I don’t understand why people are so indifferent about this topic. I think it’s one of the most atrocious modern crimes that the rich and powerful are perpetrating right under our noses. It really...
Exemplary
I don’t understand why people are so indifferent about this topic. I think it’s one of the most atrocious modern crimes that the rich and powerful are perpetrating right under our noses. It really riles me up.
I think that copyright, patent, and trademark laws have gone far beyond their original intent, and rather than encouraging innovation, have actually only served to stifle it, and have allowed large corporations to engage in anti-consumer practices, completely unchecked. What’s worse, is that these same corporations have successfully lobbied ignorant politicians into tightening their grip around their “intellectual property”. This documentary, along with many other videos from the same creator, gives lots of great examples.
I think that the concept of “intellectual property” is as dumb as it sounds. You can’t “own” ideas anymore than you can own a virus. They’re everywhere. They’re freely transmitted without us even realizing it. So often, when inspiration for a creation or an invention strikes us, we’re not even aware of the thousands or hundreds of sources we drank from, sometimes long ago, which all melded together to bring about the “original” idea that came to our minds. This documentary is really good at explaining that process.
I believe that the current “tech fatigue” that we are experiencing, is the final warning that our society is being given, before the entire system collapses. We are one humanity. There is no logical reason why we should withhold knowledge from each other. The public domain ought to be steadily enriched so that we can continue to improve upon it. I will die on this hill a thousand lifetimes over. And if you are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, then I invite you to watch this favorite documentary series of mine, entitled Everything is a Remix, by Kirby Ferguson.
I read the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s and have heard a lot of arguments against existing copyright law from people like Peter Sunde (the former...
I read the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s and have heard a lot of arguments against existing copyright law from people like Peter Sunde (the former spokesperson for The Pirate Bay) and Brewster Kahle (the founder of the Internet Archive). I have always been sympathetic to these kinds of arguments.
There doesn't seem to much energy behind the idea of copyright reform among liberal/progressive/left-leaning/leftist people in North America. (I'm not as familiar with the thinking of people with different political orientations or from different regions of the world.) One of the main reasons people give for their anger against large language models (LLMs) is that they train on copyrighted material without the authors' permission and without compensating the authors. Some are so impassioned about this that they even are willing to entertain measures that would end up restricting some humans' access to copyrighted works if it meant spiting the machines.
People make similar arguments about diffusion models like Midjourney and DALL-E that train on images.
I don't know if anyone who younger liberal/progressive/left-leaning/leftist North Americans listen to has come up with a compelling way to talk about copyright in a way that balances or integrates the anti-copyright arguments that have been made since at least Free Culture with people's desire to respect the rights of artists and to ensure they are compensated fairly. Laurence Lessig has been advocating for reasonable reforms for a long time, but it seems like most people don't know who he is.
I made what I would describe as a leftist argument for intellectual property in a sibling comment to yours, but I wanted to also respond specifically to this. It's very difficult to sum up any...
There doesn't seem to much energy behind the idea of copyright reform among liberal/progressive/left-leaning/leftist people in North America. (I'm not as familiar with the thinking of people with different political orientations or from different regions of the world.)
I made what I would describe as a leftist argument for intellectual property in a sibling comment to yours, but I wanted to also respond specifically to this.
It's very difficult to sum up any political dichotomy cleanly, but one way we might very broadly sum up left vs right is "people vs things". A leftist might value a government that looks after all its people equally, whereas a conservative might value a government that produces great works and achievements. A conservative might celebrate a policy that selects a few top students to try and create the next Einstein, but a leftist might prefer a policy that selects a broad range of students of different abilities to balance out inequalities. The famous Thatcher quote about how the left "would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich" is perhaps not entirely inaccurate — and I say this as someone firmly on the left of the political spectrum.
(This is of course a massive oversimplification of the political landscape, and I don't want to suggest that most people's politics can be flattened down to this degree — but I do think this can still be a useful lens to look at politics with.)
With this "people vs things" idea, I think the public domain is essentially protection for things — i.e. ideas, works, things that we as a society produce — whereas intellectual property is (theoretically at least) protection for people — the writers, artists, etc who are creating those ideas and works. I don't think intellectual property is necessarily great at doing that right now — IP generally doesn't remain in the hands of the people who create it, which would be the ultimate leftist goal — but I think the "people vs things" viewpoint helps explain why there's no strong leftist argument in favour of the public domain, or abolishing IP.
I tend to frame it the other way around: copyright is a legal construct that creates a new kind of capital, hypothetically for the petit bourgeoisie but realistically trading in copyright is the...
