Copying is not theft, but censorship is (2012)
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The Techdirt page contains comments from 2012 saying it was back up.
I like the sentiment that censorship robs people, it's nicely spun and true, by and large. But that mostly applies to the kind of 'censorship' described in the post which, if I'm being honest, I'm not even sure I'd call censorship. Feels a bit of a reach, semantically speaking.
I don't know what an "interpretation video" is, but covers are clearly copyright infringement.
The first question to ask is: does audio deserve copyright at all? I think the answer to most people is yes: audio is just as valid a medium for fixation [1] as writing.
In that case, it's pretty obvious that a cover violates the copyright of the song writer.
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I think it's immoral and should be illegal to distribute others people work without permission but I think it should be perfectly legal to make art based on work of others as long as you don't use original samples (it's fine to make a cover, not fine to use original soundtrack).
The same goes for software: distributing what others make is wrong and should be illegal. Making something similar yourself? Fine, go ahead with it.
Why do you think the soundtrack should be protected, but the lyrics shouldn't be?
If you're doing it "similarly" after knowing the original, isn't that just "copy my homework, but change it a bit so the teacher won't notice"? In that case, why provide copyright in the first place?
The same goes for audio, I guess. If my (potentially perfect) recreation of your song is allowed, why bother protecting it in the first place?
One could argue that open-source hurts the bottom line of plenty of people building similar things that aren't free. And that if we'd spent hundreds of years making open-source illegal, there would by now exist many industries and professionals whose jobs are only possible due to that fact, and who would therefore suffer financially if we removed that artificial protection.
Ofc this analogy isn't perfect, but you get the idea:
"People relying on business model X will make less money if you do Y" isn't on its own a strong moral argument against Y.
Why does X warrant unique protection? Sure, we've all gotten used to X, and we enjoy the creations of many who make their living that way, but who's to say the world wouldn't be better and more creative without it? Again, in a world without open source, I think it'd be tough to guess that millions of developers could come together to share massive amounts of code and work for free.
There is no law, nor any reasonable expectation, that just because you wrote a piece of software to do something then no-one else can ever independently create other software that competes with you, open source or otherwise.
There is also no law that just because an independent made a song or a film about a love story, no-one else can make another (original) song or movie about a love story in a similar style that the same listeners or viewers might also like. That seems like a fairer analogy between your open source scenario and works from small, independent creators.
And culturally, imo we should fight against propaganda like "intellectual property" and the equating of copyright violations to theft. The moral argument against theft exists because it only applies to rivalrous goods.
I'm entirely with you on almost all of this. I see no economic or moral argument for granting the longer-than-human-lifetimes durations of copyright that we have in most places today.
There is no good argument that I can see not to reduce the guaranteed period of exclusivity for new works to something much more reasonable, still enough to provide a robust economic incentive to create and share new work in the first place (which I note could be very different depending on the nature of each work, its creator(s) and its intended audience) but not completely disproportionate to that goal.
For the record, I also see few good arguments against retrospectively reversing copyright term extensions that apply to works that were originally created and distributed when lesser incentives were in effect, and none at all if the rights haven't been transferred since such an extension was introduced in law.
I'm in two minds on the theft question. Yes, intellectual and physical property are different things and have different characteristics, but ultimately both are artificial legal constructs anyway, as are the rights to control them that the law provides. Copyright infringement very often is done in a way that ultimately denies the rightsholder real money or other compensation to which they would have been entitled had the same actions been taken in a legal way, and in that situation I see little moral distinction between ripping the work without paying the money or stealing the same amount of money from someone's bank account after the fact.
Clearly not all copyright infringement falls into this category, because of the usual (reasonable) arguments that not every illegal copy represents a lost sale, etc. However, it has been my experience that most of the time when people start raising the "copyright infringement is not theft" point in an argument, they're really attempting to use sophistry to shift the argument away from what was otherwise a straightforward case of them knowingly breaking the law and ripping someone off, and which is in fact still exactly that regardless of what label is used.
The other side of that coin is that terminology like "intellectual property" and the equating of copyright to theft are actually tools embraced and popularized by those who seek to extend copyright indefinitely, so they can grow their rent-seeking profits. They're successfully planting the belief in people's minds that ideas should be treated like physical property, with rightful permanent owners. That's a dangerous belief imo, but it has now become widespread.
Also, it's my understanding that copyright law exists more to spur society-wide creativity than to protect any individual's right to profit from an idea. Yes, the mechanism by which copyright law operates is of course to grant creators limited monopolies. But I don't think we should get the law's mechanism mixed up with its moral purpose or even practical purpose. Calling it "theft" is an attempt to do just that, and is entirely unnecessary.
I think you're talking about the Satanic Temple. The church of Satan is a very different organization (not particularly scientifically inclined).
This is the excuse that multinational corporations use to protect themselves: using independent artists as hostages. Using access to Zalem/Tiphares as a carrot to get independent artists protect the industry as it exists today. This is a really effective strategy. Like cigarette companies saying smoking bans affect you freedom despite addiction being slavery to the product. Like how raising the minimum wage would mean less jobs because companies could not longer hire people for subsistence wages. Like zero hour contracts.
You can make your work free to use as an option.
For me the main problem with copyright is it’s very very long duration (70 years after the creators desth I think) I think having to register a work after x years (20 ?) to protect it longer would make a lot more sense.
what do you do when your creation is used in way you don’t like.
I wouldn't be in favor of that because every company would just do so and we'd be in a position not dissimilar from today, but if this is what we can get everyone behind as a first step, then I'm agreed. Anything shorter than the current system (indeed 70 years after the author's death) makes more sense than the current system.
I realize this isn't a major concern yet, but will be in the future. When a copyright claim runs out, will all the videos etc that have been "taken down" (which really just means hidden) automatically be made visible again, or would somebody have to re-upload them?
I think it perfectly reasonable to point out the (potential) hypocrisy of their "formal" copyright notice placed at the bottom of the page in the typical copyright notice location.