The Consoomer Menace

[CarlManvers2019]

You can’t sue people who have more money than you. So if Disney really wanted to steal ideas from the Sietch, they could do so with impunity.

Back when I was much younger, I used to watch lots of Disney cartoons with Mickey and the rest there

Nowadays I somehow only have one real idea of Mickey Mouse



Also, speaking of big corporations, is it me or they’re REALLY disconnected from the fans or actively ignore their complaints and barely do quality control beforehand

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

You can’t sue people who have more money than you.

Now see, I know you don't actually believe that, because if you actually do the only reasonable response is violent uprising.

And if you think this sort of absurd statement is remotely believable I want you to do a quick little google.

 

[S'task]

Furthermore, copyright laws never apply to the little guy because the little guy usually doesn't have the money to copyright a ton of different things.

You can’t sue people who have more money than you. So if Disney really wanted to steal ideas from the Sietch, they could do so with impunity.

Firstly, copyright is automatic and requires no filing. The minute that you put words on paper in a unique way, it's copyrighted to you. This makes it unique among intellectual property laws, as all other forms (Patents and Trademarks) DO require registering.

And on the second quote, no they couldn't. In fact, them stealing original ideas from something posted here would be a lawyer's wet dream. The entire copyright system is, in fact, premised on protecting the little guy from the big guy. That is the entire origination point of copyright as a matter of fact, it was to prevent big city printing houses from taking something written in a smaller market and distributed by a local printing house and just printing it in their big city while cutting out the original publisher and writer.

Yes, modern copyright laws have been DISTORTED against this original purpose, with copyrights extending so long, but at the end of the day, I can guarantee you if Disney or any other large corporation stole original fiction from someone online, the copyright lawyers would be lining up to take the case and argue it in the courts. Why? Firstly, being a lawyer who successfully takes on a megacorp and wins a clearcut copyright case looks GREAT on a resume. Secondly, the payout could potentially be quite lucrative and the lawyer would get a cut.

And yes, Disney HAS uses "other people's stories", stories that are explicitly in the public domain and mostly ones that are so old that either nobody knows who even told the original story anymore. Advocating the elimination of copyright just makes EVERYTHING public domain, and removes what little protections people DO have. In fact, elimination of copyright would only encourage more people to simply be consumers, as by eliminating it, you undercut people's ability to be producers of creative works, as, after all, in order to be productive producing creative works, one must be able to make a profit off those works, and if you cannot control the distribution of the creative work you created, you cannot effectively profit off it.

For someone so concerned with people not being producers, you seem to be very much against one of the main ways of protecting producers from malignant consumers who would put no effort and simply steal from producers.

 

[The Name of Love]

For someone so concerned with people not being producers, you seem to be very much against one of the main ways of protecting producers from malignant consumers who would put no effort and simply steal from producers.

That's because I don't believe there's any evidence that copyright law actually incentivizes creation in any way. Also, I do believe that any profit that comes from copyright is a form of rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the very opposite of productivity. It's sitting back and letting the money roll in. It's theft.

 

[Morphic Tide]

That's because I don't believe there's any evidence that copyright law actually incentivizes creation in any way.

Would you actually be willing to pour weeks of carefully considered effort into painstakingly building every little detail of a setting if you knew that the instant you mention any facet of it in public, every single one of those pieces will be immediately used by other people to make money?

Also, I do believe that any profit that comes from copyright is a form of rent-seeking.

Including the simple fact that it's our system for making it so that the creator actually has any degree of lasting control over what they made, so they can actually be the one selling their work?

Rent-seeking is the very opposite of productivity. It's sitting back and letting the money roll in. It's theft.

I'm curious. Do you consider license fees, where the original creator of something has their price be a periodic payment for ongoing use, to be a form of "rent seeking"? Does this notion extend to the concept of subscription fees, where access to an online connection for a particular title is tied to a periodic payment?

Where's your line for "rent-seeking"? It's a very important question, for intellectual property (stories, drawings, videos, etc.), as we live in an age where the scarcity of information is virtually nonexistent. Any purely informational product is functionally unlimited in supply once initially made, so where's the line for seeking payment for your work on something that's only data becoming "rent-seeking", for you?

The entire notion of art that's video or audio in nature holding material value has been massively damaged by the functionally unlimited replication of information, because there's nearly zero work in replication. Once initially made, the supply of an image or sound is unlimited for all practical purposes. How do you monetize the initial creation without an "arbitrary" restriction of access, if it is, effectively, replicable in perpetuity to the whole of the world for negligible cost?

