Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.

  • @200fifty
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    5 months ago

    Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.

    Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers’ work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute…

    • db0OP
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      15 months ago

      It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.

      • @200fifty
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        5 months ago

        That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it’s bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits – in which case, I agree, but, well…

        • db0OP
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          5 months ago

          It’s as relevant as we make it in our discussion, no? You brought up the theoretical noble intentions of the copyrights, so I felt compelled to mention their actual results.

          • @200fifty
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            5 months ago

            I mean, it seems like you’re reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I’m ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it’s probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’d be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)

            As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it’s a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they’re using to do it is called “copyright.”

    • David GerardMA
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      5 months ago

      writer protection is not where copyright came from

      • @zogwarg
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        5 months ago

        The Berne Convention (Which the US only joined in 1989) is from 1886 and more concerned with author’s rights than the typical american flavor, and was kickstarted by successful writers such as Victor Hugo, it’s fundamentally commercial in nature but was at least partially sold/incepted has protecting a writer’s labour:

        « La loi protège la terre; elle protège la maison du prolétaire qui a sué; elle confisque l’ouvrage du poète qui a pensé(…)14. » — Honoré de Balzac, in a 1834 “Letter addressed to the French writers of the XIX century” advocating for author’s rights.

        Translated: “The law protects land, it protects the house of the proletarian who has sweat; it confiscates the work of the poet who has thought (…)”

        From the body of the convention, in some regards it does place the author higher than the publisher:

        Article 11

        In order that the authors of works protected by the present Convention shall, in the absence of proof to the contrary, be considered as such, and be consequently admitted to institute proceedings against pirates before the courts of the various countries of the Union, it will be sufficient that their name be indicated on the work in the accustomed manner.

        For anonymous or pseudonymous works, the publisher whose name is indicated on the work shall be entitled to protect the rights belonging to the author.

        He shall be, without other proof, deemed to be the lawful representative of the anonymous or pseudonymous author. It is, nevertheless, agreed that the courts may, if necessary, require the production of a certificate from the competent authority to the effect that the formalities prescribed by law in the country of origin have been accomplished, as contemplated in Article 2.

        EDIT:

        And contains from 1886 already the spirit of fair use.

        Article 10

        The following shall be specially included amongst the illicit reproductions to which the present Convention applies: unauthorized indirect appropriations of a literary or artistic work, of various kinds, such as adaptations, musical arrangements, etc., when they are only the reproduction of a particular work, in the same form, or in another form, without essential alterations, additions, or abridgments, so as not to present the character of a new original work.

        Article 7

        Articles from newspapers or periodicals published in any of the countries of the Union may be reproduced in original or in translation in the other countries of the Union, unless the authors or publishers have expressly forbidden it. For periodicals it shall be sufficient if the prohibition is indicated in general terms at the beginning of each number of the periodical. This prohibition cannot in any case apply to articles of political discussion, or to the reproduction of news of the day or miscellaneous information.

        Article 8

        As regards the liberty of extracting portions from literary or artistic works for use in publications destined for educational or scientific purposes, or for chrestomathies, the effect of the legislation of the countries of the Union, and of special arrangements existing or to be concluded between them, is not affected by the present Convention.

        • David GerardMA
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          15 months ago

          None of that is its origin

          • @200fifty
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            5 months ago

            I’m sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn’t totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I’ll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.

            iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved “we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original,” which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I’m not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs

            also again I’m not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don’t think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I’m not a libertarian. sorry ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

          • @zogwarg
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            25 months ago

            Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.

            • @200fifty
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              45 months ago

              The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to “promote the progress of … useful arts”. Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law