I tend to frame it the other way around: copyright is a legal construct that creates a new kind of capital, hypothetically for the petit bourgeoisie but realistically trading in copyright is the domain of large scale capitalists. It takes something we all have a natural right to and turns it into a commodity to be exploited by the wealthy. Now limitless non-material things can be owned, just like land.
Copyright is the use of force to protect that capital, inflicting horrific financial harm or imprisonment onto those who dare trespass, even to create new things. If you really want to make things, you'll be coerced into performing labor for them while they capture the majority of the value generated.
I play the game, because I have to, as a software engineer and someone who dabbles in music, because it's not exactly optional, but I have a distaste for it. I deeply believe in Free Software, and consider copyright a chilling obstacle for many of the genres of music I'm interested in, as they're heavily rooted in sampling and remixing culture. (At least covers have a legal framework that has mandatory licensing...)
On the flip side, it's a new form of capital that is, relative to other kinds of capital, easy for anyone to create/obtain. IP laws do protect massive corporations, sure. But they also can protect...
On the flip side, it's a new form of capital that is, relative to other kinds of capital, easy for anyone to create/obtain.
IP laws do protect massive corporations, sure. But they also can protect Bob and Sally who come up with an idea in their garage. It'll take them a bit more time and energy to fully squeeze the money out of their idea. Having it be free to "steal" just means some corpo can do it faster and better, robbing them of their big break.
That said, IP laws are totally unequipped to handle the internet. I think there needs to be ample space for memes, remixes, spin-offs, etc.
Perhaps when we truly reach post-scarcity and money isn't necessary, we can get rid of IP as a concept altogether. But right now, I do think some level of protection is necessary, even if the system and timelines need massive reform.
I'm not even talking about corporations, necessarily. Copyright is ill-suited for music, as a glaring example, actively hindering artists from creating new songs in order to protect the wealth of...
I'm not even talking about corporations, necessarily. Copyright is ill-suited for music, as a glaring example, actively hindering artists from creating new songs in order to protect the wealth of a small handful.
The vast majority of musicians will never make a living from music, and not for any reason to do with the minutia of recording royalties or venues or whatever, but for simple economic reasons: they will never be popular enough for it to be viable. The number of artists who reach that point are a rounding error. But the artists who do, generate millions in revenue for their labels.
So every artist pays a price, where their creative potential is handcuffed to protect the capital of the 0.001% of artists.
You have to deal with licenses to simply cover a song or perform it live at a venue, a fundamental part of music. (Thankfully, those licenses are compulsory, but require someone to make the legal arrangements and collect the royalties.) And technically this does not permit you to release a YouTube video of it, though the ContentID system kind of supersedes that.
You can't remix a song or sample portions of it without explicit permission from the capital-holder (not compulsory), and they're going to want a sizable cut of your original work, even if it's only a minuscule portion.
Artists get sued by larger capital holders for songs that are superficially, subjectively similar in some aspect. (In musicological terms, this is called a genre... /s) These suits are increasingly encroaching on basic music theory, like chord progressions, which are fundamentally limited in possible combinations. (At least, ones people want to here...) Or having melodic fragments that are similar, which in one high profile case, had an obvious example from centuries-old classical music. There is now a looming specter, a chilling effect, making every artist second guess what they do in case someone can argue it's vaguely similar enough to excuse a legal battle.
EDM and hip hop are squarely rooted in sampling culture. Whether it was DJs manually looping a drum break on a turntable, or House artists loading slices of chords or vocals into hardware samplers to build entire new tracks based on a small element of a song, a massive tree of music genres grew out of the same tradition of sampling. And it's all illegal.
Yep. After the 90s "sample wars," courts landed on the decision that using a fragment of a recording, no matter how short, is squarely copyright infringement and makes your track derivative of the original.
We have samples that are so widely used, they have names. Like the "landlord stab" (a slice of a keyboard chord) or the "amen break" (a short drum break that's in a ridiculous number of songs...you'll know it when you hear it). That "whoo!" sound all over 90s dance music, like 2 Unlimited's Twilight Zone? That's a famous sample from a song called "In the Morning Time." All sorts of music uses little slices of other music as a bit of sound design, sometimes even as a wave table for a synth, and they just count on nobody noticing. (You can kind of see this in action with We No Speak Americano. The lead instrument is a slice from the old brass sample at the beginning.)
