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Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

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Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#71

Post by thereisnospork »

clarry wrote: post #48
thereisnospork wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"because my business model deserves to be profitable" Why have authors? Or poets? Or scientists? Or SWEs? we don't work for free. Or would you prefer to drive the aforementioned out of business.

> Why have authors? Because someone needs something written, and they hire you to do it. Or because you want to write, and then others discover that they like what you write, and they want to help you write more. None of this requires copyright, and in fact copyright make some works illegal to author, therefore it restricts authorship. > Or poets? As above. > Or scientists? Someone needs research done. Someone wants…

>Because someone needs something written, and they hire you to do it. Or because you want to write, and then others discover that they like what you write, and they want to help you write more. None of this requires copyright, and in fact copyright make some works illegal to author, therefore it restricts authorship.

How many authors have you hired recently? Should I go hire an author next time I want to read a book, and pay him/her a living wage for the 1000 hours or so it takes to write a good novel? Hire a trope of actors, director, SFX team next time I want to watch a movie? If I am unsatisfied with the waterproofness of my jacket I am supposed to contract GORE to provision scientists and a lab to research a better membrane? I'm sorry but this isn't passing the sniff test - none of those activities scale without IP protection.

>Strawman. GP argued against particular business models that are reliant on copyright. That's not an argument against these entire fields, and indeed most of them would continue to exist without copyright.

Your assertion that I am making a strawman is silly. Those fields rely in their entirety on IP protection - books, science, engineering. Pagerank becomes open source and what is google.com? Just a commodity - never would have got off the ground. Those fields exist[0] because of defensible IP.

> Someone wants to fund research

No one wants to fund research, people want to sell the things research brings.

>Indeed, someone needs my labor and they pay for it. Pretty simple.

No one needs my labor (or yours) if they can't sell the output (unless you wait tables or lay bricks). How does one sell intellectual output without IP protection? Patreon is not a valid answer.

[0]At any level that can be described more intensive than 'hobby'. And I don't know about you, but I'd like there to be a way for the the people working on vaccines to be working on vaccines as their day job. To say nothing of media I've enjoyed consuming.

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#73

Post by C1sc0cat »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #62
thereisnospork wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"because my business model deserves to be profitable" Why have authors? Or poets? Or scientists? Or SWEs? we don't work for free. Or would you prefer to drive the aforementioned out of business.

Why do you think copyright is necessary for that? The entirety of federally funded research in the US shows just how wrong that idea is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t... It all by law is public domain, i.e. copyright free (+legalese).

But US maps are not as good as the Ordinance survey ones in the UK

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#74

Post by newsgremlin »

koboll wrote: post #18
grawprog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the fee be based time but scale with profits. So that author making 5k/year's fees may only would only have the fee increase by a few hundred per renewal whereas a company making 500k/year would see their fees go up by a few thousand per renewal etc. As an example.

Then you kick off an arms race where regulators are constantly fighting to keep up with increasingly sophisticated money laundering techniques to obscure how valuable an IP actually is. A lot of money would be siphoned off by lawyers just so they can fight back to a stalemate. Why make it complicated? Just let works fall into the public domain after a couple decades.

Indeed, the one thing that can't be manipulated by dubious actors is time.

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#75

Post by ArnoVW »

kelnos wrote: post #70
bsder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original author should probably get one free renewal that should cover most of his lifetime. After that, renewals should occur every 5 years and get expensive . The goal is to encourage those who can create to do so--not create a rental property in perpetuity for corporations or estates.

> Original author should probably get one free renewal that should cover most of his lifetime. I don't really get this. If someone spends 6 months, or even a year or two, writing a book, why should they be entitled to profits from the sale of that book for the rest of their lives ? That seems a little excessive to me.

If you find that excessive, do you also consider that founders of startups should relinquish their shares "to the public domain" after some time?

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#76

Post by taejo »

nine_k wrote: post #30
numpad0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A corporation isn't going to pay to keep garbage registered at a high fee Look at patent registry

The fees are neither high nor increasing with time.

They are not high but in many countries they do increase with time: e.g. in Germany the maintenance fee is 70 EUR in the third and fourth years, increasing year by year to 1940 EUR in the 20th year (and 4520 EUR in the 26th year in the case of supplementary protection)

https://www.dpma.de/docs/english/formulare/allg_eng/a9510_1....

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#77

Post by app4soft »

SkyBelow wrote: post #21
DrPhish wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its fair that renewals would be allowed beyond that, but that the cost of doing so should increase on an exponential scale. That way the value of keeping a thing copyrighted would eventually be eclipsed by its value as a public property, fulfilling the social contract of limited protection in exchange for eventual public ownership.

Wouldn't corporate branding be enough? Even if Mario entered into public domain, Nintendo Mario games would still be the superior choice. It isn't like people would be allowed to claim their game was an official Nintendo Mario game. Profitable IPs would also be able to grow their IP as a means of protection. For example, there would be a significant time lag between when Mario would enter the public domain and Yoshi…

> Even if Mario entered into public domain, Nintendo Mario games would still be the superior choice

FTR, The source code for Super Mario Bros. X, a well-known Mario fangame, is now open under the MIT license.[0,1]

[0] https://www.supermariobrosx.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25160

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/opensourcegames/comments/f8tira/the...

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#78

Post by jfk13 »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #73
diffeomorphism wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think copyright is necessary for that? The entirety of federally funded research in the US shows just how wrong that idea is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t... It all by law is public domain, i.e. copyright free (+legalese).

But US maps are not as good as the Ordinance survey ones in the UK

It's Ordnance Survey.

(This message brought to you by Nit-Pickers 'Я' Us.)

Re: Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

#79

Post by C1sc0cat »

jfk13 wrote: post #78
C1sc0cat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But US maps are not as good as the Ordinance survey ones in the UK

It's Ordnance Survey. (This message brought to you by Nit-Pickers 'Я' Us.)

Ordnance, I though that got privatised as we can no loger design our own pistol or a rifle :-)
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