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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Copyright only exists for the wealthy to own even more.
This is a patent lawsuit, not copyright
even worse. software patents are just more idiotic copyrights.
Dunno, I think I prefer patents. Unlike copyright, patents usually last a flat twenty years. Copyright expires either after 95 years or 70 years after the death of the author, which is ludicrous. Both are constantly abused, but at least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time.
patents and copyright are pretty different though. IMO both are bad but you can at least make a case for protecting intelectual work from copying. Patents protect replication of ideas and ideas don't have to be unique at all. If I say it was my idea to call variables a,b,c,d,e in that order that means anyone who wants to do that in their creations needs my permission which is fucking bonkers.
I'm convinced that software patents exist purely for regulatory capture.
Might be about a design patent
This isn't about copyright. Is there anybody here that has actually read the article? It's absolutely insane how everyone just opens their mouths without understanding anything.
Consider it a catch all term for "copying intellectual property". Patents, copyrights, trademarks, its different words for the same idea.
No, Copyright exists to protect creators. It's just been perverted and abused by the wealthy so that they can indefinitely retain IP. Disney holding on to an IP for 70 years after an author dies is messed up, but Disney taking your art and selling it to a mass audience without giving you a dime is worse.
Copyright cannot protect 99% of creators because enforcing it takes enormous amounts of time and money. This isn't really a big deal though because 99% of people who create don't need these supposed protections.
That's right, the amount of writing, art, and music that is created for non-commercial purposes dwarfs what is created for profit.
Your last tidbit is highly accurate. Big business almost exclusively uses copyright to control others work to the detriment of society.
Right, but as I said to someone else in this thread, the fact thar copyright can't protect 99% of creators is a problem with capitalism, not copyright. The fact that our courts favor the wealthy isn't the fault of copyright law itself.
Also, you're correct that most art is created for pleasure, not profit, but that doesn't mean the need to protect artists' rights to their creations isn't necessary, even beyond capitalistic reasons. Bill Waterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, refused to merchandise his art simply because he didn't want to ruin the image of his characters for a licensing deal. Without copyright law, any company could have slapped his characters on t-shirts and coffee mugs to make a quick buck off of his labor. But because of copyright law, he was able to refuse his publisher's attempts to franchise his characters (reportedly, he even turned down Spielberg and Lucas' pitch for an animated series based on the strip).
I think you have bought into the lie about copyright that has been fed to us. It is really hard to look at something objectively when you have been propagandized about it your entire life.
Currently copyright and the bigger category of intellectual property only exist to benefit commercial interests, this is self-evident. It is not a natural right by any means and is a perversion of the way art and science has existed for all of human history.
We have to face the reality that in a world of billions of people nothing is really unique. If you are anything like me you would have had many great thoughts, ideas, and projects and seen many other people throughout your life with similar or sometimes identical concepts.
Who should get to rent seek for these? If I create a very similar painting or song without ever seeing or hearing of another similar one who is the first? Well the current system is first come first serve, but is that really right?
What about teachers. Should not your teacher get a portion of your creation since they inspired you? What about exposure to other art, should you pay a portion of your earnings if you were inspired by other artist?
Even when looking at case law with derivative works, what is or is not okay is hardly settled and constantly changes based on the whims of ill-informed judges.
These questions only begin to scratch the complexity of the situation because of the artificial constraints put on us by intellectual property. I don't pretend to have the answers except to say there really is no need for any of this.
Even when looking at something you may think is relatively simple like putting a characters likeness on merchandise it is never cut and dry. I have often wondered if Tigger inspired Hobbes. The likeness including even behavior is rather startling.
Who has the rights is sometimes not even the person that created it originally. This is especially evident in productions that require lots of people like movies. This leads to interesting facts like most major recording artist don't even own their own songs.
Commercial interests love to have it both ways as well. Microsoft used piracy to its advantage to spread its OS across the globe and only cracked down on it after becoming a monopoly.
I am not trying to muddy the waters here but I want to make it clear that intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests. It was ill-conceived from the start, based on false premises, and has been pushed to the breaking point from years of coordinated legal tactics.
What creator has been protected by copyright?
Anyone who creates anything? If not for copyright Steam would be a sea of games named Undertale Stardew Valley Elsa Spider-Man
Youre thinking of the google play store
lmao
You would deprive everyone of the joy of playing this game mashup!?
I know you are joking, but honestly we would have a lot better games if we were allowed to openly borrow and build off of other concepts including characters and storylines.
Simply put commercial interests don't produce the best games. Instead of innovative gameplay we get loot boxes and micro transactions.
A great example of this is Pokemon. You know damn well that fans could make a better Pokemon game than Nintendo ever could.
Holy fuck I see some stupid takes posted here but this might be the stupidest.
