#abolish ip

[kawaiimunism]

You can be anti–intellectual property / pro–copyright infringement and still dislike plagiarism, they're different things. Fitgirl Repacks isn't pretending she made Assassin's Creed. The Phantom Edit literally tells you it's derivative in the opening crawl (if you somehow didn't already know). The only relationship between plagiarism and IP infringement is that—at least in the U.S.—plagiarism isn't explicitly illegal, so if a plagiarism case actually goes to court, it does so as an IP case.

[thekimspoblog]

But it's not real hard work because someone else made these characters. Even if you had to change them beyond recognition just to give these characters depth, not your IP you don't get a dime trololololol!

writing fanfiction is just. i’m being so creative and original. i’m plagiarizing everyone by accident. i’m a genius. i’m cringe. i’m too angsty. i’m too cheesy. this is not in character. it doesn’t matter that it’s not in character because these are my characters now. i love my hobby. this is the worst possible use of my time. i’m seeking validation. i’m projecting my own personal problems onto this story and i’m barely hiding it. i know so many words and i’m using all of them wrong. im on tumblr posting about it instead of writing it.

[thekimspoblog]

Tumblr: You thought you could make money off NFTs? Dumbass! Look, I can just right-click save this jpeg. You thought you could profit off of copies of copies of your original work? Screw you!

Also Tumblr: ZOMGuyyyyys! AI is stealing my art even though it's MY COPYRIGHT. Helppppp!!!!!!

Like is a right-click save enough to prove that artificial scarcity is an absurd concept in a world where anyone can just copy an image once it's been published... or isn't it? The only problem with NFTs was it was too blatant a version of the grift the art world has been pulling for years.

[kawaiimunism]

"sure ip law is bad now, but what if we made it actually protect individual creators?" idk, i don't think turning every artist and inventor into a petty-bourgeois holder of thought-capital is a very socialist policy tbh

[akkivee]

THATS SO SICK

[thekimspoblog]

In a better world, such a silly thing wouldn't warrant such a passionate defense.

YouTube poops are legitimately, unironically, provably art. Yes there are the rare ones like Awful Fawful's "Deliver Us" that are undeniably artistic in a conventional sense, but even the low-effort garbage that's just dick jokes and Mario saying fuck is inherently making a statement against the concept of copyright and intellectual property. It's saying that as soon as a piece of media is put out into the world, it belongs to everyone and can be twisted into any abomination possible no matter how much the rights-holders try to control and sanitize it. Nintendo wants you to forget the CDI Zelda games ever existed? Too bad, Morshu and King Harkinian are now more iconic than any of the new characters Nintendo has tried to push in the last decade. Warner Bros wants to crank out yet another soulless Scooby Doo reboot? Good luck giving it a single line as memorable as "I'll swooce right in!" or "if he's out here and we're in there and he's the sheriff and we're out here then I wanna know where's the caveman?"

[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'

[themself]

i play a dangerous game using my name that can be traced back to my professional work on my gay communism pro piracy anti IP Tumblr. but I stay silly

[thekimspoblog]

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

I don't think this was ever a reasonable assumption. If you want ANY compensation for creating an image, don't release that image until the money is already in-hand. Anything else is expecting the law to clean up after your carelessness. Intellectual property is an oxymoronic legal fiction which almost exclusively benefits the owning class, and should be abolished full-stop.

"Artist" should not be a job. Self-expression should be a past-time we all have access to and that's why I support UBI. But financial incentives and intangible property rights have only ever been a detriment to the collaborative environment in which art thrives. You talk to these people long enough, you realize that the mentality underpinning this, is that they see "hobby" as a dirty word, because in their mind they are above the people who just do this for pleasure.

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law

[echoesofdusk]

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

[melancholia-ennui]

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

[thekimspoblog]

Support YouTube videos that look like absolute shit. Stuff with less than 200 views and 2 likes.

Videos made by people who aren't foolish enough to try to turn this into a career.

Videos that don't self-censor, because "demonitization" was never a concern.

Videos that have the ads turned off, and the creator doesn't interrupt their anticapitalist dissertation, to shill for a VPN or a smelly water bottle.

We all want to romanticize the "old YouTube" before google bought it. We all bitch and moan about the ways that trying to turn a profit has made the website hostile to its users. We start going down truly unhinged lines of logic, about what can be done to change the IP laws, so that "content creators" can be "adequately compensated".

But the truth nobody wants to hear is that we did this. By preferencing high production values over amateur passion, we created the personality industry. By humoring our parasocial favorites instead of telling them "I don't care how much money you can make doing this you are making society worse by playing this game" We are now stuck perpetually listening to them whine about their insufficient paychecks.

"YouTuber" became a valid career choice, not because it in anyway helps to bridge the emerging dichotomy of "celebrity or homeless", but simply because for all of us, it was the path of least resistance.

[rainbowpopeworld]

That would be Aziraphale, just as a fun hobby, if he were into film instead of books

hbo max blocks screenshots even when I use the snipping tool AND firefox AND ublock which is a fucking first. i will never understand streaming services blocking the ability to take screenshots thats literally free advertising for your show right there. HOW THE HELL IS SOMEBODY GONNA PIRATE YOUR SHOW THROUGH SCREENSHOTS. JACKASS

[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.

[txttletale]

Can fandom/fanfic (both as a literal thing and also as a way of understanding media as having a "canon" separate from other content) exist in a world post-IP law abolishment?

i don't think so and good riddance!

[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