MinionJoe said:
The biggest flaw in copyright law was the addition of copyright renewal.
The original intent of copyright law was to prevent hucksters from copying and profiting off of another's work. Not to perpetually lock-down creative concepts so that they can never be expanded upon.
This strip gets a 10/10. I look forward to reworking it in 20 years.
Well, the issue of course being that IPs can endure long beyond the rights of a creator, and remain viable. Someone who is say a writer might want to leave his body of work to his family so his children and of course their children can live well. This leads to most rights becoming part of existing estates. The need for copyright renewal is simply to ensure that someone is at least claiming control of and the rights to an IP.
In principle I have no real problem with the system, my biggest problem is when you wind up with major corporations buying up the rights to everything they can get their mitts on in case it might become valuable some day. Of course at the same time you can also blame scam artists for this, because in a lot of cases corporations are covering themselves against other people moving in on their work, or claiming they invented or innovated something they did not. That and of course excessive persecution of people using IPs without infringing on the value of the original work.
To be honest I think a lot of the problem right now is corporations being less concerned over losing money to people using bits and pieces of their stuff simply as fans, as they are with reviewers and bloggers who use their IPs and products in ways that hurt the corporation. When a popular reviewer of the moment could conceivably cost a corporation hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue by convincing people not to buy a product, or otherwise drag a corporation through the mud by using their own work and promises against them, you begin to see the problem. It might be "fair" from our perspective but businessmen don't see things that way, since they are only concerned about profit. Their concern is basically to say that nobody can use material from their IPs in videos, articles, etc... without their express permission, meaning they can of course choose not to approve anything that comes across as being negative. This of course generally means forcing things like Youtube to even handedly shut down anyone caught using someone's IP.
The thing is that the law has not really caught up with the needs of the current information age, and what's worse as the laws DO catch up they are increasingly being created and supported by the very corporations those laws are supposed to be protecting the people from.
That this was coming shouldn't really surprise anyone, I mean look at Jim's rant on "Gearbox" and ongoing hatred of "Colonial Marines" along with the massive shockwaves of bad PR it caused across the internet. A lot of which comes down to press demos never intended for the public being shown alongside the actual product along with the point that the game people shown to review and help promote was not the game that was actually released. Needless to say shady corporations would love to be able to prevent things like that, and what your seeing here is a move in that direction.
The big question at the end of the day is what can actually be done about this. The big platforms that allow most reviewers, bloggers, and other people who rely on loosely defined "fair use" laws are public entities that are themselves out to make money and can't really afford to fight other corporations over things like this, especially when many of these providers are probably also dependent on those same corporations for advertising revenue. In short any platform big enough to be an issue is one that can be intimidated legally.
Addressing the central laws is a nice idea, but again, the politicians are fed by massive amounts of corporate dollars coming in.
I'm half asleep as I write this, so hopefully it came across as I intended especially as I lead into my final point. At the end of the day good, well intentioned, laws like copyright and IP laws are always going to be abused by a minority of the wealthy and powerful when they are allowed to do so. Bureucracy and governmental administration have always played into the hands of those at the top of a society. At the end of the day a big part of the reason why we have things like the right for the people to be armed is specifically so fear of popular uprisings and such will keep such interests in line. We sort of saw this in action during the issues of yesteryear when you pretty much had armed violence between high end business owners and workers, which involved groups like the pinkertons being brought in to literally break strikes and unions with violence, and of course the workers themselves fighting back, to the point where the government had no choice but to pretty much side with the workers or face the outright destruction of the country as
the issues expanded. On some levels this is a similar kind of issue, as long as we are all fat, happy, and complacent, and do nothing but whine on the internet, there is no reason for corporations to stop being tyrannical jerks, and no reason for the government to stop taking their money. As nice as it is to say "well I won't vote for someone who supports this kind of thing" it becomes a problem when the bribes simply become a perk of whomever winds up winning the election, and the problem remains no matter what you vote for, never mind that things like IP laws are always going to remain little more than a side issue. In many cases the principle of not supporting anyone who doesn't agree with you on an issue like this simply means refusing to vote at all, and well... that simply means the power winds up entirely in the hands of those who do vote.
On a lot of levels it's very similar to what I said about "Occupy Wall Street", non-violent protests mean absolutely jack unless the people your addressing are scared your going to kill them and wreck their stuff to begin with. Non-violent protest being an exercise in showing a potential yield of force once your taken seriously, without engaging in the mass murder and destruction that would come from an actual violent uprising. The great "non-violent" protests of the 60s and 70s were backed by huge amounts of violence and terrorism which tends to be forgotten, and it was the guys with the guns and bombs that caused the hippies to be taken seriously. Non violent protestors who sit in like they did during "Occupy Wall Street" will tell you Rome wasn't built in a day, but at the same time it wasn't built by a bunch of people sitting around on their butts, refusing to bathe, and being a public nuisance either.
At the end of the day if you want to see issues like this addressed, it cannot come from within the system, or by using the system. People need to actually decide that their rights here are actually worth fighting, killing, and dying for. If a bunch of guys start going on Youtube and decapitate kidnapped copyright judges who made the "wrong" rulings, abducted CEOS and their families, and similar things, while at the same time you see non-violent protests, it might have a chance of success. Sort of like how left wing terrorist groups like the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst (and allegedly brain washed her).
Truthfully though, I do not think anything will come of this, because I just can't see the crowd being effected by this ever being upset enough to do anything except talk smack. At the end of the day you ask your typical person here, and admittedly this includes me, if these kinds of things are actually worth murder and domestic terrorism over, and at the moment I'd have to say "no". That means an issue like this is already over.
