#abolish ip

[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.

[radioregine]

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'

[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?"

[opalsiren]

sometimes i'll look up the filmography of an actor i like to see if i want to watch anything else they're in and inevitably there will be some superhero or star wars whatever acting credit. and no matter how much i like the actor i'm just like. oh i am NOT watching that lol

[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

[echoesofdusk]

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

[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

[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.

[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!

[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

[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

[kataraslove]

as someone who has recently read the reckoning of roku, it’s really not the anti fire nation propaganda that a certain subsection of fandom is making it out to be. yes, gyatso says those words to roku, but he’s angry - at both the world and at himself for the death of his sister. he later apologizes to roku. the book does not paint gyatso out to be in the right, and neither does it paint all fire nation citizens to be in the wrong. the narrative even makes a distinction between the good fire nation citizens (ta min and roku) and prejudicial fire nation citizens (sozin, primarily), and some morally ambiguous ones like dalisay, but they’re more or less abolished from any accountability for partnering with sozin.

avatar the last airbender does not do a good job at displaying much of the context associated with the crimes of the fire nation, aka the climate and perspectives that justified sozin eradicating the air nomads and many of the benders in the southern water tribe. we know from avatar that sozin wanted to conquer the rest of the world for fire nation domination and expansion, but we’re not given much insight into the causal factors that allowed him to conduct genocide and colonialism, beyond “he was able to do it all in one day with the power of the comet,” and “he was a very bad man.”

the reckoning of roku provides the context for all of that, the factors that contributed to sozin’s blood-thirst. which means seeing sentiment from sozin that view the air nomads - and their pacifist ways of life - as inferior and below human. the novel doesn’t particularly attempt to humanize sozin, not in the way that other medias do when exploring the backstory of their villain. at the end, the takeaway from the novel is that sozin is on the road to becoming the ultimate fascist we all know him for, but this time we’re provided more context into how he became that fascist, and why roku hesitated to kill him.

is it more critical of the fire nation than most of the franchise? yes, i would say so, and having a filipino author be the one to offer that commentary is an excellent decision by avatar studios. but the extent of the critique is still more or less along the lines of “this one guy was truly the operations behind it,” which is still consistent with what we’ve seen in atla. there’s nothing too radical introduced in terms of colonial theory, unlike what parts of the fandom are saying.

which leads me to my final point: if this is how badly a subsection of fandom (aka fire nation worshippers and zutara shippers [not mutually exclusive]) are reacting to the simple notion exploring how sozin committed genocide, then they’ve hit further rock bottom than i can imagine. not only that, but this type of reactionary behaviour risks alienating other parts of the fandom; for instance, fans of the avatar novels who otherwise would have given the ship and the shippers grace.

in other words, many of these hardcore shippers “criticizing” the roku novel have no one to blame but themselves if their behaviour leads to the alienation of regular fans. this loud subsection of fandom is so caught up in their one-sided, imaginary fantasy where everything in the franchise somehow revolves around aang/kataang vs zuko/zutara, that the Evil Bryke are always targeting them, to the point that they’ll fail to realize that the fire nation and fire nation characters are often absolved from accountability across the IP, and the fire nation is explored much more than the other nations are.

[novella-november]

I have no idea why this needs to be said, but you can hate generative AI, love the Public Domain, love media preservation, hate the overbearing US Copyright system, and... still believe that Copyright Laws exist in the first place for a reason, (even if, thanks to Big Corporation Monopolies, it's been twisted into its current behemoth monstrosity.)

You can hate Large Language Models and still believe in Copyright Reform over Copyright Abolishment.

You can believe in Media Preservation and still believe that Plagiarism is wrong.

You can hate the current restrictive Copyright Laws without wanting to abolish them entirely.

You can love the Public Domain and still loath predatory corporations stealing everything they can get their hands on, to literally *feed the machine.*

These things are not mutually exclusive, and if you think that

"you can't hate AI if you hate the current copyright laws"

or that

"Hating on Generative AI will only give us more restrictive copyright and IP laws, therefore you need to normalize and accept generative AI stealing all of your creations and every single thing you've ever said on the internet!"

I just genuinely don't understand how you can say this kind of crap if you've ever interacted with any creative person in your life.

I'm a wanna-be-author.

I want as many people to be able to afford my written works as possible without restrictions, and I fully plan on having free ebooks of my works available for those who can't afford to buy them.

*That does *not* mean I, in any way shape or form, would ever consent to people stealing my work and uploading it into a Large Language Model and telling it to spit out fifty unauthorized sequels that are then sold for cash profit!*

You cannot support generative AI and turn around and try to claim you're actually just defending small time artists, and *also* you think no one should have any legal protections at all protecting their work from plagiarism at all.

Supporting unethical generative AI (which is literally all of them currently), protecting artists, and *completely abolishing* copyright and intellectual property laws instead of reforming them *are* mutually exclusive concepts.

You *cannot* worship the plagiarism machine, claim to care about small artists, and then say that those same small artists should have absolutely *zero* legal protections to stop their work being plagiarized.

The only way AI could even begin to approach being ethical would be if using it to begin with wasn't a huge hazard to the enviornment, and if it was trained *exclusively * on Public Domain works that had to be checked and confirmed by multiple real human beings before it was put into the training data.

And oh, would you look at that?

Every single AI model is currently just sucking up the entire fucking goddamn internet and everything ever posted on it and everything ever downloaded from it with no way to really truly opt out of it or even just to know if your work has been fed to the machine until an entire page of text from your book pops out when it generates text from someone's writing prompt.

And no, it's not just "privileged Western authors" who are being exploited by AI.

For an updating list of global legal cases again AI tech giants, see this link here to stay up to date as cases develop: