Jake

Idle Thumbs 130: Fundamentally dangerous to the notion of culture

Recommended Posts

This Jacobin article on geek culture (called, simply "On Geek Culture) seems relevant to what Chris was talking about, and how annoying it is that we live in an era where important creative works are owned by corporate entities.

 

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/08/on-geek-culture

 

Also note I am not endorsing all of the conclusions & assumptions reached in the article, but I do think there are a lot of really good observations contained in it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I keep putting off writing this post even though this has been one of my favorite episodes since it was released, but I fully endorse what Remo is saying on this podcast in terms of copyright expiring and classic stories being inherent in our culture. It does suck what Disney did and I wish the copyright extensions laws could revert back. I don't fully understand how it works these days for intellectual property other than I think a corporation can keep renewing copyright as long as they exist and then hundred or so years?

 

The argument against Chris seemed to be that shoddy fan works would run rampant and become profitable, thus hurting culture even more by making fan fiction abundant and stifling the need for original ideas, but considering that tends to already happen, I can't see copyright expiration as being a factor against any of that. People sell their fan art of characters all the time in terms of prints and a lot of artists tend to become prominent from doing fan works instead of any kind of original ideas (Or sexy ladies. Or sexy ladies from a certain fandom). I contest that after 100 years or whatever after an original set copyright, the cream is going to rise to the top and only the best works will be remembered. Great authors and artists who play with classic public domain characters or concepts tend to do it with the intent of doing something interesting or saying something important rather than rehash. There's always something new to bring to the table that will be valuable because of an original great work. Chris Remo is fully on the money here.

 

Plus I think the other aspect to consider in terms of copyright expiration is the republishing of old works and keeping it in circulation as long as we can as a society. Once it's public domain, it can be taken upon any company or even fan to profit off of the ability to keep the work at hand in the public eye. Corporations, especially movie studios, for whatever reason have tended to guard their releases letting them rot away in a vault somewhere or just something was never properly collected in the first place (like the early large format newspaper comics). There's been so many great restorations of silent films and early comics in the last couple decades that it's almost a better time to live in than when they first premiered because it's readily available to anyone. Should anything go out of print, I'm sure publisher or individual will be in line. It's was a great time when the copyrights on multiple Winsor McCay works expired around 2005 or so because multiple publishers were jumping on the ability to collect his newspaper comics and competing for completion or superior restoration. Let's also not forget music, which may be lost forever inhabiting a rotting vinyl the way the major labels tend to work.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Somewhat related to this and the Candy Crush Saga:

I'm going to be pissed if I have to fight in order to say that my game is in a cyberpunk universe because of Cyberpunk 2077. I work slow.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

From Wikipedia:

The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States. Since the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.[1] Copyright protection for works published prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years from their publication date.

This is an insanely long time. Not to mention the irony that the same entities that so aggressively advocate for long copyright periods extensively abuse the public domain (I, Frankenstein, that shittty Hercules movie that came out last month, just for some recent examples).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This is an insanely long time. Not to mention the irony that the same entities that so aggressively advocate for long copyright periods extensively abuse the public domain (I, Frankenstein, that shittty Hercules movie that came out last month, just for some recent examples).

 

RT8XuPn.gif

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

This whole copyright thing is still going, thanks to John Walker trolling all over the internets again.

 

Honestly I think my position is that the moral right of the author to be identified as such and copyright are two fundamentally different things; moral right of authorship is, I think, something that deserves the full weight of the law behind it. Copyright, though... honestly I'm not sure I support copyright at all any more.

 

If we take the extreme position - get rid of copyright entirely - what happens? Well, we know: Germany established a copyright law a century after England and decades after France, and the market naturally congealed into a two-tier system: cheaply produced copies of basically everything, and then nicely printed, high quality 'official' versions. That honestly sounds not that different to today, with the ease of piracy thanks to the Internet: the 'cheap' version is The Pirate Bay, and the 'official' version is the special edition box set.

 

We already live in a world where copyright is close to meaningless, and the surest route to making money while harnessing the internet is to have the most passionate fans pay to support you. There is an abundance of creativity in the world - we hardly have to promote or subsidise the creation of art, all that's required is an audience. In this world, no-one's going to make very much money as the lack of gatekeepers will inspire a race to the bottom, because it's so hard to cut through that you basically have to offer everything for free, and only the already affluent can afford wasting time like that. But then, this isn't much of a step back from where we are, where only a very few hits win and the majority of creators need a day job. We can make very reasonable assumptions about what that world would look like, and it's hardly a disaster. Honestly it feels like 2002 a bit. So our initial premise - that abolishing copyright is an extreme position - is fundamentally flawed. If it's not obvious that copyright is necessary, then the question becomes: are the benefits enough to outweigh the harm? To what extent is it a vehicle for rentseeking? Does it still make sense?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

to Merus above:

 

We can also compare America to England. Here's Charles Dickens writing to his American brother-in-law about our scurrilous word-piracy in the mid-1800s:


Is it not a horrible thing that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here [in America] from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard, and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery door-mat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? 

