[caconym_]

+1

People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight: just as quickly, their work will be published and distributed by for-profit entities who can still turn a profit on it but don't have to give them a dime. Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author, except as an employee of a corporation that also controls distribution (e.g. your Disneys, your HBOs, and so on).

I don't want to live in a world where the importance of storytelling [in media] is marginalized even further than it already is. A lot of people seem to have a "how hard could it be?" attitude toward it; the answer is, really fucking hard.

[zozbot234]

> People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight

We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se.

> Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author

The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed. Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

[caconym_]

> We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se.

Do you think differences in how stories were copied and distributed "then" vs. today might have some bearing on the question of whether the absence of copyright "then" implies that authors don't benefit from it today?

For instance, in the year 1400 AD, the cost of reproducing a written work of any significant length for mass distribution was beyond exorbitant. Today, it is essentially zero.

> The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed.

If copyright is done away with, making money on works before they're released to the public might indeed be the only way for independent authors to make money. Right now it's an alternative to self-pub that's really only available to authors who already have a large established following, e.g. Brandon Sanderson; if people can just wait for you to finish and get the work for free, I doubt they're going to put money up front before you've even finished it unless they're already big fans of your work.

So---in short---no, I don't think the Kickstarter model will protect most independent authors from the effects of a dissolution of copyright law. But I welcome any challenges to the above reasoning.

> Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

What's the relevance of this bitter little nugget? Somebody who has written something is perfectly free to release it to the public domain if they like, and indeed many authors do just that. They are not bound to hold onto exclusive rights to their work just because copyright grants those rights by default.

[somenameforme]

Twitch is a reasonable argument to the contrary. You can watch Twitch completely for free with 0 impairment whatsoever to your experience (so long as at least have an ad-blocker), yet there are vast numbers of people making a living streaming, with a small chunk even becoming millionaires from it all, largely from people donating a few bucks at a time. Like you're saying there's always a big get bigger type phenomena, but that's an issue everybody has to deal with regardless of the system. And examples like Richard Bachman [1] would suggest its deterministically surmountable.

There are also countless other examples of things like DRM free products selling just fine in spite of the fact you can get a byte identical copy for free in about 2 seconds with a torrent. The point I make with this is that people are willing to part with more than enough money for people to make a living off of, even when they are not coerced into doing so.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

[caconym_]

> Twitch [...]

People donate to/tip streamers because they perceive that it will strengthen their parasocial relationship with the streamer in question, and more generally because they're watching a performance where tipping the performer(s) is directly encouraged and culturally normalized. It follows that for e.g. a writer to make money from this model, they have to either a) turn the act of writing itself into a performance compelling enough to extract donations/tips from an audience, or b) perform on stream when they aren't writing.

---

Given how competitive streaming already is (most streamers seem to report working long hours just to maintain their audience, however large or small, and burnout is common), I don't think it's unfair to equate streaming with more or less a full time job. If you aren't writing on stream, then, you've got your day job (presumably, for 99% of writers and early-career streamers), plus your streaming^[1], plus actually writing. It feels untenable to me, and it's also wandering further from "making money as a writer" as an abstract concept---at what point are you making money as a streamer/performer instead, and how important does your writing end up being to whatever success you find?

So I think we can say option b) is not a good replacement for making money off your writing directly, by selling published written works to people who want to read them. It introduces many extra steps, requires a skillset many writers simply don't have and shouldn't be expected to have (performance), and finding meaningful success will likely marginalize your actual writing practice.

As seems to be the case with many "variety streamers", you'll probably just end up playing video games in a crop top and cat ears.^[2]

---

Option a), actually writing on stream, will not be an option for most writers who haven't allowed the nature of that performance to erode the quality, complexity, and/or volume of their work. Writing is a full brain thing that requires you to hold a thread of complex context in your mind (a bit like programming, actually), and it's not visual, which is going to make an audiovisual performance centered around it that much more difficult to execute well.

Seriously, imagine pair programming except it's a thousand people looking over your shoulder and your livelihood depends on making each one of them believe you're their friend.

I know writing streamers do exist. Right now on Twitch the viewer counts are very small, but I'll check them out later because I'm curious. However, the fact that some of them exist doesn't change any of the above; the vast majority of writers aren't doing it.

