You are not wrong but as a business forced to operate in the shitty boundaries of copyright and capitalism, this was a fairly silly move
danielquinn@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Those rights are yours. They’re only denied to you because of copyright and capitalism.
janewaydidnothingwrong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Billionaires are a threat to all of us.
dellish@lemmy.world 1 day ago
These rights are yours. They’re only denied to you because of the laws that specifically say these rights aren’t yours.
greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 1 day ago
Unnatural, illogical laws of man.
Its only this way because we humans say so. We can decide otherwise.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Absolutely copyright is a flawed artificial construct.
But as it is the rights are NOT theirs from a legal perspective.
You can make your own and use yourself. But you are not allowed to either give it away or sell it.programmer_belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
You can just make stickers and put them on your steam machine. Just give the designs for free. The final product looks like a case for the machine, maybe create 3D designs for people to 3D print them?
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 1 day ago
You have a great idea, you put 5 years into perfecting it and making it the best possible Thing™. You use all the money you have, sell everything you can to get enough funding to start production of your great Thing™.
After 2 month of you selling your Thing™ I see that it is a great product and using my vast fortune I immediately start mass producing it and promote My Thing® to everyone. Due to economy of scale I can produce My Thing© for a quarter of your cost and sell it for half of your price. Everybody buys my cheaper copy and you go bankrupt without having anything to your name, because you invested it all and didn’t pay back your loans yet.
Does that sound fair to you? No? Then you better believe copyright is a boon ( if its not corrupted to hell and back).
zikzak025@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s the key. It’s the whole current state of “mine for my entire lifespan, plus decades after to make sure my descendents reap the rewards of my work for generations to come” that is so wrong with copyright.
Original copyright law in the US was 14 years, with an option to renew it up to 28. That at least makes sense to me.
So, Valve releases Portal in 2007, great. They release Portal 2 in 2011, also great. And then they do almost nothing with it. It’s been 15 years since Portal 2.
If they were making a Portal 3? Fine, just say so. Renew it and the IP for Portal 1 remains yours until 2038. Don’t want to do Portal anymore? Well, Portal 1 and its characters should have gone public domain in 2021, then.
danielquinn@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
This is the typical defence for copyright. It’s also innacurate to the point of being intellectually dishonest. It ignores the reality of capitalism where legal protections only exist for people and corporations that have the money/power to get what they want.
Your Thing™ example would be cloned and sold on Amazon by a broad range of fly-by-night companies, and that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, Amazon will clone it themselves, obfuscate your product in its search results, and sell your product under their brand, sometimes even for more than you’re selling it.
If your Thing™ isnt a physical product but rather something creative, then 99 times out of 100, there are only really two paths available to you:
In the lucky case you sell your copyright to a third party that exploits it (and you), offering you a pittance while simultaneously tying your hands, preventing you from creating derivative works or even just giving it away… for the res t of your life, and that of your kids’. In the unlucky case, you can’t afford to promote your product, so you toil for years with little to no reward for your work. Then AI techbros scrape your art and sell it back to you exclusively for their profit.
Copyright has some great marketing, but it offers you little while the rich claim ownership over your art, and our society.