 
Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country who only ask to live by writing? I vow before high heaven that my blood so boils at these enormities, that when I speak about them I seem to grow twenty feet high, and to swell out in proportion. Robbers that ye are, I think to myself when I get upon my legs, here goes!
 
That's the 19th Century equivalent of "anything one publishes will end up alongside tentacle porn on the internet."
 
I don't think copyright should be abolished, but I think repealing the DMCA and reducing terms from "life + 70 years" to something like "5 years + one or two 5-year renewals for living authors" would at least make the law somewhat reasonable. The strong moral position here is promulgation of a robust public domain free of greedmongering litigiousness.
 
I would agree that copyright and attribution are different things but I feel a reasonable implementation of the former would at least allow (if not inculcate) respect for the latter. Contemporary copyright law and its schizophrenic enforcement are absurd enough to invite violation on their own (that is to say, current legislation & practice is so out of touch with "common sense" as to promote violation regardless of digital stuff's trivial copyability). 
 
I'd add that copyright is actually not at all close to meaningless for creators; n.b. countless YouTubers whose videos are routinely marred by spurious DMCA shenanigans (manual and automated flags). A friend of mine got in touch just last week to complain about a game video being auto-pulled for a non-appealable music-related violation despite having no music in the video. Copyright clearly harms many creators, but its benefits are less clear.
 
I'm not sure copyright ever made art fiscally profitable, though it surely made artists who achieved profitability (ditto their agents/studios) more profitable than they otherwise would've been, which is not at all the same thing (nor is it a clear moral good; probably the opposite, actually). John Walker linked his friend Nick Mailer's excellent piece on IP and copyright, should anyone want a reasoned, heavily-cited take on the absurdity of the status quo, still accurate eight years on: When Metaphors Attack: How Intellectual Property Frustrates Access to Knowledge in a Networked World.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Steve Gaynor had some smart things to say about copyrights: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveGaynor/20140203/209927/Copyright_trademark__money_in_a_creative_industry.php

 

Abolishing copyrights is probably too radical a step (and would possibly violate international treaties), but I think reducing the lifespan of copyrights is extremely desirable.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If we take the extreme position - get rid of copyright entirely - what happens? Well, we know: Germany established a copyright law a century after England and decades after France, and the market naturally congealed into a two-tier system: cheaply produced copies of basically everything, and then nicely printed, high quality 'official' versions. That honestly sounds not that different to today, with the ease of piracy thanks to the Internet: the 'cheap' version is The Pirate Bay, and the 'official' version is the special edition box set.

Unfortunately, sans copyright, the fancy 'official' version would likely be made by EA with none of the proceeds going towards the actual developer.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Unfortunately, sans copyright, the fancy 'official' version would likely be made by EA with none of the proceeds going towards the actual developer.

 

And, in a world where EA lays off entire development teams right before their game comes out, so that they don't have to pay them anymore, it's different how?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

 

I like the man and his game design, but not this article.

Gaynor didn't seem to support a specific copyright term; perhaps he favors the status quo of life + 70 years (and 120 years after creation or 95 after publication for hired work).

The only concrete claim he made in support of copyright greater 20 years is that artists/managers may use profit from past work to create new work (that's the only one I can discern, anyhow).

This is a good reason to have copyright law and enforcement, but I have two concerns:

  • Being a legislative minimalist, I don’t think copyright law should be concerned with how artists/managers dispense their profits (they can spend on employee wages, new development kit, old medical bills, fireworks, Ferraris, blow, etc).
  • I do not see how it follows that any specific term of copyright (Walker’s, Gaynor’s, or mine) is supported by this reasoning or by anything else Gaynor said.

That second concern is, in a nutshell, my response to the article. Essentially, "I see that Gaynor cares about this topic, but I fail to see meaningful links between the points made and the proper term of copyright."

 

In lieu of more folk writing at length about arbitrary numbers alongside ambiguously-relevant PassionRhetoric©, I cite these studies (pdf):

Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term (Rufus Pollock)

Does Copyright Law Promote Creativity? An Empirical Analysis of Copyright's Bounty (Raymond Shih Ray Ku et al.)

