The ethics of enjoying large collaborative works of art and entertainment

[Torco]

so some arbitrary and obviously corrupt law that enables both rentseeking and almost total privatization of culture simply so that some rich guy who bought enough politicians can be even richer... *that* takes precedence over people enjoying something at literally zero cost to anyone else? zero cost other than some billionaire or other doesn't make as much money as they otherwise would, that is. yeah, that's the ethically correct position here. infinite profits for the masters verily is the most important good ¿

[xxx]

don't worry about the privatization of culture,
following the adage panem et circenses
there will always be something to enjoy for free...

but when it's free,
that's when you have to worry...

there's no reason to profit without giving something in exchange
for someone else's artistic talents, except to make a slave of them,
or to be a thief...

[Travis B.]

so some arbitrary and obviously corrupt law that enables both rentseeking and almost total privatization of culture simply so that some rich guy who bought enough politicians can be even richer... *that* takes precedence over people enjoying something at literally zero cost to anyone else? zero cost other than some billionaire or other doesn't make as much money as they otherwise would, that is. yeah, that's the ethically correct position here. infinite profits for the masters verily is the most important good ¿

To me there is a difference between individual creators owning their own intellectual property and big corporations buying it up. If I had my way intellectual property rights would not be transferable -- only the immediate creators of a work would have them.

Personally, I have intellectual property rights to the software I create on my own, which enables me to license it as I see fit. Over the years I have chosen the LGPL 2.0, the BSD3, and most recently the MIT license to license my software it with, specifically because I have chosen to make my own software available for others to use, distribute, study, modify, and yes, sell.

That said, the software I have created over the years at the various places I have worked at has been proprietary and owned by my employers, and one could argue that creating proprietary software at my day jobs has helped subsidize my creation of FLOSS on my own.

Of course, I would not object if intellectual property rights just evaporated tomorrow and all works were immediately put in the public domain. Yes, that would include my own work. To me, the gain from all works entering the public domain would be greater than whatever would be lost by not being able to license one's own works, my own works included.

[xxx]

Of course,
but in a complex society, intermediaries are a necessity,
and you can't refuse an offer to acquire rights
in exchange for a remunerated distribution on this transfer...
how else to do it...

[Torco]

there's no reason to profit without giving something in exchange
for someone else's artistic talents, except to make a slave of them, or to be a thief...

artists have made a living, and often occupied important social roles like, say, griots, for the entirety of the history of the human race up until the privatization of culture (why shouldn't i be worried about it, btw? other forms of privatization have gone sooo well for humans¿) look, it's the megacorpos that profit off the current copyright regime, mostly by fencing it in, not artists. imagine if actors had to pay royalty to the east india company or whatever in order to put on shakespeare, or cellists needed to go online to buy the rights to bach's prelude before learning it. heinlein and borges are dead: who, exactly, am I "stealing" from? who, exactly, am i "making a slave"?

sure, sometimes piracy is iffy: for example, if I were to torrent a small game from a small studio two days after launch or something biensure, gronde-moi, but your overly-general position here is, and i say this with without anger, absurd.

how else to do it...

thish ish pure ideology, sniff sniff. come on there's all sorts of other ways we could do it. other, better ways. here's a few choices.

• vanilla copyright, but not demented: three or four years worth, and some tapering off of control like 3 more years of exclusive make-a-sequel rights. maybe 10 years of veto power in works that use your characters / functions / whatever, maybe 8 years of royalties over support contracts over some app you made. that kind of thing
  
  insta-public domain everything, travis [and my] preferred option.
  • what, you say? people wouldn't make new stuff? sure they would. pharmaceutical companies won't develop drugs? so what, universities can develop drugs: they're full of phd students looking for a good theses, you know.
    
    what's that? people wouldn't develop games? sure they will, they do for free now. and we could have public (or private-charitable, if you prefer) scholarships, contests, competitions and awards.
    
    competition, awards and scholarships are silly? no they're not. a lot of chilean cinema is publicly funded, as is a lot of european flicks. one of my favourite games was made possible by some grant from the canadian fund for the arts or whatever it's called. the long dark, neat game!
    
