• shneancy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    15 hours ago

    though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…

    which happens anyway, but uh, i guess it’d happen more?

    honestly idk, let’s do a test run of a year without any copyright laws and see if anything changes like at all

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      12 hours ago

      though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…

      It’s very difficult for some small independent creator to take a big corporation successfully to court. Imagine going up against The Mouse or someone similar with a lawyer paid for by your legal insurance. You might as well just not do it at all.

      The same thing is even worse with patents. I made a few things that I could patent. But for that I’d have to cough up a few thousands per year, roughly 100k over the life-time of the patent, and in turn I only get the right to sue someone violating my patent. I don’t even get the guarantee that my patent is valid.

      Patents are designed exactly so that big corporations can use them excessively to suppress smaller competitors while they are too expensive and too uncertain for small inventors to use them.

      • shneancy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        11 hours ago

        yeah at first i wanted to say “corporation” and “individual” but that’s not an equal playing field at all. So i just switched my woring to “bigger” thinking of idk, a writer in the same field who has a bigger following than you

        i didn’t even get into the patents part because i’d be ranting about Adobe for hours again, and i already spend too much time thinking about them

        edit: but then i said corporation anyway lol, i blame the fact i just woke up when i was writing that comment

    • e$tGyr#J2pqM8v@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      13 hours ago

      one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court

      I’m against the notion that ideas can be stolen. I mean, you can keep an idea to yourself, choose not to share it, but if you share your ideas in whatever shape or form, it’s there for others to do with as they please. Or atleast, despite that not being the case, in my opinion, that’s how it should be. You can of course disagree, but in my view the idea that the first one to come up with an idea, can plant a flag on it and then own this idea, is not helpful. Rather it is limiting, it is holding us back. I think humanity as a whole functions better if we can use eachothers ideas as we please. Humanity functions by copying eachothers behavior and ideas and occasionally improving on them. Like with FOSS, if an idea is improperly executed or can be improved upon, even if just according to some, it is helpful, that the idea can be forked.

      Like I said, I prefer to focus on patent law first, rather than copyright law. But fundamentally I think there is no difference.