The move from physical books, CDs and DVDs to downloadable digital versions was supposed to unlock all kinds of new possibilities: a wider choice of material,...
I personally disagree. If you write a song, why can’t I learn it and sing it? If you build a guitar, and I take it, then you can’t use it, but if I just learn to sing your song then I’m not depriving you of anything. Why should you be able to prevent me from singing what I want when it doesn’t harm you?
The idea that you should get to control your creative works and no one should be allowed to touch them feels to me like it’s just appeasing control freaks while costing massive amounts in terms of remixing, and creativity.
While rewarding artists is a good idea, in the digital age, copyright is a fundamentally bad way of doing it. The entire core concept of copyright exists because unlike physical goods, information can be copied and replicated nearly infinitely for zero cost, and when something is ubiquitous, capitalism says that its value is $0. So rather than embrace the fact that information now has effectively zero cost to distribute to everyone once it’s digitized, we spent billions on lawyers and laws, and engineers and technological walls, all just to create artificial scarcity so that it would have value again.
There is a fundamental difference between the properties and behaviour of information, and the properties and behaviour of physical matter, and at a core level copyright is a hamfisted way of trying to mash digital information distribution into a system designed for the distribution of physical goods.
Here’s a scenario: You make a song but your YouTube channel has 6 subscribers. It’s a good song and the views are slowly going up, this might be your big break. A week later, just when the views start inching towards the 5 digits, Drake comes out with the exact same song. Your version fades into obscurity, he never even mentions you, he makes millions off your single. It’s not exactly fair.
I think copyrights are currently much too strong and easy to abuse. Fair use should be expanded and the time limits greatly reduced but doing away with the whole concept isn’t the best solution imo.
Absolutely fair scenario, I’m not advocating to abandon copyright with nothing to replace it.
The fundamental structure of copyright right now, is one based around granting ownership and exclusivity rights, but only the second part is flawed, the exclusivity rights part.
A copyright system that makes sense in the digital age is an ownership and attribution system, whereby in that scenario, Drake would acknowledge that it’s your song and then a certain portion of his proceeds from that song would end up going to you automatically. If he didn’t he would face a regulator / court / arbitration system that could impose massive penalties to disincentivize non acknowledgement.
It doesn’t really change any of the economics of live art, but for digital art, rather than everyone paying for different subscriptions and having all the profits go to enriching middle men with exclusive, non competitive contracts, everyone would always have free access to everything and you’d have the streaming and viewership numbers etc influence how much money the government or an arm’s length arts agency / crown corporation is paying out to artists.
Well said. Realistically we need a completely new system that’s more in tune with the digital age and puts society first while incentivizing small time artists.
The best would probably be to couple it with profits, so any artist which makes more than X amount using an other persons work needs to hire lawyers and figure out who he has to pay or get sued.
I personally disagree. If you write a song, why can’t I learn it and sing it? If you build a guitar, and I take it, then you can’t use it, but if I just learn to sing your song then I’m not depriving you of anything. Why should you be able to prevent me from singing what I want when it doesn’t harm you?
The idea that you should get to control your creative works and no one should be allowed to touch them feels to me like it’s just appeasing control freaks while costing massive amounts in terms of remixing, and creativity.
While rewarding artists is a good idea, in the digital age, copyright is a fundamentally bad way of doing it. The entire core concept of copyright exists because unlike physical goods, information can be copied and replicated nearly infinitely for zero cost, and when something is ubiquitous, capitalism says that its value is $0. So rather than embrace the fact that information now has effectively zero cost to distribute to everyone once it’s digitized, we spent billions on lawyers and laws, and engineers and technological walls, all just to create artificial scarcity so that it would have value again.
There is a fundamental difference between the properties and behaviour of information, and the properties and behaviour of physical matter, and at a core level copyright is a hamfisted way of trying to mash digital information distribution into a system designed for the distribution of physical goods.
Here’s a scenario: You make a song but your YouTube channel has 6 subscribers. It’s a good song and the views are slowly going up, this might be your big break. A week later, just when the views start inching towards the 5 digits, Drake comes out with the exact same song. Your version fades into obscurity, he never even mentions you, he makes millions off your single. It’s not exactly fair.
I think copyrights are currently much too strong and easy to abuse. Fair use should be expanded and the time limits greatly reduced but doing away with the whole concept isn’t the best solution imo.
Absolutely fair scenario, I’m not advocating to abandon copyright with nothing to replace it.
The fundamental structure of copyright right now, is one based around granting ownership and exclusivity rights, but only the second part is flawed, the exclusivity rights part.
A copyright system that makes sense in the digital age is an ownership and attribution system, whereby in that scenario, Drake would acknowledge that it’s your song and then a certain portion of his proceeds from that song would end up going to you automatically. If he didn’t he would face a regulator / court / arbitration system that could impose massive penalties to disincentivize non acknowledgement.
It doesn’t really change any of the economics of live art, but for digital art, rather than everyone paying for different subscriptions and having all the profits go to enriching middle men with exclusive, non competitive contracts, everyone would always have free access to everything and you’d have the streaming and viewership numbers etc influence how much money the government or an arm’s length arts agency / crown corporation is paying out to artists.
Well said. Realistically we need a completely new system that’s more in tune with the digital age and puts society first while incentivizing small time artists.
The best would probably be to couple it with profits, so any artist which makes more than X amount using an other persons work needs to hire lawyers and figure out who he has to pay or get sued.