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cactus
@cactus

if you start from a principle of “property is theft” then it is easy to get from there to copyright abolition. but if you start from a principle of “labor is entitled to all it creates” i think the straightforward conclusion is that copyright is good, at least in principle.

if i write a book, and you did not write my book, then my book is more mine than yours, and copyright is the mechanism by which i am entitled to sell copies of my book and you are not. obviously under fully automated luxury gay space communism or whatever i will not need the money anyway so it won’t really matter, but here in the present, i would want to get paid for the work that i did, and if you instead get paid for the work that i did, that is bad and not good.


no i do not hate waffles: i do not think letting disney define the term of copyright is good, and i think fair use should be expanded further, and i am aware of the numerous other issues with copyright law as it currently exists.


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in reply to @cactus's post:

i was nervous reopening cohost and relieved to only see 11 notifications, but I can handle people making bad counterarguments in my quote rechosts. although things get really annoying if they're good counterarguments. who's to say, chase your bliss

i have similar thoughts myself on this topic. the compromise position i've reached is we should probably phase out copyright in replacement for social funding of the arts. In the short term that means public funded grants that artists can apply to to create whatever they want, getting paid to make art, with the condition that when they are finished the art enters the public domain because it was socially funded, it belongs to everyone. It's not a perfect idea but it would at least give artists some options for funding their creations other than "be independently wealthy" or "deal with publishers/producers."

The long term would probably look more like just socialist UBI for everyone, and a lot more people making art as a consequence of not needing to work to survive.

I think any weakening of the protections individual artists get for their work cannot precede weakening of the power of corporations to exploit that work. if I can get a modest but comfortable income from writing a song, and then Apple can use that song in a Super Bowl commercial and sell four billion iPhone 38s and not give me a dime, that all still sucks real bad. especially if I was only having a modest but comfortable income while I recorded that one album, and I have run out of ideas for now and the grant has expired

"in an ideal world, we wouldn't need [x], but we're not in an ideal world"; basically, a necessary evil. yep.

even in a world where copyright doesn't exist, there's still "intellectual property" to consider. even if your stuff can be copied and shared, where do the lines about transforming it lie?

at least we can all generally agree that the system as-is has a lot of flaws.

it's interesting to think of it in terms of, like, the Odyssey. the modern conception, commonly, is that Homer was the author in a way that would probably result in copyright, but even if they'd had the idea back then i don't think they'd assign it. it was really a collection, a codification, of stories long in circulation.

which raises the interesting question: can copyrightable works exist without copyright? does the novel make sense in a world without copyright? could we have novels without it? i suspect the answer is yes, but i don't really know, and it's the type of question that often gets brushed over in copyright abolition talk.

Aren’t novels roughly 2 millennia older than copyright? Of course in the ancient world copying the work was materially hard, all our modern considerations stem from pretty specific marginal cost conditions.

There were a few Ancient Greek and Roman works that are referred to as novels, if I remember correctly they were quite popular in the Hellenistic world, but of course nowhere near the levels of popularity and success of the 19th century “peak” of the form. Compared to theater or poetry I would think mass printing would make a way bigger difference.

The tale of Genji is early 11th century and commonly called the first novel (it certainly isn't but it is one of the earliest complete examples we have access to), there were novels being published in Arabic in the 12th century, and the novel was developing as a form in Song Dynasty China with the advent of printed books.

I feel like there's a flaw in this argument, namely in the idea that the only labor that goes into writing a book is the writing of the book.

Writers do not exist as blank slates who take ideas from the æther and arrange the words on a page — they swim in a sea of ideas and creative work from which their work is in large part constructed.

It is true that labor is entitled to all it creates, but "property is theft" is not opposed to this idea, it follows from this idea.

For a specific example, let me use the Super Bowl commercial example from elsewhere in the comments:

if I can get a modest but comfortable income from writing a song, and then Apple can use that song in a Super Bowl commercial and sell four billion iPhone 38s and not give me a dime, that all still sucks real bad

The question this raises is: Why is this the part that's bad? Suppose for sake of argument you were entitled to a residual of the sale of iPhone 38s by dint of having written the music for the Super Bowl commercial; why is this where that logic ends?

Could we not say that if I get a modest but comfortable income from teaching music, and then a student can use those skills to write a song that gets them millions in residuals and not give me a dime, that's equally terrible?

The chain of logic goes on, and from the idea that labor is entitled to all it creates, it follows that property is theft. By being able to own a song, you steal from labor that to which it is entitled!