“Rapture Riders” was a fantastic mash-up, something really creative and well-done. The person who created it really hit on something, when they noticed the songs could go together. It may still exist somewhere on the internet, but when I checked youtube a couple weeks ago, it was no longer there. The reason it vanished? If it wasn’t copyright that was the culprit, it is in many, many other cases. Rapture Riders was artistry, using the art of others.

Or compare it to a rugby guy who has been doing NFL reaction videos. It’s as much about him experiencing the videos as the videos themselves. No, moreso, because people wouldn’t be watching the clips, if that were all he was posting. His channel’s exploded, and has pre-clip ads, but he’s not making much from that. Who gets the profits from his creative works? Corporations*, mostly. Who protects him? Who advocates for his creative freedom? Not you, AC. You want him stripped of earnings because he “stole” the videos – and he doesn’t even host them, just puts them up while recording so we can see what he’s reacting to.

You, by your logic, want him to stop “stealing”, shut down his video series, abandon the success he has found there, and pay…not original artists. Not artists at all, since these are mostly videos of old, forgotten football games, and not entire games, at that. It isn’t the fellow youtubers whose video compilations he is watching. More exposure’s good for them.

Check him out, his videos are great stuff. Just search for ‘rugby guy reacts’, to find his channel. And keep in mind who’s getting the lion’s share of his ad revenue, rather than him.

You know what the artists in both cases lacked? A huge capital investment in getting all the permissions from copyright holders, before creating their art. Or publishing, whatever. In neither case is the art valuable enough to invest in, in advance, and while the RR artist didn’t ask for money at all (thus (C) would preclude her/him from posting it at all), the Rugby guy started out with little to no ad revenue, and wanted to make some – but how could he pay in advance for something he didn’t see coming?

Those are just two artists whose works copyright holders would want gone. Or maybe just working for them, so they can add hundreds of dollars that would have gone to him to their private vaults.

You, AC, want Rugby Guy to lose revenue for his “theft”. The only artist being hurt is him. The only artist losing money is him. Copyright laws make it so that he must lose that money to the owners of the original content. Who are almost all, if not entirely, not artists. The artists in the football clips get nothing for their efforts, in terms of (C) payments.

In short, no artists benefit from the ad revenue being off the performance art of Rugby Guy. If one does (and best I can tell, there’s only the theme song he uses to account for it, the song’s artist), it ain’t much. Pennies out of the dollars he’s not getting.

Copyright holders such as the RIAA, MPAA, and the NFL, to name a few want this status quo to continue. So do you. You want this guy to have to pay, and pay, and pay some more to entities that do not create art.

Those with the proclivity to abuse the law are the ones who are spending big money to re-write the laws to favor themselves, and then use those laws to suppress artists who do not conform to their business model. The ones who do conform aren’t going to be making big money without the publishers, anyway.

If I check a book out of the library, or buy it from a used book store, the author gets nothing from me or the sale. I have done plenty of both, “costing” all those authors money in “lost revenue”, even though when I did so, I couldn’t have afforded new copies, and would not have purchased any of them at all.

I guess buying used books makes me a pirate, too. Now those who shill for the corporate copyright model we currently have can lecture me about how my used-book piracy is stealing from authors, right? Right?

Whoever it was who claimed to be an author in this thread can comfort themselves with the khowledge that I will likely never download anything by them to read for free, and therefore am unlikely to ever read anything at all by them. In fact, if I know who they were, I’d be certain to not read anything of theirs, other than via purchase of used books – and then only if they’re already an author I like.

I do have authors who I spend new-book money on. Each and every one of them I encountered via non-author-payment transactions described above. Authors who demand I purchase a pig in a poke because “artists deserve to get paid, because copyright!” can keep the pig and the poke. You’ll never lose money due to piracy by me, and you’ll never make a dime from me, either.

Doesn’t make you happy to know that you’ll never lose a sale to me due to piracy on my part? Of course, you’ll never make a sale to me, either. If I read something of theirs for free, OTOH, I might have been interested, but at least they haven’t had to endure the horror of knowing I read their art for free, before I became a customer, which since I didn’t, I couldn’t.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? Maybe the corporations need to find a justification to bill non-customers for non-purchase of works they have never even seen, to make up for that lost revenue, then write that into copyright law, too. Of course, then indie artists would end up having to pay for the revenues lost from non-sales due to non-exposure, along with the rest of the customer market. You won’t be a scofflaw and object to paying, will you, Author-chan?

Metallica’s not getting turned off, if I hear it on the radio, but I’m not buying anything of theirs, either, given their taking the corporate side on the topic. Any author-chans want to sign up to join them on my list? I promise to not consume anything produced by verified members. At all. Unless, of course, you are willing to pay me to check it out, since my time’s valuable, too, and your work(s) may turn out to be a waste of it, but I deserve to get paid for time invested in your product, if I didn’t enjoy it.

Or is that the bottom line for all author-chans, that they want my money up-front, no refunds, and if their crap turns out to be crappy, I’m out my time, as well. That’s the model that crappy writers use. Good ones can sell more books to people who read a book or two for free, first. Bad ones worry about how piracy is hurting their sales, and then they wonder why they aren’t selling more.

So the copyright shills can continue to support the major cash flows of copyright corporations, because apparently, blind sales are all they have for income. Or maybe they think that their repeat customers would steal from them, if they could legally. Neither authors who expect me to pay for the privilege of experiencing their Great Art for the very first time, nor businessfolk who view all their customers as potential thieves deserve my business, nor anyone else’s.

And they have no support for artists like Rugby Guy at all. Content creators like that are thieves, after all, unlike those who create derivative works in ways that are acceptable under the current system.

Are all of you headquartered at a Buggy Whip Manufacturers’ Support Society office, or something?