The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny’s Child, because you couldn’t afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you’re an evil pirate! You wouldn’t steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it’s fair use, and even if it’s used to make a legitimate point, you’re getting demonetised. That’s assuming your videos don’t disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn’t shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube’s convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you’re a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone’s intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don’t deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
@music@fedibb.ml @technology #technology #tech #economics #copyright #ArtificialIntelligence #capitalism #IntellectualProperty @music@lemmy.ml #law #legal #economics
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon The same way any other creative labor is paid.
I certainly wouldn’t write code for companies without fair remuneration.
Most other forms of creative work also lend themselves a bit better to crowdsourced patronage & merch than my own craft.
In any case, the value is with the labor, not the resulting work. Mostly only labor can lead to new works or improvements to old ones.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Your model for writing code implies that all code writers must be someone else’s employee. But what if they want to be independent? How do those folks get paid?
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Well, that’s where the crowdsourced patronage & merchandise models (among two typical options) come in.
Both unfortunately rely on popularity with an audience will & able to pay to really work.
They’re hardly the only options, streamers have found corporate sponsors for example, but I couldn’t call myself an expert in alternative monetization practices.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Having been a freelancer and independent contractor off and on for 45 years, I’ve looked into most of them, and in most cases, for them to “work” – by which I mean provide a living – the artist must still be protected by copyright law; otherwise, others could duplicate and sell his/her work as their own and receive money that otherwise would have gone to the creator.
what do you think of a hypothetical law that would allow reproduction and modification of work and selling it, but only at cost and one would have to include credit to the original author?
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon One would think the ease of attribution and finding out plagiarism on the internet would help mitigate that.
Credit/attribution remains essential.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Even with copyright law, plagiarism happens all the time, albeit usually on the personal level rather than the industrial level. Imagine how bad, and how industrialized, it would get if we had no copyright law.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon I think it might finally motivate people to participate in the indexing efforts I care about, since they’re the only real way to mitigate that.
Currently other than archival nerds and data hoarders, barely anyone seems to care.
indexing efforts? 👀
@salarua Stuff like MusicBrainz or the various boorus & iqdb/saucenao, for two examples that are mostly crowdsourced (whereas Google Images is very much a corporate-made tool that’s also often much harder to use).
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Your mileage may vary, but in my experience, particularly online, when people can get a copy of a particular work they want without paying the creator, that’s what they do, if only because it’s one less step.
@panamared27401 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Well yes, the notion of productivized digital works is an inevitable casualty (it never really made sense either, as Taxxon highlights in her videos).
Voluntary support remains.
On the software side of things, I’d most definitely welcome the death of proprietary software and productivized software.
It has led to an absolutely awful amount of corporate malware being normalized, among other atrocities.
@lispi314 @chucker @kkarhan @ajsadauskas @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon Also, the guy in the video says we should either ban copyright or severely shorten its length. Those are two VERY different things. I have to wonder whether severely shortening its length and streamlining the process for obtaining rights wouldn’t solve most of the problems currently surrounding U.S. copyright while still allowing creative people a chance to make money.