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?
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.
I think this statement does have important truth value in it! Copying books used to be done by hand (someone writing manually). Then printing press came, which lead to problems. And that is when copyright concept and law was created!
PS: IANAL and nor a historian. Just sharing my current understanding.
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.
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.
Copyright maximalists always move the goalposts when you pin them down.
What value system grants the right to control what you make?
Outside human culture, where does nature exhibit this value?
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.
Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?
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.
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.
But maybe you will pleasantly surprise us and show what kind of valuable thing you create and offer for free.
I don't know why you are taking such a hostile position towards someone you have never interacted with, but you are welcome to believe what you will. I don't feel any need to prove or justify my actions to Internet strangers. I've participated in the FL/OSS software movement long enough that I still put the FL/ in front of the name.
I don't sell my thoughts, they are freely given. If everyone behaved this way, there would be no need for copyright (or copyleft). I choose to engage the world in the way I wish it to be.
Source code is a recipe. You can't copyright recipes by themselves, but that hasn't caused any sort of chilling effect in the food and hospitality industries.
I agree with you that removing copyright protections breaks the GPL. What I think most responses to my comment miss is that we wouldnt NEED the GPL without copyright. Copyleft only exists so that copyright cannot be used by companies against users.
I know Stallman isnt the most popular on this forum, but history has sorta proven he was right, time after time.
Are we going the communist soviet union route where everything is decided by central committee?
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.
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.
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 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 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
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.
You do realize people created and shared things long before copyright became a thing, right?