The point is not "consuming things for free", the point is neutering "the Biz".
I for one wouldn't mind to lose Hollywood as an industry, or Broadway, or Silicon Valley...
All of these industries are way too big and over-influential in all aspects of our lives, and leave us without any chance of a more human-scale alternative to counteract.
I mean, how many TV networks are owned by Disney? Do you really think that all that lobbying is just to keep people away from watching copies of Mickey's Fantasia?
> Disney is not stopping you from making your own home movies.
Excuse me? What if I want to adapt some Hans Christian Andersen story over 150 years old and get a cease and desist from Disney? Even if their adaptations are older than many people alive today.
It's about all the other movies that don't get to be financed because of the 19th re-hash of Star Wars (or Marvel movie, or live-action remake of Lion King/Aladdin/Pocahontas/Dumbo/Bambi) that is going to be released and it's "guaranteed" to make another billion dollars in the box office.
It's about having two small kids who get bombarded with products from their franchises on every media outlet.
It's about them using their movies and works to promote whatever ideological propaganda that gets them in favor with government.
Film funding is not a zero sum game. There are lots of other places to secure funding. I've seen about 20 new indie films already this year.
The rest of your comment is unrelated and somewhat unhinged, and appears to be going off into a general complaint about advertising, it has nothing to do with copyright.
> I've seen about 20 new indie films already this year.
Good for you! Now go ask the other 99% of the population what they watched this year?
> The rest of your comment (...) has nothing to do with copyright.
It has to do with concentration of power, of which copyright (and any kind of "intellectual property") is one of the favorite instruments from big corporations.
I also used to fall for this "people are free to choose" techno-libertarian bullshit. The problem is that it is not in the interest of all the corporations for you to choose responsibly. They make the game so complex and so energy consuming that eventually people break in one way or another.
"Copyright enforcement" only benefits the big players and the corporate world.
But that's not true, if you didn't have copyright the biggest one would just copy everything and nobody could do anything about it. With copyright you have a way to sue them for ripping you off.
It means people being forced off the internet because of nothing but unproven accusations because they only have one ISP in their area.
It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.
It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.
It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants
It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.
It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.
It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format.
It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away
If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.
No, it means almost none of that. Pretty much nothing you said has anything to do with copyright law. This is why I have a problem with this rhetoric, it very frequently goes off the rails towards something that doesn't help the goal at all.
> It means people being forced off the internet because of nothing but unproven accusations because they only have one ISP in their area.
This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
>It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.
Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.
>It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.
No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.
>It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants
This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately.
>It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.
This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
>It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.
This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.
>It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format. It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away
No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
>If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.
There's no coherent issue anywhere else in your reply and there's nothing to pay attention to. I've tried to make these comments constructive so maybe that can guide you towards what your real issue is.
> No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
The moment an author makes something public and it gains significant traction is the moment it starts to be part of global culture instead of just only the author's.
Either publish the work with everything that it entails, including archival and assimilation of that work into popular culture, or don't publish at all. If you don't want society to archive your works, then it shouldn't even know of their existence. There's no middle-ground.
> This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
It's a problem regardless. No industry should be allowed to force a 3rd party to cancel your service with them over mere accusations. The fact that there are countless examples of DMCA notices being sent in error, or intentionally sent inappropriately doesn't make the situation any better either. While I agree that ISPs should not be a monopoly and we should all have easy access to high speed connections at low prices from a large number of providers, that's not the reality we live in, it still wouldn't solve the problem since as long as there are finite amount of providers you'll still eventually be able to be kicked offline, and I shouldn't be forced from the provider of my choosing in the first place.
> Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit.
The people who decide not to publish aren't doing it because they fear random lawsuits from random people. Their fear is very specific. They decide not to create or publish their work out of fear of being sued under our overbroad and excessively punishing copyright laws.
Winning doesn't help if you're driven into debt and bankruptcy by the costs. While companies I've never heard of could randomly sue for any reason out of nowhere (a major problem on its own) the risk of that happening to me is very small. For people publishing music (even those within the traditional system) it's much much higher and it's already having an impact. (see: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-copyright-la...)
I don't think this is unintentional. By increasing the risk of creating new works outside of relative safety of the RIAA's umbrella they can silence indie artists who don't want to sign their rights away.
> No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects.
See above - it does stop the creation of new works from people who either can't find the rights to do what they want, can't afford them, or fear the lawsuits they will face if they go ahead anyway. Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues) is a great example of a wonderful creative original work that almost didn't happen because of our insane copyright laws. In the end, the creator was only able to get the work out to the public by releasing it for free and she's still at risk of lawsuits. I recommend reading the copyright section of her FAQ here https://www.sitasingstheblues.com/faq.html
> This never happened.
Strange take in a discussion of Duckduckgo removing links to the project form their search engine and immediately followed by how even though it was wrongfully removed before other people had forks so somehow that didn't matter. It mattered then, just like it matters now that DDG is hiding that tool from the public.
> This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
The censorship issue is concerning what ISPs, hosting services, and search engines are forced to remove. No company should have the power to remove content from the internet without due process and right now, that's not happening.
Youtube pulls content down all the time in response to DMCA notices that should never have been enforced and that content stays down unless the uploader invests significant amounts of time and effort getting it restored which is still not always the outcome.
So far, the US has resisted site blocking at the ISP level (something the MPA/RIAA has managed to force on ISPs in other countries) but they keep asking for that capability here as well.
Oversight doesn't come in the form of aggressive takedown demands or automated systems blindly taking down content whenever a DMCA notice gets fired off. It comes from careful evaluation of takedown notices before content is removed or sites are taken offline.
