181–190 of 260 posts
> The original US copyright lasted for 14 years, and could be renewed for another 14 years, but only by the creator (not by the publisher). I wish we would go back to that.
Hot damn I’m a sucker for a good analogy… ”Giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. You're just enriching the bullies.” The big “5,4,3,2,1” is also a powerful piece of rhetoric. Who is this Doctorow person? He has my attention! :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You answer your own question. Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights.
No, they're not different. If I can't sign away the title to my car, it's literally worthless. Exactly the same is true of my IP rights.
IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP. It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in a commercial way at least). Compare this to traditional property rights that merely prevent you from walking up to the owner and taking their (non copyable stuff) - a much lesser restriction.
This is why IP rights need to have limitations like a time limit, but I don't see why other limits like non-transferability are out of the question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they're not different. If I can't sign away the title to my car, it's literally worthless. Exactly the same is true of my IP rights.
They're absolutely different. IP rights are a creating of artificial scarcity for what would otherwise be an infinitely-copyable work. Physical property rights are a codification of rights to a naturally scarce item. IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP . It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in…
Why is that so hard to understand? You're free to negotiate such terms, but the buyer can and will push back.
> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, o…
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow. Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing. I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it…
> some authors have had good luck with self-publishing Indeed. What are the relative statistics on authors who have managed to bootstrap themselves vs. authors who make a comfortable living through the Big Five?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Misleading phrases like this are why I dislike Doctorow. Just before that he tries to sell us on the idea that there are no alternatives when actually there are. For example, you don’t have to publish a book through the Big Five. There are many large and small independent publishers, and some authors have had good luck with self-publishing. I do think copyright law needs reform, but don’t trust Doctorow to explain it…
His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues. He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
What are you referring to here?
It amazes me the number of people who are raging at how AI is hurting creators, and will make long videos and posts about this subject, without touching on the fact that the __ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY__ is the single largest abuser of creators, and it's far worse than AI is or probably will ever be. That's how you can tell that the RIAA/MPAA propaganda campaign against AI to protect its racket is working.
The RIAA isn't opposed to AI as much as they're saying "join me, and together we can destroy indie music forever". The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stag…
Real talking head videos do way better than AI videos though (there's a huge authenticity movement), and a lot of what people like about consuming content is the connection with the creators, so I don't think creators are really threatened by AI.
Generative AI is dangerous to pop, but for subculture fans, the uniqueness of the art means a lot more, because subculture people tend to be discovery motivated.
I don’t know if Cory Doctorow has read the “fantastic 1981 novel”, but I have (decades ago) and as I recall the plot of the book and the plot of the movie are very different from each other. The author of the book didn’t write the screenplay and I doubt he had much (if anything) to do the character designs in the movie. So even if he has the rights to his novel back, it’s not at all clear to me that he could just mak…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the problem with basic income if you don’t also increase the housing supply: landlords will just raise rents and soak it all up.
It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used…
Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.