this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
846 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
76945 readers
2941 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Those are patents, not copyrights. There are a bunch of different forms of intellectual property. Off the top of my head:
Copyright
Trademark
Patent
Moral (not very substantial in the US, but more-meaningful in France)
IMO, the way it should be is that concepts and art should be free to be used by anyone. However, specific incarnations made someone can't be copied. For example, Nintendo can make a Pokemon game, as can Sega with the same characters. Naturally, Nintendo can make a Shin Megami Mario game.
The important thing is that the company or people behind an incarnation is distinctly labelled, so that people can't confuse who made what. In this way, variants of a media can fulfill niches that otherwise wouldn't be possible. Say, for example, a WoodRocket "Jessie Does James" hentai anime.
Once you start studying non capitalist propaganda, the idea of "intellectual property" becomes transparently harmful. Copyrights don't protect ideas, they protect the wealth of rich people.
Indeed. I'm not against copyrights owned by individuals. Corporations owning rights is downright dystopian.
I'm not even sure that IP being owned by non-natural persons is the problem, for example I could see a coop collectively owning copyrights/patents relevant to their work. The problem is the frankly ridiculous amount of time granted for copyrights and obvious methods being patented.
Change both of those and you keep the benefit of innovative individuals/small groups having legal protection from large corporations muscling in and stealing their work and get rid of most of the damage done by the current system.
So, we can use Donald Duck, but not Harry Potter? I don't quite understand why. Why shouldn't I be allowed to write my own Harry Potter books? (not that I would).