this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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The original intent was good. You make something, you can legally ensure people can't just copy your work and slap their name on it for profit. People could make creative works without fear of someone else ripping it away from them.
Then Disney just kept bribing politicians to extend it to a ridiculous degree so they wouldn't lose Mickey to public domain until they moved his likeness into their trademark, which lives as long as it's being used actively.
And then you have DMCA, where everyone is guilty until innocent and that whole can of worms, and DRM which is technically illegal to circumvent no matter how much time or what reason. Corporatization and the Internet turned that relatively simple and good ideas into an utter mess.
that original intent never mattered. no one's gonna make mickey mouse shorts and people be like "oh that must be their character, not Disney's". Mickey became famous and profitable from Disney's amazing animation and enjoyable writing. Without copyright, that's still the case. Queen and David Bowie didnt fall from financial or celebrity grace because Vanilla Ice copied them, because being copied doesnt detract from you. Again, all it did was enable the rich to profit from more things they didnt make. Get rid of all of it.
I think a short copyright period is fair enough to stop corporations putting out word for word copies of your book a week after you publish it. But it doesn't need to be more than 5-10 years, the current death+70 that the USA has pushed on the world is obscene.
Any author popular enough to be copied by a corporation is already well supported by fans. People prefer to support artists they like.
It's not the popular authors that would be getting ripped off, it'd be the small ones. Corps would have people scouting books en masse, find one worth taking without a reputation to back themselves up, then present their own version and crush any momentum you might gain against their millions of dollars in marketing.
The small ones already dont make money from their work. If theyre undiscovered, they dont have any fans to buy their book. If they are discovered, they have fan support.
I think you severely underestimate the greed of corporations. If there was no copyright whatsoever there would nothing to stop, for example, amazon not publishing the new novel by a middling author and instead selling their own version where they take all the profit.
I didnt disagree with that part. Youre missing the part where theres nothing stopping fans from giving the author money instead.
How are they finding fans?
The same way they are now?
By not having their work stolen and published under a different author?
Stolen before its ever been published? I think yall are getting tripped up with thinking corporations can see the future and can steal something that will become successful but has not yet been discovered by any readers. If its successful enough to be stolen, its already successful.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.