---

> Richard Bachman

From the linked Wiki page:

> King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the "talent versus luck" question, as he felt he was outed as Bachman too early to know. The Bachman book Thinner (1984) sold 28,000 copies during its initial run—and then ten times as many when it was revealed that Bachman was, in fact, King.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what point you're getting at by invoking Bachman. Writing is a talent and a skill, and King is supremely talented and skilled at it. From a 'determinism' angle, it makes complete sense that he could write a book under a pseudonym, get it published, and see some amount of success on the market. The average debut author starting at his level could expect the same.

However, the average debut author is not at his level. King has (famously) done a lot of writing, and it shows. One has to wonder how that would have gone if the only way for him to find success as an author was to run a successful Twitch channel at the same time.

---

tl;dr: Streaming is not writing, and they go together like oil and water. Other media might integrate better with audiovisual performance, e.g. drawing. Either way, losing rights to their work will strip independent creators of important avenues to profiting from it.

---

> There are also countless other examples of things like DRM free products selling just fine in spite of the fact you can get a byte identical copy for free in about 2 seconds with a torrent. The point I make with this is that people are willing to part with more than enough money for people to make a living off of, even when they are not coerced into doing so.

It's naive to think torrenting is an accessible option for the average person. It would probably take me hours spread across multiple days to get my wife set up for it, for instance.

"DRM Free" content, unless I'm mistaken, still allows the original creator(s) to maintain the copyright. This prevents big distribution channels that are accessible to normal consumers (e.g. Kindle) from selling the work without giving the creator(s) a cut. If I publish a novel "DRM Free" in some indie-ish context, I can still sell it through other channels, and I have some recourse if somebody rips it off. Not so, if copyright is dissolved.

> coerced

This word choice is totally absurd. Nobody is being coerced, with a few notable exceptions (students who need certain overpriced textbooks to graduate, etc.). Is it coercion if I list an old lawnmower on Craigslist for $100, and when somebody shows up to buy it I expect them to pay?

---

^[1] Obviously, hypothetically, you expect streaming to pay your bills. Bootstrapping an audience big enough for that is the problem; if you already have a following big enough to make a living on, maybe you will have the time and creative energy to write on the side to do a little writing, but this goes back to the Kickstarter problem: you have to build your platform first.

^[2] Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it isn't writing.

[hakfoo]

I suspect we'd see a shift towards "give the first one away free". If you're a new author, you're going to have to release some compelling teaser to get people to subscribe to the second installment.

It sort of reminds me of how anime series tend to trail behind their source material, or cut off after a few dozen chapters-- there's a real expectation it's a teaser for buying the serialized books and magazine releases.

[TheDong]

Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

Red Hat certainly does package up a large collection of open source work and sell support for it, but that has not caused authors of open source software to despair and quit writing code. It is not common for a commercial entity to republish open source software, and Red Hat is an exception.

Sure, there are a vast number of open source developers who do it on the side, or are not compensated... but that is also true of professions where copyright remains. Most authors, most artists, they write or draw on the side, post their work to substack or twitter or deviant art or such, and never see a dime.

I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make, people are still creative, and a tiny fraction of people manage to make a profit off their passion projects.

[ssalazar]

Copyleft / GPL licenses require copyright law to have any threat of enforcement. Otherwise anyone could just ignore the terms of a copyleft license and use open source under any terms they wish.

[caconym_]

> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

[...]

> I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make [...]

I think this is a quite a stretch given the prominence of copyright in popular open source licenses, including (for example) the extremely popular and permissive MIT license. You can copy it, modify it, distribute it, etc., but I still own the copyright, and you still have to give me credit for the initial development. I can choose whatever license I want, which may or may not impose restrictions on who can use my code in derivative works, etc., and how.

In a very real sense, I do own the FOSS software I've released to the world. If legal codification of that ownership isn't important to open source developers, why are so many pixels spent discussing it?

[TheDong]

Public domain / UNLICENSE style licenses are less popular, but still have the same qualities I mentioned of people feeling ownership, even though there is zero copyright in that specific case and their is no legal codification of ownership.

I understand that MIT etc are copyright licenses, but they remove the majority of copyright's requirements. They only require attribution, and are a statement that the other parts of copyright, the restrictions on distribution and modification, explicitly do not apply.

They remove the part of copyright that people typically think of when someone says copyright.

[caconym_]

Sure, some developers are cool with public domain; the same is true with writers and other creatives working in pretty much any medium you can name.

