this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
35 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43385 readers
1505 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.
As someone who makes minimum wage from my intellectual property, the IP laws (in the UK) have allowed me to prevent the very wealthy just taking my ideas and profiting from them.
And they have tried repeatedly.
It isn't the law, but the corruption of the law that's at issue. However, without that legal framework there would be no financial incentive for anyone but the wealthy to make IP.
Is that what you want? Entertainment by big corporations only, and art made solely by the upper middle classes?
People already make memes and mods for free. Humans are a social species and will continue to create and share things until the end of time. Making money off of creation is a privilege for only a tiny few.
And as I said in my comment, it isn't my customers that want stuff for free, often they want to pay to support me. Those laws stop big multinational corporations from taking my work and selling it on their t-shirts.
We are social creatures, but fuck me, we need to eat and pay rent.
So you think that because some people chose to make things for free there should be no legal protection for people that want to sell what they make?
The only people who can choose to make things for free are the privilidged few.
I see you make art. What if I said to you, I'd like to give you some money for that art, for maybe a print of it. Not just so that I can own some but because I want to support you.
And then someone just copies your art and gives it to me free. You get no money for it.
Are you genuinely OK with that? Are you saying that everything you make is copyright free?
Not the person you're asking, but I'd say yes. Don't bother charging for bits, except for something like the bandcamp model, i.e. "yes, i could pirate this but i want to support the creator and it's really easy to do so".
We have better funding models now that we've solved the problem of copying at zero cost. Patreon is a good and popular one, as well as kickstarters. You can't pirate something that doesn't get made, which is the perfect solution. Other art like music also makes money off of things like live performances that can't be digitized.
Note that the one aspect of copyright that I like is attribution requirements. I think it's perfectly fine to hand out information to anyone, as long as you say "here's this cool thing, this is who created it, and this is how you can give them money".
I'm telling you this as someone that works in the arts, that's just not true.
You can pirate digital material and repackage it. I see illustrators getting their designs ripped off by large scale clothing manufacturers all the time.
Similarly, I know some acts that have heard their music on adverts and films and haven't been paid. It seems like it is being stolen if you ask me.
There needs to be protection or the creation of art becomes a luxury for those that can afford to not make money from it.
I respect that you work in the arts. However, I think too many people worried about copyright think that things would look similar to the way they are today, but the situation would be radically different without copyright. For example, Disney wouldn't exist. You wouldn't have large corporations taking and not giving back, because those large corporations wouldn't exist like they do now in the first place.
I do not make art, I just post it here on lemmy. I'd be OK with that. People freely create, copy, and iterate on memes, and they are the greatest cultural touchstones we have. First and foremost, people create because they have something to say.
I'm sure astronauts love their work too, but they still get paid. Artistic endeavours cannot be reserved solely for the idle rich.
Art isn't work, it's speech. It's part of the human condition. Art is useless, said Wilde. Art is for art’s sake—that is, for beauty’s sake.
Art, as the old adage goes, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. It certainly is work, if you've ever sculpted an eight foot block of marble, or memorised one of Beethoven's piano sonatas. And it doesn't leave much time for paying the rent. The question is whether we compensate people for art, such that they can keep doing it. Does society invest in it, so that people of limited means can participate and have their voices heard? This debate has existed for thousands of years.
Ideally it is a way for somebody who put a lot of time and effort into something (as a loss) to get paid for their work. But our current system favours patent trolls and billionaires