Yeah, screw your creativity and subculture, that's now a crime. Music appears fully formed from divine inspiration, in the head of a blessed capital holder. It definitely doesn't come from a vast ocean of things that came before.
Something bothers me about a tiny few ruining a fundamental part of humanity for literally everyone else, just to enrich themselves.
As someone who has long checked out from politics because of how divisive it has become, I very much would want “intellectual property” [sic] to remain in the hands of the people who create it...
...IP generally doesn't remain in the hands of the people who create it, which would be the ultimate leftist goal...
As someone who has long checked out from politics because of how divisive it has become, I very much would want “intellectual property” [sic] to remain in the hands of the people who create it (rather than greedy, faceless corporations).
Like I said in that comment, I agree with that principle, not just for IP, but also for all forms of inherently rent-based property. But the key question is how can it remain in their hands. And...
Like I said in that comment, I agree with that principle, not just for IP, but also for all forms of inherently rent-based property. But the key question is how can it remain in their hands. And for something to remain in their hands, i.e. for individual people to profit off the things that they've created, we need to acknowledge that the creator has a right to be in charge of the distribution of their own work. Tools like Creative Commons are great for people like me who produce creative works essentially as a hobby, but if you want to be a professional artist, you need the tools to be able to stop someone else from selling your work and making a profit from what you've produced.
Right now, the best mechanism we've found is this idea of intellectual property, at least as far as I can tell (feel free to suggest alternatives). It has flaws, and we should be working to fix them, but IP as a concept isn't necessarily a bad thing.
At its extreme end, though, this argument would suggest that any intellectual work must be done pro bono, for the public good, and given immediately into public hands for others to use, and that...
I think that the concept of “intellectual property” is as dumb as it sounds. You can’t “own” ideas anymore than you can own a virus.
At its extreme end, though, this argument would suggest that any intellectual work must be done pro bono, for the public good, and given immediately into public hands for others to use, and that seems deeply absurd to me. Intellectual work is still work — writing a book, directing a film, creating music, whatever else — these are acts of work, and a society that doesn't reward certain forms of work is a society where that work becomes undervalued and minimised and ignored*.
The question shouldn't be about who owns the rights to what, the question should be about rewarding valuable intellectual work — how we build a system where artists, writers, etc can profit from their work in the same way that the worker in the steel mill, or the bus driver, or the farmer profits from their work?
Public domain absolutism is essentially a demand for nationalisation of intellectual work. Nationalisation can work in some situations, where a given resource or service would naturally create monopolies, and therefore it is necessary to ensure that monopoly is in public hands. But it also has downsides. If intellectual work is nationalised, then intellectual workers must either be unpaid for their work, or they must be paid by the state. If they are unpaid, then we can only hear the voices of those who can do intellectual work in their spare time — those for whom writing is a hobby that they have time to indulge in. If intellectual workers are paid by the state, then workers critical of the state are going to struggle to have their voices heard.
Intellectual property has a lot of flaws, but the basic concept — that someone can create an intellectual work and place it into the marketplace and expect to get paid for that work — is necessary if we want to rely on the variety and abundance of intellectual work that we see today. I agree with the idea of reforming intellectual property (although I think the deeper issue is reforming the current power structures that allow vast amounts of intellectual property to be consolidated into the hands of a few large corporations), and I could even imagine the possibility of getting rid of the concept of intellectual property and replacing it with something else. But whatever that replacement is, it can't just be the public domain.
* Good examples here are professions like nursing or teaching, that are deeply undervalued and are not well-rewarded, but also completely necessary. As a result we see deep cracks in our education or healthcare institutions, where these professions often rely on young people coming into the workforce, being worked to the bone, and then burning out and leaving the industry.
Which is why I never argued for intellectual work to be done pro bono. The bone that I’m picking with intellectual property, is the concept. Intellectual property is not “property”, not the way...
At its extreme end, though, this argument would suggest that any intellectual work must be done pro bono, for the public good, and given immediately into public hands for others to use, and that seems deeply absurd to me.
Which is why I never argued for intellectual work to be done pro bono. The bone that I’m picking with intellectual property, is the concept. Intellectual property is not “property”, not the way that I see it anyway.
Putting aside EULAs for a moment (which is a whole other can of words), the M1 Mac Mini that I bought with my money, from which I am typing this out, is my property. I own it. It is a physical object in space of which only one exactly copy like this one exists. Were it to be stolen from me, then I would lose it. In that sense, it is a property that can be “owned”.
