Alright but Archiving is already an exception to most laws (clearly not well enforced seeing what happened to the IA) and your proposal would harm young artists who need to share their works in order to gain publicity for something they intend to sell and sustain themselves on.
Comment on Yet more examples of how copyright destroys culture rather than driving it
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months agoI’m more open to burning the whole edifice of copyright law down than you are, but the key reform that I want that maybe we could agree on is that it should be legal to distribute coprighted works for free. No need to to let someone else try to make a profit by undercutting your sales, but if someone is willing to make and distribute copies (or ecopies) of a work to no profit for themselves they should be allowed to. What that would mean in practice if it was legal would be an online content library containing all human art and culture, freely available for download to all comers. It might hurt the income of some creators, but you’d still have a lot of other ways to make money that don’t entail depriving people of that library.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 4 months ago
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
“your proposal would harm young artists who need to share their works in order to gain publicity for something they intend to sell and sustain themselves on.”
The default is already for young artists to share a lot of their work hoping to get noticed. Getting rid of copyright would be reorienting the whole system to center that experience more rather than the established artists and art producing corporations who now are in a strong enough position to charge. “Making it” would just mean that your patreon was doing gangbusters rather than selling a lot of copies of whatever your art is.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 4 months ago
No, it would empower anybody, especially corporations, to take the new artists’ ideas and work and repackage them as an item for sale to others. Anything you share would not be covered by copyright and therefor no longer be your property.
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If you are already sharing something for free in order to gain publicity, what is the downside of others repackaging them and spreading them further? That is exactly the kind of publicity you’re trying to gain.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
IA didn’t get sued for archiving. They got sued for mass redistribution.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
You can have that library today (see: Project Gutenberg), just on a delay. The problem, IMO, is that the delay is much too long. If copyright only lasted 10 years, it would be much more useful as a store of human knowledge. We could even allow an application for a longer term for smaller creators who need more time to monetize their works.
That’s pretty close to how it used to work in the US, it has just been twisted by large orgs like Disney and the RIAA.
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah Project Gutenberg really demonstrates how this is all pretty much already built, just illegal to include recent works in. Though of course that’s just books where the post copyright free library could also include all other art and culture such as tv, radio, movies, images, games, etc
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Sure, and there’s no reason it can’t include other art and culture, like TV shows, radio programs, etc. The main issue is the length of time before those become legal to redistribute. It sucks that only movies made in the early 1900s are legal to redistribute, when the most culturally relevant works are still 50+ years away from entering the public domain.
So we should be looking at shortening that time, trying to end copyright entirely isn’t going to happen.
psychothumbs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Shortening the time is good, and adjusting it while it still does apply to allow for more legal free sharing of the work.