Alesson: Fair enough for you. But you do appreciate that some people do? And of course, chances are that you’d be buying the authorised version anyway. After all, if you’re a reputable publisher, you’re hardly going to waste time trying to copy books that aren’t bestsellers, so if you’re buying early on you’re only going to have the authorised version out.
To all: that’s me for the day. I’ll check in again tomorrow.
Copyright is cool. Lets artists + everyone else who works get paid. But they are ridiculously long lived now, and somewhat overly broad in the rights they grant.
Derivative works, for example. Nobody can make a Star Wars movie without permission from George Lucas for the next… Oh… 100ish years. Redistribute his movies, fine, protect that. But if someone can make a better star wars movie than lucas(which wouldn’t be hard), well, there is now incentive for him to step up his game and compete. His body of work remains unaffected. If it sucks compared to the New Adventures of Star Wars line of movies, thats competition. Healthy.
I’m not saying get rid of that protection, but a few years should be enough.
Mostly it just pains me how I can’t find a damned movie streaming online because the studios are so worried about copyrights. I would pay netflix $50 a month to have access to their entire library online. More, perhaps. Especially if it was HD. Meanwhile I know a dozen websites with good quality streams where I can watch the new releases.
Patents are mostly fine, but they definitely need to reform the criteria for rewarding one. Patents for things that took a long time and a lot of effort to develop are one thing. Patents for things that took someone 5 minutes to figure out when a novel problem presented itself and that any number of other people could easily figure out if faced with the same problem are stupid. It forces ridiculous workarounds to get around patent squatters, or a fat patent portfolio of your own so you can come to a I’ll-ignore-your-infringements-if-you-ignore-mine deals. Software patents are especially egregious in these regards. Pretty sure the people at the patent office have absolutely zero clue how computers work and just reward a patent for the most trivial nonsense. 1 click shopping? Patentable. Loading screens in games got you down? To bad. Someone patented the idea of minigames during the load screen.
Without copyright laws, the right to publish first is of very little value. Most people DON’T buy a book immediately after it comes out.
The author won’t get paid royalties from knockoff publishers.
As for your contention that readers will prefer to buy “authorized” copies, experience has shown that this isn’t true. J.R.R. Tolkien’s books were published in unauthorized copies, and there was a little blurb on the covers of the authorized copies, asking that people please, please PLEASE only buy those copies, so that Tolkien could get his rightful royalties.
And a lot of people were perfectly happy to buy stripped paperbacks, knowing that they had been reported as unsold and destroyed.
Software piracy was a HUGE issue back in the 80s, and for all I know, it still is. People would gleefully copy and swap software. And today, we have all sorts of copyright protection schemes, which pirates laugh at and the rest of us curse, because those things make it hard for legit users to run the programs. An ethical user sometimes resorts to buying the official version (in order to pay for it) but then downloading and using a cracked version, because the cracked version isn’t crippled. Shareware was promoted as a way of distributing software, but from what I’ve read, a lot of people used shareware, but very few ever paid a fee. Shareware was and is regarded as freeware.
If an author or musician or artist wants to allow his/her intellectual property to become common domain, there’s nothing stopping him/her. But I enjoy having the ability to buy professional music and literature and art and software. Yeah, I do consume some freeware, but for the most part, the standards are not nearly as professional as the works that I pay for.
Bolding mine, since everyone who decided to respond focused on my slightly abrasive assessment of their position. I stand by my original statement, but I should amend it to read “I want to be entertained exactly as I am now and have no imagination for alternative possibilities.”
Look dude, you are free to not like my off-the-cuff example. But twice I said that entertainment will be different. DIFFERENT. So yes, I understand that media would be different. Do you need me to quote myself again?
I’m all for authors getting their due. I want to see innovation and progress. I think that is possible under different circumstances and the idea is an interesting one. Still, I think this thread is too focused on some weird desire to maintain the entertainment status quo. Things aren’t going to change, so relax and enjoy the hypothetical.
You see no problems in a system where an illegal product is superior to a legal one?
I understand that you want to read books. However, copyright law is stifling innovation in ways that effect more than just entertainment. There’s an interesting discussion here if you’re interested.
I see a LOT of problems with this system. The basic problem stems from the fact that piracy was rampant, and the people associated with making the software weren’t getting paid because of the piracy.
And I don’t agree that copyright law is stifling innovation, unless you think that a gazillion fanfics of Harry Potter is really innovation. Copyright is supposed to ensure that innovators can be rewarded for their efforts. Again and again and again, if someone comes up with something new, and wants to release it into the wild without requiring royalties, nothing is stopping that person from doing so. Copyright laws just stop people who had nothing to do with the innovation from profiting from it. How, exactly, are copyright laws stifling innovation?