Now, let’s take an idea for a fantasy novel that I have for a different example (I actually do have one): The inspiration for this novel came to me from games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Fire Emblem (the Tellius entries), as well as The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. I liked different elements from these pieces of fantasy fiction, and in my head, they melded into something of an “original creation”.
What if, after you read that last paragraph, you (in case you happened to also have played those games and watched those movies) come up with an idea very similar to mine, and we both publish them separately? What if our readers noticed the similarities and accused either you or me of plagiarism? Were we to go to court over this, who would win, and based on what argument?
Doesn’t this seem rather silly to you?
If I call all of the sources of inspiration for my novel “intellectual property”, then I am implying that by taking inspiration from them—that is, by reusing certain elements that they contain in my own work of fiction—that I am stealing that “property”. That, however, is not true. Nothing was stolen, because nothing was displaced. Nothing that occupies physical space anyway. Nintendo or Tolkien didn’t wake up one day and find that the elements that I reused in my novel, had vanished from their works. That’s not how “ideas” work. They can’t be “owned”. There isn’t some kind of physical barrier that prevents someone’s idea from entering someone else’s brain just because the second person didn’t come up with that idea themselves.
And this is the nature of all “intellectual work”. All of it is derivative. Society needs to acknowledge this reality, both philosophically as well as legislatively.
My argument was not in favor of the complete abolishment of copyright, patents, and trademarks. As you correctly pointed out, the alternatives would have a terrifying effect on intellectual work (and society as a whole). Intellectual work would either be relegated to an elite (as it has in ages past), or fall under the tight control of the state (as it also has in ages past).
If you study the history of copyright law, you will find that its original intent, was to allow those who do intellectual work a great enough window of opportunity to make money from it, before it entered the public domain. This way, everyone benefits. The public domain keeps being enriched, while those who contribute to it get a chance at making a living.
My argument is that it makes no logical sense, for example, for copyright to extend beyond a creator’s lifespan. Why should it? For his descendants (who likely had no involvement in it) to sit on the proceeds (or “tinker” with it later)? Or worse, for large corporations to buy it out and basically lobby to extend their “ownership” it into perpetuity? And why are faceless corporations, rather than the individuals who had the actual ideas, allowed to own “intellectual property” at all? That’s where the law has been perverted, and has—through a culture of anti-competitive mass litigation—stifled innovation.
This is to say that, all of Walt Disney’s works, for example, should have entered the public domain in 1966. But here we are, almost 60 years later, and Disney keeps holding onto those “properties” for dear life, and dishing out absolute garbage (a lot of which is prequels, sequels, reboots, or adaptations), because they have become lazy as company. They haven’t had to compete with anyone, because they haven’t had to come up with any new ideas. They’re sitting on their “intellectual property”. And this is true for every large media conglomerate out there.
This is in complete violation of the original spirit of copyright laws.
I agree with your final point that the current IP laws need improvement, I just don't see how you can make that argument based on your premises. If you truly believe that IP cannot be property,...
I agree with your final point that the current IP laws need improvement, I just don't see how you can make that argument based on your premises. If you truly believe that IP cannot be property, then how do you get to the idea that we should have copyright in order to protect those who create intellectual property?
The argument that intellectual property doesn't exist because it doesn't represent a physical thing in the real world is lazy. Plenty of important legal fictions exist that don't represent physical things in the real world. That doesn't make them not important. There is no physical or biological way to determine what a "human right" is, but it's still important that we define it. In the case of intellectual property, as humans we have certain intuitions around intellectual work, and IP is a way of codifying them: saying that being inspired by other people's work is okay, but directly copying them is generally not okay.
The argument that intellectual property doesn't exist because it's possible that multiple people could come up with exactly the same idea at the same time is absurd. Firstly, because it's already handled by existing copyright law, which does allow people to create the same work independently and differentiates this from one person copying the work of another. Secondly, because that's not how human thought works. We don't just regurgitate what we've been told verbatim, we synthesise our inputs and then we create new works out of them. Intellectual property is not your "sources of inspiration" — intellectual property is specifically the words put down on paper, or the dialogue spoken, or the pixels animated. Of course the concept of intellectual property becomes nonsense if you conflate the two, but that is not a good definition of intellectual property.
Your third main argument that, even if intellectual property exists, it should be heavily limited is one that I agree with, but it's important to keep in mind that this is not how we treat any other form of property. If I own land, I am freely able to give it to my children (modulo taxes). They did not work for that land, and will proceed to profit off its ownership. Yet you argue that the same should not apply to intellectual property. I would argue that the better argument is that we should treat more property (in particular anything that can create economic rent) the way we do intellectual property. But I think we should be at least somewhat consistent here.
