Jake

Idle Thumbs 130: Fundamentally dangerous to the notion of culture

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I thought it was Life+70. Eitherway, it's there for the benefit of the copyright owner, not the creator.

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This I don't understand. Why the +50 years? What good would that do to the original creator?

 

It provides assets to the deceased's heirs. I believe most people find some value in the idea that they can pass along assets to other people after they die.

 

Although I still agree that the merits of copyrights having this sort of lifespan are outweighed by the problems they create.

 

Copyright exists as an incentive for people to create original works. That's would be all well and good if you believe that there are a deficiency of original works, but that would be an odd thing to believe.

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I thought it was Life+70. Eitherway, it's there for the benefit of the copyright owner, not the creator.

 

Easy calculation: 

# of years Walt Disney has been dead + 20.

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That's the Sonny Bono copyright DLC, which is only available in the US.

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Zack sounds a lot like JP, it's a almost eerie.

 

Also, a permadeath stealth game, that's what DayZ was a lot of the time. I think the reason it doesn't completely suck there is because it's PvP, what happens after you get detected is more interesting than in most stealth games and it's not just a binary state change. If someone spots you they might not be hostile, they might stalk you for an hour to find your camp, they could spot you at 5m or at 500m, it's easy to lose track of someone, other than at close range it's hard to actually hit someone. The game leaves so much room for a situation to unfold. I haven't seen anything like that in a singleplayer stealth game.

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Forget Mickey Mouse, let's talk about something that is significant:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-27/opinions/41497155_1_fair-use-king-s-speech

And consider how charging 50 cents a word could affect how history is written:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/16193821734/churchills-heirs-seek-to-lose-future-charging-biographer-to-quote-his-words.shtml

Awesome episode. Zach's perspective on copyright was really hopeful in neat way that I hadn't considered. Fan-fic is such an interesting concept, though it typically isn't very interesting to read. I love hearing the concept being discussed.

Also: Is there any reason that Idle Thumbs shouldn't have one of those patreon accounts?

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On the topic of losing "net lore" this story comes to mind, circa 2007. A long, funny tale from a Dev on Street Fighter 2: The Movie: The Game, which was orignally posted to the shoryuken.com forum, but seems gone. I was able to find a copy, seemingly ripped to a PDF, but it's now behind some paywall, but you can read it, FOR NOW. 

 

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/142024089/Street-Fighter-the-Movie-Broke

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... I'll even take it one step further: by tying the most salient aspects of a given character or work to a corporation, current copyright law ensures that the inevitable derivative works enrich the corporation, either with money or fame, rather than the character, the creator, or the culture.

That's a bit misleading. The current copyright law ensures that derivative works enrich the holder of the copyright. That might be a corporation, but it might also be the creator or another natural person (e.g. the creator's heirs). Nothing about the current copyright law requires (or even necessarily favours) corporations to hold a copyright. 

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I thought it was Life+70. Eitherway, it's there for the benefit of the copyright owner, not the creator.

It depends where you live. Most places it is +50, but in the US it is in +70. The longer copyright benefits both the copyright owner and the creator, at least in as much as the longer the copyright, the more valuable the copyright: the creator can ask for a higher price for a 70 year copyright than he or she could for a 50 year copyright. 

 

My understanding is the "+50" is there to benefit older creators, not just in terms of their heirs but in the sense that if you are 75 and sick and want to sell your rights, no one is going to buy them if they expire as soon as you die. From a practical perspective the purchaser needs some certainty that the right will not expire in the near future. 

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I'm glad that my work is more or less worthless within 20 years.

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I haven't seen the game yet, but Chris's description of Delver remineded me a lot of Daggerfall. Randomly generated, first person, 3D but the monsters are sprites.

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That smash doc is great! But I too wish it spent more than a glancing thought about some of the more unfortunate aspects of the subculture (and all American fighting game subcultures). More than that, though, I wish the doc wasn't so horrible when depicting Japan or Japanese players... whenever anything about Japan comes up the doc goes from quite interesting to almost unwatchable. 

 

I mean, Girls Generation? Seriously? Guys. Come on.

 

If I recall, the Gee Gee song was a request from a high-tier kickstarter backer, and the guy had to throw it in somewhere. I guess Japan is close enough to Korea?

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*nsfw

 

It seemed like a safe bet that in 2013 people would know goatse was nsfw.

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I've played Kingdom of Loathing on and off since 2004 so this episode was a delight. I actually found out about Idle Thumbs from one of the very early KoL podcasts.

I feel that the style of Idle Thumbs and the KoL podcast/video gameshotdog is very much the same except the blood alcohol content is a lot higher in the latter.

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Pertinent to the copyright talk:
 
http://everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
 
A well-produced miniseries, that.
 
I benefit from copyright and I think it needs to be drastically shortened... but then I would since I'm a hateful polity and public domain-oriented type like most American governors were in the 18th century. Fourteen years and a one-time option to renew if the creator lives sounds right to me.
 
Positive reform of copyright seems unlikely. The US has snaked so far up its own colon in the name of individualism and wealth that we just don't care about a meaingful public domain anymore, let alone cogent fair use regulations (not in numbers sufficient to elicit change at the federal level, anyway). Extant IP legislation reflects the fact that our culture seems to conceive of life as a propertymongering rat race. Something something temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
 
Patent reform may happen soonish given the volume of scammy litigation burdening the USPTO and hurting corporate interests, but not copyright.
 
A memorable quote from this cast I must find and transcribe was Zack Johnson on the not-quite-ephemeral nature of digital media:
 

I thought that about this one particular... like... clown... joke... post... on usenet, and then I found it a couple years ago. [...] Just search Google Groups for Gustave the Clown; I think it was crossposted to alt.sex.stories which is where you got all your text porn.

 

The notion of a "joke busker" made me chortle.

 

About the related discursion on the viability of creative jobs in the modern era: ehh, I dunno, I don't think it's getting any worse, it's just that more people are being exposed to how hard it is. "Creative" occupations (ugh) have always been precarious and they will always be because sustainability in such fields depends on the taste and interest of leisure audiences. If anything, there's surely more creative work to be found in our era both as a relative and absolute measure, although with the increasing wealth disparity of western nations there might be a reversal of the relative trend as the middle class shrinks.

 

Great guest this time.

 

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It seemed like a safe bet that in 2013 people would know goatse was nsfw.

I think the opposite is true, at least if you haven't being netting for a while.

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If I recall, the Gee Gee song was a request from a high-tier kickstarter backer, and the guy had to throw it in somewhere. I guess Japan is close enough to Korea?

 

Well, that's understandable at least. Still quite unfortunate. That scene alone significantly narrows down who I can show the doc to with a straight face, as most of my nerd friends are either from Japan or have ties to Japan somehow and tend to get pretty angry about media misrepresentation of their country (especially "look at this weird Japanese thing" sort of articles). 

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It seemed like a safe bet that in 2013 people would know goatse was nsfw.

Hey man, you never know. Some people have gaping holes in their knowledge.

 

And some people don't.

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Hey man, you never know. Some people have gaping holes in their knowledge.

 

And some people don't.

 

Well, those people should probably open up a little and really stretch themselves to learn more.

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Yeah, I think it's good to be more open, you know, as a person. I think we should all give ourselves a moment, every now and then, to just open ourselves to the world and really take it all in. Being that open might be scary, and sometimes it can be weird and messy, and I know it can be uncomfortable to be judged the way people sometimes judge this kind of 'radical' behavior: But sometimes, by allowing ourselves to really open up, we can be touched, in a special way, deep down inside, in a place and in a way which nothing has ever quite touched us before.

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stretch your butthole out real big

Okay anyways great episode. My favorite part (of many great parts) was that it reminded me to become a patron of Porpentine on Patreon (which itself urged me to tweet about it). I miss Nick though.

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