Literally everyone who's ever written a book, recorded a song, painted a painting, or created any other artwork.
Books and song rights go to the publisher. Graphic artists generally dont own their art they make money from, I.E. illustrations or concept art for various things like shows, movies, games.
First of all, no, publishers don't necessarily own the copyright. Most authors do a licensing deal with a publisher, but they retain the copyright to their work. My understanding is that music industry contracts vary a lot more, since music is usually more collaborative, but lots of artists still own the rights to their songs. But even if that were true, artists being forced to sell their rights to cooperations isn't an issue with copyright, it's an issue with capitalism. It's like blaming America's shitty healthcare on doctors instead of a for-profit system controlled by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
A licensing deal for rights to make money off an intellectual property. I.E. a way to use their wealth to profit even more off something they didnt make. Music industry has fun examples of musicians having to rerecord songs because an ex-record label still owned rights to the original. So there's situations where a musician entirely created and recorded a song and isnt allowed to sell that recording. And authors and musicians are the closest to owning their work they make a living off of. Any kind of industry visual artist has no ownership of anything.
Copyright is an issue with capitalism. It only exists for wealthy to profit off of.
I've run out of ways to tell you that's not correct. The explicit purpose of the copyright law in the constitution is to allow creators to profit from their work. If you're arguing that we should live in a pure communist society, where the products of all labor, including intellectual property, belong to community, fine, but we don't live in a communist utopia. We live in a capitalist hellscape, and you're looking at one of the only protections artists have, seeing how it's been exploited by capitalism, and claiming the protection is the problem. It's like looking at the minimum wage, seeing how cooperations have lobbied Congress to keep it so low it's now starvation wage, and coming to the conclusion that the minimum wage needs to be abolished.
Idk about that, maybe indefinite copyrights would be but limited term is entirely fair. Like imagine you spend 5 years and $50M to develop something (random numbers here), then the next day someone just copies it and sells it cheaper since they had no overhead in copying your product. There's no incentive to create if all it does is put you in debt, so we do need copyrights if we want things. However Pokemon came out in 96, that's 28 years. There's been very little innovation in their games since. And seeing as Digimon wasn't sued it's not about the monsters, it's about the balls. But those balls haven't changed in almost three decades so I don't think the really have a case to complain
I can see the opposite argument made for copyright that if someone can coast off the success of their first work that in and of itself can de-incentivize them from making anything new, this is why movie companies just remake the same movies and stories every few years, it's to coast on the success of the old one, and this is even a problem with shorter term copyrights. Their limiting factor is with the technology of the time making the old ones look dated, not so much the copyright expiring. If it didn't look dated, they would just re-release the same ones over and over and over again.
Copyright was made for Joe, or a small business, but applying that to a big business doesn't work, and is in fact a bad-faith argument, trying to tug at our heart-strings to make us feel bad for someone that we shouldn't feel bad for. If Disney couldn't sue people for copyright infringement they'd still find a way to go after them, they have more than enough money to hire a PI to ruin the person's life, or you know just hire a hitman. It doesn't do anyone any favors to Compare Disney, Paramount, Amazon, Facebook, or Google to a small business who needs our help to not be screwed over.
Ironically in this day and age it doesn't do as much for those small businesses anymore because they don't have the money needed to fight those claims, you know who does though, the big ones, the ones who don't need protection at all. They're free to predate on these smaller people if they choose, and those smaller people will be otherwise powerless to fight back, and even if by some stroke of luck they do, it'll likely bankrupt them because of it.
The problem is that IP laws eventually are lobbied by the big copyright holders into being excessively long. How long did Steamboat Willie really have to be copyrighted for, and has their release into the public domain really affected Disney?
Eventually after you get back the money you invested, it's just free money, and people like free money so much they pay lawyers and lobbyists that free money so that they can keep it coming.
Pokemon: The innovative RPG where you couldn't even walk diagonally until generation 6...
The people spending 5 years to develop something arent the ones that own the rights to the end product. Like I said, copyright exists so rich people can own more. The people that own the rights to pokemon are not game developers, artists, writers, anyone that put actual work into creating the games and other media. Its people that had a lot of money, shareholders and executives. And then they receive the biggest share of the profits off others work and the feedback loop continues.
First, not really, there’s been a LOT of innovation in Pokémon, as much as people want to deny it.
And second, 28 years is really not that much. We’re not in the Disney realm of copyright-hogging, I think 50 years is a fair amount of time. The issue is that it’s often way too broad: it should protect only extremely blatant copies (i.e. the guy who literally rereleased Pokémon Yellow as a mobile game), not concepts or general mechanics. Palworld has a completely different gameplay from any Pokémon game so far, and (most of) the creatures are distinct enough. That should suffice to make it rightfully exist (maybe removing the 4/5 Pals that are absolute ripoffs, sure).
