Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 7 months agoI’m happy that you’re able to work on commission, but with all due respect, your logic is somewhat specific to your chosen medium. Various other forms of art—novels come to mind—would not be so unaffected.
Gabu@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Not only would they, they already are - that’s what crowd funding like Patreon is for, and it’s also how it gets used. There are hundreds of thousands of sites sharing “copyrighted” material produced for supporters, and yet no artist bothers going after them, because it’s irrelevant. The people who want that content enough to pay for it do so, anyone else is just tagging along for the ride.
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This is a terminally online opinion.
The vast majority of books are not crowdfunded lmao
The real advantage of copyright to authors is not to prevent any and all unauthorized reproduction of their works, but rather to distinguish genuine reproductions in the marketplace. Authors don’t give a fuck about free online “libraries”, but you best believe shit goes down the second bootleg copies appear on shelves at B&N or on the Kindle Store. Consumers expect purchases made in legal markets to benefit the owner (ideally the creator) of the work.
For the record, I don’t particularly like the concept of copyright, and I really don’t like current copyright laws. My only concern regarding the complete destruction of copyright is the immense difficulty in determining the creator of the work that it would obviously create. There is absolutely no obligation to provide attribution for public domain works. You can even claim to be the creator yourself, if you wish.
daltotron@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I think probably the obligation, or rather, advantage, of attributing original creators for public domain works, is: how else will I find more of this work that I like? It would probably also still be frowned upon to just take a work wholesale and post it without crediting the creator, on the basis that it makes the creator harder to find, and makes work that you like harder to find. Whenever somebody ends up trying to pass off something without the author’s name, there’s usually someone close behind asking who did this, tracing the lineages of the media.
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Agreed, there are clear advantages to giving credit when both parties are acting in good faith. There is nothing stopping me from claiming that I wrote Macbeth and asking for donations on my Patreon so that I can write Macbeth 2, save for maybe Patreon’s ToS (I haven’t read it). In the absence of all copyright law, I could do that with any work, including ones published this morning by an artist struggling to get by.