According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law.
“Broadly, I don’t disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents,” said Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. “They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system.”
Artist that want to make money can preform or sell their work like they have always done. IP is about commercial interests like royalties and licensing. This has nothing to do with the actual promotion of arts and science. It is about control.
Most artist don’t do it to make money even. This confusion of expression and commercial interest is the crux of what we are dealing with.
There is no natural protection from someone copying, remixing, or reinventing your work. This is literally how art is made. No one creates in a vacuum and everyone is inspired by someone else.
There are already no protections for the little guy. Corporations borrow and use whatever they want. The IP system is NOT for the average person. It is designed to benefit and enrich an extreme minority and it does this well.
Doing something to make money and making enough from doing it to keep doing it full-time are two very different things, and I would argue the latter would be more difficult, not less under your proposed system. Yes, corporations do that already because they can throw enough money at the case to wear down the plaintiff into settling. But how much more do you think they would steal if they didn’t even have to do that?
Why do most people lock their doors at night? Do they really think that a piece of metal stuck in a slab of wood would stop any thief who really wants to get in? No, of course not. But the amount of effort and risk required is enough of a deterrent that most thieves won’t bother.
Copyright law is similar in my eyes. Will it stop a huge corporation that is willing to dump huge sums of money into any one case? Not really. But the effort and money involved is enough to deter them in most cases. Remove that they have no incentive not to steal work. Find a catchy song? Get one of the thousands of artists on contract to re-produce it to a T, send it to your millions of online viewers, and rack up 100k views in 12 hours. Congrats, you beat the artist to their 15 minutes of fame and any chance they could get at exposure, their potential earnings are yours now and it hasn’t even been a day. Any future web searches for the song will show you as well, so the original artist will likely be very quickly lost to time, and everyone remembers that one track the Capitol Records conglomerate put out that one time. That’s the kind of stuff I envision happening with literally no safeguards.
Exercising copyright in a court of law is extremely expensive. $250k+ minimum for a federal case. It is not a system designed for the artists you are describing.
In fact, it is just the opposite with corporations going after small artists regularly, not the other way around.
How has copyright been a deterrent to AI? This is a great case example of the system working as it is intended. Benefiting corporations which is what the system is designed to do.
Most major recording artists do not own their works. Where is their protection? The system is once again not designed for the individual.
Copyright was designed to create artificial scarcity. It was created out of the guilds back in England and was designed to censor and control the printing industry NOT protect authors rights.
While I will admit copyright is the most palatable of the Intellectual Properties it is still extremely problematic and we would be better off without it.
Don’t even get me started on patents and trademarks and the abuse these system perpetrate on our society. There is doubt the elimination of intellectual property would be beneficial to our society at the detriment of the rent-seeking capitalists.
Unless someone who’s more famous than you decides to just steal it and put their name on it.
Oh well I guess. Back to the drawing board so it can happen again! Any day now, we’ll be a communist society with no need for money, so I’ll just keep putting out music to be stolen until then!
Corporations already do this everyday.