I love this video/series -- I used to show it to my comp students when we talked about genre and remix. We didn't get too bogged down in part 4, but the first 3 parts are really illustrative of...
I love this video/series -- I used to show it to my comp students when we talked about genre and remix. We didn't get too bogged down in part 4, but the first 3 parts are really illustrative of how nothing is made in a vacuum, and how masters of craft are true students of genre. They understand the disparate parts and how they fit together, and--most importantly--how the parts can be broken down, shuffled around and inverted in order to create something new and exciting.
Talking about simultaneous discovery. I have always been fond of the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, which explains creativity and invention in much the same way, and that was...
Talking about simultaneous discovery. I have always been fond of the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, which explains creativity and invention in much the same way, and that was published in 2011. The original parts of this video were published from 2010 to 2012, according to the closing credits. If you want to read more on the topics discussed in parts one to three, I can recommend it.
That title, and this video series, has been my mantra any time someone is complaining about the lack of originality in media 'these days'. I picture the astronaut - gun - astronaut meme.
That title, and this video series, has been my mantra any time someone is complaining about the lack of originality in media 'these days'.
I don’t understand why people are so indifferent about this topic. I think it’s one of the most atrocious modern crimes that the rich and powerful are perpetrating right under our noses. It really riles me up.
I think that copyright, patent, and trademark laws have gone far beyond their original intent, and rather than encouraging innovation, have actually only served to stifle it, and have allowed large corporations to engage in anti-consumer practices, completely unchecked. What’s worse, is that these same corporations have successfully lobbied ignorant politicians into tightening their grip around their “intellectual property”. This documentary, along with many other videos from the same creator, gives lots of great examples.
I think that the concept of “intellectual property” is as dumb as it sounds. You can’t “own” ideas anymore than you can own a virus. They’re everywhere. They’re freely transmitted without us even realizing it. So often, when inspiration for a creation or an invention strikes us, we’re not even aware of the thousands or hundreds of sources we drank from, sometimes long ago, which all melded together to bring about the “original” idea that came to our minds. This documentary is really good at explaining that process.
I believe that the current “tech fatigue” that we are experiencing, is the final warning that our society is being given, before the entire system collapses. We are one humanity. There is no logical reason why we should withhold knowledge from each other. The public domain ought to be steadily enriched so that we can continue to improve upon it. I will die on this hill a thousand lifetimes over. And if you are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, then I invite you to watch this favorite documentary series of mine, entitled Everything is a Remix, by Kirby Ferguson.
I read the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s and have heard a lot of arguments against existing copyright law from people like Peter Sunde (the former spokesperson for The Pirate Bay) and Brewster Kahle (the founder of the Internet Archive). I have always been sympathetic to these kinds of arguments.
There doesn't seem to much energy behind the idea of copyright reform among liberal/progressive/left-leaning/leftist people in North America. (I'm not as familiar with the thinking of people with different political orientations or from different regions of the world.) One of the main reasons people give for their anger against large language models (LLMs) is that they train on copyrighted material without the authors' permission and without compensating the authors. Some are so impassioned about this that they even are willing to entertain measures that would end up restricting some humans' access to copyrighted works if it meant spiting the machines.
People make similar arguments about diffusion models like Midjourney and DALL-E that train on images.
I don't know if anyone who younger liberal/progressive/left-leaning/leftist North Americans listen to has come up with a compelling way to talk about copyright in a way that balances or integrates the anti-copyright arguments that have been made since at least Free Culture with people's desire to respect the rights of artists and to ensure they are compensated fairly. Laurence Lessig has been advocating for reasonable reforms for a long time, but it seems like most people don't know who he is.
I made what I would describe as a leftist argument for intellectual property in a sibling comment to yours, but I wanted to also respond specifically to this.
It's very difficult to sum up any political dichotomy cleanly, but one way we might very broadly sum up left vs right is "people vs things". A leftist might value a government that looks after all its people equally, whereas a conservative might value a government that produces great works and achievements. A conservative might celebrate a policy that selects a few top students to try and create the next Einstein, but a leftist might prefer a policy that selects a broad range of students of different abilities to balance out inequalities. The famous Thatcher quote about how the left "would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich" is perhaps not entirely inaccurate — and I say this as someone firmly on the left of the political spectrum.
(This is of course a massive oversimplification of the political landscape, and I don't want to suggest that most people's politics can be flattened down to this degree — but I do think this can still be a useful lens to look at politics with.)
With this "people vs things" idea, I think the public domain is essentially protection for things — i.e. ideas, works, things that we as a society produce — whereas intellectual property is (theoretically at least) protection for people — the writers, artists, etc who are creating those ideas and works. I don't think intellectual property is necessarily great at doing that right now — IP generally doesn't remain in the hands of the people who create it, which would be the ultimate leftist goal — but I think the "people vs things" viewpoint helps explain why there's no strong leftist argument in favour of the public domain, or abolishing IP.
I tend to frame it the other way around: copyright is a legal construct that creates a new kind of capital, hypothetically for the petit bourgeoisie but realistically trading in copyright is the domain of large scale capitalists. It takes something we all have a natural right to and turns it into a commodity to be exploited by the wealthy. Now limitless non-material things can be owned, just like land.
Copyright is the use of force to protect that capital, inflicting horrific financial harm or imprisonment onto those who dare trespass, even to create new things. If you really want to make things, you'll be coerced into performing labor for them while they capture the majority of the value generated.
I play the game, because I have to, as a software engineer and someone who dabbles in music, because it's not exactly optional, but I have a distaste for it. I deeply believe in Free Software, and consider copyright a chilling obstacle for many of the genres of music I'm interested in, as they're heavily rooted in sampling and remixing culture. (At least covers have a legal framework that has mandatory licensing...)
On the flip side, it's a new form of capital that is, relative to other kinds of capital, easy for anyone to create/obtain.
IP laws do protect massive corporations, sure. But they also can protect Bob and Sally who come up with an idea in their garage. It'll take them a bit more time and energy to fully squeeze the money out of their idea. Having it be free to "steal" just means some corpo can do it faster and better, robbing them of their big break.
That said, IP laws are totally unequipped to handle the internet. I think there needs to be ample space for memes, remixes, spin-offs, etc.
Perhaps when we truly reach post-scarcity and money isn't necessary, we can get rid of IP as a concept altogether. But right now, I do think some level of protection is necessary, even if the system and timelines need massive reform.
I'm not even talking about corporations, necessarily. Copyright is ill-suited for music, as a glaring example, actively hindering artists from creating new songs in order to protect the wealth of a small handful.
The vast majority of musicians will never make a living from music, and not for any reason to do with the minutia of recording royalties or venues or whatever, but for simple economic reasons: they will never be popular enough for it to be viable. The number of artists who reach that point are a rounding error. But the artists who do, generate millions in revenue for their labels.
So every artist pays a price, where their creative potential is handcuffed to protect the capital of the 0.001% of artists.
You have to deal with licenses to simply cover a song or perform it live at a venue, a fundamental part of music. (Thankfully, those licenses are compulsory, but require someone to make the legal arrangements and collect the royalties.) And technically this does not permit you to release a YouTube video of it, though the ContentID system kind of supersedes that.
You can't remix a song or sample portions of it without explicit permission from the capital-holder (not compulsory), and they're going to want a sizable cut of your original work, even if it's only a minuscule portion.
Artists get sued by larger capital holders for songs that are superficially, subjectively similar in some aspect. (In musicological terms, this is called a genre... /s) These suits are increasingly encroaching on basic music theory, like chord progressions, which are fundamentally limited in possible combinations. (At least, ones people want to here...) Or having melodic fragments that are similar, which in one high profile case, had an obvious example from centuries-old classical music. There is now a looming specter, a chilling effect, making every artist second guess what they do in case someone can argue it's vaguely similar enough to excuse a legal battle.
EDM and hip hop are squarely rooted in sampling culture. Whether it was DJs manually looping a drum break on a turntable, or House artists loading slices of chords or vocals into hardware samplers to build entire new tracks based on a small element of a song, a massive tree of music genres grew out of the same tradition of sampling. And it's all illegal.
Yep. After the 90s "sample wars," courts landed on the decision that using a fragment of a recording, no matter how short, is squarely copyright infringement and makes your track derivative of the original.
We have samples that are so widely used, they have names. Like the "landlord stab" (a slice of a keyboard chord) or the "amen break" (a short drum break that's in a ridiculous number of songs...you'll know it when you hear it). That "whoo!" sound all over 90s dance music, like 2 Unlimited's Twilight Zone? That's a famous sample from a song called "In the Morning Time." All sorts of music uses little slices of other music as a bit of sound design, sometimes even as a wave table for a synth, and they just count on nobody noticing. (You can kind of see this in action with We No Speak Americano. The lead instrument is a slice from the old brass sample at the beginning.)
