141–150 of 321 posts
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I would bet the drop in album sales is more likely due to the rise of Spotify and other streaming services than piracy.
CD sales have fallen since 2000. Spotify, in your example, came out 8 years later. https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/ Conversely, Napster was released in 1999.
Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades (I'm being kinda generous, some songs are old after a few months / one to five years). I hate the state of copyrighted works. Movies can stay copyrighted for a good 40 to 50 years, anything else is crazy. Books maybe 50 years too, but again, it's just crazy and clear that the extended years of co…
> Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades You say that but the Beatles, Elvis, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson are all artists that had their heyday 30-60 years ago and are still the top selling artists. A lot of them are dead now because of varying reasons, but some are still alive and kicking and giving new performances of the…
I work in software, as I assume many of us do. I don't assume an inherent right to gain perpetual income from my work. The vast majority of all employment operates this way.
I'm not sure how that reality doesn't undermine the idea that there exists some inherent right to prevent other people from, say, singing a song they heard (by getting a local authority to recognize you as the author of that song, and then stop others from singing that song and making money from their performances, by putting them in jail or fining them if they do, for example).
It's important to make a clear distinction between the kind of "right" copyright represents and, for example, the right to free expression.
The underpinnings of the rights are different. We assume that everyone legitimately starts off with the right to free expression.
It's not so clear that everyone starts off with some inherent legitimate right to prevent some dude two doors down from re-singing a song you came up with and sung to him.
It seems much more reasonable to view copyright as an artificial right: something we create to promote certain ends. The state is in no way obligated to provide the establishment of copyright (it's not a real "right"), so the justification for its bounds is entirely pragmatic: what benefit it has to society in general.
I used to have a Youtube channel where I posted videos of me playing the piano. I played mostly Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff compositions. I had around 40 videos in total. Sometime around 2014, I started getting DMCA takedown notices from various companies claiming copyright. I was getting one or two per week and I contested them and things were ruled into my favor. But then it started getting harder and harder…
How is this not considered fraud or theft?
What's the point of using the word "lawful" here? Free expression is free expression, conforming to a law or not is subject to the country and time. I think it somehow dilutes the absolute nature in the meaning of: free expression.
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This comparison is intellectually lazy or maybe even dishonest. One difference between a house and a recording is marginal cost of replication/reproduction: not zero in case of a house, effectively zero in case of a recording. Without a government granted monopoly on copies, the marginal financial value of a copy is close to zero in all but the most exotic cases. With a government granted monopoly comes a real cost:…
On the other hand, the society does not have a $DEITY granted right to benefit from the creations of an author, material or immaterial. The fact that in one case the creation is easily reproducible with almost zero marginal costs, speaks not of the inherent value of the original creation (that was presumably undisputed at the author's lifetime), but is mere opportunistic thinking from the perspective of the society.…
This doesnt create many opportunities for abuse like a monopoly of the state on the creations. Public domain is, by virtue of being freely reproducible, free.
One solution would be to host videos on your own site. It's another argument for decentralization. Of course it's not simple. We need a decentralized platform for this and social media, but the questions on how to achieve that are many.
PeerTube (YouTube lookalike), Mastodon (Twitter lookalike), and PixelFed (Instagram lookalike) are already that[0]. On top of that, they all follow the same federation standard (ActivityPub), meaning that you can follow and comment on a PeerTube channel or a PixelFed feed from within Mastodon. You don't really need three separate accounts, you can just have one.
They are practical on some levels, impractical on others, and they definitely do require some tweaking of how you use social media.
But they do exist, they are decentralized (as in, anyone can run their own instance), they are in active development, and they even have some fair amount of users. If I remember correctly, Mastodon boasts with around 1.5 million users at the moment. IMO, minuscule number for something that's considered a social network, but a gigantic number for something that's a decentralized social network.
[0] There are way more clients than the three I've mentioned. I chose to mention these three because they're lookalikes, meaning that you already kind of have the idea of what they are for.
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> Copyright should only have a term of life (with a minimum duration of 50 years in case the artist dies at 20-30) and that's all. Boy you are generous, if it was up to me copyrights would have a life of 10 years, no extensions/renewals. Ten years ought to be enough to squeeze a healthy chuck of profits out of your material. If after 10 years you can't/haven't come up with anything new, then you better find a new job…
I don't understand why HN seems to want everyone to be a wage slave. If I create original work, I want to profit off it for my life. Anything else is just punishing people who are creators rather than property owners.
Of course you do. Everyone wants free money.
But look at the flip side - you want everyone else to accept an obligation to not do a a number of things with that work, and other people to enforce your rights, which is a claim on other people's time and money.
So even if you believe there's some moral right to prevent others from doing things with some "intellectual property", you're still stuck compromising with all the people you're demanding do or not do certain things.
> Anything else is just punishing people who are creators rather than property owners.
Actually, you're calling a failure to coerce others into to building legal regimes to your preferred specifications a 'punishment'. You might instead ask, why should the fact that I scribbled something down create legal obligations on someone I have never met?
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The problem is fundamentally that ContentID is done on the cheap. Things would work better with human interaction on the requests by Google. But bluntly, if you want your video host to do due diligence, hire one that does. Google do a bad job of this because they're a free hosting provider, and as a video uploader you subsequently get what you pay for.
Why do they even need to use ContentID? What’s in it for YouTube? If someone wants to complain about infringement, they should be required to send a certified letter to YouTube detailing the exact infringement along with providing proof they are in control of the offending work.
Legally this make perfect sense to Google, as there are two options:
1. Take down everything requested. Creators get mad but they are a dime a dozen.
2. Don't take down everything because some of it isn't technically a violation. Get sued constantly by the media cartels. Get brought before Congress for "stealing from artists". etc...
One party in the dispute is rich and politically powerful, the other is not. There's really only one choice a large company like Google is going to make.
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The problem is fundamentally that ContentID is done on the cheap. Things would work better with human interaction on the requests by Google. But bluntly, if you want your video host to do due diligence, hire one that does. Google do a bad job of this because they're a free hosting provider, and as a video uploader you subsequently get what you pay for.
Why do they even need to use ContentID? What’s in it for YouTube? If someone wants to complain about infringement, they should be required to send a certified letter to YouTube detailing the exact infringement along with providing proof they are in control of the offending work.
IANAL, but as I understand it, Content ID is part of how they justify being a safe harbor under DMCA.
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I agree with the gist of this, but I'm actually leaning towards a shorter copyright lifespan. Maybe 20? The reason being that I feel this better balances the need to benefit from your work (20 years is quite a while to be exclusively entitled to something) with the need for society to build on your work without threat of litigation. I feel 50 years benefits the former a bit too much at the expense of the latter. Just…
I absolutely agree with this. There is a human right to be a storyteller, to reimagine characters and themes, to expand settings and genres. To sit around the campfire and make new stories of King Arthur and Lancelot, new stories about Sherlock and Watson, new stories about Harry and Hermione. Copyright is supposed to be a balance between the author and society. In exchange for releasing the full body of the work, th…
Although I disagree that this should be considered a human right, isn't this generally covered by fair use in the US anyways?