The fact remains, copyright is very much relevant to the open source community today. It's absurd to say otherwise, given the amount of discussion the topic generates. On that basis I categorically reject your statement that "free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code."

> They remove the part of copyright that people typically think of when someone says copyright.

"People" don't know the first thing about copyright, because (besides the obvious lack of technical knowledge) it's invisible to them when it's working in their favor and highly visible when it isn't.

What does copyright mean to creators, to whom it is granted? Does it mean ownership, in some vague, ill-defined sense? Guaranteed attribution wherever their work ends up? The right to ensure their work is used only for applications they consider ethical? A guarantee that nobody will be able to make money off it? A guarantee that nobody will be able to make money off it but them? A guarantee that movie studio X won't hire a hack writer-director for a cash-in sequel that ruins the original's reputation? The answer is that it means all these things, and more, to different creators.

As a creator of copyrighted works (of both FOSS and fiction, as it happens), copyright means something in particular to me. It means something else to other creators. I wouldn't speak for them, and I'm kind of astonished by how many people with (apparently) little or no skin in the game are willing to do so.

[thayne]

So it would be like a copyright system where you have to give credit to the creator, but don't have to pay royalties.

[vel0city]

Free software/ open source licenses are copyright.

[throwaway75026]

MIT/BSD licenses are essentially a copyright waiver.

[rdpintqogeogsaa]

They are not. You still have strings attached: the requirement of attribution and the disclaimer. With 3-clause and 4-clause BSD, there are even more strings attached.

You can't just take MIT-licensed code. You have to take the code and the full copyright notice and license grant with disclaimer.

[throwaway75026]

Copyright law doesn't allow you to waive those rights without falling into Public Domain, which is considered grey area in some countries.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

And some of those licenses are being rethought by companies as they realize that that Amazon/Google/Microsoft can just take their work, put it on AWS as SAAS and capture most if not all of that value.

[pabs3]

I watched a talk somewhere that argued that Amazon/Google/Microsoft selling SaaS access to software massively increases the size of the market for that software and in the process actually increases the revenue of existing businesses in that market, while still decreasing their market share. With a savvy team and a good relationship with the big SaaS vendors, you could definitely ride that wave to increased success.

[mattnewton]

We ran that experiment of dramatically shorter copyright terms, and it produced much of the culture you know and love before 1975. Copyright has been extended in 1976 and then again in 1998 mostly at the behest of rent seeking corporations who bought the culture after it’s creation and after paying the authors handsomely for it. Calling Disney’s business “marginalized” seems ridiculous to me?

[caconym_]

See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688954

I'm advocating for copyright from the perspective of independent creators, not big media conglomerates. Additionally, my comment is (explicitly, if you read closely) addressing the case of copyright being completely dissolved, which---as crazy as this seems---is an idea some people apparently support. You need look no further than this thread to prove this to yourself.

I am not necessarily against shorter copyright terms. Honestly, since the main reason I support copyright is because it protects independent creators' rights to their own work, I would be totally fine with completely striking the postmortem copyright period for non-corporate authors (certainly, 70 years is insane) and cutting the pseudonymous/corporate terms in half.

[mattnewton]

Then I think we are in violent agreement. People who say “copyright has gotten out of control” or “is the cost worth it to society” largely are complaining about the current state of copyright where it lasts generations in my experience. Nobody hates the creator of culture they love, the hate the lawyers strangling anyone’s ability to participate in that culture in any way other than as a consumer. If we turned back the clock to 1975 levels of protection, we would get a public domain again which is good for creators, and creators would still have long periods to profit off their labor. The next Disney could be born as the first Disney was, by remixing the rich public domain. Of course that wouldn’t be good for the current disney monopoly and so it’s unlikely to happen.

[landryraccoon]

I think there's middle ground between "throw away all copyright protections" and "throw copyright infringers into prison for years".

I'm more inclined toward leniency than the draconian laws we have now.

I mean, 95 years of copyright protection? Is society really going to be destroyed if Disney has to release some of their IP under creative commons after 30 years instead? I doubt it.

[caconym_]

I don't really disagree with any of this. Big business has corrupted the modern implementation of copyright law (e.g. erosion of fair use) and something should be done to turn it back in favor of independent creators.

Of course, big money runs everything, so that probably isn't going to happen.