The first study finds an optimal copyright term of 15 years with a 99% confidence interval up to 38 years. I’ll just quote the second:

 

Our study suggests that when lawmakers consider whether to expand copyright law, there is little empirical or theoretical support for the position that increasing copyright protection will increase the number of new works created. Based upon the historic data, the most that can be expected is a 38 percent chance that the new law will be associated with an increase in the number of new registrations for some unknown category of work. In contrast, lawmakers are more likely to find a relationship between an increase in the number of new works and those laws that reduce or otherwise limit copyright protection, and even then the relationship is far from guaranteed. Expecting a legal change to increase the number of new copyrighted works is akin to shooting a gun with both live ammunition and blanks at targets moving in the dark. You will occasionally hit a target, but you will not know when this will happen or which target you will hit. Population size, not law, is uniformly and consistently the best predictor of the number of new works produced.

 

That's my empiricism for the day; copyright should last a million jillion years!

 

As to Gaynor’s article specifically, I’ll attempt a commentated summation (but do read his article first if you want to plow into this):

¶1-3: John Walker et al. are talking about proper copyright terms; Walker thinks 20 years is good. I don’t.

¶4: Artists/managers may use profit from old art to engender new art. Profiting from art is a gamble.

¶5: Making lots of money via art at all is rare, and extended profitability is probably rarer still.

¶6: Restatement of ¶4 in the form of an anecdote about a Washingtonian record label.

¶7: Restatement of ¶4 this time with “devs need to be paid” and “money needs to come from somewhere”.

I find everything in 4-7 agreeable.

¶8: Cormac McCarthy should retain copyright to Blood Meridian (1985) for longer than 20 years because 1) he made The Road in 2006 and 2) his publisher used profits from McCarthy’s novels to publish other authors.

I strongly disagree with this (with the opening premise, mind, not the veracity of the justifications). Firstly, I don’t think McCarthy was incapable of supporting himself in the interim (note that Gaynor only implies he couldn't). Secondly, if his publisher isn't a cabal of cretins, they too should be able to support their business on the merit of their representation, clientele and track record, all of which publishers managed to cultivate when copyright terms were markedly shorter.

¶9: Walker’s analogies between game development jobs and workman jobs is “asinine” because the jobs are different (one is a continuous series of localized jobs with fairly-reliable localized pay and the other is a gamble in which the product of a long, expensive development is heaved upon the Public Sea with Hope billowing its sails). Walker “patronizingly simplifies” these differences.

I agree that they're different in the way Gaynor explicates; I wonder how Walker would have drawn an analogy at all were they not. I didn't find anything “patronizing" about Walker's comparison or simplification. I could read paras 4-7 of Gaynor's article as patronizing and banally obvious, but I didn't; I just think he passionately cares about the topic and tried to relate his position as best he could (ditto Walker).

¶10: I’m happy to support good art, both directly and indirectly. I want to make money off of Gone Home for more than just 20 years (if it’s feasible) so I can make new stuff, pay others for working with me, etc.

Surely all non-shit folk like to support good work, arty or otherwise. As to the twenty years stuff: it assumes 1) Gaynor will have spent/lost all the money he made from Gone Home in those twenty years and 2) he'll be unable to make money from Gone Home post-expiration. The first may or may not come to be, but the second is untrue. A copyright expiration wouldn’t magically remove Gone Home from digital storefronts, and people could have trivially pirated his game the whole while. Furthermore, as I indicated above, I’d think something was amiss with Gaynor as a developer and/or manager were he unable to support new projects in the interim. People who hit it big and then do nothing else (and/or produce a string of failures) have no inherent right to state support in new creative endeavors, especially not indirectly through the vagaries of the copyright system. They do have a right to seek unconventional funding or new occupations; indeed many artists have "real jobs", as they often define them (though I think they usually do both themselves and "real jobbers" a disservice with such language).

¶11: [direct quote] “John’s article doesn't differentiate between “ideas” and the work itself. Copyright protects the work itself: the actual film or record or game based on the intellectual property (ie the specific game called “Gone Home,” vs. the title, characters, setting, etc. of Gone Home.) This is why anyone can (and seemingly does) make a movie/game/TV show/etc. based on and called Alice in Wonderland and starring Alice and the White Rabbit and the Queen of Hearts etc. etc., but Disney can still claim exclusive copyright to the Tim Burton film created in recent years-- to the work, the film itself inspired by the ideas-- not to the ideas themselves.”

The rest of ¶11 is iteration on this bald untruth. The claim that copyright is not about the ideas is strange and incoherent. The game “Gone Home” literally is “the title, characters, setting, etc of Gone Home”. What else could it be? I’ll devolve into philosophical talk here if others want to, but I don’t think it’s necessary; this strikes me as a patently fallacious non-distinction.

