This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.
> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things
How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?
They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.
I support copyright reform, but that history has a large portion of "get lucky while sucking-up to the local rich dudes for a patron", which... isn't ideal either.
Copying was prohibitively expensive.
The original statement was about there being little incentive to create a work you don't "own"
Difficulty in copying is irrelevant to owning it.
Moreover, this does not address music or spoken word. A pre-copyright musician can just listen to a piece and play it in the next town over. A poet or storyteller can just memorize a work and retell it.
Is it the pursuit accumulating capital (incentive to profit) or merely to fund something? You switch from the former to the latter. Why do you believe that profit is reliant on copyright? Piracy is so widespread that copyright may as well not exist (in the context of the consumption of media) outside of moralizing rhetoric, and yet insane profits are made all the same.
I cannot at all relate to being so devoid of passions in all categories but the accumulation of capital. If we are to justify copyright and the concept of intellectual property writ large, then as far as I can see its only real usecase is in defending against precisely the people who are possessed by an obsession with capital, those dragons who merely care to see their hoard grow larger. Unfortunately, that's not how these systems are structured in our society. The transferability of intellectual property all but warps the idea into something that instead empowers those it should disarm.
Accumulation of capital is the engine by which this stuff runs. You aren't going to get a staff of full-time writers, actors, set designers, costume designers, composers, and editors to create something great off of passion alone. These creatives may love what they do but at the end of the day they need to eat. The promise of future returns are why works like movies and tv shows receive the massive funding necessary to be produced.
You should check out this thing called open source software
> You should check out this thing called open source software
Open source actually demonstrates that copyright serves a purpose. There are still customers for non-open software, even when open alternatives exist, so the ability to monetize brings new offerings to the economy.
Open source software is unique in that it takes little to no capital investment to create. People post free art too. It doesn't mean that Game of Thrones didn't cost anything to produce.
Writing books and creating music also takes no capital investment
And people do do those things out of passion, and many of them are happy to share it so you can listen to it for free. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't own the right to control what happens to what they made.
Sure, but you said that open source software is unique because it doesn't take capital. It isn't unique, as demonstrated by the two other examples (out of many) that I posted.
Whether someone should own the right to control is a separate issue. Your previous response made it seem like the lack of capital requirement was the distinction, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
You argued that if you didn't own the copyright, there would be no incentive for creating and sharing work. Someone said that open source software shows that you can have creative work without needing to maintain ownership. You then said that was only applicable to software.
It clearly isn't, because of my examples.
You should check out this thing called GPL that is the standard license of open source projects like Linux, and heavily depends on copyright laws.
Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?
You may want to review your history. The GPL is copyleft -it only exists to subvert copyright law by using it against itself in a sort of intellectual legal judo. If "IP" laws were not as they were, there would be no need for the GPL. Software would be Free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
A key component of the GPL is the requirement that source of code of programs that use the GPL code be made available. Without IP laws, how would you achieve that goal of the GPL?
Even if companies didn't have copyright protection on their source code, that doesn't mean they'd post it all on the internet for anybody to freely download.
No, not all of them, but some companies, many organizations, and plenty of individuals would.
Not everything has to be done for a profit. Plenty of us make software, art, and technology because we find it fun and interesting to work on, and because we want to live in a world that is richer for it.
Removing draconian intellectual property laws that mostly only benefit the giant corporations that lobbied for them isn't going to stop me from doing so, and I doubt it would stop many others.
You are not a developer so you don't understand you can compile to a binary without revealing your sources?
No copyright -> No GPL -> anyone can release their own close source version of open source software.
Why do you think GPL was create in the first place? We always had public domain you know.
My compilers work just fine? Perhaps I'm not sure what your point is.
My point is that you are unable to understand the difference between GPL and public domain.
Okay.
This is naive in the opposite. Creators gonna create.
Creators can only create as long as they can sustain the costs of creating (including opportunity cost).
Who is giving a creator millions of dollars to create something if there is no guaranteed path to recouping production costs.
Are we going the communist soviet union route where everything is decided by central committee?
That is not the only scale to create on. Also, Linux is free. There’s more than one way to make something available.
Just a fundamental disagreement then. I want to live in the world that created The Lord of the Rings.
Linux is clearly not public domain as it has a GPL license. And GPL heavily depends on copyright laws.
Capitalists who capitalize on creative outlets need capital to incentivize them to do so. It's basically circular.
Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.
Sure, those lines get muddy when you want to do it professionally, but that's a separate argument.
>Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.
How do you create without capital? To make a film you need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, caterers, a director, scriptwriters. A world without professional creatives is so much poorer than the world we already have. Why would you give it up just for some vague notion of ideological purity.
You absolutely do not need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, and caterers to make a film. You need a director and scriptwriters, but those can be the same person. Do many film sets have all those? Absolutely. But one can still make a film without them. Some of the best films ever created were mostly the product of one person with a budget less than half that of the average car.
Would you be able to create big-budget movies without said big budget? Of course not. I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better? It feels like you're conflating art creation with art business, but they are not the same thing.
I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.
>I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better?
If you legitimately believe something like 2001: A Space Odyssey would be as good with a budget of $10,000 then that just seems delusional.
The world you want is one in which the only people who can create things are people who are wealthy by other means, there is no pathway for a talented but poor kid to go from making home movies to working on films without IP laws. They must abandon their dreams and go work in the coal mines or whatever. It is dystopian.
I want the most amount of people possible to be able to work as professional creatives because it enriches my life and the lives of everyone in the country I live in.
> I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.
i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca
that and everything the NFB puts together.
Art is worth putting government money into
>i quite enjoyed watching some animations made on a $10 budget over winter. www.giraffest.ca
Sure, if you want to discount the thousands of hours (and dollars) that they spent to get good enough to make those things. People are willing to spent time and money getting good at animation because there is a career pathway for them.
Also there is a fundamental difference between a short experimental art film and a 90+ minute narrative feature film.
Exactly, it is the difference between creating as a hobby and creating as a profession. The latter is only possible when there are IP protections in place to ensure compensation.
The point is that without copyright you can' do it professionally. Someone will just sell whatever you created for you and you will not get a cent from it.
Yes, absolutely, and that is why history shows so few examples of any art having been created prior to the invention of copyright: nobody had any reason to do it.
Prior to the invention of copyright, it was not very cheap or easy to make a faithful copy of something. Books had to be type set by hand, before the printing press they had to be copied by hand. Photography of good enough quality to reproduce a painting is very very recent. So is ability to record a play well enough to enjoy it like you are there later.
>> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things.
You do realize people created and shared things long before copyright became a thing, right?
Can you explain how something like the Lord of the Rings film series gets created in a world with no IP laws.
Many versions are made, the best ones get the most views. You don't need huge budgets and guaranteed revenue to make great art. In fact, I'd argue it's often the opposite. Most big budget movies suck these days.
Where is the money coming from? Who is financing the production?