*ducks*
The last two are not mutually exclusive
No. Let’s take Harry Potter.
I acknowledge JK Rowling’s role as creator of the franchise as well as her current devolvement into this transphobe asshole that she is. The material itself is to my knowledge not transphobe (it doesn’t mention transitioning or trans persons itself, and could maybe even be viewed as pro-trans with the whole polyjuice stuff).
So I know the source of this work and can thus be cautious about potential transphobe parts
Her work is (ignoring her) a very popular piece of culture and we as a community should thus be able to extend it further, thus making it a community effort and slowly releasing it from the grasp of Rowling.
So both can work together.
I will not go into more detail about HP or JKR to save us all time.
Second this, especially considering how the mix of public concepts that directly inspired Rowling create a world that is actually very queer suited regardless of her ability to recognise so.
I hope we can one day walk away from her copyright and build a proper public domain magical universe but for now we have to deal with the copyrighted version as the only one that is given a budget for large media formats.
We can also celebrate the input of individual artists working on this media that extends the creators vision beyond her input that we must remain skeptical about.
- True: so attribution is a must
- True: so attribution is a must
- 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
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.
You make a good point, like copyright rules were supposed to protect the small people, the artists that actually make the work, but an entire cottage industry has grown up around the idea of copyright to fund businesses to make absurd amounts of money and to punish people for enjoying the art in a way that does not produce the most profit for the copyright owner.
For instance, I would argue that nintendo fan art and derivatives of things like Mario have done more to enshrine Nintendo as one of the premier game companies in the world than most of their games have themselves, and yet Nintendo is ridiculously litigious over its IP, either suing or threatening to sue dozens if not hundreds of people over making derivative fan art over their love of the IP.
It’s actually why I’m boycotting Nintendo, not because they’ve done anything to me, but they’ve done things to their superfans that are in my mind so egregious that they are not deserving of money from me.
Over time*
Overtime means extra work
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.
Excellent point!
Statue of Anne gang! Avast ye!
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 like the idea of remembering who came up with stuff…
but yes, copyright bad, i want to draw legal MLP comics.
Agreed, attribution should be a must
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.
Atill owned, still laws. Will be used to abuse. Why pretend justice can exist in capital?
Point of order, shouldn’t the images in this meme be reversed for this community? (Monocle Poo looking pretty bourgeois…)
I was actually considering that lol, but I thought it might create context confusion for which perspective was being framed as the most “enlightened”
yesyes the tux pooh would have to be sad and bored while regular pooh would be happy to be a bear <3
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.
“fuck Aristotle that slave-owning bitch!”
This made me laugh out loud because I actually once knew an armchair anarchist who felt this way hahaha
Philosophy conversations with him were always fun
(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)
You’re in luck, Aristotle was indeed a slavery apologist, if not a slaver himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_slavery
He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them. In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue (and this is a union which is formed, not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves), and of natural ruler and subject, that both may be preserved. For that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest.
Seeing then that the state is made up of households, before speaking of the state we must speak of the management of the household. The parts of household management correspond to the persons who compose the household, and a complete household consists of slaves and freemen.
Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.
Aristotle sought to reinforce the idea of slavery as inherent to the natural order of the world; that some people were pre-defined to be slaves by innate characteristics that separated them from a “master”-class (of which he was a member).
(Source for quotes: https://historyofeconomicthought.mcmaster.ca/aristotle/Politics.pdf)
