I managed to get about six minutes in before I had to stop watching - just too many misconceptions about copyright and the industry. My background is as an author and the owner of a small publishing company, so I deal with copyright on a regular basis. So, to correct some of the misconceptions in the first six minutes:
1. Copyright IS about protecting creator's rights. However, 95% of it is not about protecting creator's rights from consumers. Most of copyright is a legal framework governing the interaction between those who create and those who distribute the creations, mainly during the contract negotiations. An example of the protection provided is to prevent a distributor from taking a creator's work, declining to publish that work, and then adding a new name to it and publishing it anyway. That goes both ways - another protection is to prevent a creator from selling exclusive rights to a work to one publisher, and then going behind that publisher's back and selling the same exclusive rights to another.
2. Copyright IS built so that the creative artist owns the copyright to his/her work upon completion of the work. In order for the creative artist to lose those rights, s/he has to sign them away. One of the reasons that there are literary agents is to protect authors from contracts that strip them of their rights to their own work. That the equivalent in the music industry often do not do the same is scandalous, to say the least.
3. There are nasty companies out there with highly predatory practices interested only in their bottom line, 'tis true. The music industry is one of the worst out there in that. But that's a problem with industry practices, not copyright law. To say that it's a problem with copyright is like saying that a security company failing to call the police on time during a burglary is a problem with anti-theft laws. Requiring creative artists to sign their entire copyright to a work away in the music, film, and software industries is a nasty industry practice, but it is an INDUSTRY practice.
4. If anybody wants to say that game companies are not injured by computer game piracy, I would ask them to take a moment and count the number of PC game companies that hopped ship to the smaller console market over the last 10 years. Compared to 2002, the computer game world is considerably sparser than it used to be.
5. Publishers are important, and when doing their jobs properly can provide a level of quality control, distribution support, and marketing that a creative artist alone cannot. To say that in the past the need for distributors was an illusion is ludicrous, particularly considering that the internet has only been available to the general public for the last 20 years or so. It may be easier to self-publish now, but it wasn't in the past, and many of the functions of publishers and distributors are still done better by distributors than by the creative artist alone, if for no other reason than the distributor generally has more resources.
Anyway, that corrects the more grievous misconceptions. I really wish that people would do their research sometimes.
1. Copyright IS about protecting creator's rights. However, 95% of it is not about protecting creator's rights from consumers. Most of copyright is a legal framework governing the interaction between those who create and those who distribute the creations, mainly during the contract negotiations. An example of the protection provided is to prevent a distributor from taking a creator's work, declining to publish that work, and then adding a new name to it and publishing it anyway. That goes both ways - another protection is to prevent a creator from selling exclusive rights to a work to one publisher, and then going behind that publisher's back and selling the same exclusive rights to another.
2. Copyright IS built so that the creative artist owns the copyright to his/her work upon completion of the work. In order for the creative artist to lose those rights, s/he has to sign them away. One of the reasons that there are literary agents is to protect authors from contracts that strip them of their rights to their own work. That the equivalent in the music industry often do not do the same is scandalous, to say the least.
3. There are nasty companies out there with highly predatory practices interested only in their bottom line, 'tis true. The music industry is one of the worst out there in that. But that's a problem with industry practices, not copyright law. To say that it's a problem with copyright is like saying that a security company failing to call the police on time during a burglary is a problem with anti-theft laws. Requiring creative artists to sign their entire copyright to a work away in the music, film, and software industries is a nasty industry practice, but it is an INDUSTRY practice.
4. If anybody wants to say that game companies are not injured by computer game piracy, I would ask them to take a moment and count the number of PC game companies that hopped ship to the smaller console market over the last 10 years. Compared to 2002, the computer game world is considerably sparser than it used to be.
5. Publishers are important, and when doing their jobs properly can provide a level of quality control, distribution support, and marketing that a creative artist alone cannot. To say that in the past the need for distributors was an illusion is ludicrous, particularly considering that the internet has only been available to the general public for the last 20 years or so. It may be easier to self-publish now, but it wasn't in the past, and many of the functions of publishers and distributors are still done better by distributors than by the creative artist alone, if for no other reason than the distributor generally has more resources.
Anyway, that corrects the more grievous misconceptions. I really wish that people would do their research sometimes.
