Problem Machine

Well, first, I don't think they should have that right, and it's actually something of an open question whether they really do, they just benefit from youtube/google not wanting to get caught in that legal crossfire. Second, i don't believe in people being good or bad, I believe in them doing good or bad, and something which hurts everyone for no concrete benefit is something I struggle to view as doing good. You should never exercise 'rights' just because you have them, but to achieve something worthwhile. Regardless of streaming stuff copyright law needs to be overhauled. There are so many cases of gross overreach that that's basically incontestable at this point. The question is, what should copyright look like, which is where all of this stuff of ethical rights and economic harm comes from. Yeah sure they can want to all they like, but how much power to we really want to give massive corporations to 'control their image'? Well conveniently enough I outlined my stance a page ago.

I actually addressed that in my above post, I was dissecting why charging makes a difference. edit: actually I missed a few words to make what I meant explicit in the last sentence I think

This gets back to what I was saying earlier about it being important to separate the ethical and economic interest behind our arguments. So, we can agree apparently that creating a fan-work is not an ethical transgression against the original artist. Would this be the case if they explicitly said they didn't like fan-work or want it made? How far should an artist's control extend in this regard? As I said above, I don't think they should have any say at all what other artists do with it as long as it doesn't create confusion over who created the original, but that's a stronger stance than most take I think. But, anyway, that's the ethical side of it. The other side of it is the economic, IE will it do economic harm to the artist if we sell this fan-work? In most of these cases it's extremely hard to make the case that it would, especially if we respected the moral rights of the creator as mentioned above. So, the relevant question here I think is do you think that making fan-work based off the work of an artist who explicitly hates all fan-work is a transgression against them? Or, do you contend that it's an economic transgression to then sell the work despite no demonstrable or even supposed damages?

Because your opinion seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong) that anyone who doesn't create their own IP is less of an artist than someone who does. But that's only true if the rights-holder (who isn't the creator, in the case of DC) doesn't give them permission to? So that splits pretty cleanly along legal grounds which have been aligned to corporate interests rather than ethical grounds based on the moral rights of creation and inspiration.

I can't get over this apparent disregard for anyone who creates something based on an IP which isn't 100% original (none are but whatever). Out of curiosity, do you share this same level of disdain for, say, the creators of the Sherlock television series, or people hired by DC to write Batman comics? Or is it only people working in an 'unlicensed' fashion that are lesser artists?

I think the hope was that they'd only be going after people streaming/showing new Nintendo games and people playing around with two-decade old roms would be ignored.

Track for last month, done late. Hopefully will get another one done this month too. Dreams and Nightmares

It's hard because I can tell we're talking past each other but I can't tell how. The place you're arguing from just isn't quite clicking into place for me, and I can tell that because of that I'm not really addressing the questions you're trying to ask. For my own part, it feels like my arguments are being construed as a defense or apology for LPing -- understandable given that that was largely why I entered the conversation, but at the moment I'm more just trying to understand what exactly is being advocated here. I just don't really understand what you're saying, and I think we both find that frustrating. Are we talking about the law or ethics? Are we discussing them as they are or as they should be? Are we talking about the obligations of the streamer or the obligations of the dev or the rights of the streamer or the rights of the dev? I can't tell. So let me try to set out my stance, rather than leaving it open to inference. I believe that artists have a moral right to their creation, but should have very limited rights to control how that creation is interpreted and used. I think creators should have almost no power to shut down original fan-works outside of trademark disputes and interference with the original moral right to their creation, IE these works promote confusion as to what was made by whom. I think that the bar for transformative use should legally be set very low, but that artists should be good citizens and give credit where credit is due. When it comes to LPs the source games are obviously credited so that's not really an issue, but comes up all the time in other stuff. Adding money to everything makes things a lot more complicated, since capitalism is pretty inherently unjust. A lot of our understanding of who a real artist is and isn't is grounded in capitalistic assumptions that work to further the interests of corporate entities rather than artists, and especially rather than art itself, which is enriched by more and more creations. Because there is no real ethical participation in capitalism, I have no idea what the right way to handle money as it pertains to LPs is, except that the system as it is seems to be a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties as long as neither gets greedy and tries to double-dip. So the rhetoric I've been using basically splits into two lines: The line which corresponds to the first paragraph, discussing the moral rights of creators and limitations thereof, and why I believe in a generally open economy of ideas: And the rhetoric of balancing equitable trade between two abstract business partners, and why attempting to disrupt that is in no one's best interest and tends to stem from inherently anti-artistic capitalistic assumptions and impulses.

