They can’t. Copyright is not the same as Trademark.
I shouldn’t have said knockoff, perhaps. It’s true today that there are products equal to Gucci bags in all but name, and that are cheaper; nevertheless, people pay extra for the Gucci label, simply because of the branding.
Or, take prints or replicas of famous paintings: you can buy something that looks for all intends and purposes like a van Gogh for perhaps a couple of hundred bucks, probably significantly less than that; yet still, people are willing to pay millions for the original. So it’s just not the case that because knockoffs can be produced cheaply, the originals necessarily loose value.
That may be true for handcrafted items, but not for mass production.
Oh my…
Well, I can see the anti intellectual property types haven’t ever been in serious business. 100% of the alternative suggestions depend on thinking based on the largest “stars” as well as privileging a narrow bit of art, and utterly ignore everything else (paying to hear books read? That would work so brilliantly for trade books… just to illustrate the utter shallowness of thinking).
There is a real problem in creep on IP and although some of my business depends on it, I think IP time coverage across the board needs to be rolled back in the big jurisdictions - particularly USA. But throw it all out? One only needs look at emerging markets where IP protection is effectively zero to see what happens when one does that (hint, not pretty, truly terrible for innovation).
No, it’s true for anything people attach for whatever reason value to based on where it comes from or what it represents, as opposed to merely what function it fulfils. Gucci bags are as mass-produced as any other kind.
Right, and people buy them because they look and feel like Gucci bags. If someone else made bags that looked exactly like Gucci and were of the exact same quality, why buy the original? I mean, I’m sure that a few consumers would pay more for the bragging rights, but the vast majority just want a good product.
Alessan is spot on here. Where 100% top qual Gucci fakes are available, the ‘real deal’ simply doesn’t survive. That’s not commercial theory, its observable fact in markets where piracy is rampant.
You have no idea what I’ve been involved in over the course of my life. :rolleyes:
If you paid a bit of attention, you’d realise that I was responding to claims that the biggest stars would be the ones who would no longer survive without copyright. If you’re acknowledging that the biggest stars would be just fine then at least you’ve managed to understand some of my point. If you’d read my other posts you can clearly see I’m not ignoring everything else.
Trade books. Yeah, I can see how unscrupulous publishers are going to be printing knockoff copies in the millions to cash in.
No it’s not. If there’s anywhere Gucci fakes are available in all forms, it would be China. And link.
[quote=“phaemon, post:90, topic:594969”]
Nothing. They can do that. However, the publisher that the author has struck a deal with gets…
[li]To make a deal with distributors that if they want the first printing, they can only carried the authorised version[/li][/QUOTE]
The internet is failing me at the moment, but I seem to recall that Nintendo tried to do this to Toys R Us back in the day and was told by the courts that they couldn’t.
Can’t find that either. They were involved in a price fixing case, maybe that’s what you were thinking of?
I can see how it might be considered as anti-competitive behaviour though. Maybe it wouldn’t be allowed.
Without trademark protection, all handbags will say “Gucci”.
Except for the ones which say “Coach.”
But without trademark protection, how would a consumer know they are getting what they expect? I may not agree that a Gucci handbag is intrinsically more valuable than one from Kohl’s, but the purchaser seems to expect a certain level of quality from a genuine Gucci bag that may not (or just might) be supplied by a trademark jumper.
Of course, in the hypothetical world of irrelevant trademarks, no consumer could have any confidence in any item they buy, since the bottle with the Heinz Ketchup label on it might have anything at all in it next week.
(In an economy based on cottage industries, then you would be able to ensure that the village ketchup-monger will provide an adequate product by shunning him if he tries to foist off an inferior sauce, but in an economy of mass production trademark protection seems to be equivalent to consumer protection.)
That explains why all restaurants will be Taco Bell.
What are you talking about? Creators don’t have to “license” anything.
Anybody can sue you for anything. Even if a lawsuit is frivolous you still have to defend yourself from it. Eliminating copyright will not protect you from frivolous lawsuits.
Sure they will. If the original publisher can make money off an unknown author* so can the knock-off publisher.
Your “first to market” business model would only function for works that recovered the bulk of their investment almost instantly upon hitting the market – a blockbuster novel that sold zillions of copies the first week it was released, a blockbuster movie that has an enormous opening weekend. But every creative work I can think of has a much longer tail than that. Books, movies, videogames – they all make their money over months or even years. Any business model that cuts out that long back end is going to radically alter the way such products get financed and distributed.
(* And presumably they expect that they can, otherwise they wouldn’t be publishing the book in the first place.)
Yes, they do. People working in the creative industries do not work in a cultural vacuum. If you create a backing track based on someone else’s song, or if you create a video and use music in the soundtrack for example, you’ll need a license.
Sure, the knock-off publisher is going to spend millions creating knock-off copies of every single book by every single author who’s ever published regardless of their sales potential! :smack:
When they’ve gone out of business, you’ll probably be left with the ones who concentrate on trying to produce better value copies of bestsellers…
But… if there are no copyrights, how can there be “knock-offs”? Isn’t every copy equally legit?
In retrospect, handbags were a bad example, seeing as it’s really not my area of expertise. But I’m reasonably certain there are handbags of a quality comparable to Gucci, yet cheaper; and Gucci’s still in business.
Or take cases where content is given away free, and nevertheless, their creator makes a living on it. Like the popular webcomic xkcd, for one. Or people who buy records from the above-mentioned Corporate Records, even though they could have the same content for free, legally. I’ve done it myself, and not out of the goodness of my heart, but because I enjoy the offered creations, and want to be able to continue to do so.
Saying that relaxation of copyright means starving artists is just way too simplistic. There are other models, other ways of reimbursing creators for their creative efforts that can – and, in my opinion should be – explored; and the limited ways in which this has already been attempted have shown at least some promise.
I’m not even coming at this from an ‘information should be free’-angle. I don’t think information ‘should be’ anything, and I’m not even sure I know what saying so is supposed to mean. There’s no intrinsic quality to information that one could point to as necessitating its freeness.
I’m looking at this from the far more pragmatic angle that the possibility of virtually limitless and cost-free information reproduction exists, and we have to deal with it some way, and the way we presently deal is less than optimal. A law under which the majority of citizens is criminalized is simply not a good law, if we’re going by democratic principles. The industry must adapt, and if it doesn’t, it will fail – industries have failed before, nobody’s entitled to their success. This isn’t a question of how things should be, but of how they are, and we’re not going to get the genie of limitless information sharing back in the bottle.
You don’t NEED to borrow other people’s work. You’re perfectly free to write your own song or compose your own music.
In the 15 years I’ve been making videogames I can count the number of times I *wanted *to license content on the fingers of one hand. I think I’ve only actually done it once. (“Baby Got Back” for the record.) The idea that not being able to borrow other people’s work stifles creativity just isn’t true. Rather I’ve found it to be the opposite. Making things from scratch is a spur to creativity.
No, they’ll just make copies of books that are selling well.
Legitimate publishers must bear the cost of paying authors, but, what’s worse, they must also bear the cost of flops. Knock-off publishers will look at what’s selling, then rush cheaper copies onto the shelves. Because they don’t have to subsidize flops, their prices are lower. The legitimate publishers may have several weeks of exclusivity, but with the long tail in publishing, this won’t give them any advantage.