this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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like I've had more than one super good YouTube video essay go missing, getting permanently pulled because of some copyright issue with a background shot or something, so I'll actually add really good YouTube videos to my Plex library just in case as well
Totally. Though, that case can be a tiny bit tricky. Like, people should be allowed to remove stuff from the Internet that they've created if they want, but it should also be okay to archive content that may be abandoned or lost. Hard to create rules that differentiate the two effectively for enforcement
the specific ones I'm talking about, they were removed by YouTube and not at the creators behest. like one of them is about the three stooges and whoever owns The Three stooges material complained about some copyrighted material in the background horse shit
Sure I'm just thinking about how you'd write a law or policy that accommodated both reasonable scenarios
well it's a really interesting concept. there's really no other form of media where you could put something out there and then recall it somehow. like if you wrote a book that you didn't like, there's absolutely no legal way you could prevent people from reading it, etc. sort of ties into the Barbra Streisand effect
What's interesting with the comparison to books is that you can stop it from being published. You can't force people to give up the copy they already bought, but they can't make more copies and distribute it.
Hard to draw that distinction in the digital world
And if you want a better comparison, though of YouTube like a drive-in theater. You're not allowed to make a copy of the film with your camcorder and go distribute it.
it's almost more of a philosophical question than a legal one. sure, maybe they can prevent you from recording the drive-in movie and showing it to other people, but would they have the moral authority to say that you couldn't repeat the storyline to someone else?
let's say someone produces some documentary that ends up containing some hideously embarrassing error. something that could really ruin some third party's life. you pull the documentary from theaters, you pull it from streaming services, anybody who owns a copy owns it illegally. but, anybody who's seen it, or heard it described, could sit down in front of an audience and act out the entire thing piece by piece, attributing the entire thing to the original producer's name.
it ties into a line of thinking I had the other day when reading my credit card number to somebody over the phone. me talking to another person, giving them digit by digit, it was like two computers talking but we were people. if we had been computers, using a speaker and a microphone to communicate numbers in that way, we would have laughed at it and called it stone age technology, but that still how humans communicate with each other.
This gets into a weird debate about the difference between reproducing a thing and describing a thing. With sufficiently accurate description you can create a reproduction.
And when you take that into the realm of computing, where we've functionally automated the process of describing things with extreme accuracy it gets really blurry. But we can all agree that "take what you want, give nothing back" is not a good way to run a society, least of all an economy :D
So we're left with the task of crafting internally consistent legislation that attempts to allow certain types of reproductions, but not others.
The thing is, this is the type of debate just should be happening at the administrative level, in Congress, etc. But instead, special interest groups and lobbyists are doing the legislating on this stuff.
No, no they shouldn't. This is antithetical to the generally good intention behind copyright.
The point was not to allow people to take away things they have created, but to permit them to profit in order that they might choose to make more, and be able to support their life in a capitalist system. These intentions are largely good.
Allowing people to take away what they have created is the opposite of this intent, and harmful to the public good, which benefits from as many works as possible being accessible to the public.
Playing devil's advocate here, but is it truly a public good to have as many works as possible accessible to the public?
What if misinformation outweighs real information in the aggregate?
I'd say generally yes but maybe not in every instance. Consider it an overall principle rather than a hard no exceptions rule.
That said, copyright/creator control is not the correct tool to use to do so.
You misunderstand my meaning: they shouldn't be able to go out and remove all copies of something in existence. But they should be able to limit distribution of the thing they created, up to and including stopping distribution.
Why? How is it better for society and people overall if they have the power to do this?
Allowing the creators to profit is understandable and necessary in our current system, but what benefit is gained for the public by them being permitted to stop distribution altogether?
If there is a benefit to the public and society that I am not seeing, then ok, but 'they created it so they should control it' is harmful to the people at large, and that should be prioritized over a creator's ego or desire for control.
Because the right to determine distribution channels and the right to prevent distribution are inseparable. I challenge you to write a law that successfully implements one but not the other. Any law you write that guarantees a creator control over who distributes their work and how will inherently allow that creator to literally or functionally prevent distribution.
The alternative is saying that creators don't have a right to control distribution at all - anyone must be allowed to reproduce and distribute, even if not for free - and that is a known disincentive to invention and economic growth; there's a reason we only enforce that requirement in select places like standards and protocols
How do you achieve that, manually or automated?
manually.