117
Why copyright is a bad fit for the internet age
(www.dallasnews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
117 points (88.7% liked)
politics
19090 readers
4662 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I personally disagree. If you write a song, why can't I learn it and sing it? If you build a guitar, and I take it, then you can't use it, but if I just learn to sing your song then I'm not depriving you of anything. Why should you be able to prevent me from singing what I want when it doesn't harm you?
The idea that you should get to control your creative works and no one should be allowed to touch them feels to me like it's just appeasing control freaks while costing massive amounts in terms of remixing, and creativity.
While rewarding artists is a good idea, in the digital age, copyright is a fundamentally bad way of doing it. The entire core concept of copyright exists because unlike physical goods, information can be copied and replicated nearly infinitely for zero cost, and when something is ubiquitous, capitalism says that its value is $0. So rather than embrace the fact that information now has effectively zero cost to distribute to everyone once it's digitized, we spent billions on lawyers and laws, and engineers and technological walls, all just to create artificial scarcity so that it would have value again.
There is a fundamental difference between the properties and behaviour of information, and the properties and behaviour of physical matter, and at a core level copyright is a hamfisted way of trying to mash digital information distribution into a system designed for the distribution of physical goods.
Here's a scenario: You make a song but your YouTube channel has 6 subscribers. It's a good song and the views are slowly going up, this might be your big break. A week later, just when the views start inching towards the 5 digits, Drake comes out with the exact same song. Your version fades into obscurity, he never even mentions you, he makes millions off your single. It's not exactly fair.
I think copyrights are currently much too strong and easy to abuse. Fair use should be expanded and the time limits greatly reduced but doing away with the whole concept isn't the best solution imo.
Absolutely fair scenario, I'm not advocating to abandon copyright with nothing to replace it.
The fundamental structure of copyright right now, is one based around granting ownership and exclusivity rights, but only the second part is flawed, the exclusivity rights part.
A copyright system that makes sense in the digital age is an ownership and attribution system, whereby in that scenario, Drake would acknowledge that it's your song and then a certain portion of his proceeds from that song would end up going to you automatically. If he didn't he would face a regulator / court / arbitration system that could impose massive penalties to disincentivize non acknowledgement.
It doesn't really change any of the economics of live art, but for digital art, rather than everyone paying for different subscriptions and having all the profits go to enriching middle men with exclusive, non competitive contracts, everyone would always have free access to everything and you'd have the streaming and viewership numbers etc influence how much money the government or an arm's length arts agency / crown corporation is paying out to artists.
Well said. Realistically we need a completely new system that's more in tune with the digital age and puts society first while incentivizing small time artists.
The best would probably be to couple it with profits, so any artist which makes more than X amount using an other persons work needs to hire lawyers and figure out who he has to pay or get sued.