copyright in a sociailst society?

[RedMarxist]

would there be copyright in a socialist society? furthermore, what are your opinions on copyright as well as the DMCA in general?

[Princess Luna]

Regardless of rather it is right or wrong (and i think Copyright is wrong) it is rapidally becoming obselete due to technology. We are still at the dawn of the internet and i can already get almost any movie, music, or video game i want for free, imagine what it will be like 50, 100, 150, years from now. But i don't think your going to find many copyright defenders here anyway :)

[bietan jarrai]

As far as music goes, I got some good answers in this thread, where I asked if a musician can make a living in a socialist society: http://www.revleft.com/vb/music-ownership-marxist-t157860/index.html
I don't agree with copyright, but there has to be a way artists can live with their art, which is something capitalism hasn't helped us with really.

[RedMarxist]

I do agree that one should be allowed to use a song, in a creative way, in a you tube video. double points of the song actually goes with the video, and the video itself is high quality(such as an animation, live action etc.).

What bothers me is when internet reviews are taken down because they showed some scenes from shitty movies, which apparently is violating copyright as "one does not have the right to show scenes from movies"

why is this so? why can't one show scenes from movies without permission? remember the tommy wiseau issue wherein he took down NC's video of the Room.

[Ocean Seal]

would there be copyright in a socialist society? furthermore, what are your opinions on copyright as well as the DMCA in general?
No intellectual property is private property.

Copyright laws are honestly abundantly silly. They are the inhibitors to progress and the fact that some people uphold them as "moral" merely shows us that capital cannot continue to exist as it prevents the socialization of property which would happen naturally with very little effort. It is capitalism which prevents abundance and thus copyright laws highlight in a very clear fashion the contradictions of capital and clearly point out that in the future the classes will not be able to reconcile their differences.

The reason for that is as follows. The private ownership of this property can be boycotted by the demand element such that it becomes impossible to produce for a profit this digital content. Thus production under these conditions cannot continue for much longer. However, in the hands of society as a whole this production would continue because it would be subsidized in order to keep it alive.

Soon as more becomes abundant the idea of private production will become silly because it will become more easy to find a way around it to the extent where the bourgeoisie will fail to produce profits and their failure will lead to the triumph of socialism.

[RedMarxist]

I remember finding this Catholic website wherein they tried to argue that breaking copyright law WAS A SIN.

religious people. what are you gonna do?

[TelevisionIncarnate]

Music, movies, games, these are all works of creativity and art.

Art should not be privately held and made a profit of, it should be a gift to society to enlighten others minds. As RedBrother said, no intellectual property is private property.

[mykittyhasaboner]

would there be copyright in a socialist society?

No, because copyright laws are a product of a commercial society wherein everything is a commodity. When labor ceases to be a commodity ("socialist" society), so will everything else, including art.

There would not be a need to "protect" one's art from others if there was no means to benefit financially from it to begin with. The concept itself is already becoming obsolete even in the current society.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Regardless of rather it is right or wrong (and i think Copyright is wrong) it is rapidally becoming obselete due to technology. We are still at the dawn of the internet and i can already get almost any movie, music, or video game i want for free, imagine what it will be like 50, 100, 150, years from now. But i don't think your going to find many copyright defenders here anyway :)

I don't think that digital information has made copyrights obsolete or can do so on its own. In fact while it is possible for many people to find things for free, these technologies have increased the need for information copyrights by the capitalists and resulted in stronger copyright laws and a weakening of artist guilds.

I think at least for now they will be fine reaping ancillary profits at minimum production cost and minimum (or no) extra wage costs side by side with a black market.

[RedMarxist]

but in a socialist society, if there is no copyright law, how will I prevent people from stealing my work?

I'm a writer OK. So say in a socialist society I write a book. Well, how can I prevent people from committing plagiarism?

[bietan jarrai]

I guess it just is no longer "your work" because nothing is yours, everything is everyone's.

[bietan jarrai]

Ideally something like a Copyleft license would be applied, something more like Creative Commons and less All Rights Reserved?

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Ideally something like a Copyleft license would be applied, something more like Creative Commons and less All Rights Reserved?

No licenses, at all. I imagine that plagiarism would not be seen positively, however, in the sense of people demanding recognition for the labour of others.

[Rowan Duffy]

but in a socialist society, if there is no copyright law, how will I prevent people from stealing my work?

I'm a writer OK. So say in a socialist society I write a book. Well, how can I prevent people from committing plagiarism?

Copyright is defined to produce limited monopolies on information. However, it also doubles as a legal right to attribution. There is no reason why these two concepts can't be decoupled.

A socialist society should probably support people publishing innovations for greater glory rather than unbounded monetary reward. That means we should have a legal framework that supports attribution of works and penalises plagiarism.