    think of it I paid for that game, you know? i torrented it, found out i loved it, and bought it. paid what i wanted, too, steam sales and all that. and then paid for an update. wouldn't have made a difference if the button said 'donate' instead. and actually, the dudes working in that studio are treated, I bet, a lot better than ubisoft treats their devs.
    
    companies wouldn't write software? sure they would! employees can code stuff, people can do open source, and honestly, enterprise software is a scam. did you know a licence for an oracle ERP can go for like student loan money? for a single business to use something or other.
  only human beings can hold intellectual property. ¿what? companies wouldn't hire professional creatives? sure they're gonna. they'd just have to give them better terms.

trademarks and fraud law can handle image and authenticity issues. copyright is just another enclosure on reality: another actual thing that is not merchandise that rich people have convinced us should be property. next thing you know they'll be privatizing names, and you'll have to pay some blackrock subsidiary in order to be called Joe. and people like you will say "in a complex society, we need intermediaries".

[zompist]

insta-public domain everything, travis [and my] preferred option.
vanilla copyright, but not demented: three or four years worth,.

Why is it that the ultra-left position is that artists, of all laborers, should all suffer and die? They'd never say "farmers, doctors, and auto workers" should work for free", but artists apparently don't deserve to get paid for their work.

Note, I said artists, fuck off if you pretend I'm talking about corporations.

Writing a book can take years-- Tolkien famously took 17 years to write LOTR. They get zero, zip, and zilch for that work. Then, if they sell it, you graciously allow them three years to profit before randos and corporations can take away their money. Dude, books sell for years, that's how authors make their very scant living.

The median income for book authors is $10,000 a year. That's about half the salary of a grocery store clerk in this area. But go ahead, keep shitting on authors, it's always cool for "leftists" to fuck over poor people.

Finally, though your "authors suck" bullet points don't deserve a response, I'll just say that asking people to work for free, you generally get what you pay for. You're basically saying you only want art from hobbyists and rich people, the ones who don't need the money. There's a whole thing going on, a call for more diversity in art; guess what, you don't get diversity from hobbyists and rich people.

[Torco]

such abundance of strawmen. of course artists etcetera should get paid: they should be able to sell their paintings too, and tickets to their concerts etcetera etcetera. books take decades to pay off? okay, then, life of the author for royalties then, or a hundred million, whatever happens first. that's totally different from no one can make a spinnoff for a a century and a half, or the mule from asimov being exclusive property of comcast or whoever.

remember, we ultras want everyone to work "for free". and also get what they want "for free". sure, insta-public domain can't work under capitalism? yeah, yeah, I know, there's stuff to get done first. it'd still be pretty cool, right? people not dying for lack of a pill just cause some mousy suit decides to hike up the price for "his" intellectual "property".

[Ketsuban]

imagine if actors had to pay royalty to the east india company or whatever in order to put on shakespeare, or cellists needed to go online to buy the rights to bach's prelude before learning it.

Music itself is not copyrightable (it's considered to be an idea) but you can copyright a performance or an arrangement. A quick google got me sheet music for Bach's Prelude in C which has been made available without cost "for any non-profit public or private performance" according to the home page. There are doubtless others if you want a more formal free license.

Note, I said artists, fuck off if you pretend I'm talking about corporations.

Artists have a tendency to band together and become (indistinguishable from) corporations. To use video game examples in a category I've been looking into recently: one person can (apparently) produce Pokemon Type:Wild, but that seems to be an exception rather than a rule* - one-person productions generally have clear shortcomings, the vast majority of fighting games are made by corporations, and the only difference between the developers of Skullgirls and Street Fighter VI is scale.

* Especially given the developer of Pokemon Type:Wild is alleged to be or have been an animator on the Pokemon cartoon.

[xxx]

remember, we ultras want everyone to work "for free". and also get what they want "for free".

the day this happens,
there will be no reason to pay artists either,
as their rights are only a weak retranscription of the general scheme...

in the meantime, stealing from them, whatever the pretext,
is intolerable especially if it's moral...