Okay, for funsies let's imagine that. Since all of the high-value IPs belong to major corporations, we have essentially the same climate of fan-work now except people could actually sell their fan stories on major sites. Big companies could steal and sell existing IP, but they can basically do that now anyway with only minor changes, then through the force of marketing power position their clone as the original in the minds of the mass audience which, again, they do all the damn time. The only thing that would change would be that they could use the real names -- which they don't actually have any motive to do, since it's more profitable to rip off the story, slap mickey mouse on it, and sell it as a new plotline. Except obviously not mickey mouse any more since he's relatively irrelevant. And then, as now, the only thing keeping them honest is that people notice when they do that shit and occasionally raise a fuss about it. And so we get Lion King, which was actually a pretty good movie in its own right. I'm starting to get really fucking peeved at seeing this framed as though I have no personal vested interest in the status of art while the people I'm arguing with do. I draw art commissions to pay my rent, I write a weekly blog, I compose music which I put up online, I'm two years into developing a one-man game project: I am not an outsider or a moocher, and I'm getting sick of being painted into that corner just so those who disagree with me can position themselves as being 'on the side of the artists'. I'm on the side of the artists too, okay: I'm just a bit less choosey about who I give the privilege of being called a real artist to. That said, what about Garfield Minus Garfield? What about DBZ: Abridged? What about the Pogo video I linked? These are works which are largely cut and pasted versions of existing works, but are certainly significant in their own right. What amount of cutting and pasting is enough to transform an original work into something else? So if you make a video of walking through a beautiful cathedral and it gets a million views you should owe the architect money?

I mean that already basically happens just without the justification. Copyright basically doesn't cover stealing someone's story wholesale with only very slight changes, and so that happens all the damn time. The only thing that is litigible at all in that example are characters, and that's primarily because Disney made it that way because Mickey Mouse. Gameplay doesn't even have to come into it. Well, again that fails the 'whole work' test I brought up before, and also fails to be transformative because it doesn't integrate it into a greater work. What if it rearranged the strip order to make the reader's interpretation different? Or if it edited out one of the central characters? Or if it superimposed characters making jokes based on what was going on in the strip? These are all way more borderline cases. I think there also needs to be some test of proportionality, like what degree of the finished work is original vs appropriated. That's one that gets super tricky though, because what about a song made entirely out of clips of someone else artfully rearranged into a whole new piece ? What's the proportionality there?

Um. What? This is extremely abstract and blue sky. How do you actually see this happening? How exactly would corporations abuse this, and what exactly is the 'this' they'd be abusing? The loop hole right now isn't a legal one so much as a cultural one: Whose side the law is on in the matter of fair use re: game streaming/recording is still an open question. Is your concern that if the current status quo were turned into a law that it would be one prone to abuse? The scenario above frankly doesn't make a lot of sense, since the assets as they're present within the game are very different from the assets that are used to make it. Extracting the models and using them is then reverse engineering a competitor's product in order to steal their in-house assets, which seems fairly cut-and-dry illegal. I guess the argument might hold more water if someone took screenshots and used them as sprites or backgrounds, but tbh if a AAA dev did that they'd be laughed out of the market so I think it's kind of an absurd hypothetical. I'm not sure I'm comfortable having it inferred that I oppose codifying the current state of relations into writing, though I think I may be opposed to then codifying those writings into law, since, as you observe, any law thus created would be vulnerable to abuse (as, incidentally, most laws are eventually shown to be).

How is it you think something like one of these scenarios would happen? I'm not sure I see the connection I completely fail to understand how that follows in any way from anything I've said.

Well gameplay itself is an engine of transformation. Adding gameplay is like adding a bin of crayons and a sign telling people to go nuts next to your drawing: Maybe they don't completely own whatever they make then, but neither do you.

Man, I literally could not understand what you were saying to me. If you want to parse that as an insult, then fuck it obviously there's some fundamental disconnect in our methods of communication and meaningful discourse is impossible. I think part of the standard implicitly being used here is the 'whole work': If you include an entire work, in its full salable form, by someone else, that's obviously not fair use (outside of an educational context). However, if you use part of a work and thereby apply the transformative artistic choice of choosing which parts and how, that goes back towards fair use territory. The tricky aspect that you highlight here, though, is that components of that excerpt may themselves be salable works. The presumption, I think, is that in most cases all licensing costs for these were covered by the creator of the original long-form work.

