The process for reporting to them for sales is also horrible. Uploading excel spreadsheets to an ASP.NET backend that's barely holding together. It's minimal effort from them to leverage all possible legal action over you. Horrible.
And "we paid for something and want ROI" are not damages. There's no legal right to profit from an investment. You gotta use it or lose it.
Normally you can't win a lawsuit without proving damages. My overarching point is that buying IP with no intent to use it does not create damages when someone infringes it. And relicensing IP is not "using" the IP to me - you either use it, or lose it. Unless of course, you're the original author (and by author, I mean the humans, not businesses that paid them)
The point of IP laws is to protect creators and encourage development. When the resulting markets do the opposite you have to ask if the design of those laws is flawed, and I really believe that.
If I come up with a brilliant new compression algorithm, but don't have the software development skills to make a robust production implementation, what difference does it make whether I hire someone to write that production implementation, license my algorithm to someone who writes that production implementation, or sell my patent rights to someone who writes that production implementation (or licenses my algorithm to someone else who does that)? Heck, given that software is fluffy abstract stuff rather than physical goods, would you consider selling a program to count, or is it only someone who makes a hardware device that uses the algorithm who gets to count?
1) You patent something, but don't do anything with it except enforce the patent.
2) You patent something, but the only thing you do with it is license others to use it, potentially hiring someone else to manage the licenses but you retain ownership.
3) You patent something, you sell the patent to someone else to do 2)
Cases 1 and 3 have significant negative effects on both technology and society that the law should prevent. Case 2 covers your brilliant new invention but don't bring it to market yourself and is fine.
The key notion here is that you cannot sell intellectual property. It's ephemeral. You can license it and create all sorts of creative license terms, but once you're dead or the timeline of exclusive rights runs out, or you personally stop "using" it (or all companies stop using it), the patent effectively expires because you can't claim damages if you or your license holders have not seen any negative impacts.
In a perfect world, "defensive" patent strategies and rent-seeking by middlemen would be prevented by construction. This maximizes the incentive to innovate and share ideas, instead of bottling them up. If you want true, exclusive rights to something, don't share it in a patent.
How are 2 and 3 meaningfully different as far as anyone outside is concerned though? If I own a field and I'm not a farmer, no-one cares much whether I rent it out to someone else to farm on or sell it to (either for some proportion of their income or for a straight up flat fee). Economically it's all the same - you can rent something or you can buy it funded with a loan, and your cash flows will be more or less identical.
The patent "business" is just garbage. A company full of lawyers collecting rents on mathematical algorithms does not "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I think there is still a place for patents, but most of the time they seem to just stifle innovation and increase the cost of everything.
Patent owners don't even have the right to make the invention themselves (because it may infringe on other patents).
So your problem is fairly foundational.
'To promote the progress of science (total human knowledge) and skilled technical artisans.'
Arguably, given the pace of technical innovation, and the clear effects on independent artisans, there shouldn't be patents at all. Copyright should also be re-evaluated, and if it still exists (it's so very easy to copy anything these days), and targeted towards maximum cultural diffusion of expressions of ideas within pop-culture cycles (20 years sounds LONG for such a timescale).
Trade Marks, however, those are consumer protection and product reputation issues and call for registered (pay a fee to the government) marks that renew as long as paid.
That phrase had a fairly specific meaning back when it was written, and they seem to be hewing to it.
It does not match today's colloquial understanding for sure, but that doesn't mean they are ignoring it.
Steam, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, BandCamp, commissions... The creator economy is booming and is on the rise. I've seen some metrics say it's got a 40% CAGR.
MrBeast, PsychicPebbles, VivziePop, Joel Haver - all made brands for themselves. The currency is personal brand. Most of the creators I follow these days are indies, not big studios.
But even excepting that, you can always work for a big studio if you're not interested in the additional headache of working for yourself and building a personal brand. Gaming, film, and music are huge and there are companies hiring in these spaces.
Ah there's the magic word! You shouldn't have to be a "brand"... the people you listed are not who I would call "independent".
Capitalism is the root of evil to all this. Sorry.
Pardon my French, but get the stick out of your eye and lighten up a little bit about this.
Not everything should be "kumbaya, my lord" neighborhood arts and crafts, string beads, hillbilly woodworking, or stay at home mom Etsy finds. You can enjoy things that have their own distinctive brand identity. Where the artist becomes inseparable from the art.
Web comics, their own brands. Fan fiction authors, their own brands and followings. YouTubers and Twitch streamers, even the smallest of the small - duh. Brand. Bloggers. Columnists. Photographers. Even illustrators have their own brands. They don't want to be generic fungible goods. They want to be unique. That's what it is to be an artist and the name of the artist carries recognition, accolade, and following.
So sorry there's an element of marketing and self promotion involved, but that's the name of the business for everyone. If you don't like it, you can work for somebody else and follow their brand guidelines and direction.
because they have to be.
> Not everything should be "kumbaya, my lord" neighborhood arts and crafts, string beads, hillbilly woodworking, or stay at home mom Etsy finds.
False dichotomy.
The commenter is not bemoaning that it is impossible to make a living as a creative (though it is difficult); they are bemoaning that the mechanisms of enforcing, in law, that what is yours is yours requires a substantial amount of capital and legal expertise. If Ubisoft, for example, were to steal the IP of an indie developer and integrate it into their own game, is there a realistic path for that developer to take to get the dividends of their creation from Ubisoft? Yes, technically. But how much money, time, and work will it take? And how can it possibly be fair, when Ubisoft has an entire legal division at their disposal who's job it is to make sure they don't have to pay, and the indie developer has to take time away from their job to do all of the same things?
It's enormously disingenuous to compare the rise of hucksters like this to artists or creative professionals.
Further - gaming has just seen the greatest layoffs in history, as all the major studios and publishers attempt to reduce costs and leverage 'AI', since the games as a service model is winner takes all. Independent film is all but dead since the franchise film has taken the box office. And music, are you kidding? Spotify has so cucked musicians that it's actively replacing them with AI generated mush, trained on their work, and the economic disparity is so great there's nothing they can do about it - https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music
The only naive “Kumbaya, my lord” perspective around here is that the current “creative” tooling the corporate tech sector is building is positive for humanity’s creative landscape, and they didn’t just take what used to be the largest and healthiest independent creative marketplace humanity has ever experienced and hand it directly to corporate entities and low-effort, low-value bullshit “content” hucksters.
The other direct-sell platforms you referenced have already been flooded by people bulk-creating AI knock-offs. The giant slop hose has already won the race to the bottom making it nearly impossible for people that aren’t already established to get started. It’s most obvious in stock photo markets, but in music, some of the creation tools specifically advertise generating output to avoid triggering copyright scanners.
And no, you can’t just go grab a job at the big studios because a) a lot of them are using, or assuming they’ll soon be able to effectively use, the same AI tools that everyone else is based in other peoples labor and eliminating FTEs, b) since so many commercial artists have been displaced by tech companies essentially selling their work, everybody— including former freelancers and indies— is shooting for the same dwindling set of jobs, and c) nobody in those industries is leaving their jobs because they know it might be the end of their career if they do.
I don’t expect you to understand the markets outside of your area of expertise, but I would appreciate your being less patronizing while you attempt to explain my career to me.