Owyn_Merrilin said:
Dr. Witticism said:
I gues if they also stole character models from someone who creates them, dialogue from someone's movie script, mechanics from someone who created a small game nobody has heard of, a story from someone's blog, etc., that would also be totally cool, right? Those people shouldn't ask for reimbursement just because someone stole their property so they wouldn't have to pay to develop something themselves, right? Your opinion, taken to its logical conclusion. Let's just steal every facet of our game from someone. Each facet is small on its own, but it adds up to tons of savings if you keep stealing them, and then if someone tries to make a claim against us, we can count on the Escapist community to defend us!
Captcha: face the music. Good advice for a lot of people on here.
You do realize that would only benefit humanity in the long run, right? Having the whole of human creation available as a kind of open source library would allow people to re-use the things that already work, while only adding the parts that are actually new. It would cut down on the huge bars to entry into the field, and allow a myriad of amazing new works to be created.
I mean, how do you think Disney got so huge? By building on works in the public domain. And now they do their damndest to make sure nothing ever falls into the public domain again, because if it did, that would mean their work would go PD too, and somebody else might make something amazing with it, and by golly, we can't have that, can we?
First, allow me to clarify something: I am not defending IP law as it stands. It is patently (pardon the pun) unfair in many cases and favors corporate entities. Current IP law does NOT, in any way, favor graphic designers like the guy who went up against ND. When I finish law school, I plan to try and get a job with a non-profit organization that fights corporate-favoring IP law system at the expense of individuals.
But what you're sugesting is the opposite extreme of the spectrum from the current laws. There needs to be a middle ground. You can't just make the "whole of human creation available as a kind of open source library." then nobody gets paid for anything. Sure, Disney made money by building off of public domain stuff, but they also maid money by PAYING people to animate, write dialogue, etc. Most of what went into Disney movies at the time you're talking about was not public domain, just an overall work on which it's based was. The animation, dialogue, etc. was all done by paid workers, workers who wouldn't have made a cent off of their own sweat, labor, and time if they could simply have their work or someone else's stolen from somewhere else. And eventually Disney's copyrights will expire (some already have), thus making them public domain.
Just because something might increase creative output doesn't mean it's a good idea, and that's a philosophical argument anyway that has little evidence to support it. People aren't going to create much if they need to get another job or two to support creating those things just because they can't be paid for it. To suggest that whatever someone creates should just become public domain automatically would not only put millions out of jobs, but would destroy entire industries. Every artist, graphic designer, etc. would no longer be paid for their work. Nobody woould have to hire them because they could just find prior works and steal them.
Your idea would work if we didn't live in a society based on money, but we do. We don't live in a barter and trade society where we can simply trade something we created that someone else needs for something we need. Instead, we must be paid money for the work and creativity we put into something. Until we live in some Marxist utopia, your system is unworkable.
Furthermore, shouldn't laws be concerned with humanity in the long run, not just the short term?
I appreciate that you're one of the few people here who are expressing their opinions and trying to back them up. And I appreciate that you're engaging in this conversation instead of making sweeping statements about the law that are untrue or merely making philosophical points. Thanks for that.
Oh, one more thing. Copyrights do NOT last forever. They expire, and then automatically become public domain. Do you know why some of the things Disney used were public domain? Because the copyrights had already expired. It would have been no different for them if they made those movies today, because the things that were public domain then are still such now, and many more things are as well. Copyrights do not last forever.
EDIT: so really, what you want is already, in a sense, part of our system. The whole of human creation does, eventually, become public domain. It just takes several decades (or the renunciation of a copyright by its holder) to become so. What you want is already in place in most regards. The point is that you can't steal a work someone just recently made. Also, with regards to your point about laws only helping humanity in the long run: isn't that what we should be looking toward? Laws should not be made just for current circumstances. Laws should and MUST look toward the future. What's the point in helping humanity now when it will hurt it down the road? It's like climate change. Sure, everyone is happy with how things are going for now. But does that mean we shouldn't start passing laws in anticipation of the huge amount of chaos, turmoil, and suffering that will occur in a few decades? What about the people who will live in the future? We are not the only ones who matter.
EDIT 2: I just want to clarify a matter on which you might be unclear. Disney or anyone else can take someone's work and create something NEW from it. They cannot, however, take someone's work and jsut make it an element of their new creation without changing it in any way. Taking someone else's work and simply putting it in the larger context of a new work is not ok. Using someone else's work and BUILDING on it is. That's why the guy's map was ok to make: he didn't take MA's transit system map and simply claim it as his own or put an exact copy of it into a larger work. He made very significant changes to it. See, you can actually do creative work based on something that is copyrighted, so long as you make sufficient changes to it to create something new. That is not what Naughty Dog did. Instead, they took something and simply placed it in something larger, rather than paying to have it made by an employee or paying the original creator to use it.
