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Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

(savingcountrymusic.com)
153 points breve | 4 comments | 31 Aug 25 05:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rsp1984 ◴[31 Aug 25 08:35 UTC] No.45081515[source]▶
It gets even crazier when compared to other IP law:

Engineer makes an invention: Write 30-Page patent application. Multi-year patenting process with USPTO, pay 1000s of $ if DIY, 10x that if using an IP law firm. Multiply by 4x if going international. With luck, patent gets issued 3 years later. It protects you for 25 years, but only if you have deep pockets for an IP lawsuit in case someone does copy you -- and with uncertain outcome.

Artist releases a song: automatically enjoys 100+ years of protection, even for minor samples, hooks, melodic elements. Lawsuits are easily won as long as you can prove you are the copyright holder.

I have my theories about how we ended up in this state of affairs but no jurist with a sliver of common sense can seriously claim that this is fine.

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bonoboTP ◴[31 Aug 25 09:54 UTC] No.45081915[source]▶
Copyright and patents are very different things. Lumping them under the disingenuous umbrella term "IP" only serves to muddle the waters and create FUD. They are not property rights.

It's best to criticize each precisely and surgically. Know the terms, know the rules, the exceptions, etc. Know the history, know the original purpose of these laws. That kind of broader knowledge in broader society is what can help. The big corps are interested in having a vague blurry idea around "IP" that just makes you scared and think "wouldn't download a car" and has a chilling effect of thinking that all "that stuff" is electrified and better not touch it, and that it's just natural that there's "intellectual property" and it's just minor details whether it's copyright or patents or trademarks or whatever else. Property rights are ancient. By associating copyright with that, they make it seem that it's also just as fundamental and civilization-grounding as private property, when most of intellectual history had no such concept. Derivative works, tweaking ideas, splicing them in new ways was just normal.

A related disingenuous propaganda term is "content consumption", again creating the association between e.g. reading a book or listening to a song on the one hand and eating food, or using up soap or fuel on the other.

See also:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-...

https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LT...

https://conversableeconomist.com/2013/03/29/is-intellectual-...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

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_rm ◴[31 Aug 25 11:23 UTC] No.45082334[source]▶
What? Copyright and patents are exactly the same thing. Making "you copied me!" actionable at a court of law, by statute, when before that there was no such legal fiction of "intellectual property" or any other exclusive rights to reproduce a thing.
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Borealid ◴[31 Aug 25 13:10 UTC] No.45082889[source]▶
Copyright and patents are absolutely not the same thing at all.

A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.

A copyright is a prohibition on someone copying you, with certain exceptions where they are allowed to do so ("fair use" or "fair dealing"). Copyrights also, in the USA, bring certain protections against people attempting to use a work in a way you did not intend even where they are not duplicating it.

A trademark is a prohibition on someone causing confusion by copying something you use to identify yourself, or by using/referencing it (without copying) in a context you don't wish.

A trade secret is a criminal prohibition on someone intentionally causing another to divulge certain information that you contractually banned them from divulging.

A security classification is a ban on certain ideas/information being shared with parties that a government agency did not wish them shared with, or used in certain contexts. This is not a protection available to individuals, only to governments.

A license is an intentional weakening of one or more of the above types of protection, potentially with attached civil penalties in the event the bounds of the license are exceeded. It can thus, when accepted, limit behaviour beyond what would normally be allowed by one of the IP types above.

All six of these IP types protect against Person B doing something that is in some way related to an activity Person A did earlier, but they are really quite different in what they cover and how. I don't agree at all they're the same thing.

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1. happytoexplain ◴[31 Aug 25 20:20 UTC] No.45086709[source]▶
>A patent makes it illegal to use a particular idea, by any means. It is a limited-time universal monopoly on a set of specific "claims" (the selected applications of the idea). It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you or not.

Just FYI, as a layman with no opinion on whether they are "the same thing" in this context, this paragraph sounds self-contradictory. It sounds like you're describing copying somebody's idea, and then you say "It has nothing to do with whether someone copied you", so I ended up confused as to your meaning.

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2. Borealid ◴[31 Aug 25 21:44 UTC] No.45087382[source]▶
Let's say I come up with the idea of using a fan to blow a balloon into the air. I get a patent with the claim "a device made buoyant in air and propelled by forced wind".

Someone else comes up with the idea of blowing a dust bunny into the air with their breath.

Their idea, which has nothing at all to do with my idea and is certainly not a copy, infringes my claim because what they are doing matches what I've claimed as the core idea in my patent. They didn't "copy" me, for two reasons:

1. Their idea was had independently of mine, with its own creativity 2. Their idea is fundamentally not the same as mine, but because my enumerated claim is sufficiently broad to cover their concept too, it's still infringement

With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe. With a copyright, you can't claim anything broader than the work you actually produced.

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3. bonoboTP ◴[01 Sep 25 01:07 UTC] No.45088514[source]▶
> With a copyright, their additional creativity would have made their work not infringe.

But not generally. You can't sell a new Hogwarts-based book with Harry Potter characters. This is both due to copyright and trademarks. But already copyright blocks derivative works even if there's additional creativity with a new plot.

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4. Borealid ◴[01 Sep 25 05:25 UTC] No.45089723{3}[source]▶
You can't sell a Harry Potter book, but you can sell any number of Magical School for Wizards books. They can use similar themes to Harry Potter, similar pacing, even similar artwork styles.

They just can't copy the characters, significant chunks of text, or images.

That's the difference between a copyright and a patent in a nutshell: you copyright an implementation of an idea, while you patent the idea itself.