According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law.
“Broadly, I don’t disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents,” said Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. “They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system.”
Current system is obviously broken, but you don’t believe that artists and creators should have a right to control their intellectual property at all?
And yes, intellectual property is real whether you want it to be or not. And it’s not necessarily about money, but about controlling what can be done with your work.
For example, Bruce Springsteen should 100% be allowed to tell Trump to fuck off and stop using his music at rallys.
What would be the mechanism to do that without IP?
Personally I don’t have an issue with individual intellectual property, it’s the acquisition and trade of it by corporations that I have an issue with. For example, I believe no copyright should last after the creator’s death. Disney is dead, Tolkien is dead, many musicians are dead, let alive creators contribute to their worlds.
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.
I wouldnt say that IP doesnt exist, but once you share information with someone, they are now also a holder of that IP, just by the nature of reality.
To answer your first question no.
Intellectual property is a societal construct and it is as real as racism is. Which isn’t saying much.
If an artist doesn’t want their music to be heard and possibly replicated, altered, or used in a way they don’t like then it is their responsibility to never release it. Only by hiding it can they keep the world from misusing it.
rofl pure stupidity
The thing that irks me the most is that everyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liberal or some shit. No matter how grounded and nuanced your take is.
Every leftist has their own, ultra specific orthodoxy, and they will always find something about yours that makes you “not a real leftist.”
Nothing new either, it’s happened countless times. It’s so self-sabotaging.
You have no take other than approving the purchase and sale of our culture controlled by corporations.
You say IP is for the little guy, the average federal copyright lawsuit cost a quarter of a million dollars to pursue.
You have no clue about remix culture which was destroyed by profiteers. Corporations control the majority of artist’s commercial music. Many artists don’t own their own work.
Corporations constantly steal IP. AI has shown us that they don’t respect the very laws they created.
The only person living in a dystopia and loving it is you. The abolishment of IP would cause an explosion of science and art like the world hasn’t seen since they created laws to prevent it.
Not the person you responded to, but how would a recording artist earn a living in that model? If their work can get scooped up by a mega corporation and sold for pennies on the dollar due to the massive existing resources, reach, and infrastructure available to the corporation, what protections would there be against that happening?
Artist that want to make money can preform or sell their work like they have always done. IP is about commercial interests like royalties and licensing. This has nothing to do with the actual promotion of arts and science. It is about control.
Most artist don’t do it to make money even. This confusion of expression and commercial interest is the crux of what we are dealing with.
There is no natural protection from someone copying, remixing, or reinventing your work. This is literally how art is made. No one creates in a vacuum and everyone is inspired by someone else.
There are already no protections for the little guy. Corporations borrow and use whatever they want. The IP system is NOT for the average person. It is designed to benefit and enrich an extreme minority and it does this well.
Doing something to make money and making enough from doing it to keep doing it full-time are two very different things, and I would argue the latter would be more difficult, not less under your proposed system. Yes, corporations do that already because they can throw enough money at the case to wear down the plaintiff into settling. But how much more do you think they would steal if they didn’t even have to do that?
Why do most people lock their doors at night? Do they really think that a piece of metal stuck in a slab of wood would stop any thief who really wants to get in? No, of course not. But the amount of effort and risk required is enough of a deterrent that most thieves won’t bother.
Copyright law is similar in my eyes. Will it stop a huge corporation that is willing to dump huge sums of money into any one case? Not really. But the effort and money involved is enough to deter them in most cases. Remove that they have no incentive not to steal work. Find a catchy song? Get one of the thousands of artists on contract to re-produce it to a T, send it to your millions of online viewers, and rack up 100k views in 12 hours. Congrats, you beat the artist to their 15 minutes of fame and any chance they could get at exposure, their potential earnings are yours now and it hasn’t even been a day. Any future web searches for the song will show you as well, so the original artist will likely be very quickly lost to time, and everyone remembers that one track the Capitol Records conglomerate put out that one time. That’s the kind of stuff I envision happening with literally no safeguards.
Exercising copyright in a court of law is extremely expensive. $250k+ minimum for a federal case. It is not a system designed for the artists you are describing.
In fact, it is just the opposite with corporations going after small artists regularly, not the other way around.
How has copyright been a deterrent to AI? This is a great case example of the system working as it is intended. Benefiting corporations which is what the system is designed to do.
Most major recording artists do not own their works. Where is their protection? The system is once again not designed for the individual.
Copyright was designed to create artificial scarcity. It was created out of the guilds back in England and was designed to censor and control the printing industry NOT protect authors rights.
While I will admit copyright is the most palatable of the Intellectual Properties it is still extremely problematic and we would be better off without it.
