371–380 of 614 posts
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Why should tax dollars be used for this?
Because government, and the tax dollars that support it, are how we, as a society, take collective action?
Why can’t those who care about or undertake the effort? Thousands of nonprofit private historical societies exist.
Copyright law needs to change. Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it. Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later). Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really belie…
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Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall. That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself. Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel ma…
I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work. Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long…
The difference is that in this case, everybody would be free to adapt it as they see fit. HBO doesn't get the exclusive rights. Under the current system, only very big producers can afford to license well known properties. Under a more permissive system, anybody can do it.
It seems like more and more of these old-school discussion forums are disappearing, and their modern equivalents (discord? subreddits?) just don't seem to have the same feel. DPReview is probably the most recent example, but I occasionally I will still visit specialty forums like eevblog.com for EE, or VW forums for my car. It's hard to imagine finding the same sort of expertise and years-long knowledge base on current discussion platforms.
Where do we go next? What happens when these communities are lost? Where are we to go if, for example, HN were to disappear?
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Whether you support copyright or not, the Internet Archive did a dumb thing that will probably cost us having the Internet Archive. Everyone is mad because everyone saw it coming and told them not to risk it all. I'm not "supporting" the cops when I tell someone they should stop their car when they get pulled over. I'm recommending someone not get themselves shot.
If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
That's an incredibly extreme take. Giving someone solid, possibly life saving advice, shouldn't need to include your favourite political sentiment in order not to count as explicit support for a unjust system.
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If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. Like in this instance we need to rally around copyleft politicians for the next election cycle so that something like this can’t happen again. We need to have willpower and not be so weak willed to let the rent seekers win.
> If the conversation ends with “be afraid of cops” and not, “let’s organize to change cops”, then you are supporting cops. That's an incredibly extreme take. Giving someone solid, possibly life saving advice, shouldn't need to include your favourite political sentiment in order not to count as explicit support for a unjust system.
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Individual Geocities pages are not valuable landmarks, but Geocities as a whole - the aesthetic, the community, the history - is definitely something to preserve. And the cost of saving all of Geocities is a tiny fraction of any physical monument.
What about the right to be forgotten? I certainly wouldn't want some random geocities page I made as a pre-teen, quite possibly with personal information on it, preserved and accessible for all eternity. Times were oh so much more innocent back then, putting mailing addresses and phone numbers on personal sites wasn't uncommon.
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I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much late…
I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist. That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies. No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent righ…
I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).
On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.
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I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much late…
Let them maintain copyright for longer, then, so long as they're willing to pay property taxes on it.
I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader cultural dissemination of their work.
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> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator ha…
The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. It's a government granted monopoly. Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable. If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be…
People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too.
I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think it would work well for things like code (or situations where people don't really care about the creator and just want the product).
Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.