Wings of Vi? I mean, it might well be the case that it's more popular for streaming than playing, but I suspect the dev knew very well that would be the case when making it. Very few people have the patience for that genre of game, but they're always a hit for streaming since they're so frustrating. I'd actually kind of like to give it a shot sometime, but I find it kind of intimidating and haven't gotten a chance to get it on sale yet -- $15 is a big chunk of change for me. Yeah I think pretty much everyone here can agree that's super gross.

I don't think public discourse would be against that principle if that was ever the framework in which it were discussed. When the topic comes up, though, it's usually because of a dev pulling something like Nintendo did and claiming 100% of the revenue on every video they can find. Also, as has come up, even if a 10% license is agreeable in principle, the amount of paperwork generated at that point is ridiculous, and probably costs more than the 10% itself in terms of wasted labor. Has this happened?

Ah yeah, with TWD: Season 1 I played through it, then watched my friend play through it, then we both watched NovaWar play through it on youtube. It's a surprisingly great streaming game, especially if you've already played it... though there's a kind of sadistic element to watching someone get their spirits crushed, haha. It's actually kind of a natural extension of the stats screen at the end of each episode.

That part in particular confused me -- I mean, I'm also an artist? And, though I did bring up the arts thing it was in relation to how often people denigrate certain kinds of work as being worth less because they're 'easy and fun', something that's often used to screw artists over and devalue their work.

Okay I think there was some other stuff in there but that makes sense. I kind of disagree with a couple of those points but can't imagine anything good coming of trying to argue against a third-party translation of someone's position...

I can't parse this post at all. What?

Hm. I'd be curious to see a regional breakdown. One of those articles presumes that $8 wouldn't be a hardship to most of the people pirating, which is a viewpoint hugely centered on a few wealthy western countries where that's not a not of money -- tbh, it's a not insignificant amount of money to myself at the moment.

Another big complaint I have about copyright laws is that the original intent behind them was to prevent selling copies of a whole work: This whole idea of using it to keep you from using components of a work in yours is a result of massive century-long scope creep on the part of copyright laws, first to account for slightly changed knockoffs (e.g. no Barry Porter and the Chamber of Secrets) but expanded to include the use of any character, and often thematic elements and incidental art, largely in the interests of corporate entities like Disney. These changes are not in the interests of the broader creative or economic landscape, just in the interests of the biggest corporations that hold the most IP. Most arguments about how this approach is justified fail to describe any level of harm caused by this 'thieving' use, falling back on ownership culture rhetoric and the word of the law as self-justifying rather than questioning why we accept this as status quo. In other words, I think that the bar for 'transformative' work has been set way too high, notched up progressively over time mostly by, well, probably Disney. Also, may I just say, it's pretty gross to me that you didn't take my claim to have issues with copyright that I didn't want to get into because we've been dragging this thread off-topic for like 5 pages at face value, and interpreted that as me having nothing of substance to say. If we're talking about disrespect... Is there a source for those numbers?

man I guess the way some people write. I mostly just try to keep my notes tonal to each other, and give zero shits about sticking to a key. Something I like in fact is that because a given chord can be a component of any number of key signatures you can easily perform the same motif while changing the key signature around it and just occasionally transpose a note a half step to keep it from going out of whatever key you're working in now. It's worth remembering that anything that doesn't deal directly with the physical properties of sound is basically made up. Major and minor keys and all of the different modes are just conventions people have gotten used to. Go pentatonic, go chromatic, go harmonic, make up your own keys, go into your synth and tune everything out a quarter step, whatever. It's all about what sounds interesting to you.

I think we can take it as given that jokes, music, etc all contribute to the prevailing cultural outlook on sex, violence, etc, whatever it may be -- since they are that culture, in a sense. The question is then primarily a matter of a) what kind of content maps to what kinds of attitudes, and how strong that influence is. Another extreme example is sitting Supreme Court justices citing the fictional television show 24 in order to justify 'enhanced interrogation' protocols: Would they have found another reason to do so if 24 had never been aired? Perhaps. It's a chicken and egg problem though: 24 is a symptom of a culture that believes in the efficacy of violence, and 24 also reinforces that culture by parroting that narrative. The Beastie Boys song is both product of and component of a culture that devalues women. That doesn't make either of these creations inherently without worth, or even less worthy, but it does mean their overall feedback into the system maintains problematic aspects of that system. And, yeah, in some cases you're going to get someone who twists something innocuous into the focus for their violence. You get outliers in every field. That's not a good reason to let other work, which feeds back into the system in a very direct way, off the hook. Just because flukes sometimes happen doesn't mean that everything is a fluke or that trying to analyze causality is a fool's errand..

I don't think anyone's really arguing legality here, except perhaps in an idealistic sense (what the law should be rather than what it is).