Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the joke-shortage dept
We’ve got a double-winner this week, but also a very very slow week overall on the funny side, so this will be a somewhat truncated post. On the insightful side, both top comments are similar thoughts in response to the judge dismissing charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, starting with this first-place winning comment from Huntly:
Fastest way to shut down Trump’s 1776 fund will be for Kilmer, Letitia James, James Comey and others who have been targeted by Government weaponization to start applying.
In second place for insightful, it’s an anonymous comment along similar lines, which also racked up the votes to be the first place winner on the funny side too:
Does Kilmar get a cut of the anti-weaponization fund?
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the legislative effort in California to stop companies from killing off old games. First, it’s JoeDetroit with a response to the comments from the Electronic Software Association:
“The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is “a natural feature of modern software,” the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance.”
Natural feature of “modern software”?! A big FU right there. Perfectly good software out there gets a new version that fucks everything up, harder to use, & has no real improvement is what we often get. As long as their is no security holes, I’ll run the older version, thanks.
As to “software requires online infrastructure maintenance” we’ve seen fan based wildcat servers that work very well many times. They use copyright to shut them down. It boggles my mind that they waste resources chasing down their best customers to stop them from enjoying their older products. Why do they care? It’s not costing them any money.
Next, it’s n00bdragon emphasizing our point that measures like this bill aren’t really the true fight:
I agree completely. All this other stuff feels like people pretending trying to do something even if that something is entirely useless and ineffective. Real copyright reform is needed and it should be targeted directly rather than these little culturally downstream problems.
Over on the funny side, we’ve already had the first place winner above, and beyond that there’s really just a lot of not-particularly-funny comments that received a tiny smattering of votes here and there (and none with enough to receive a badge). So we’ll just wrap things up with a single hybrid of second place and editor’s choice, from Thad responding to our headline about Trump Mobile’s “struggle” to ship any phones:
I don’t know about “struggled”. That would seem to imply that they’ve tried.
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
When dealing with digital works, where there’s no issue of the cost of keeping it in publication when it’s not selling well, perhaps go with automatic reversion. If it’s unavailable for purchase for 10 years, rights automatically revert to the creator with no appeal allowed. If the creator leaves it unavailable for 10 years, it’s automatically licensed under CC-BY.
Re:
I’d argue that a copyrighted work made today should fall into the public domain after 10 years, and that copyright terms should be shortened retroactively to 20 years prior to the passage of a bill that shortens copyright terms. Under this concept, if that bill passes in 2026 and goes into effect in 2027, any work made prior to 2007 (including sound recordings!) would become public domain and any work made from 2027 onward would become public domain after ten years, with works from the twenty years not covered falling into the public domain annually until 2047.
Re: Re:
The problem with the public domain is someone can take the work, make their own version of it, claim copyright on that and use it to block anyone else from using the public-domain version. See Disney’s movies. CC-BY achieves the same result as the public domain without leaving that loophole open to exploit.
Also this needs to be limited to cases where there’s no significant cost to keeping the work available. If there’s a cost, like a minimum print run for a book, the copyright holder shouldn’t have to choose between taking on that cost with no expectation of recovering it or losing their rights.
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, so, here’s the thing about that:
No, they can’t.
Plenty of people have “remixed” Pride and Prejudice; of those remixes, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one of the more famous ones. But did the author of that remix try to claim a retroactive copyright on the original work and block anyone from distributing it? No. No, they did not.
As for Disney: It only owns the copyright on its version of classic fairy tales and such. Anyone can distribute a copy of One Thousand and One Nights with “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” in it, but they can’t distribute a version that alters the text of that story to match Disney’s version of it. The same goes for copies of Grimms’ Fairy Tales that include “Rapunzel”, “Snow White”, “The Brave Little Tailor”, “The Frog Prince”, and the Brothers Grimm version of “Cinderella”.
Such legalities won’t matter to con artists, grifters, and other such hack frauds. But they will matter to courts and lawyers.
If they can’t recover their costs in a decade, that’s on them. Maybe they didn’t market their work right. Maybe their work sucks. Them’s the breaks. But that shouldn’t prevent a work from falling into the public domain. People made works even when copyright terms were 14 years, had an optional renewal, and required registration. George Romero accidentally left Night of the Living Dead in the public domain and he kept on making movies (including more Living Dead movies). Life is unfair; you can do everything right and still lose. But in this day and age, the cost to distribute a work can be minimal compared to the costs incurred prior to the Internet Age. Those costs shouldn’t be a factor in whether a work should be in the public domain.
Re: Re: Re:2
For God’s sake Andy Serkis’s The Jungle Book and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio came out the same year as the respective Disney remakes.
Re: Re: Re:2
The problem I can foresee with this is that large publishers will just wait 10 years for good self-published books to hit the public domain and then publish them on their further-reaching platform, owing nothing to the artist. Amazon would love to stop paying royalties to every self-published author that uses KDP. Sure, the local library could compete, but Amazon has the market dominance and infrastructure, so it’ll benefit greatly before a full paradigm shift or technological change.
If we’re going to make copyrights expire faster, we’d need something like universal basic income to support the artists whose works will be more exploitable and less profitable in the long run.
Re: Re: Re:3
Absolutely agreed. We’re going to need UBI in the near future anyway, for one reason or another. We may as well add “copyright” to the pile of reasons why.
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:³
“large publishers will just wait 10 years for good self-published books…”
If there’s still a profitable market for the book after a decade, the author or their original publisher can pay to extend the copyright. Even Amazon throwing their 900 pound marketing gorilla at the long tail won’t resurrect a tapped out mine.
Authors, for their part, will do what they’ve always done, keep writing. The incentive of copyright is creating new work not sitting on your laurels cashing royalties for all eternity. Whoever came up with that notion it’s everything wrong with copyright.
Sorry for ranting. Copyright failing to do its job is a topic that goes back decades on this site.
Re: Re: Re:2
Except that for the courts and lawyers to get involved means getting into court. Going through the very expensive discovery process (see “lawfare”). That’s the reason a lot of people cave rather than fight copyright abuse: your average author can’t afford the cost of winning.
Re: Re: Re:
Yes, that’s why nobody’s made a Wizard of Oz movie since 1939.
Wait, what?
Re: Re: Re:2
Fuck, I should have gone with a Shakespeare reference.
“Yeah, it’s like how since 1997 nobody is allowed to perform Romeo and Juliet anymore unless they pay royalties to Fox and have the characters carry guns that say SWORD on them.” Something like that.
Re: Re: Re:2
I was about to say, “I wish,” but Return to Oz kicks ass.
One day it will be frankcox’s week, I’m sure of it.
Re:
Who is that?
Seems the current software trend is not releasing the software at all and it just be forever in “Pre-Release” like Dark and Darker and others.