[Ares Land]

I'm not sure I fully understand the debate here to be honest. But! I'm pretty sure public libraries solves most of the problem you mention here, at least when they're adequately funded.

[WeepingElf]

insta-public domain everything, travis [and my] preferred option.
vanilla copyright, but not demented: three or four years worth,.

Why is it that the ultra-left position is that artists, of all laborers, should all suffer and die? They'd never say "farmers, doctors, and auto workers" should work for free", but artists apparently don't deserve to get paid for their work.

Note, I said artists, fuck off if you pretend I'm talking about corporations.

Writing a book can take years-- Tolkien famously took 17 years to write LOTR. They get zero, zip, and zilch for that work. Then, if they sell it, you graciously allow them three years to profit before randos and corporations can take away their money. Dude, books sell for years, that's how authors make their very scant living.

The median income for book authors is $10,000 a year. That's about half the salary of a grocery store clerk in this area. But go ahead, keep shitting on authors, it's always cool for "leftists" to fuck over poor people.

Finally, though your "authors suck" bullet points don't deserve a response, I'll just say that asking people to work for free, you generally get what you pay for. You're basically saying you only want art from hobbyists and rich people, the ones who don't need the money. There's a whole thing going on, a call for more diversity in art; guess what, you don't get diversity from hobbyists and rich people.

I whole-heartedly agree with you! Artists deserve to get fair payment, and intellectual property rights as we have them in the western world are certainly not the ideal solution of this problem, but a better one than a bureaucracy which decides which works are worth subsidizing and which not, especially considering the risk that the latter gets abused as a censorship authority (or at least, will be perceived as one by those artists it turns down).

[WeepingElf]

I have just read an essay (from 1979) about music bootlegs, i.e. unauthorized publications of recordings not officially released, which reminds me of what I think about them, and is relevant to this thread. Some bootlegs are admittedly interesting documents of the history of an artist, e.g. live recordings of famous performances, or early versions of well-known pieces that differ from the final versions in interesting ways. Most bootlegs, however, are just money-making, exploiting the passions of music fans and record collectors (now legally exploited by the record companies by churning out overpriced box sets and other pseudo-rarities), and few meet professional quality standards. But always, unless retroactively licensed (which has happened, but is rare), they not only deprive the record companies of their profits, but more importantly, they deprive the artists of their hard-earned royalties, and this latter point is IMHO sufficient reason not to by such machinations. (Counterfeit records, i.e. illegal reproductions of officially released records, are much worse still. They are not only illegal, but just plain criminal, and never of any documentary value!)

[Raphael]

But always, unless retroactively licensed (which has happened, but is rare), they not only deprive the record companies of their profits, but more importantly, they deprive the artists of their hard-earned royalties, and this latter point is IMHO sufficient reason not to by such machinations. (Counterfeit records, i.e. illegal reproductions of officially released records, are much worse still. They are not only illegal, but just plain criminal, and never of any documentary value!)

The problem with the claim that downloading pirated stuff always deprives artists of their royalties is that it assumes that everyone who downloads pirated files would otherwise have bought the work in question. All too often, that's simply not true, because if the person hadn't pirated the work, they simply wouldn't have gotten it at all. So, no, you can't just multiply the number of illegal downloads of a work with the price of buying it legally and get the total loss to the people selling the work.

Besides, experience seems to show that people will often pay for works, even if they can get them for free relatively easily at a relatively low risk, as long as the works are affordable for them, the price is reasonable, and the format isn't cumbersome.

[Travis B.]

To me capitalist-owned copyrights are a much bigger issue than creator-owned copyrights. In a market economy, as opposed to a communist one, one can argue that the latter has its place*. After all, creators do have to eat too. However, the former is exploitation by capitalists of creators, hence why I believe copyrights should be non-transferable, to prevent capitalists from essentially forcing creators to give up their copyrights.

* Of course, one alternative option would be to have the government fund creators, who are voted on by consumers of content.