Hero is using a special thesarus that lists innovation and larceny as synonyms.
The “cost of complying with copyright law” for creators is negligible. Anything your create is automatically under copyright. Of course, for a publisher there’s certainly a “cost of complying” – they have to pay the creator to use his work. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
In general you only get in trouble if you sample an existing riff. If would be very difficult for someone to successfully sue because a riff merely resembles an existing riff.
But these are a problems with exploitative contracts, not with copyright itself. Without copyright record companies wouldn’t have to pay artists anything, and the artists couldn’t stop them.
No wonder I was confused.
I see copyright law as a good thing. Without it, my favorite authors would not publish nearly as many books, my favorite musicians would not be able to put out as many recording, my favorite game makers would not put out as many games, etc. In many cases, I doubt that I’d even hear about the various books and recordings and games if the creator and publisher couldn’t make as much money from them. I think that copyright laws encourage more people to put out quality work.
Without copyright law themost valuable and popular information willbe governed by strict private contracts and will be even less accessible to the public
Most readers could not care less if a book is authorized or not.
Are you under the mistaken impression that there are a lot of authors who are as popular as J.K. Rowling?
I don’t think the general public gives a damn about the quality of the paper, binding, etc., as long as the book isn’t literally falling apart faster than it can be read. Libraries would care about getting a durable physical item, and some readers would be willing to pay more for a more attractive looking book, but I see little reason for competing publishers to worry about coming out with a better quality edition of the same book. They could come out with an equally good quality edition for less than the original publisher, since they wouldn’t have to pay the author a dime. The author and original publisher would presumably be handling the marketing too.
For the vast majority of authors, no. There are a very small number with large, devoted fan bases who might care about getting the author-approved version, but generally the public would be happy with whichever edition was cheapest/most convenient to buy.
More than 90% of the book sold in Peru are pirate copies. People buy them because they are very cheap. most give a fuck about first prints or signigns.
On the other hand, in Germany, they tried marketing a lower quality/lower cost alternative to the regular edition of a CD, with no booklet, less artwork etc., reasoning that since people are just interested in the content, they’ll go for a cheaper alternative more readily – I don’t think it ever gained much traction.
Really, if it were true that people are only interested in the functional, as apart from decorative or embellishing features of some product, there’d be no luxury items – everybody would buy the cheap knockoff handbag instead of the one that says ‘Gucci’ on it. So one could try marketing author approval along the same lines as brand recognition, perhaps.
There’s quite a bit of difference between a book reprint and a deliberately stripped version of a CD. A publisher could produce a book he didn’t have to pay for at a really low cost - just hire one guy to copy the book (or have a machine do it). Provided that the quality of the printing and binding is the same, the knock-off publisher is at a huge advantage, and all the buyer of the “original” book gets is a warm, fuzzy feeling - ain’t gonna work.
Conversely, while the reduced versions of CDs didn’t really take off, there’s an increasing number of “Deluxe” versions - often in a nice digipack with an extra CD or DVD with live songs, interviews or videos. Those sell rather well, I believe. Wouldn’t it be great if I could copy those discs, put them in an even nicer box and sell them for five bucks more? Instant profit!
But if copying anything you want is legal, then there’s no reason why an unauthorized copy will be of a lower quality than an authorized one. A Gucci kockoff is inferior to the real thing because it’s made by an illegal, fly-by-night company; if it was manufactured by a multibillion dollar corporation, it would be as high-quality as an original.
Of course, a company like Gucci wouldn’t survive in your world anyway, becasue what good is an exclusive brand if anyone can use it?
Or I can make a product that’s just as good as the authorized product. And because I’m not paying anyone royalties, I can sell my product for less.
Yes it is.
Which is irrelevant. I can’t believe you are seriously arguing that “first to market” is a worthless concept.
Erm, yeah, that’s right.
…and Tolkien died penniless, because no-one bought the authorised copy? I’m not sure this example helps your case…
Wrong again. Lack of copyright does not mean lack of professional work. That’s exactly what we’re talking about.
“License”. The word is right there in the part you quoted.
“In general”? Oh well, that’s OK then. Nothing more fun than going to court to defend yourself against a potful of lawyers with the confidence of a “in general” and “very difficult”.
I’ve discussed this concept already in the book replies.
No, I’m talking about big name authors because those are the ones people were arguing would no longer exist. After all, they’re the ones whose books would get copied: no-one’s going to waste time copying books from an unknown author.
I’ve already discussed the advantages that a publisher would gain from being connected with the author.