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.
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.