[WeepingElf]

But always, unless retroactively licensed (which has happened, but is rare), they not only deprive the record companies of their profits, but more importantly, they deprive the artists of their hard-earned royalties, and this latter point is IMHO sufficient reason not to by such machinations. (Counterfeit records, i.e. illegal reproductions of officially released records, are much worse still. They are not only illegal, but just plain criminal, and never of any documentary value!)

The problem with the claim that downloading pirated stuff always deprives artists of their royalties is that it assumes that everyone who downloads pirated files would otherwise have bought the work in question. All too often, that's simply not true, because if the person hadn't pirated the work, they simply wouldn't have gotten it at all. So, no, you can't just multiply the number of illegal downloads of a work with the price of buying it legally and get the total loss to the people selling the work.

Besides, experience seems to show that people will often pay for works, even if they can get them for free relatively easily at a relatively low risk, as long as the works are affordable for them, the price is reasonable, and the format isn't cumbersome.

Fair. There are people who use pirated downloads and streams to check whether they like the music in question before buying it and if yes, buy the record - and if not, don't buy the record but do not check out the pirated stuff again, either. They thus use YouTube or whatever as a virtual listening booth. This, at least, is how I use YouTube, where much - but not all - music is of questionable legality. I also used it in my research for my book on prog rock - many important records are now no longer available, or only at collectors' prices, so listening to (often illegal) rips on YouTube was the only viable option to get to know them.

[Travis B.]

The big issue at the present IMO is not piracy but how the likes of Spotify and iTunes (and yes, I am very guilty of listening to Spotify, which I do pay for) only pay artists a pittance -- but at the same time buying and carrying around CD's of all the artists one wants to listen to is extremely impractical, especially in this day and age where most laptop computers and, increasingly, most cars no longer have CD players, and even when they did, I personally found carrying around and switching between large numbers of CD's to be a pain.

Personally what I would like to see is artists collectively creating means of directly distributing streaming music themselves, while cutting out the likes of Spotify and iTunes. I would be perfectly willing to pay money for this, more money than I currently pay Spotify. Unfortunately, this is not very compatible with the likes of record companies, which exist in large part to suck money off the top (after Spotify and iTunes have already sucked money off the top), and hence they would probably do their best to prevent this from ever happening on a large scale.

[Travis B.]

I should note that even when I did play music from CD's, what I did typically, after the iPod appeared on the scene, was to rip music from CD's I owned as MP3's and load those MP3's onto my iPod simply for practicality's sake. Of course these days it's been years such I've touched my iPod (do they even sell them anymore?)...

[Raphael]

but at the same time buying and carrying around CD's of all the artists one wants to listen to is extremely impractical, especially in this day and age where most laptop computers and, increasingly, most cars no longer have CD players, and even when they did, I personally found carrying around and switching between large numbers of CD's to be a pain.

Well, that's why I generally do what you describe as your former behaviour in the next post:

I should note that even when I did play music from CD's, what I did typically, after the iPod appeared on the scene, was to rip music from CD's I owned as MP3's

[Travis B.]

Part of why it is my former behavior is because I generally want to listen to, in most cases, three or four songs by any given artist, and those songs may be spread out amongst multiple albums, so buying entire albums means spending a lot of money on albums for only a limited number of songs off of each of them. Yes, there are singles, but conversely in many cases the songs I want to listen to are not necessarily on them. The other part is that I listen to music heavily at work, and I highly doubt my work would appreciate me putting MP3's on my work computer, even if I acquired them completely legally. That said, if there was a way to buy individual songs directly from artists as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, without DRM and without iTunes or like taking a cut, I would gladly do so.

[WeepingElf]

Spotify and similar platforms may have been the rescue of the music industry, but not of musicians. They get virtually no royalties from them. Which is the reason why so many people call for boycotting them. What regards my own listening behaviour, I prefer listening to whole albums (in my favourite music genre, progressive rock, there are many concept albums which are made for listening from genesis to revelation) in good sound quality. Therefore, I have a good (about €2000) stereo at home, and buy CDs which I play on it.