As to the Alice in Wonderland anecdote: Disney’s ability to use “Alice in Wonderland” and all its characters has nothing whatever to do with Gaynor’s fluffy non-division between “ideas” and “works” and everything to do with the fact that its copyright expired in 1907. If Carroll had written Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in the America of 1924 instead of the England of 1865, Disney's 2010 adaptation attempt would've been shitcanned (assuming they hadn't bought the rights).

¶12: Restatement of ¶4 with “inspiration/perspiration” angle. Restatement of ¶12’s fallacious division, equating ideas to inspiration and work to perspiration.

This is a straightforward analogy but it doesn't render Gaynor's ad hoc division of ideas from work coherent, nor is it intelligibly pertinent to copyright (either de jure or de facto). The last two sentences highlight the strangeness of Gaynor's work/idea split. I’ll simply quote them:

 

That 1%-- the idea that inspired the work, that might be an inspiration for other new works (that themselves would need to be funded)-- perhaps that's what feels more appropriate to enter the public domain on a shorter timescale. Because frankly I would love to make a System Shock sequel, but no way am I negotiating the rights for that.

 

How would a copyright enforcement system allow the System Shock sequel of Gaynor’s dreams while still protecting the original in any meaningful sense? Either Gaynor can make a spiritual successor (i.e. alter all the words and phrases of contention, use all-new assets, etc, and do more than simply clone the game) or he can do nothing.

Surely that’s the point of copyright: it means one owns the thing itself in its entirety with naught but limited, explicit exceptions. If I want to make a movie out of a Cormac McCarthy novel, for example, I must get license from McCarthy. I can’t just crib all his names and ideas wholesale, call the result a “filmic pastiche” and expect to get away with it.

 

Well, I sure spent a bit of time on that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

In that they can only do it to teams they've bought out. With no copyright, they could do it to any dev team anywhere.

 

A lack of copyright wouldn't allow them to block other devs from receiving payments.

 

I also don't think developers would engender much goodwill if they resold other people's works sans substantive changes immediately after their publication (it certainly wouldn't be easy to do on the sly).

 

... not that I think copyright should be abolished, mind. I'm undecided on that as a matter of principle, but as a pragmatic matter I think it should be retained. I think a well-designed and enforced copyright system might actually promote respect for attribution, as I said above.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm just saying that if the war is between the cheap edition and the nice edition, that means the winners are the ones who can make the cheapest edition and the ones who can make the nicest edition -- neither of which, necessarily, are the creators of the work. It's a dynamic we already have seen play out, really, where someone makes a solid fun game, and then a bigger company comes can makes the same game with nicer graphics, a more accessible presentation, and a bigger marketing budget. As far as the public is concerned, that game is the original because it's the one that they saw first.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Surely all non-shit folk like to support good work, arty or otherwise. As to the twenty years stuff: it assumes 1) Gaynor will have spent/lost all the money he made from Gone Home in those twenty years and 2) he'll be unable to make money from Gone Home post-expiration. The first may or may not come to be, but the second is untrue. A copyright expiration wouldn’t magically remove Gone Home from digital storefronts, and people could have trivially pirated his game the whole while. Furthermore, as I indicated above, I’d think something was amiss with Gaynor as a developer and/or manager were he unable to support new projects in the interim. People who hit it big and then do nothing else (and/or produce a string of failures) have no inherent right to state support in new creative endeavors, especially not indirectly through the vagaries of the copyright system. They do have a right to seek unconventional funding or new occupations; indeed many artists have "real jobs", as they often define them (though I think they usually do both themselves and "real jobbers" a disservice with such language).

 

Thank you for explicating a lot of what I found bothersome about Gaynor's argument. I especially liked the part I quoted from you, which refutes the most irritating assertion of most critical rebuttals to Walker's original piece. No one's suggesting that the creator of an original work be divested of the rights to it immediately upon completion, nor that the creator be forbidden from continuing to sell said original work after expiration of their rights to it, but that's invariably what is implied if not outright stated by Walker's detractors.

 

I can think of very few game development companies that have existed unchanged for twenty years (and none at all that retain their original members and makeup). Such a situation makes copyright a thing for corporations, not for creators, in which case only Gaynor's argument about copyright indirectly subsidizing further creative works holds water. I myself can think of several better ways for us to do that besides exclusive rights for lifetime plus seventy years.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm just saying that if the war is between the cheap edition and the nice edition, that means the winners are the ones who can make the cheapest edition and the ones who can make the nicest edition -- neither of which, necessarily, are the creators of the work. It's a dynamic we already have seen play out, really, where someone makes a solid fun game, and then a bigger company comes can makes the same game with nicer graphics, a more accessible presentation, and a bigger marketing budget. As far as the public is concerned, that game is the original because it's the one that they saw first.

