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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I am not going to split hairs about whether the commoner would use copyright back in 1710. You know they would not.

    For the privilege of copyright your idea must be truly unique to deprive others the right to use it. Perhaps you have never thought through the reality of creating artificial scarcity.

    Your elaborate strawman is apparently copyright is needed for the arts which I have pointed out is not true and I had thought you agreed with.

    We will never know if the creator of Calvin and Hobbes choose not license merchandising for the reality they could have been hit with trademark infringement.

    Certainly if Nintendo can go after Palworld, Disney could have come after Calvin and Hobbes. This is all I was alluding to.


  • The commoner could not read or write in 1709. Even back then the law was meant for the upper class hence monied interests. So not the opposite at all. Wealthy using the law to protect their profits seems to be what has always happened. Hard to look at this as a some sort of positive for people like you and me.

    What you describe is exactly what is happening in the majority of commercial writing nowadays. The corporations still have complete control. Strange how the law didn’t change the status quo rather just carved out an exception for wealthy writers to be rent seekers. Once again, anyone without the means would have their work copied with no recourse.

    Copying is not a bad thing as it is the foundation of all human culture. Trying to create a artificial system of scarcity perhaps made some sense to commercial interests when publishing cost so much. With the Internet though and our fast past culture it really is a ridiculous concept nowadays.

    Once again owning the rights to your work doesn’t matter unless a corporation wants to reprint, distribute your material, or in modern times allow you on their platform. Copyright would never stop this.

    Even to this day the majority of those who create art don’t expect compensation. Most do it for fun as a creative outlet. This obsession with trying to conflate art with profit has always been a lie. Only an extreme minority of people will ever make money from their art. So we are all to bow down to them copying our culture?

    They did not create anything in a vacuum and they refuse to recognize this. This is what I mean when I say it is a flawed premise. We don’t need to commercialize art to promote it.

    We don’t need to concentrate wealth for rent seekers and lawyers by creating a system of artificial scarcity. This does not promote the arts or protect them in any meaningful way.

    Copyright does not protect the vast majority of artists because they don’t need it and if they did would not have the resources or time to access our dubious legal frameworks in a court of law. It is a broken idea turned into a broken system.





  • The real issue is we need to protect everyone from the extreme violation of privacy and psychological manipulation that has become endemic in our online culture. It is not just social media. It is also Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

    This is why when the government goes after Tic Toc to protect children it is so hollow. It is a scapegoat for the industry. Only the system is so corrupt it can’t even sacrifice the lamb anymore. It is has become a lip service to a problem so large it will likely be the defining point for the new millennium.

    We need real privacy protections yesterday. The government should have broken these companies up a decade ago. Everyday we normalize this behavior it is putting profits above human dignity.


  • I think you have bought into the lie about copyright that has been fed to us. It is really hard to look at something objectively when you have been propagandized about it your entire life.

    Currently copyright and the bigger category of intellectual property only exist to benefit commercial interests, this is self-evident. It is not a natural right by any means and is a perversion of the way art and science has existed for all of human history.

    We have to face the reality that in a world of billions of people nothing is really unique. If you are anything like me you would have had many great thoughts, ideas, and projects and seen many other people throughout your life with similar or sometimes identical concepts.

    Who should get to rent seek for these? If I create a very similar painting or song without ever seeing or hearing of another similar one who is the first? Well the current system is first come first serve, but is that really right?

    What about teachers. Should not your teacher get a portion of your creation since they inspired you? What about exposure to other art, should you pay a portion of your earnings if you were inspired by other artist?

    Even when looking at case law with derivative works, what is or is not okay is hardly settled and constantly changes based on the whims of ill-informed judges.

    These questions only begin to scratch the complexity of the situation because of the artificial constraints put on us by intellectual property. I don’t pretend to have the answers except to say there really is no need for any of this.

    Even when looking at something you may think is relatively simple like putting a characters likeness on merchandise it is never cut and dry. I have often wondered if Tigger inspired Hobbes. The likeness including even behavior is rather startling.

    Who has the rights is sometimes not even the person that created it originally. This is especially evident in productions that require lots of people like movies. This leads to interesting facts like most major recording artist don’t even own their own songs.

    Commercial interests love to have it both ways as well. Microsoft used piracy to its advantage to spread its OS across the globe and only cracked down on it after becoming a monopoly.

    I am not trying to muddy the waters here but I want to make it clear that intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests. It was ill-conceived from the start, based on false premises, and has been pushed to the breaking point from years of coordinated legal tactics.