The last two are not mutually exclusive

Ideas have a material and historical basis and must be acknowledged within that context or the deeper meanings are lost. Tying the art to the artist isn't enough on it's face. You must preserve author's socio-economic position at the time of writing, the historical moment at which the piece was produced, and the publication through which the material was conveyed.

Whether you're reading Das Kapital or Debt: The First 5000 Years or the "I Have A Dream" speech or Ender's Game, you need more than just the name and demographics of the writer. You need the whole context behind the work as it is being produced. Reading Marx without knowing about the American Civil War or the Taiping Rebellion introduces you to ideas that are being espoused in the middle of a long-running conversation. Picking up "Debt" without knowing about the 2008 financial crash leaves you puzzling over Graeber's sudden concern with the subject matter. You can't talk about MLK's most famous speech without knowing the conditions of the African-American working class in the 1960s. Neither can you seriously discuss Ender's Game without knowing about the wars in Vietnam or Korea, or the various special ops programs and advances in military technology that birthed the combined fascination and horror that Orsen Scott Card sought to conceptualize.

Copywrite binds the material to the publisher more than it binds the ideas of the material to the author. The real sin of modern capitalist mass production is the disjointing of written works from the period they were produced. Making an Ender's Game movie fully divorced from the historical context in which it was written is a crime.

i like the idea of remembering who came up with stuff...

but yes, copyright bad, i want to draw legal MLP comics.

I’m confused where copyright comes into this.

We could certainly have a society that doesn’t allow private ownership of ideas but still protects accurate attribution and faithful replication of ideas.

It’s kinda funny. For a while, it looked like the digital age had solved those problems for good.

At the time of the Statute of Anne, Western (Anglo) society was suffering from epistemic chaos caused by bootleg printers producing sloppy incomplete reproductions and obscuring the original author’s message and identity.

But computers are good at making exact copies and preserving sources.

Or at least they were…

Anyway, we should be able to legislate prosocial norms without having to sneak them in through financial instruments. To think otherwise is to uncritically accept the neoliberal frame.

1. True: so attribution is a must
2. True: so attribution is a must
3. True: and attribution is part of how we maintain the social-cultural fabric of what the stock characters we create mean to the people creating new stories with them, or vernacular music, or anything else

Point of order, shouldn't the images in this meme be reversed for this community? (Monocle Poo looking pretty bourgeois...)

Over time*

Overtime means extra work

My personal suggestion would be that anything invented or created that we consider intellectual property now can only be owned by living individuals, whom can exploit their creation for 5 years as they do now, fully dictating who and how gets to use it. This is to maintain the material incentive of being creative.

After those 5 years the IP goes into the public domain, allowing full and free personal and commercial use for anyone.

There is some leg room for a possible fixed percentage going to the inventor or the public after those 5 years as well, but generally the idea is that yes, being smart and making something great should also reward you with first dibs on any commercial opportunity deriving from it, but ONLY you and not some patent farming conglomerate, and only for a fixed time.

So much this. I want a world where the Harry Potter canon can just be "forked" and retconned to make all the "good guy" characters Jewish trans people and all the bad guys TERFs.

I think it's quite possible to separate the art from the artist as long as the artist does not do something that is so transgressive that it tanks everything they've ever done.

Rockstars that use their fame and wealth to seduce and sleep with underaged people?

You kinda can't separate that.

It's pretty much sex stuff.

Like, if you're famous and you use your fame to force or coerce people to do things with you sexually that they would not have done otherwise, then you can't separate the art from the artist.

But like, tragic poets that do a murder suicide. It's also an abhorrent thing to do. It's taking someone else's life against their will and then taking your own so that you don't face any consequences from that action. And yet, you can still enjoy the poetry they wrote, at least if enough time has passed.

I mean, there's also the knowledge that many of the great ancient philosophers probably owned slaves in ancient Greece.

It was just a normal thing back then.

But we don't say "fuck Aristotle that slave-owning bitch!" We still study his work and quote them to each other like it's just a normal thing.

(I don't know if Aristotle owned slaves. I'm just saying that chances are, amongst the ancient Greek philosophers, there were quite a few slave owners, and nobody makes a big deal of that)

So yeah, depending on what they did, you can separate the art from the artist, but if it were something that would get you lynched for non-racist reasons in the Old West, or that would cause people to cheer when the person that murdered you for your actions didn't receive any punishment, then maybe not.