Don’t even get me started on patents and trademarks and the abuse these system perpetrate on our society. There is doubt the elimination of intellectual property would be beneficial to our society at the detriment of the rent-seeking capitalists.
Unless someone who’s more famous than you decides to just steal it and put their name on it.
Oh well I guess. Back to the drawing board so it can happen again! Any day now, we’ll be a communist society with no need for money, so I’ll just keep putting out music to be stolen until then!
Corporations already do this everyday.
Whatever you say Motoass!
Insults and nothing else? Thanks for proving you’re nothing but a petulant child who does not understand the real world.
I just returned an insult, you are welcome dumbass.
Blocked for being someone not worth talking to.
Your inability to view your own shortcomings will be a hilarious continual failure for you. Congratulations on being one of far too many morons to walk this earth.
I do believe that.
Intellectual property leads to all kind of unfairness. It should be normalized that artist would be paid for the work done, nor for property ownership.
This adds to some other believes about people shouldn’t be paid just for “property ownership”.
And once the art is done and released is part of human race, that does include terrible human beings, but it also includes absolutely everyone else.
Some other argument for this… For instance, being an artist is one of the jobs with biggest pay disparity, from the poorest of them all to some of the richest. That’s a normal output of basing income on property ownership, things snowball once you have enough property.
I don’t think there’s a way to make private property (physical or intelectual) work in a fair economy. And remember, private property is not the same as personal property, just in case.
I do think the world of art would get much better and more diverse if we got rid of property as a way to measure revenue and put work in the center as a way to measure how much we should pay each artist.
You live in a dream world. Why would I release my music to the public when there are people who will make a living stealing it, putting their name on it, and selling 1000x more than I ever could because they already have name recognition? And those people WILL exist for every form of creative content.
Artists need some sort of mechanism to protect them from exploitation that is inherent to capitalism
Yeah… victory belonging to the person with the widest reach and deepest pockets rather than the originator of the material/idea is one way to ensure that all creatives become paupers. This is one of those many on-paper ideas that, without the upheaval of pretty much every other established human social structure, would be awful in practice.
I thought you were going to say something about Spotify for a moment.
99+% of art is never sold. The vast majority of artist don’t make money. Who really cares about the extreme minority who use capitalism to control our culture. They don’t get to decide what the rest of the world does purely for their economic interests.
No they don’t need any mechanism. The arts and sciences existed for thousands of years without modern silly interpretations for commercial interests.
So for the artists that created works but did not sell them, you believe that they would be fine with someone else photocopying it and then selling it themselves?
Sorry I’m not a head in the clouds, utopian. I try to base my beliefs in plausible reality.
Yes. Art is interative. You don’t even understand how art works that is how stupid you are.
Save me the utopia bullshit all I here is someone licking boots. What does it taste like?
Why are y’all so fucking rude?
I’m a bootlicker because I don’t think getting rid of the concept of intellectual property completely is a good idea.
Ok Bud
And you know nothing about me and whether or not I’m a musician or an artist, so you shouldn’t assume.
But I know for a fact that most artists would not be fucking ok with someone photocopying their work (that they didn’t sell) for profit.
I know this because it literally already fucking happens, and artists hate it.
You think every artist is a selfish asshole like you. That is just called projecting.
You are incapable of good faith discussion.
Hope you get help for your anger issues. Have a good weekend.
Because you will be paid for it?
In the current world I could torrent your music and you’ll be “losing money” and will end up investing more work in anti-piracy and advertisement than in making good music.
If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property and the means of capitalism, it would mean that you could 100% focus on making music and everyone could enjoy the things you made. You couldn’t care less if I torrent your music in this new world. Hell, music would probably be mainly distributed by torrenting.
Everyone will be happy, except investors and people thriving of this inefficient and unfair system.
Meanwhile, I’ll be seeding.
And how would that system decide how much you get paid and where would the money for that payment come from? How do you make sure a carefully crafted piece of music, that brings happiness to millions of people gets paid fairly compared to someone just putting together a song in 5 minutes by pressing random notes on the keyboard?
What is “fair compensation”, in this case, for you? Does bringing joy to millions of people entitle you to more money or do you see the happiness you shared and subsequent fame as part of your “payment” - what you get out of it?
Any system to evaluate compensation would be better than the actual one, which is a completely mess that does not properly compensate artists for their work.
Currently marketing, frontstore presence and market dominance is far more relevant on a particular artist income than their craft.
Any system that actually would think about what people think about a particular craft, how much time and effort got put into it, how much it was enjoyed, etc, would be better. Currently is just about who can make more sales and get more ad money, the art is secondary and I’m being generous.
Ok but you’re literally describing a utopia. That is not a world that exists in reality.
