This Week In Techdirt History: July 21st – 27th
from the as-it-were dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, we looked at how the FTC’s settlement with YouTube pissed everyone off and how its settlement with Facebook got everything backwards. Oakland was on its way to becoming the third city to ban facial recognition tech while Orlando police ended their facial recognition deal with Amazon and a UK parliamentary committee called for an end to use of the tech by the government. A judge tossed a crazy copyright lawsuit over a Gigi Hadid photo, while another tossed a lawsuit that claimed muting a Runescape character violated the first amendment. Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard launched her lawsuit against Google.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2014, a FOIA request revealed just how much data airlines and travel sites shared with the feds (who then stored it unencrypted), while an ex-State Department revealed that everyone was focused on the wrong NSA surveillance programs. A judge gave the government open-ended access to all content in a suspect’s Gmail account, while we saw the fallout from another court’s overly broad discovery order. A report revealed just how many supposed terrorist plots were actually cooked up by the FBI, and it appeared the DC police were taking lessons from them. Also, we got a couple stark examples of the revolving door, with both the main architect of PIPA and Hollywood’s former favorite congressman taking jobs lobbying for the MPAA.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2009, we were trying to tell the newspaper industry that Google is not making money from news (though the message still doesn’t seem to have landed), and were pushing back on the idea that the internet would be empty without the copyright-driven content industries. We dug deeper into the AP/Shepard Fairey case, looked at copyright lobbyists celebrating bogus stats with government officials, and wrote about how we might have been smarter about copyright laws 100 years earlier. Meanwhile, Disney managed the feat of getting its own movie trailer taken down from YouTube, while more musicians were getting annoyed about record labels getting their music videos taken down.
Comments on “This Week In Techdirt History: July 21st – 27th”
…pushing back on the idea that the internet would be empty without the copyright-driven content industries.
The just refuse to acknowledge the internet and web of 5-10 years prior. And the internet at the time, for that matter. (Automatic copyright doesn’t count, and isn’t an industry driver anyway.)
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Copyright fanatics have never been able to explain why the existing status quo incentivizes them. Automatic copyright does provide the advantage of not requiring content creators to do any meaningful paperwork, but aside from that the automatic protection doesn’t do a thing to encourage more work being created.
average_joe/antidirt and John Smith have stated on several occasions that reducing the length of copyright – say, from life + 70 years to life + 50 years – would actually convince artists en masse to create less content, or no content at all – but they’ve never really gone beyond a simple claim. Knowing whether or not my corpse makes money off another twenty years shouldn’t pose any bearing on whether I make something or not. It doesn’t apply to any sort of industry or product. But IP people just gotta be the special needs children in the room, every single time.
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That’s an insult to Special Needs children, who are smarter than IP maximalists…
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That’s bullshit on a fundamental level.
I’m creating content right the fuck now by calling out Jhon Smith and antidirt idiots. And People create stuff for fucking free, every fucking day.
If anything, reducing copyright would increase the amount of creating (which is already a lot with the current maximalist-led regimes).
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You would be entirely right, but the idea that “people create things for free” has never been something that copyright shills ever want to admit. Their interpretation of copyright has never factored in the idea of “amateur” creation, never mind that “amateur” creation these days can punch far above its weight class. Copyright shills do not expect the average person to fight for their own copyright unless they’re famous enough. And why would the average person do so? The costs would be far too prohibitive.
So what copyright shills do is frown and gripe and moan at the fact that amateur content exists. John Smith and antidirt have bemoaned that a lot of shit now exists on YouTube and the like because anyone can cobble together a shoddy Windows Movie Maker project. Which isn’t completely wrong, and if this was the late 2000s when shitty lyric videos were rife on YouTube, their point would still stand.
But what you see is the paradoxical mental gymnastics copyright shills have to do to themselves as justification. They have to tell themselves and others that copyright incentivizes creation – they just can’t bear to admit that not all creation is incentivized by copyright, and they can’t bear to admit that not all creation is creation they think merits copyright protection. It is “rules for me but not for thee” in the most hypocritical, self-serving way.
Auto copyright lowers the burden on small creators if they don’t plan on actually bringing any claims, or anything, and doesn’t seem to help most of the time wrt automated systems and trolls/abusers/large-publishing-houses (but i partially repeat myself).
And no, none of the maximalists can ever explain the incentive. Seems more an incentive to pulling works from access for which people already paid, and possible destruction of said works, and keeping traditionally orphaned works in limbo.
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Er… meant to be a third-level reply above.
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