Just recently, lack of oversight caused youtube to take down people's videos after youtube got DMCA notices that were not legitimate and youtube's polices made it very hard for real copyright owner to get the issue resolved. (https://torrentfreak.com/bungie-files-lawsuit-to-punish-send...)
> This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.
If DRM was a purely technical problem, we'd be free to use purely technical means to get around it and you'd be right except that it's illegal to bypass DRM or to post tools that would allow that to happen. The law which makes it illegal is the DMCA. When youtube-dl was forced offline the action was defended under that very same __copyright__ law. Their argument was that the tool circumvented youtube's DRM. It doesn't, but that didn't stop them from trying to make that case.
> No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
Yes. It is. It's our culture. We all share it. If an artist wants full control over their work they should keep it to themselves. Once they release it to public it becomes a shared experience that belongs to everyone involved. Do you really believe that Superman isn't a part of our culture? That Mario Bros. isn't a part of our culture?
Copyright law was put in place to give special rights to creators for a limited time to encourage new works. Not because naturally they have the right to keep us from our culture. They don't. They needed special rights to do it. The deal was we'd accept that for the sake of new works, we would temporarily give up our rights, and in exchange once that temporary period of special rights ended, works would enter the public domain. They broke that deal with perpetual copyrights and DRM. Copyright law is being abused to hinder the creation of new works. It's time to change the system.
> There's no coherent issue anywhere else in your reply and there's nothing to pay attention to.
I can't force you to understand, but I'm willing to help you as long as you're willing to listen.
There are plenty of misunderstandings of copyright law from its detractors but this comment seems to be in places the other side of the coin (plenty of the DMCA's detractors misunderstand it but it's not as common to see a hardline supporter of copyright like yourself who doesn't seem to have heard of the DMCA) and in places failing to recognize that you're engaging in a discussion of whether the law as it exists is good or bad: claiming that our laws cause collateral damage to the public isn't always a "misunderstanding" of the law.
>This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
ISP monopolies aren't due to copyright law but these disconnections are a consequence of copyright law: it is the only reliable way you as a third party can get an ISP to disconnect someone based on unsubstantiated allegations. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is attacking your systems in violation of the CFAA and they'll likely ignore you, maybe they'll ask you to prove it or better yet go after the person doing the hacking. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is file sharing in violation of the Copyright Act, and if they don't meet your demands (which far exceed anything prescribed by the DMCA) they're liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement [1].
>Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.
They can, but the relevant laws and legal precedent decide whether the plaintiff can get a decent lawyer to take their case and whether the suit will survive your first attempt to get it dismissed. The doctrines we have around copyright make it easy to bring claims against infringers and get a court to hear it out. But unintentionally they allow for abuses as "small time" as internet subscribers to be dragged into multiyear lawsuits for file sharing when it later emerges that the plaintiff has - literally - no evidence [2] or as "big time" as Katy Perry getting baselessly sued for using a fairly generic sequence of chords and needing an appeals court to overturn the jury verdict against her [3]. In both of these examples, legislation or new legal precedent could raise the standards for bringing certain types of cases without hurting righteous plaintiffs. On the other hand, in both examples the righteous party eventually won. But in others they lose, or pay a nuisance settlement because the court fight isn't worth it [4]. Frivolous lawsuits are a big problem and aren't at all limited to copyright, but clearly there are features of copyright law that make it attractive for people looking to abuse the legal system.
>No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.
I agree that there's a very common misconception here, but there are two real issues with copyright law that are also being referenced. Copyright law makes it unnecessarily difficult to create derivative works based on very old works that would have passed into the public domain if not for relentless lobbying for longer corporate copyright terms. It might also protect "abandoned" works and works where the corporate copyright holder is defunct too aggressively, there's a good argument for both sides of that issue. But it's an argument to be had over how the law can avoid causing real problems, not a "misunderstanding" of the law.
>This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately.
The article this comment thread is under is about precisely the issue of copyright lawsuit threats being used to hide youtube-dl from search results.
>This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
The "censorship without oversight" refers to the DMCA notice and takedown procedure. Outside of extremely rare court injunctions, there is no authority that can monitor or stop flagrant abusers of a system whose purpose is to legally compel the removal of content from online services, which might be called a form of censorship.
>This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.
Again, this is "first paragraph of the Wikipedia article" level DMCA. If DRM circumvention were not illegal, it would be purely a technical means, but courts have repeatedly ruled that DRM doesn't need to be any good technically speaking to have legal force.
>No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
Those authors need something else because stopping annoying archivists is not in the scope of copyright law. The purpose of copyright is to give authors a limited monopoly on the making and selling of copies of their work. And before the second half of the 20th century, we had copyright law with the understanding that creative works outside of IP law were part of the "public property", "common property", or the newer term "public domain". Now, of course, there are ways of protecting works more effectively than copyright alone by never selling individuals copies of works, only licensing them, and using legally protected DRM to discourage breaking the license terms.
The natural state is that yes, you can share everything since, for things that are intended to be experienced by humans, there are no technical restrictions that do not succumb to the analog hole. So yes, not being able to consume everything for free is collateral damage from copyright and thus to justify copyright you need to demonstrate that their is more gained in return. This is why initial copyright terms were much shorter than they are now - because the deal has always been to encourage the production of more content that then becomes part of the commons, i.e. eventually can be consumed by everyone for free.
It's more nuanced than hand-waving away anyone that wants to talk about copyright reform with neo-capitalist 'everyone will choose to be a freeloader' hyperbole.
"If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay? This represents the difficulty at which we find ourselves straining at the opening of the twenty-first century."
"collateral damage" just means...why can't I just consume everything for free, as if it's some human right?