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

Normally I'd be peeved over this thread getting pretty badly derailed by a debate over the efficacy of copyright law, but this is an issue I don't have a solid opinion on and both of you seem to be making good points and I'm learning a lot, so I personally am willing to let it slide, That said, I don't know what The Sietch's policy on thread derails is, and we may already be violating it. Perhaps it would be prudent to make a new thread for this discussion?

 

[Duke Nukem]

I

Normally I'd be peeved over this thread getting pretty badly derailed by a debate over the efficacy of copyright law, but this is an issue I don't have a solid opinion on and both of you seem to be making good points and I'm learning a lot, so I personally am willing to let it slide, That said, I don't know what The Sietch's policy on thread derails is, and we may already be violating it. Perhaps it would be prudent to make a new thread for this discussion?

I can make one, what should the title be?

 

[S'task]

Normally I'd be peeved over this thread getting pretty badly derailed by a debate over the efficacy of copyright law, but this is an issue I don't have a solid opinion on and both of you seem to be making good points and I'm learning a lot, so I personally am willing to let it slide, That said, I don't know what The Sietch's policy on thread derails is, and we may already be violating it. Perhaps it would be prudent to make a new thread for this discussion?

I

I can make one, what should the title be?

Or I can just abuse my powers and pulls the posts into their own thread, give me a minute.

 

[S'task]

Alright, I've copied the copyright discussion over to it's own thread. Because of the way some of the discussion was entwined, I had to leave the posts in here too. As such folks, please take the copyright discussion to the new thread and return more to the original topic here.

 

[The Name of Love]

@S'task I'm not going to talk about it any more anyways. There's no arguing with these people.

 

[Arch Dornan]

Why were you so bored as a child, first of all? Didn’t you have interests?

General interests like any normal child have.

I just want it for moments where I have to wait with no access to the computer or gaming platform.

I remember having to wait long hours for a bus to come and I'd scream at my mom to say when can we go home?

The worst is fighting for the TV. I wanted to watch Cartoon Network but they needed to use it.

With a phone and access to at least kiwifarms I'd have shut up real quick.

 

[The Name of Love]

General interests like any normal child have.

I just want it for moments where I have to wait with no access to the computer or gaming platform.

I remember having to wait long hours for a bus to come and I'd scream at my mom to say when can we go home?

The worst is fighting for the TV. I wanted to watch Cartoon Network but they needed to use it.

With a phone and access to at least kiwifarms I'd have shut up real quick.

I’m just saying... I was limited in my computer time growing up, and I wasn’t bored.

 

[Arch Dornan]

I’m just saying... I was limited in my computer time growing up, and I wasn’t bored.

You're just not as attached to the magic fun box.

 

[LordsFire]

@S'task I'm not going to talk about it any more anyways. There's no arguing with these people.

When your 'argument' is based on making statements that are not just factually false, but that others here have personal experience with being factually false, and then trying to construct a logic chain based on that...

Yeah, people aren't going to give your arguments any credence. Because they so obviously have no merit.

 

[The Name of Love]

When your 'argument' is based on making statements that are not just factually false, but that others here have personal experience with being factually false, and then trying to construct a logic chain based on that...

Yeah, people aren't going to give your arguments any credence. Because they so obviously have no merit.

Please stop trying to bait me. I know you want to have this argument you know you can win. But I don't. The argument will basically boil down to whether the empirical evidence of whether copyright increases creativity, and that's not something you can empirically measure. So what's the point?

 

[LordsFire]

Please stop trying to bait me. I know you want to have this argument you know you can win. But I don't. The argument will basically boil down to whether the empirical evidence of whether copyright increases creativity, and that's not something you can empirically measure. So what's the point?

I have made a post responding to this. It's here on the new thread that was made for this topic.

 

[prinCZess]

To steer the rudder back to the topic, and also attempt to restrain my urge to purple-prose:

Consumption of media/entertainment/etc. products is a natural human trait that appeals to the imagination, and has obvious uses as a stress relief method. It's just as natural as the production of those same things in any variety of contexts (not everyone is an author or singer by trade, but folks sing in the shower, or doodle while they're on hold, or what-have-you).