Yeah, screw your creativity and subculture, that's now a crime. Music appears fully formed from divine inspiration, in the head of a blessed capital holder. It definitely doesn't come from a vast ocean of things that came before.
Something bothers me about a tiny few ruining a fundamental part of humanity for literally everyone else, just to enrich themselves.
Man. Wow. I could not have said it better. I might copy-paste everything you said here next time I argue with someone about this matter.
As someone who has long checked out from politics because of how divisive it has become, I very much would want “intellectual property” [sic] to remain in the hands of the people who create it (rather than greedy, faceless corporations).
Like I said in that comment, I agree with that principle, not just for IP, but also for all forms of inherently rent-based property. But the key question is how can it remain in their hands. And for something to remain in their hands, i.e. for individual people to profit off the things that they've created, we need to acknowledge that the creator has a right to be in charge of the distribution of their own work. Tools like Creative Commons are great for people like me who produce creative works essentially as a hobby, but if you want to be a professional artist, you need the tools to be able to stop someone else from selling your work and making a profit from what you've produced.
Right now, the best mechanism we've found is this idea of intellectual property, at least as far as I can tell (feel free to suggest alternatives). It has flaws, and we should be working to fix them, but IP as a concept isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Interesting. I just discovered that I actually had added Lessig’s book to my wishlist a long time ago. Thanks for telling me about it.
At its extreme end, though, this argument would suggest that any intellectual work must be done pro bono, for the public good, and given immediately into public hands for others to use, and that seems deeply absurd to me. Intellectual work is still work — writing a book, directing a film, creating music, whatever else — these are acts of work, and a society that doesn't reward certain forms of work is a society where that work becomes undervalued and minimised and ignored*.
The question shouldn't be about who owns the rights to what, the question should be about rewarding valuable intellectual work — how we build a system where artists, writers, etc can profit from their work in the same way that the worker in the steel mill, or the bus driver, or the farmer profits from their work?
Public domain absolutism is essentially a demand for nationalisation of intellectual work. Nationalisation can work in some situations, where a given resource or service would naturally create monopolies, and therefore it is necessary to ensure that monopoly is in public hands. But it also has downsides. If intellectual work is nationalised, then intellectual workers must either be unpaid for their work, or they must be paid by the state. If they are unpaid, then we can only hear the voices of those who can do intellectual work in their spare time — those for whom writing is a hobby that they have time to indulge in. If intellectual workers are paid by the state, then workers critical of the state are going to struggle to have their voices heard.
Intellectual property has a lot of flaws, but the basic concept — that someone can create an intellectual work and place it into the marketplace and expect to get paid for that work — is necessary if we want to rely on the variety and abundance of intellectual work that we see today. I agree with the idea of reforming intellectual property (although I think the deeper issue is reforming the current power structures that allow vast amounts of intellectual property to be consolidated into the hands of a few large corporations), and I could even imagine the possibility of getting rid of the concept of intellectual property and replacing it with something else. But whatever that replacement is, it can't just be the public domain.
* Good examples here are professions like nursing or teaching, that are deeply undervalued and are not well-rewarded, but also completely necessary. As a result we see deep cracks in our education or healthcare institutions, where these professions often rely on young people coming into the workforce, being worked to the bone, and then burning out and leaving the industry.
Which is why I never argued for intellectual work to be done pro bono. The bone that I’m picking with intellectual property, is the concept. Intellectual property is not “property”, not the way that I see it anyway.
Putting aside EULAs for a moment (which is a whole other can of words), the M1 Mac Mini that I bought with my money, from which I am typing this out, is my property. I own it. It is a physical object in space of which only one exactly copy like this one exists. Were it to be stolen from me, then I would lose it. In that sense, it is a property that can be “owned”.
Now, let’s take an idea for a fantasy novel that I have for a different example (I actually do have one): The inspiration for this novel came to me from games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Fire Emblem (the Tellius entries), as well as The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. I liked different elements from these pieces of fantasy fiction, and in my head, they melded into something of an “original creation”.
What if, after you read that last paragraph, you (in case you happened to also have played those games and watched those movies) come up with an idea very similar to mine, and we both publish them separately? What if our readers noticed the similarities and accused either you or me of plagiarism? Were we to go to court over this, who would win, and based on what argument?
Doesn’t this seem rather silly to you?
