Is copyright a good or bad thing? Why? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
“Intellectual Property” is a lobotomy on civilizational development.
It creates scarcity out of the most vibrant and fruitful products of our mind. It is fundamentally incompatible with the collaborative nature of intellectual and cultural work. It hangs like a sword of Damocles above every creative endeavor, ready to be dropped by large Owners who weaponize it to protect and expand their power. The worst part is: the very existence of IP laws forces participation from creators, and they end up having to defend it to survive.
Copyright and Private property kind of go hand in hand where they basically exist so someone can’t “steal” your property and profit off of it themselves.
But it’s been talked over a bunch and I don’t wanna repeat the points that provide compelling and reasonable arguments for why it could/should be abolished. Or how should we abolish it.
I’m more interested in the identity aspect of it. Copyright law doesn’t actually do anything to make sure your attribution to something you’ve put your work into stays. Capitalists love turning things into hobbies so you work for free in a precarious environment and they can keep stealing from you and copyright anything you made, that they see they can extract value from. They will copyright anything and everything their wallet allows them to and hold it all hostage.
I like to be a bit “realpolitik” about it.
The original concept made sense under a capitalist mode of production, if you are the inventor of some idea you should essentially have “dibs” on making money off it for a certain duration of time before people can just copy your work and sell it as their won. And yeah I see why that original model did benefit artists cuz it would suck if you wrote a cool novel that was selling well but then some guy CTRL+C CTRL+V’d it into another doc and changed the title and sold it for $5 less than your own copy.
But obviously it pretty quickly got abused with the length of that period of “dibs” getting extended to essentially forever and being mostly used by massive corporations to try and demand everyone pay them for fucking everything.
Ideally under FALGSC none of this shit would matter, you could just create stuff, and the only issue would be proper crediting of work since nobody would care about profit. But I guess as long as we live in a world where people get paid for shit and we’d like artists to get paid sometimes having some better version of copyright exist may be good.
theyre fun to violate
its bad
Piracy and legal consumption of media are really two sides of the same coin under capitalism: The value of a piece of so-called “intellectual property” comes from the labor that went into it, which is Not Just the labor that went into creating the original copy, but also the labor that went into creating all subsequent copies — crucially including “illegal” copies! — as well as all fan content and all other derived works including all commentary. Copyright itself is just the use of everypony’s favorite Monopoly on Legitimate Violence to create the artificial scarcity that is a prerequisite of value, both through actually shutting down so-called “copyright infringement” and by controlling the Discourse to present piracy as a bad or dangerous thing. This means that Walmart DVDs are kinda like the O’Hare Air of media: We could’ve had a breathable atmosphere, but we’re stuck with this crap instead.
So this is why I support total copyright abolition and hear no excuses for the institution.
There’s a good article on the GNU project website that talks about copyright: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.en.html though there are many other writings on copyright from a socialist perspective. (disclaimer, author is a bernie bro libertarian)
Essentially copyright acts as a mechanism for the bourgeois classes (publishers, media conglomerates, large firms) to siphon and hoard works for themselves. Initially the system was germane but as patent and publisher lobbying groups grew under capitalism, the system of copyright, patent and trademark law all were lobbied to favor publishers more highly than both authors and readers (the infamous “Mickey Mouse” law was used to extend copyright past a regular human’s average lifespan, essentially enshrining artistic works as permanent private property.
In a socialist society, copyright would be essentially done with as its main purpose was to “protect” (big air quotes here) the profits of publishers. If every author and artist had a guaranteed salary and training, copyright would not be needed. Note that copyright is explicitly not the same as attribution. A sad example of this is how many manga artists in Japan (a global north country that is infamous for draconian copyright enforcement) actually don’t hold the copyright to their works. For example, the creator of One Piece (a series which grossed hundreds of billions of dollars in its 2+ decade span) doesn’t actually “own” One Piece, Shueisha, the publisher, does. The mangaka is simply an employee hired by the publisher to produce authorized content of said series.
Today we have what we call “copyleft” licenses which were coined by Richard Stallman back in the late 80s which use copyright laws and flips them on its head, allowing for the work to be collectively owned. The GNU General Public License and Creative Commons licenses are both examples of copyleft licenses.
Please note that many other asshole things would still be very bad and asshole-ish, even if there were no copyright laws. For example, if I printed Pokémon Trading Cards and claimed that the Pokémon Company printed them, it would definitely be fraud and deception.
We can also punish a lack of citations or attribution through culture without turning it into a criminal penalty.
It might sound weird, but copyright might not benefit a lot of big companies as much as you think in all circumstances. If a Twitch streamer plays a copyrighted song on Twitch and it gets muted in the VOD, does it really directly benefit the label? Not really, they’re losing an opportunity for free advertising. Don’t forget that music and information are not scarce; if I listen to a piece of music on my hard drive, it doesn’t prevent you from listening to the same music on your computer.