50 years is already excessive, dude or dudette. The north american law originally gave 14 years, plus another 14 years if the creators actively sought after and were approved (most did not even ask, and approval was not guaranteed). This is comparable time to patents, which serve the exact same function, but without the absurd time scales (Imagine if Computers were still a private tech of IBM ... those sweet mainframes the size of a room). 28 years, or lets put 30 years fixed at once, is more than sufficient time for making profit for the quasi totality of IPs that would make a profit (and creators can invest the money received to gain more, or have 30 years to think of something else). 30 years ago was 1994, think of everything the Star Wars prequels have sold, now remeber the 1st film was from 1999, would star wars prequels ventures really suffer if they started losing the IP from 2029 onwards ?
I still think if copyright laws weren’t so oppressive, 50 years would be fair (And still a huge improvement from the current situation).
Maybe have it in tiers or something? First 10 years: full copyright - until 30: similar products allowed, but no blatant reproduction - until 50: reproduction allowed as long as it’s not for-profit - post 50: public domain?
Humm..., i don't think this scheme would work out in practice. The definitions of several concepts are fuzzy, and therefore can be circumvented or challenged or abused by all sides of the equation. What is a 'similar product' that is allowed after 30 years (and therefore what is a 'dissimilar product' that would be forbidden before), how would a non-profit that just pays high salaries to its managers fare between the marks of 30 and 50 years (and just gives some little money to research or charity). And again, why give artists and creative companies so much more time of IP protection than we give STEM inventors and companies time in patents (this random site claims patents last 15 to 20 years only) ?
They are, but it’s not like they’re very definite nowadays either.
I’d say “similar product” is anything that doesn’t try to pass off as the original one, and is mechanically different enough. Palworld for example, or all the other Pokéclones that popped up in recent years.
They wouldn’t, in that period I’d allow stuff like piracy or free cultural events, stuff like that. Obviously the copyright holder would still be able to profit off of their own products, but everyone else would have to ask them to do so.
Because those are things that humanity needs to progress. I do think they could be longer in a different way, like “they can be used by anyone without consent from the inventor, but they need to pay a small percentage in royalties” or something like that, just to ensure they have a permanent source of income that’s enough to live off. I’m not knowledgeable enough about that to talk though, so I can’t really answer that question without going into baseless speculations.
50 years.. 5 maybe. If you have not earned back your investment by then you are just squatting on it.
I think 50 is generally too much, but I think it should depend on categories, so that it is based upon the efforts put into an idea to create and how much it value (like in expected ROI).
I fear, that is hard to define
As an artist 20-50 depending on context is where I'm hovering. It is very hard to define.
I agree with you almost entirely, but if we're being honest, there really hasn't been a lot of innovation in their games since Gen 4, and that was almost 20 years ago. Once they figured out the physical/special split, nothing really changed in the major mechanics. They have a new gimmick mechanic every game, like Z-Moves or Dynamax, but they're always dropped by the next game. I guess camping/picnics are evolving into a new feature, but that's about it.
If we’re talking PvP, battling has constantly evolved through new abilities, even without gimmicks the way the game is played changed a lot through the years.
In single player they also changed a lot of stuff since gen 4, although the positive changes were mostly in gen 5/6 and the later ones like wild areas and the switch to “””open world””” were… not as well received.
Well, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. To me, most of the updates have been set dressing, not significant changes to the formula or gameplay. But I guess that's a matter of opinion, not fact.
How about no. Let people create if your only incentive is money fuck you. If someone spent $50 million to develop something the labor has been paid. You will be first to the market and you can make money if your invention isn't that unique oh well.
Thats a great way to make companies spend 0 on r&d that has longterm benefits and instead focus on squeezing out every penny from current assets.
Want to make something, the people eho want it pay to make it happen, once it's done and paid for, it belongs to everyone. I rather live in the star citizen dystopia than the Disney vampire dystopia.
Making an unlimited reproducible resource artificially scarce for 160 years is really fucking evil parasiticism.
I dont think anyone here thinks that the ridiculous terms on current IP laws make sense (at least I havent seen anyone defending them), but there is a big difference between a short term of 5-10 years for you to get the earned benefits of an innovation you created and zero protection where a larger more well funded company can swoop in copy your invention and bury you in marketing so they get the reward.
Intellectual property has been abused beyond recovery, we need an entirely new paradigm. Duration of right is just a tiny part of it. Any system that turns the infinite resource into an artificial scarcity is fundamentally evil.
So you tax the fuck out of them and fund invention though schools and unis. But the fact companies won't is not a sure thing.. it just means they will be more pickey.
Even when it doesn't, it becomes its eventual outcome.