←back to thread

1503 points participant3 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
djoldman ◴[] No.43577414[source]
I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.

That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.

Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.

There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.

For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.

replies(18): >>43578724 #>>43578771 #>>43578899 #>>43578932 #>>43578976 #>>43579090 #>>43579150 #>>43579222 #>>43579392 #>>43579505 #>>43581686 #>>43583556 #>>43583637 #>>43583944 #>>43584544 #>>43585156 #>>43588217 #>>43653146 #
4gotunameagain ◴[] No.43578724[source]
It is not about trademark laws. It is about where laws apply.

If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many advanced countries.

But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire internet and builds a product with other people's work ?

Totally fine.

replies(3): >>43578916 #>>43578974 #>>43579047 #
1. avereveard ◴[] No.43579047[source]
This. It seem the situation is controversial now because of the beloved Studio Ghibli IP, but I want to see the venn diagram of people outrage at this, and the people clamoring for overbearing Disney chatachter protection when the copyright expired and siding with paloworld in the Nintendo lawsuit.

It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever media they like most.

But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the better question would be how we plug the gap that let a multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.