I hope the ChatGPT and its siblings bring about the end of copyright. Unfortunately it’s more likely we’ll pervert the idea of personhood yet again and claim these things are people same as was done with corporations.
Happily an anarchist but also an artist, and I’m wondering why a complete lack of copyright would be a good thing.
Scenario A: I make a cool thing, it catches on, corpos with gajillions of dollars legally make tons of money off of it and leave me unable to pay rent and taking zero credit despite me doing all the actual work.
Scenario B: I make a cool thing, it catches on. It gets ripped off by everyone freely, and I’m left unable to pay rent and taking zero credit despite doing all the hard work. In fact, everyone who feels like it claims it as their own. I have zero recourse. This is all legal.
Scenario C: I’m a scuzzbag, so I copy-paste everyone else’s hard work onto various merch without their permission, pirate their software, make lots of money, cheat them out of the fruits of their labor. Except it’s all legal woo!
Scenario D: ChatGPT and its ilk have front-loaded all the theft, so now ripping off artists is transparently accessible to anyone who wants to pop in some “prompts” and claim they’re so creative. Hard-working artists are mocked as obsolete because their efforts were scraped and stolen. They struggle to pay rent and take no credit.
I hate copyright abuse (i.e Disney) as much as everyone else, but I also feel like the champions of “abolish copyright” want everything for free because they don’t make anything themselves, and creative efforts are just that: effort.
Those things happen, and unfortunately the law as it stands is stacked against “the little guy”, but I still struggle to understand how “Just let everyone rip each other off and it’s not even wrong anymore” while forced to survive a hustle-or-die economy, would be a beneficial development.
Artistry predates the industrial revolution and industrialized commercial artmaking as well…so…? It’ll just be a hobby? But only a hobby reserved for the ultra rich because everyone else who would have otherwise done it are to busy working for someone else?
I’m serious here. I’m training really hard as an artist, and being completely unable to pursue ANY recourse against theft seems like it wouldn’t improve anyone’s lives at all…except maybe the fan communities of particularly-litigious entertainment giants…
If someone just starts mass producing “This thing in MonkeMischief’s style”, why the heck would anybody bother in the first place? As if alienation, depression, and struggle to find meaningful expression weren’t abundant enough these days already…
I’ve still yet to get a response that explains how it would all get better. Just “lol you’re wrong and should feel bad.”
I get it, using stuff unrestricted for free is lots of fun, but making profit from it when someone else made that thing feels pretty lame…
I don’t know what to tell you that could satisfy your internal struggle here. If you have a style worth stealing it will be stolen. Copyright doesn’t protect that.
For what copyright does protect, it is only enforceable if you have the funds to protect it.
The system wasn’t designed for people like you, it was literally designed during the same time in which only the wealthy were able to peruse art. It was created to protected monied interests, not the commoner.
If you expect to make a living on your art, you need to plan to collect earnings up front. Commissioned work is exactly that.
This idea that you’re going to create some initial idea and then coast on it for life does not align with any reality.
Sometimes, if you create something new and interesting, you’ll end up with a following and they will fund your endeavors but there will still be copycats and you either waste your life perusing that or spend your life perusing your art. You cannot do both. Paying someone else to peruse your “rights” doesn’t change this equation, you’d be creating to fund the protection. Enforce it too hard and your fans will turn on you, as the original post here illustrates.
There is no winning move via copyright that leads to the land of riches. That’s the problem. That’s what copyright is bullshit.
It’s not designed to protect us but so long as the monied interests can convince us otherwise, we’ll go along with it like temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Always convinced if we’d play the game too, we could win.
The system is rigged and it’s not in your favor. Whatever appears to favor you is a facade meant of not to keep you playing the game.
Sincerely, thank you for explaining this perspective. You make a lot of really good points!
You’re right that it’s a mess out there and stuff will always get stolen. And no, I never expect to coast on anything for a lifetime, but I still think if we were to abolish copyright as it stands, there should still be something enforceable that benefits creators of works.
One who publishes a book or a game should accept piracy as a reality, but having zero recourse for say, anybody uploading your exact work a dozen times on Steam under their own names would be pretty terrible wouldn’t it?
If it were abolished out in the open, yeah, we’d basically need to not have to earn money anymore. Otherwise, there would simply be no point to anybody making anything.
We’re already seeing such a threat from un-checked ML scraping everything in existence.
Thank you so much for the valuable discourse. I hope you have an awesome day :).
(P.S: I think you meant “pursue” rather than “peruse”)
One tube of toothpaste lasts me 14 months. I’m not joking. I started a new one January 2023 and It just ran out at the beginning of March 2024.
because you know how the instructions on the tube say that small children only need a “pea-sized” amount of toothpaste? well the same is true for adults.
Make a cookie clicker that makes you feel like you’re learning a language, mix in some strange sentences for free meme advertising, add a weirdly violent owl. Boom infinite money unlocked.
This meme’s older than the latest yuzu thing. I’m pretty sure I saw it on reddit, and I haven’t been there in months. Nintendo’s been like this forever.
It’s important to note how we got here. In old English man just meant human. Wereman meant male and wifman meant female. Over time that “were” prefix got dropped and man now means male but the ambiguous meaning of humankind stuck around. In fact “human” comes from old french “of man”, again the non-gendered use of the word man.
The point is to fix all these problems we just have to bring back the “were”. The progressive werewolves are way ahead of us on this issue.
You mean apart from them occuring at set intervals? The length of time between the average women’s periods is 28 days, but the moon’s 28 day cycle is 100% reliable, and always happens regardless of individual stressors. Having a regular solar event that confirms you’re accurately keeping track of days is pretty practical.
I’m not seeing a comment pointing out why 28 days isn’t a moon thing, so I’ll take a shot. If you watch new moon to new moon or full moon to full moon, it’s a 29.5 day cycle. It’s true, the moon’s orbit is only 28 days. However, that’s 360° of travel. We don’t track the moon against the stars for its cycle though, it’s tracked against the sun. A full moon sits opposite the sun, a new moon in line with the sun, etc. So, in that 28 day orbital period, the earth has also orbited about 1/13 of an orbit around the sun, changing the position of the sun against the stars . That means the moon has to travel an extra 28° of orbit to reach the new moon position again - about an extra day an a half.
Odd indeed since the link works fine in my mobile app (connect) but doesn’t show on the native comment thread. I kinds figured it was something like that with a different source instance. At least I can feel good knowing I explained where 28 does occur
To pay his debt this kid cuts out and sells hundreds of cardboard Disney characters every day! He has blisters so awful that he can now never play a switch even if he had one.
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