The “legitimate intent” of copyright, increasing the odds that original artists get paid, can be achieved without copyright laws, whether in a capitalist or socialist economy.
For example, in a capitalist context, artists could rely more heavily on direct patronage, live performances, commissions, or crowdfunding models that already thrive today despite and sometimes because of the limitations of traditional copyright enforcement. Platforms like Patreon, Bandcamp, or Substack show that audiences are often willing to support creators voluntarily when they feel a personal connection or see clear value.
In a socialist framework, creative work could be socially funded through public institutions, cooperatives, or community supported grants, ensuring artists are compensated not by artificial scarcity or legal monopolies, but by collective recognition of their contribution to culture.
Moreover, the idea that copying inherently harms creators assumes that exposure and sharing don’t generate value which, in the digital age, is increasingly untrue. Viral sharing can launch careers, build fanbases, and create demand for authentic experiences that can’t be copied: concerts, signed prints, behind the scenes access, or personalized interactions.
So copyright was never a fair deal. It restricted creativity, harmed sharing, and only pretended to help the public. Now, when information spreads easily and attention is what matters, it’s just an outdated tool for control.
Please note that many other asshole things would still be very bad and asshole-ish, even if there were no copyright laws. For example, if I printed Pokémon Trading Cards and claimed that the Pokémon Company printed them, it would definitely be fraud and deception.
This is an interesting case, because the Pokémon Company purposely entangles the Copyright and Trademark of it’s product. For a market to work even in a no-copyright world, you do still need some trademark protections; for example, if you sell 3rd party Pokémon cards, it would have to be explicit that they are not Pokémon Company cards.
If a Twitch streamer plays a copyrighted song on Twitch and it gets muted in the VOD, does it really directly benefit the label?
Content IDs feel like the prelude to do rent-extraction on users who will be made to pay a subscription for the right to stream such music. The industry is conglomerating around a few big companies and they could definitely do this to a point where there are no other alternatives besides not playing copyrighted music.
Copyright is very outdated, but also very useful to capitalists even paradoxically so.
Copyright is a double-edged sword. It only “works” for them if:
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Everyone is relentlessly enforcing copyright without leaving any non-copyrighted alternatives
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The streamer would buy the rights to stream the music if copyright was enforced on them
Most of them aren’t true and are very hard to prove.
If the dystopia you’re talking about does happen for whatever reason, a lot of streamers might switch to playing no music, rely on environmental sounds like bird songs, use non-copyrighted music, or generate their own music via AI.
The only real winners with the status quo are the law firms and lawyers imo.
I have no doubt that some companies benefit from the current system in some circumstances, but it’s a double-edged sword for sure.
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I don’t know that there is a functional model of IP law that will not be eventually bent to serve the most powerful at the expense of everyone else. At this point I feel the whole thing needs to be thrown out and rebuilt from the ground up with great care and trepidation, if at all.
Money was a mistake
Copyright is private property applied to the intellectual commons.
It’s way worse than other illegitimate forms of property.
If a corporation obtains a factory through dubious means, you can still attempt to have some very limited amount of empathy for them, because at least physical resources are limited.
With intellectual property none of this applies, ideas are not scarce. If I think of an idea, I don’t prevent you from thinking the same idea. If I play a Nintendo game on my hard drive, Nintendo doesn’t lose a copy of the same game on their end (you might argue it’s bad that ideas aren’t scarce though, and honestly, they might have deserved to lose their copy of the game)
Equating all copyright infringement to physical theft is just fallacious.
Sure. Ctrl-c, ctrl-v shows how silly copyright is. It’s antithetical to the entire function of computers.
This isn’t a complete idea, but it’s a financial tool that is used to keep technology and ideas out of the hands of poor and often racialized peoples in the internal periphery, forcing them to pay a premium to access those technologies and ideas of the imperial core.
They’re really good, I’m sick of people with “ideas” trying to make use of MY intellectual property that I refuse to ever actually make anything of quality with. It’s far better that I can just own the rights to a bunch of stuff and never make anything with them, but also can prevent anyone else from making anything too similar, just to ensure that there’s no competition in the market, it’s a completely fair system that works wonderfully, though it can be a little too lax sometimes. It would be nice if they just made it so that if you have less money you automatically lose the legal battle, it would save me a lot of time.
they’re a tool of the bourgeoise and are net-bad for humanity, but i would like a mechanism to prevent nazis from using something i created.
The Cuddlefish Standard English way to spell that word is “CopyWRONG”, so that may tell you something about how I feel about them.