 

I don't want you to read me as combative (just upfront).

 

Yeah, if the war is between the cheap version and the nice one, you'd be right. I'm not sure whether that premise is correct, though. I haven't researched this, but your take seems at best an incomplete account of market dynamics. I disagree (in some sense) with your last sentence. Not every consumer is blind to provenance, and there are (as I alluded to above) plenty of wordy people who'd surely get pissy if egregious ripoffs cropped up in a non-copyright society. I don't think self-policing of this sort would prevent all gross copy-products from taking off, though, hence my non-abolitionism; I'm no cyber-utopian.

 

Thank you for explicating a lot of what I found bothersome about Gaynor's argument. I especially liked the part I quoted from you, which refutes the most irritating assertion of most critical rebuttals to Walker's original piece. No one's suggesting that the creator of an original work be divested of the rights to it immediately upon completion, nor that the creator be forbidden from continuing to sell said original work after expiration of their rights to it, but that's invariably what is implied if not outright stated by Walker's detractors.

 

I can think of very few game development companies that have existed unchanged for twenty years (and none at all that retain their original members and makeup). Such a situation makes copyright a thing for corporations, not for creators, in which case only Gaynor's argument about copyright indirectly subsidizing further creative works holds water. I myself can think of several better ways for us to do that besides exclusive rights for lifetime plus seventy years.

 

You're welcome; this topic tends to pinch at my brain for all the strange, passionate argument it stirs up (something something self-described objectivist, something something oh Jesus not this tripe again).

Merus might have made the abolition argument above, and I think the retort to it was adequately put to words by Problem Machine. I'm very sympathetic to that argument; it's the basis of why I think we shouldn't just toss out copyright, along with a basal desire that people be paid for their work. I distrust that argument, though, because there's very little robust academic study of the topic and it seems deeply cynical. I try not to be cynical (god help me).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

 Yeah, if the war is between the cheap version and the nice one, you'd be right. I'm not sure whether that premise is correct, though.

Oh, that's fine, it wasn't my premise anyway. I was just pointing out that if that was the scenario, as Merus suggested, it wouldn't play out as well for creators as suggested.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Usually the big selling point of the 'nice' one is that it's the official one - because the people willing to shell out serious money for the nice one are going to be far more compelled to buy the one that's been blessed by the creators, and with one 'officially approved by the creators' mark you've just ensured that it's the one that counts. (False advertising laws still exist.) I'd doubt that people would, in practice, make nice non-official copies because it's essentially paying a premium for a pirate version - not without modifications, at any rate.

 

I would contend that the hazard of big companies lifting creative works, changing them just enough that it's not outright theft and then selling them already happens. Copyright did not prevent PopCap, Zynga and King.com from lifting games others had created, rethemeing them, adding on their signature design quirks and then reselling them. Moreover, I'd also contend that copyright does not, in general, prevent any sort of unwelcome reappropriation except when big corporations are the owners. There are countless examples of big corporations stealing content from smaller creators, who can't afford to sue and for whom suing is unlikely to recoup their costs. There's also quite a few examples of small creators lifting material, and they usually get in financial trouble only when they lift from a big fish.

 

A law that, in practice, mostly allows only big corporations to profit is usually rent seeking.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I would contend that the hazard of big companies lifting creative works, changing them just enough that it's not outright theft and then selling them already happens. Copyright did not prevent PopCap, Zynga and King.com from lifting games others had created, rethemeing them, adding on their signature design quirks and then reselling them. Moreover, I'd also contend that copyright does not, in general, prevent any sort of unwelcome reappropriation except when big corporations are the owners. There are countless examples of big corporations stealing content from smaller creators, who can't afford to sue and for whom suing is unlikely to recoup their costs. There's also quite a few examples of small creators lifting material, and they usually get in financial trouble only when they lift from a big fish.

 

A law that, in practice, mostly allows only big corporations to profit is usually rent seeking.

 

I'd say that's a failure of extant copyright systems (and it may be a failure intrinsic to all copyright systems; I don't know). This is one of those areas where I wish there was more research, because it just comes down to anecdote. I mean, I know several illustrators who've made successful copyright infringement claims against print shops, shirt sellers, etc. Most of what I hear vis-a-vis copyright litigation is the big stomping the small, though, and I'd agree the current situation constitutes rent-seeking.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now