If I call all of the sources of inspiration for my novel “intellectual property”, then I am implying that by taking inspiration from them—that is, by reusing certain elements that they contain in my own work of fiction—that I am stealing that “property”. That, however, is not true. Nothing was stolen, because nothing was displaced. Nothing that occupies physical space anyway. Nintendo or Tolkien didn’t wake up one day and find that the elements that I reused in my novel, had vanished from their works. That’s not how “ideas” work. They can’t be “owned”. There isn’t some kind of physical barrier that prevents someone’s idea from entering someone else’s brain just because the second person didn’t come up with that idea themselves.
And this is the nature of all “intellectual work”. All of it is derivative. Society needs to acknowledge this reality, both philosophically as well as legislatively.
My argument was not in favor of the complete abolishment of copyright, patents, and trademarks. As you correctly pointed out, the alternatives would have a terrifying effect on intellectual work (and society as a whole). Intellectual work would either be relegated to an elite (as it has in ages past), or fall under the tight control of the state (as it also has in ages past).
If you study the history of copyright law, you will find that its original intent, was to allow those who do intellectual work a great enough window of opportunity to make money from it, before it entered the public domain. This way, everyone benefits. The public domain keeps being enriched, while those who contribute to it get a chance at making a living.
My argument is that it makes no logical sense, for example, for copyright to extend beyond a creator’s lifespan. Why should it? For his descendants (who likely had no involvement in it) to sit on the proceeds (or “tinker” with it later)? Or worse, for large corporations to buy it out and basically lobby to extend their “ownership” it into perpetuity? And why are faceless corporations, rather than the individuals who had the actual ideas, allowed to own “intellectual property” at all? That’s where the law has been perverted, and has—through a culture of anti-competitive mass litigation—stifled innovation.
This is to say that, all of Walt Disney’s works, for example, should have entered the public domain in 1966. But here we are, almost 60 years later, and Disney keeps holding onto those “properties” for dear life, and dishing out absolute garbage (a lot of which is prequels, sequels, reboots, or adaptations), because they have become lazy as company. They haven’t had to compete with anyone, because they haven’t had to come up with any new ideas. They’re sitting on their “intellectual property”. And this is true for every large media conglomerate out there.
This is in complete violation of the original spirit of copyright laws.
I agree with your final point that the current IP laws need improvement, I just don't see how you can make that argument based on your premises. If you truly believe that IP cannot be property, then how do you get to the idea that we should have copyright in order to protect those who create intellectual property?
The argument that intellectual property doesn't exist because it doesn't represent a physical thing in the real world is lazy. Plenty of important legal fictions exist that don't represent physical things in the real world. That doesn't make them not important. There is no physical or biological way to determine what a "human right" is, but it's still important that we define it. In the case of intellectual property, as humans we have certain intuitions around intellectual work, and IP is a way of codifying them: saying that being inspired by other people's work is okay, but directly copying them is generally not okay.
The argument that intellectual property doesn't exist because it's possible that multiple people could come up with exactly the same idea at the same time is absurd. Firstly, because it's already handled by existing copyright law, which does allow people to create the same work independently and differentiates this from one person copying the work of another. Secondly, because that's not how human thought works. We don't just regurgitate what we've been told verbatim, we synthesise our inputs and then we create new works out of them. Intellectual property is not your "sources of inspiration" — intellectual property is specifically the words put down on paper, or the dialogue spoken, or the pixels animated. Of course the concept of intellectual property becomes nonsense if you conflate the two, but that is not a good definition of intellectual property.
Your third main argument that, even if intellectual property exists, it should be heavily limited is one that I agree with, but it's important to keep in mind that this is not how we treat any other form of property. If I own land, I am freely able to give it to my children (modulo taxes). They did not work for that land, and will proceed to profit off its ownership. Yet you argue that the same should not apply to intellectual property. I would argue that the better argument is that we should treat more property (in particular anything that can create economic rent) the way we do intellectual property. But I think we should be at least somewhat consistent here.
I love this video/series -- I used to show it to my comp students when we talked about genre and remix. We didn't get too bogged down in part 4, but the first 3 parts are really illustrative of how nothing is made in a vacuum, and how masters of craft are true students of genre. They understand the disparate parts and how they fit together, and--most importantly--how the parts can be broken down, shuffled around and inverted in order to create something new and exciting.
Talking about simultaneous discovery. I have always been fond of the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, which explains creativity and invention in much the same way, and that was published in 2011. The original parts of this video were published from 2010 to 2012, according to the closing credits. If you want to read more on the topics discussed in parts one to three, I can recommend it.
That title, and this video series, has been my mantra any time someone is complaining about the lack of originality in media 'these days'.
I picture the astronaut - gun - astronaut meme.