sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

copyright should be exclusively assigned to creative works by individual people if it's to exist

I'd like to share this post but i worry doing so could make the site temporarily annoying to you

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.

"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.

If copyright was 7 years long I would grumble a little but cheerfully accept its existence.

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!