[nuodag]

> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything.

If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context. That is against the law now.

[luckylion]

No it's not. Go ahead, tell your friends the book you recently read. As a matter of fact, go ahead, read that book to your friends.

Perfectly legal.

Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah, that's something else.

[kroltan]

Is the Internet Archive making money off of it?

I agree with your statement in isolation, but this is in the context of preserving stories (and heck, history) so they can be retold at all.

---

Unrelated tangent, I really miss the distinction of "story" ("estória") and "history" ("história") in the Portuguese language, it makes speaking about topics involving but not exclusively fiction very hard.

[luckylion]

The IA isn't, but the argument was that copyright is dumb, not that a nonprofit like the IA should have exception. Archiving and making publicly available are different things though, so I don't think an exception for archiving should extend to distribution. The archiving also clashes with individual privacy rights and the "right to be forgotten" (which I'm not a big fan of in its depth, but totally agree with in principle).

Perhaps not having distinct terms isn't the worst thing: it reminds us that history is largely fictional, both on the personal and the society level, and its truthiness and usefulness is derived from our shared belief in it.

[627467]

Its a vacuous argument: it's very obvious that any domain hosting such content for free incurs in costs of hosting and handling legal threats for doing so. So any income received would be another excuse for legal threats.

On the other hand: why are these public goods services still hosted in infra/protocols exposed to western/us legal arm?

[luckylion]

> On the other hand: why are these public goods services still hosted in infra/protocols exposed to western/us legal arm?

Because you can't host them on thoughts and wishes alone. The capitalist system with its legal constraints is what created it, funded it and runs it.

And yes, hosting incurs costs, but hosting copies of content isn't "retelling" or "remixing", it's copying. And since we want cultural output, we're incentivizing the production by giving you exclusive rights to benefit from your creations.

If you believe that the terms are ridiculously long and should be drastically shortened, I agree. But rejecting the idea of copyright will just remove much of what is created. I don't think we'd be better off in that case.

You might argue that that which wouldn't have been created had there not been the promise of potential profit isn't worth much culturally, but in that case you shouldn't be worried about the copyright restricting access to it, much like you shouldn't be worried about a locked door denying access to an empty room.

[getwiththeprog]

A lot of the internet was created at public universities with public money for public benefit. A lot of the best of the internet is hosted on and by community groups, with various kinds of funding.

[luckylion]

Yes, universities played a big role in the foundations, but they don't play a big role in running int, and they didn't play a big role in the democratization and commercialization, that is: in allowing everyone to participate, not just a chosen few.

I know, many people feel nostalgic for the internet of old before the unwashed masses joined and they wish to return to that time. I don't, I find today's internet much better, I welcome the technological progress and I'm happy that it is serving all of society and is no longer an elite-only thing. Sure, I get annoyed by Spam, Google flooding its index with SEO nonsense and people screeching on Reddit, but I find those to be minor issues compared to the advantages that we get from the internet. And I do believe that commercialization is responsible for most of the development since then.

[disgruntledphd2]

So, you're telling me that Disney send the vast majority of their profits to the descendants of the Grimm brothers?