In addition the society should probably by default exclude legal right to limited monopolies, and instead support knowledge production publicly as it is a non-rival public good.

[The Idler]

Public domain and copyleft.

[syndicat]

So say in a socialist society I write a book. Well, how can I prevent people from committing plagiarism?

as RD said, rules against plagiarism can be separated from copyright, which is a claim of ownership. Copyright exists to enable making money off of creative works.

so, the real issue you should ask yourself is, How would writers make a living if no one owns their books and they can be freely reproduced?

[Dogs On Acid]

Copyrights as we know them are a product of Capitalism.

What there will be in a Socialist society is credit where credit is due. A musician would be credited for his work if it were to be altered or edited by someone else, but that's it.

[RedMarxist]

no one has answered my question concerning movie reviews. Why are reviews wherein scenes are shown, companies cry "theft" when the scenes are used to make fun of the movie?

Is it not fair use to use scenes from a movie to poke fun at it as well as to give a general opinion on what you think of the movie?

[o well this is ok I guess]

no one has answered my question concerning movie reviews. Why are reviews wherein scenes are shown, companies cry "theft" when the scenes are used to make fun of the movie?

Is it not fair use to use scenes from a movie to poke fun at it as well as to give a general opinion on what you think of the movie? Waaah waaah they're insulting our product launch the lawyers

Anyone who makes a movie does not want anyone saying the movie is bad.

[Kotze]

I'm pretty sure that for the vast majority of people who write books today it's not their primary source of income, so I believe that removing copy restrictions would be a big improvement over the status quo, even without establishing a public funding mechanism. I actually find it kinda weird that people exist who write as their main income-generating activity, and would rather like to see more people doing a small part in writing stuff, so I think people in general having more free time and less stress is the more important change than establishing a funding mechanism for that, though I do think that there should still be paid specialists in animation and audio.

What amazes me is that there are academic journals where all the writers get paid nothing, or they even have to pay for the honour of putting colour graphics into their articles, and a copy of an issue is very expensive. Hopefully this practice will die out soon.

The advantages of being able to freely re-use older stuff are more obvious for writing non-fiction than fiction (think about fixing small errors and updates based on techological developments, you usually don't have that in a crime novel); though for writing fiction there would be of course advantages too, just think of translations. Abolishing copy restrictions would also make it easier for critical re-examinations, whether in the form of reviews or parodies. Today, even if there are fair use rules where you live, you can get into a lot of legal hoopla for making a work that is critical of another one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone).

Among fictional works, the advantages of re-using stuff will be much bigger with movies than with writing, think about not just being able to add any soundtrack you want, but also people sharing objects in computer animation, which mesh much better into vastly different works than old film clips.

Copyleft is more than a mechanism that helps in creating an island of stuff that is basically public domain. A world where everything text/pic/musci/film/software is copyleft is different from a world where copyright doesn't exist, and I'm not just referring to attribution here. To make it easier to learn from and to modify a work, it should be required or at least encouraged to publish more than the finished thing, to make the creation process more transparent. The GPL is a common software license which requires that the software's source code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code) is also made available, which is not something that all software becoming public domain would imply. For any animation that receives funding, there should be a requirement to make available not just the film, but also the used 3D objects and, if it's 2D, separated animation layers.

[DinodudeEpic]

I consider intellectual property to be a type of personal property, so I think copyrights are needed. But, fair use laws are also needed. I think it should be up to the person/group to chose whether he/she/they wants to sell and copyright their works of art or not.

[Ilyich]

In the capitalist mode of production, the producer produces not so that the consumer may use the product but to make a profit. Use is merely a byproduct of profit under capitalism. Therefore, in a capitalist society, it is absolutely necessary for the producer to copyright his/her product.

In the socialist mode of production however, the producer producer so that the consumer may use his/her product. There is no profit involved. copyright laws are thus rendered unnecessary.

[Tenka]

I consider intellectual property to be a type of personal property, so I think copyrights are needed. But, fair use laws are also needed. I think it should be up to the person/group to chose whether he/she/they wants to sell and copyright their works of art or not.
What do you mean, sir, by "personal property"? Do you mean a possession, like a tooth brush? Because that would be pretty absurd; you don't edit your toothbrush, copy and distribute it to people who may or may not feel inspired to replicate it (to use a recorded music analogy).
I get the eerie feeling you mean something closer to ((anti-))intellectual property as condoned by the RIAA. Care to elaborate a little?

edit: also, what is this talk of selling...

[Dogs On Acid]

edit: also, what is this talk of selling...

I sniff a social-democrat, Grrrr whoof whoof!

[DinodudeEpic]

I actually advocate an economy where the worker-own cooperatives compete in a free market. It is NOT social democracy.

