You know what gripes my goat?
When people take public domain materials, clean them up in some non-transformative way, and claim that is sufficient to produce a new copyright (when that kind of work is clearly "Sweat of the brow" work and not "creative work" and is therefore not eligible for copyright protection.)
I don't mind people selling public domain works, or claiming copyright on actual transformations.
But don't CC-BY-NC your restoration as if that's enforceable.
@jollymnemonic that's just the way modern American copyright law works.
Facts aren't copyrightable. Archival work doesn't qualify for copyright.
Show me how a garbage collector could benefit from copyrighting his collection routine and we can talk about that, but until then I'm not sure what point your trying to make.
This is not to say that modern copyright law is good. It's broken. It's too long and too restrictive. But there's no need for us to actively make it worse.
@ajroach42 I guess I would like to see a system of one-off payment of content creators. I know it's not a popular opinion among those who make a living in the current system but I believe that it would be more fair to all of humanity. Limiting copyright to five years or so would be a big step in the right direction.
Less creatives, more nurses.
I am so confused by what point you're trying to make?
First you say that garbage collection should be copyrightable, and then you say that copyright should be limited to five years, and then you go off on a tangent about nurses.
What point are you trying to make, other than to be weirdly disparaging towards people that work in a creative field?
Creative work is copyrightable because creative work is copyable.
If we don't give creators at least some form of copyright protection, we're dooming them to never earn money from their work.
Current protections are out of control and broken, but abolishing them would lead to suffering.
You're saying you want to see a system of one off payments, who gets to determine what a work is worth? where does that single payment come from?
The law says that labor can't be copyrighted, and facts can't be copyrighted, and the labor of compiling facts can't be copyrighted. It was written in response to phone books (not copyrightable.)
If work isn't transformative or otherwise "creative", it's not copyrightable. That's not a value judgement on the work itself, just on whether or not it should be covered by copyright.
@ajroach42 The law is not universal but bound to a certain jurisdiction (I'm guessing the US in this case) and any law has hidden assumptions in it.
Legal scholars are content creators. Any law written by them will naturally skew towards the rights of the creator.
Basically I have doubts whether, say, a book or a film is fundamentally different from any other mass produced good.
Ah, so you're argument is that writing isn't real work, and writers should starve?
But writing is worthless in your world view, yeah? People who write don't deserve to earn a wage from that work?
Andrew (Television Executive)
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