Too far into the 'rabbit hole' can be unhealthy as one cedes real-life work, interaction, and self-help or self-care to excessive indulgent in entertainment for that 'stress relief' feeling. Becoming too puritanical in assessing this line gets you the...puritan-style...disdain for creative works in general or human expression in art and music. The latter is, arguably, the attitude that's had undue sway in the last decades--particularly in the US where it does line up with some of that 'protestant work ethic' stereotypology and the general skepticism of the esoteric or expressive in favor of the physical that has something of a history here. Probably a matter that plays into different societies dominant cultural attitudes--and, somewhat ironically, the 'anti-consumer' message broadly present in this criticism also gets some play in the hippy, counter-culture-y messaging from back in the day (who shifted the consumption to psychadelic rock instead!) so...*shrug*

 

[Certified_Heterosexual]

In a slight tangent, but one which I feel is still relevant to the topic, Reddit has recently announced their worst policy yet:

Reddit will now start warning and banning posters for upvoting "policy-breaking content," where the "policy" is Whatever We Feel Like. Just a few hours after this announcement Reddit had already sent out a mass wave of such warnings, as follows:

Not that these "policies" would have ever been reasonable anyways— but notice how these warnings don't even allege which "policies" are being broken. You "engaged" with "abusive content," you better start "making changes" for "healthier behavior"— or else.

This is what makes the character of our Western corporate thought police "totalitarian"— they are never through with you. They are not satisfied if you simply acquiesce to their rules. You need to be made to believe in the rules yourself. There will be wide room for you to debate the latest capeshit or capeshit-adjacent film and upfloof heckin pupperinos, but that is your only freedom— the freedom to consoom product. The boundaries of acceptable discussion will never be spelled out this clearly— in classic corporate Newspeak, the admins even declaim all responsibility: they've "been alerted" of your activity. The notice of your transgressions merely appeared to them from on high, they are only the middle managers interpreting the strange and precarious whims of fate.

Of course in practice they can't really stop people from votecrime, it's really a ridiculous concept and hardly worth the time it takes to criticize. I could be out lesson planning or working out or working on my novel instead of wasting my time here. But I think it matters in a small way, it betrays the very ugly spirit of a small soul, and serves as a reminder that there is no transgression too petty for our vindictive keyboard warrior janitors. If this is any indication of future trends, the Chinese government hasn't gone far enough— it is only cancelling the dissidents who speak out. Soon it will have to cancel the dissidents who listen in, too.

Reddit and China and the WHO are all of one spirit— we've disappointed them. Why did we fail them, didn't we know better? Bertolt Brecht famously said of the Soviets that they could always dissolve the people and elect another. Today we go further— we must dissolve the person— and then what?

 

[Deleted member 88]

The idea is less I think to get people to actually believe in their nostrums, and more to be intimidated into silence. Even upvoting is a form of speaking online.

Its a form of intimidation most of all, designed to smother opposition. And choke it out.

 

[Duke Nukem]

In a slight tangent, but one which I feel is still relevant to the topic, Reddit has recently announced their worst policy yet:

Reddit will now start warning and banning posters for upvoting "policy-breaking content," where the "policy" is Whatever We Feel Like. Just a few hours after this announcement Reddit had already sent out a mass wave of such warnings, as follows:

Not that these "policies" would have ever been reasonable anyways— but notice how these warnings don't even allege which "policies" are being broken. You "engaged" with "abusive content," you better start "making changes" for "healthier behavior"— or else.

This is what makes the character of our Western corporate thought police "totalitarian"— they are never through with you. They are not satisfied if you simply acquiesce to their rules. You need to be made to believe in the rules yourself. There will be wide room for you to debate the latest capeshit or capeshit-adjacent film and upfloof heckin pupperinos, but that is your only freedom— the freedom to consoom product. The boundaries of acceptable discussion will never be spelled out this clearly— in classic corporate Newspeak, the admins even declaim all responsibility: they've "been alerted" of your activity. The notice of your transgressions merely appeared to them from on high, they are only the middle managers interpreting the strange and precarious whims of fate.

Of course in practice they can't really stop people from votecrime, it's really a ridiculous concept and hardly worth the time it takes to criticize. I could be out lesson planning or working out or working on my novel instead of wasting my time here. But I think it matters in a small way, it betrays the very ugly spirit of a small soul, and serves as a reminder that there is no transgression too petty for our vindictive keyboard warrior janitors. If this is any indication of future trends, the Chinese government hasn't gone far enough— it is only cancelling the dissidents who speak out. Soon it will have to cancel the dissidents who listen in, too.

Reddit and China and the WHO are all of one spirit— we've disappointed them. Why did we fail them, didn't we know better? Bertolt Brecht famously said of the Soviets that they could always dissolve the people and elect another. Today we go further— we must dissolve the person— and then what?

Reddit seems to going full 1984 .