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A post on John Scalzi's website.
I don't have a problem with the idea of copyright, in and of itself. I think it's a good thing, on the whole, because a content creator should be able to legitimately make money for themselves and their family, without having to worry about blatant knockoffs or outright copies of their work being sold (or freely distributed) by others who had nothing to do with the creation of it. (Or worry so much, anyway, given that some people are always going to do that stuff no matter what, I don't care what the laws say, and until ways are developed to prevent that from happening which don't also harm legitimate paying customers [often more so than they do the ones actually being targeted, e.g. pretty much every DRM scheme ever devised], there's just no point getting too worked up over that shit. Because if you protect your work using methods that more often than not harm your actual customers as much as or even more so than they do the ones illegitimately copying/selling your work, then you also become one of the bad guys, in my eyes, about as bad as the so-called pirates themselves.)
I just don't like it when copyright (or trademark or patent, etc.) is used as an indiscriminate bombing run against things (e.g. fan fiction, fan art, fan music, fan games/game mods, Let's Plays of video games, etc.) that clearly aren't harming the original properties, and which can and often does, in fact, drive more sales toward the original work, or at least would if said things weren't just knee-jerk nuked from orbit as a matter of course.
But all of that's almost entirely irrelevant to the above post and is just a thing I usually say whenever the subject of copyright comes up, regardless of the original point being made, so I'll just leave it alone for now.
I don't have a problem with the idea of copyright, in and of itself. I think it's a good thing, on the whole, because a content creator should be able to legitimately make money for themselves and their family, without having to worry about blatant knockoffs or outright copies of their work being sold (or freely distributed) by others who had nothing to do with the creation of it. (Or worry so much, anyway, given that some people are always going to do that stuff no matter what, I don't care what the laws say, and until ways are developed to prevent that from happening which don't also harm legitimate paying customers [often more so than they do the ones actually being targeted, e.g. pretty much every DRM scheme ever devised], there's just no point getting too worked up over that shit. Because if you protect your work using methods that more often than not harm your actual customers as much as or even more so than they do the ones illegitimately copying/selling your work, then you also become one of the bad guys, in my eyes, about as bad as the so-called pirates themselves.)
I just don't like it when copyright (or trademark or patent, etc.) is used as an indiscriminate bombing run against things (e.g. fan fiction, fan art, fan music, fan games/game mods, Let's Plays of video games, etc.) that clearly aren't harming the original properties, and which can and often does, in fact, drive more sales toward the original work, or at least would if said things weren't just knee-jerk nuked from orbit as a matter of course.
But all of that's almost entirely irrelevant to the above post and is just a thing I usually say whenever the subject of copyright comes up, regardless of the original point being made, so I'll just leave it alone for now.
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Date: 2021-03-15 05:50 pm (UTC)From: