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Posted by Cider9986 5 hours ago

Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished(grapheneos.social)
250 points | 231 commentspage 4
bronlund 3 hours ago|
Copyright is just formalized greed.
AlienRobot 3 hours ago||
I don't think I have ever seen someone outside of tech saying this. It's always people working with the data-copying machines, never the people creating the data protected by the law, that want said laws gone.
badlibrarian 4 hours ago||
The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.

Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.

Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.

palata 4 hours ago|
> Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense

That's a question I have: if you abolish copyright, does that mean that anyone is free to do what they please with leaked code?

badlibrarian 1 hour ago||
[dead]
_davide_ 4 hours ago||
I agree, copyright is a just yet another monopolistic tool and it isn't making the market any favor. Copyright could be gradually be reduced to a few years, the market will adapt, for example collecting money before producing the content (like a movie or an album), collecting more money from concert rather than music directly (which is going to happen anyway since it's competing against generated content), etc... Having a weak copyright or having it replaced with a far lighter framework is not science fiction and i honestly believe it would improve the quality of life for the vast majority.

> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,

If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.

conorcleary 3 hours ago||
"The ceiling blocks my view of the sky, and the roof doesn't let me see my TV from outside; we don't need framework or anything to keep the weather out, it's sunny!"
Yizahi 3 hours ago||
Copyright is good and should be enforced. I say this as a person who doesn't hold any copyrighted materials. Anyone pro abolishing it is deluded by the "free market" myth, which is not possible in any form.
ButlerianJihad 3 hours ago|
You actually do hold copyright on everything you've written. For example, your comments here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Yizahi

All owned by you and copyrighted by you, sublicensed to Y Combinator.

Your employer may have agreements in place where you assign copyright to them for any notes or code or other works you produce while at work. But if you draw a stick-figure picture in a notebook, that's your copyright.

Yizahi 2 hours ago||
Yeah. I extremely simplified my message to the point of some minor factual mistakes, as you have correctly noticed.

The reason was to emphasize that I don't directly profiting from some work and may be considered biased (which is also wrong, but I'm simplifying again).

Copyright is not for some faceless megacorpos, though they do profit from it. Copyright is for us, regular tiny humansies, to defend against megacorpos.

To all naysayers - just do a mental experiment and imagine a world with any copyright whatsoever. Do you think Disney would be harmed elen a little bit then? Lol, they will simply enforce their own big daddy "threat of lawsuit" (yes, they will find a reason, there people whose profession is doing just that). But will a regular writer or programmer or painter have any defence then? Course no.

maybewhenthesun 4 hours ago||
Copyright is good. It's the justice system letting money buy it's way out of enforcement that is bad.

If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.

Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.

Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.

ozim 4 hours ago|
Let’s face it, justice system uses money as proxy for how important things are for society not for single citizens.

As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute.

I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.

maybewhenthesun 58 minutes ago||
I agree that this is often the situation in practice. I feel it's kind of bleak to just accept that status quo. Democracy lost? Back to the medieval system of nobles and serfs? Where having money means having rights?

We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way.

> waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.

flaburgan 4 hours ago||
Interesting to read this while the US gov doesn't give a fuck at all and use Pikachu and Tetris to make racist hateful games...
intended 5 hours ago||
Not disagreeing with the post- wouldn’t this come under the category of “everything is bad for users when the corporations become too big”?
t43562 4 hours ago|
Yes, there should be some limit on the amount of IP that can be accumulated. I don't know how one would do it in a way that couldn't be perverted/abused though.
cat-whisperer 4 hours ago|
yes
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