Comment on Japanese Government Calls on Sora 2 Maker OpenAI to Refrain From Copyright Infringement, Says Characters From Manga and Anime Are 'Irreplaceable Treasures' That Japan Boasts to the World

• bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They should happen in that order, and ideally copyright would only be awarded to individuals (or perhaps specifically named lists of individuals, with some reasonable cap), not corporations.

  That’s actually the law in Germany. Here it’s not called copyright but originator’s right. The big caveat being that things you create while under contract are licensed to companies. But the originator’s rights can not be transferred or erased.

  Of course international contracts severely muddy the waters here.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s how it should be, and that’s awesome that Germany does that!

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• LillyPip@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I disagree, because I think all of these things address the wrong problem.

  Individuals should be able to gain from their own inventions, and others shouldn’t be able to force them into poverty by stealing people’s IP. Corporations especially should not be incentivised to do that.

  Then again, unfettered capitalism is geared towards incentivising corporations to do that.

  The answer isn’t to weaken people’s already vanishing IP, but to change what’s incentivised. Also to stop treating corporations as people. They aren’t.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The answer isn’t to weaken people’s already vanishing IP, but to change what’s incentivised.

    IP protections are stronger than ever! If you write a novel and a company takes that without making a deal with you, almost any law firm will take that case with no payment until you get a massive settlement/judgement. You need to have evidence, of course, but IP is one thing the courts take very seriously.

    Protecting IP is not an issue, the issue is the protections last way too long and are generally owned by corporations through employment contracts. I don’t think that should be legal. Instead, you should only be allowed to grant your employer a perpetual, royalty-free license to use your work and perhaps a noncompete for some reasonable time after (i.e. can’t license your work to specific competitors), and that agreement should be void if they terminate your contract unlawfully. The creator should always be able to use their creations for their own benefit.

    But yeah, the real issue is incentives, and this dramatically changes incentives. Instead of a company like Disney milking their IPs for decades, they’ll need to continue to innovate because they can’t rely on courts to preserve their monopoly. Pokemon was created about 30 years ago and fans have continually complained about the state of the IP (games are samey and whatnot), so it’s high time they have some competition with that IP. Likewise for so many other popular IPs that companies just sit on and milk and only innovate when that stops being profitable.

    If you change the IP structure, you’ll see a big shift in the creative market.

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• Zink@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Making it so corporations cannot directly own some random valuable thing?

  It’s a nice thing to think about, but it has 0% chance of happening in our current system.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They kind of could. They could employ someone to own the copyright, and pay them handsomely to retain control of that copyright.

    That’s honestly how it should be. The same should be true for patents.

    Trademark, however, should be company controlled.

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    • Zink@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh I didn’t mean that it couldn’t be done. Just that it wouldn’t be. The people who control such things are actively moving our system in the opposite direction.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Not without a populist movement, no.

        And IMO, it shouldn’t be our top priority either. We should focus on electoral reform so it’s easier to get decent representatives in office, making it easier to pass stuff like this.

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