Although, people are taking those laws way too extremely. For example, the Nostalgia Critic review of the Room was taken down temporarily even though it was definitely fair use. Also, at least release the contents of movies and games like the music/3d models (Whether for sale or for free.) so we can at least get legal access to them.

[Kotze]

Compared to allowing in general to copy and modify stuff, copyright with fair-use exceptions is very bureaucratic. Where do you draw the line between proper fair use and misusing that label as an excuse?

It's easy to say that there should be an exception for important historical events. So when there is only one person with film material of such an event (this usually has more to do with dumb luck than anything else), the general interest overrides that person's right to set any price for that as a monopolist, though they might get some compensation. But at what point do we make the distinction that something has such historical importance?

It's easy to say that there should be an exception for allowing to make unpaid copies for educational contexts. What's an educational context? What if I'm homeschooling? Let's say I'm homeschooling myself. Can I warez everything?

It's easy to say that shameless imitation should not be allowed, but parodies and criticism. What's stopping anybody who makes a lame imitation from claiming it's a parody or a form of criticism? What about changes made to tone down the violence so kids can watch it? What about Star Wars fan-edits without Jar Jar? What about porno versions?

It's easy to say that there should be broader usage rights for non-commercial usage. But again, the question is how you make such a distinction. Suppose non-commercial copying is to be allowed in general, how would you then classify a website that hosts files and that doesn't demand any payment for downloads, but they do have ads? Or suppose some film bits and music are recycled for something that is basically a commercial for a specific product, though you have no means to prove that those making that clip got paid for that and aren't rabid fans.

As you know, fair-use laws don't stop companies from bullying people. Companies don't always follow the law, they rather operate with a lot of bluffing to browbeat "pirates" into shitty deals. Imprecise laws are inviting that behaviour. If on the other hand you have a good idea how to make laws that precisely answer how to classify a work, that's probably going to be very complex, so people will end up being very unsure about their rights either way. It's much more simple to allow copies and modifications in general without making all those fair-use distinctions.

[RedMarxist]

I am for copyright, but agree that for example reviewing the Room is fair use. I don't see how using a few choice scenes to make fun of it will hurt the company economically. Lets also take for example downfall parodies, which were put back up eventually(fair use for the win!). I know there are plenty of shitty parodies of downfall out there, yet for every piece of shit there is a gem of creativity and funny humor.

plus, using movie footage in this way to "rewrite" the scene or make fun of it unleashes human creativity. Plus it entertains us. :D

[punisa]

Copyright in a socialist society... hmm, perhaps not in a sense we see it nowadays, but some sort of author acknowledgment should exist.
As in if you were a musician and you wrote a great song. Sure, others can listen to it and play it whenever they want, but they would still acknowledge that you were the original author and that would be the reason why many people will want to hear you play it :)

[Flying Trotsky]

As you can probably see from everyone's answers, the question of "will copyrights exist in a socialist society?" is a resounding no.

But of course, that just leads to the real question of "how do we protect the integrity of a work and/or creator?"

It's sounds like a complex problem, but I think the solution is pretty simple. I mean, suppose it all comes down to how good the work is. If you write some lousy bit of poetry with no style or artistic value, chances are it won't be famous, and so no one will try to plagiarize it. Inversely, if you create a masterpiece, it'll be famous for its style and artistic value, and everyone will recognize it as being yours, so no one will be able to steal it. For middle of the road works (as most things are), you do run the risk of someone stealing it, but if you're pretty prolific, people will recognize that the work in question comes from you. Think of YouTube videos. There's plenty of stealing and plagiarizing going on there, but at the end of the day, people recognize whoever has done the best job with the material.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

I am for copyright, but agree that for example reviewing the Room is fair use. I don't see how using a few choice scenes to make fun of it will hurt the company economically. Lets also take for example downfall parodies, which were put back up eventually(fair use for the win!). I know there are plenty of shitty parodies of downfall out there, yet for every piece of shit there is a gem of creativity and funny humor.

plus, using movie footage in this way to "rewrite" the scene or make fun of it unleashes human creativity. Plus it entertains us. :D

I'm sorry, but did you just concern yourself with the economic well-being of a capitalist enterprise? "Hurt the company"? Who cares? Why are you for copyrights, they are without a doubt a form of private property, the purpose of which is to give control over production and create an artificial scarcity, and for this reason, copyrights are anti-socialist.

Things should be freely copied: this does not, NOT, mean that plagiarism, that is to say taking someone else's work and presenting it as your own, would be acceptable - but countering plagiarism is not responsible for the growth of copyrights whatsoever and companies regularly disregard minor players anyhow and force actual producers of culture to comply with their decisions, and copyright serves no purpose in this regard, either.