Of course you understand that people made creative things before copyright existed. You understand that that happened when the copyright term was 14 years. You understand that it happened before Warner Bros. Discovery existed.
You understand that it is possible for a company to make games without requiring a 120 year copyright term, right?
Right. Copyright is supposed to be for the good of the population. In order to encourage people to create things, they’re given a short monopoly on it after which it enters the public domain. The original copyright term was 14 years, I think.
The new setup is absurd. The public doesn’t benefit for more than a century, at which point the copyrighted item is probably of next to no value.
And, like you said, the artist rarely benefits. Writers are probably the ones who come the closest to benefitting. They only have to pay their agent a cut, their publisher, then, finally Amazon. With advances, etc. you have to wonder how much they get paid for each additional book sold. Musicians basically don’t make anything anymore, with the bullshit that Spotify (partially owned by the record companies) does. And then movies, TV, and other video stuff, the amount that creators get is massively watered down, and that’s after the “Hollywood accounting” makes profits from even successful things disappear.
I really don’t respect copyright anymore because it doesn’t benefit me (a member of the public) nor does it benefit the artist. It’s just a tool to hand money to certain entertainment conglomerates.
“give it back” means “seed to at least a ratio of 1.0”
There are a few authors and musicians who do things like that, selling things DRM-free on their own site. But, the US “content” industry is a handful of mega companies who are doing everything possible to maximize copyright so they can lock up and control as much stuff as possible.
Piracy has never been stealing.
When you steal something, the real issue is that the other person is deprived of some tangible item they used to have.
When you “pirate”, you’re merely violating a copyright. The government granted someone a monopoly on the expression of an idea, and you’re not respecting the government’s decision on that item’s exclusivity.
One of the most surprising thing in old timey movies is that streets were truly mixed-use spaces, people walked there, rode horses, sold things from carts, etc. I guess that was possible because horses and horse-drawn carts were slower than cars, plus horses would generally try to avoid crashing into something, even without orders from their rider or driver.
I always thought that a “street” and a “road” were synonyms, until I heard the term “stroad” from Not Just Bikes. It turns out that in modern planning, a street is meant as a paved path intended to provide local access to homes, shops, and other things. A road is supposed to be a way to get from A to B. A “stroad” is a derogatory term to refer to a street that has been combined with a road, so you get high speed traffic that wants to travel through an area next to homes and businesses.
Stroads are the worst of both worlds because you end up with people who just want to get through an area dealing with kids playing, cars turning onto and off the path, other drivers slowing down to spot an address, etc. It also sucks for the locals because the way onto their driveway or school has to deal with large volumes of high-speed traffic.
IMO we’re not going back to horses and carts. High speed movement of people is here to stay. But, we really need to use modes of transport that separate people who are passing through on their way somewhere from people who are exercising, playing sports, shopping, hanging out outside their homes, etc.
The best way to do that is public transit, especially light rail and subways which pack a lot of people into a really efficient people-mover. Subways additionally move the people-mover underground to an area where there’s nobody who isn’t trying to travel. Light rails are easier to build, but they have to share the above-ground with people doing other things. But, at least when they’re on rails the only shared space is the rail, and the pedestrians know that as long as they’re not standing on rails they don’t have to worry about the light rail vehicles.
For North America, giving up cars might be too difficult, at least in the short term. But, it seems like in newly built neighbourhoods, the least they should do is make it so every second “street” is pedestrian / bicycle only. Or, maybe allow local vehicles but with an incredibly low speed limit, less than 10 km/h and a rule that they must yield to pedestrians at all times. That way someone can still pull into their driveway but they’ll only drive half a block on the local street to get there.
They used to, they called it shareware. It could happen again.
Look, if my personally ignoring copyrights for certain things causes certain media companies to go bankrupt and causes a whole re-think of how the creative economy should work, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think my choices are that powerful, but we can always hope.