So is a world without murder. That doesn’t mean that we should defend murderers doesn’t it?
A world where gay people had equal rights surely was an utopia on the year 1800s, look how far have we come. Thanks to people that though that a better word is, indeed, possible.
Why wouldn’t we strive for a better way of doing things? Why defend faulty systems that we know they are bad just because those are the systems currently in place?
I do believe we can be better.
And if not… Piracy it is.
Just because we could do better doesn’t magically make tearing all protections down a remotely intelligent idea.
They’re asking for a SPECIFIC idea of what to replace them with… because you dummies will just end up reinventing IP laws without 70 year copyrights… like they were originally…
This is a trains for public transit situation… You’ll whine all day about the status quo, say nothing good exists, want to tear it all down … and then just reinvent the same fucking thing we already have but just need a different mix of…
I think you are arguing against an imaginary group of people here.
Is he? Seems to me he is spot on. A lot of words about how things should be and precious little how to make it so.
Sure, you got to start somewhere but you also need a plan to get there in the first place.
I’m literally talking about how we should try to do better. I’ve just been around long enough to know that this ain’t how you do it.
I also believe all intellectual property laws shouldn’t exist, so patent, copyright, and trademark.
Artists and creators already don’t control their intellectual property. The megacorporations do, and they have always violated the intellectual property rights of small artists with little to no consequences.
Intellectual property laws are a recent and catastrophic mistake. For the majority of the history of our species, no one could retain sole ownership of art. And it was better. We make the best art when we trade it back & forth and reiterate on it.
We should scrap intellectual property laws, and heavily tax corporate AI use to fund a national artists stipend to provide them a good standard of living.
If you want a capitalist society it needs to die.
If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.
Exactly. And why would Springsteen have any incentive to distribute (or ultimately, even record maybe) any of his music in this proposed reality?
Not a fan of Springsteen, was just the first example that came to mind.
I’m just trying to imagine the incalculable amount of great music we would have been deprived of had we been living in a world without IP laws.
They might have written them, but we’d never get to hear it.
If we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society, it could maybe work and that would be wonderful. But we’re not, so just getting rid of IP entirely is just a bad idea.
It’s imaginary property. It’s not real and only exists in our heads. Saying someone stole your “intellectual property” is akin to saying they “stole your idea.”
It is about the money, as well. Nobody should be able to own an idea.
Bruce Springsteen will just have to grow up and get over it.
So just no music business then?
No movies. No TV shows. No comics…
It may surprise you to know that people produced music before IP laws existed.
Music does not need copyright to exist. Man you are dense.
Where did I say that it did?
I’m just trying to picture what this world would actually look like, and it seems shit.
People will still create music, but without having any sense of ownership over it whatsoever, there is zero incentive to distribute it.
Whether you believe in private property or not doesn’t change the fact that artists will always feel a sense of ownership over their creations
Man you are a lying bootlicker.
So no one created and distributed music throughout the history of mankind?
You don’t have to picture it, it happened. Also, the majority of art and music is never sold or distributed.
Just admit you are young and dumb capitalist that thinks art = money when in reality art = expression. At least then you can be honest and people won’t waste their time talking to you.
Why are you people always so fucking rude when you’re shit is challenged in any way?
Look at my other comments in this thread if you care to actually understand my position. I never even suggested that people would stop making music.
I even said that it could maybe work if we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society. But we are, so completely getting rid of the concept of IP is a bad idea.
I read all you comments. You don’t even have a foundation in any of this. Just a little shit talker who licks the boots of your corporate overlords
We live in an ultra capitalist society which is perverting art and sciences for money. All the while defended by idiots like you.
No art, no poetry, no video games. . .
IMO creators should have better protections - the current laws don’t seem to stop AI gobbling up their work. But at the same time this Nintendo thing is obviously bullshit. I’m surprised the court * allowed it. Probably a decision made by a very old Christian man who doesn’t understand what games are and can’t use a smartphone.
* Oops decision was made by patent office who really should know better
Pretty neat how capitalists invented art and it isn’t at all an intrinsic part of the human experience since at least 40,000 years ago.
They certainly patented it.
My point is that people make stuff even without a profit incentive.
Yeah it’s clearly broken. But there is a complete lack of nuance in these “get rid of IP and copyright completely (and if you disagree you’re an idiot)” arguments. They’re just supremely unhelpful.
Yep I’m right there with you. Artists of all types should be entitled to the proceeds of their work. Also, if I were creative and something I’d created was plagiarised, I’d be unhappy about that too. Just because a big company abuses a system doesn’t mean it shouldn’t protect individuals.
*supremely unhelpful for capitalists
FTFY