Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law, it wouldnt exist in its current form. No memes, no game streamers or videogame youtubers, no unlicensed music, no image sharing. Copyright needs to be defended to the best of the holders ability otherwise they lose it. It would necessitate a constant stream of scanning and policing and litigation thatd be so taxing on platforms theyd just shut down. Video game streaming operates in a legal grey zone because the law is flawed.
Theres a reason programming tools are almost all open source. From languages to libraries to software, the alternative is just too inefficient.
Copyright is an old shitty system from the days when books required publishers who had to register an ISBN for everything they published. The modern equivalent would be if every unique copyrightable contribution on the internet first required submitting the media to a government agency to store a hash of it and issue a UUID.
Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.
I think most artists would agree (unless they’re specifically interested in the concept of freely distributing their work).
There should be a mechanism to reward artists for their work and enable them to keep creating, but without also allowing a system of vampires to control that mechanism and enslave them in a twisted web of dependency and power.
cough UBI cough
That’s what I was getting at, yes.
I genuinely believe it might not fix everything, but will go one hell of a long way to making a lot of things easier to fix.
If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law
Whose law? Whose enforcers? The Internet is fundamentally incompatible with traditional sovereignty and jurisdiction concepts
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.
Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.
Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.