildly different from transformative art where it's like. it's art. if you make a collage out of cut out magazine pictures you don't have to research and seek out every single person responsible for every image you use and create a works cited page (although doing so would be an interesting art project in and of itself) and you don't have to put in text citations on your painting where you referenced a pose from something else.

and then copyright and IP law are a different beast entirely and should be abolished.

thanks for coming to my ted talk

[freebroccoli]

The best copyright reform would be to abolish it, but a good intermediate step would be to make it so if you ever stop monetizing your IP, it automatically becomes public domain. Oh, you don't want to provide any legitimate means of accessing your IP? Then it won't hurt you to lose your monopoly.

[echoesofdusk]

I hope you people seeing my posts about copyright don't assume I'm a corpo shill. I'm not. I don't give a single shit about corpos. fuck corpos. I wouldn't shed a single tear over Disney burning down. the point I'm making is that it's not unreasonable of artists to want to protect their work and make money off of it for as long as they're alive in a capitalist society. I want people to understand where some artists are coming from when they want to enforce copyright over their work. why they want to make money off of it. why they think abolishing copyright and IP law wouldn't be beneficial for them, and how abolishing or enforcing copyright law is beneficial for corporations and detrimental for smaller creators either way!

if you want to abolish copyright and IP law, you're gonna have to abolish captialism to begin with

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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