EDIT: This post is a joke! It was posted in /c/memes, of course it is going to be a meme! If you consider this news, please re-evaluate your choice of sources.
At the same time, I think it says something about Nintendo that some actually believed this…
I hope the ChatGPT and its siblings bring about the end of copyright. Unfortunately it’s more likely we’ll pervert the idea of personhood yet again and claim these things are people same as was done with corporations.
Happily an anarchist but also an artist, and I’m wondering why a complete lack of copyright would be a good thing.
Scenario A: I make a cool thing, it catches on, corpos with gajillions of dollars legally make tons of money off of it and leave me unable to pay rent and taking zero credit despite me doing all the actual work.
Scenario B: I make a cool thing, it catches on. It gets ripped off by everyone freely, and I’m left unable to pay rent and taking zero credit despite doing all the hard work. In fact, everyone who feels like it claims it as their own. I have zero recourse. This is all legal.
Scenario C: I’m a scuzzbag, so I copy-paste everyone else’s hard work onto various merch without their permission, pirate their software, make lots of money, cheat them out of the fruits of their labor. Except it’s all legal woo!
Scenario D: ChatGPT and its ilk have front-loaded all the theft, so now ripping off artists is transparently accessible to anyone who wants to pop in some “prompts” and claim they’re so creative. Hard-working artists are mocked as obsolete because their efforts were scraped and stolen. They struggle to pay rent and take no credit.
I hate copyright abuse (i.e Disney) as much as everyone else, but I also feel like the champions of “abolish copyright” want everything for free because they don’t make anything themselves, and creative efforts are just that: effort.
Those things happen, and unfortunately the law as it stands is stacked against “the little guy”, but I still struggle to understand how “Just let everyone rip each other off and it’s not even wrong anymore” while forced to survive a hustle-or-die economy, would be a beneficial development.
Artistry predates the industrial revolution and industrialized commercial artmaking as well…so…? It’ll just be a hobby? But only a hobby reserved for the ultra rich because everyone else who would have otherwise done it are to busy working for someone else?
I’m serious here. I’m training really hard as an artist, and being completely unable to pursue ANY recourse against theft seems like it wouldn’t improve anyone’s lives at all…except maybe the fan communities of particularly-litigious entertainment giants…
If someone just starts mass producing “This thing in MonkeMischief’s style”, why the heck would anybody bother in the first place? As if alienation, depression, and struggle to find meaningful expression weren’t abundant enough these days already…
I’ve still yet to get a response that explains how it would all get better. Just “lol you’re wrong and should feel bad.”
I get it, using stuff unrestricted for free is lots of fun, but making profit from it when someone else made that thing feels pretty lame…
I don’t know what to tell you that could satisfy your internal struggle here. If you have a style worth stealing it will be stolen. Copyright doesn’t protect that.
For what copyright does protect, it is only enforceable if you have the funds to protect it.
The system wasn’t designed for people like you, it was literally designed during the same time in which only the wealthy were able to peruse art. It was created to protected monied interests, not the commoner.
If you expect to make a living on your art, you need to plan to collect earnings up front. Commissioned work is exactly that.
This idea that you’re going to create some initial idea and then coast on it for life does not align with any reality.
Sometimes, if you create something new and interesting, you’ll end up with a following and they will fund your endeavors but there will still be copycats and you either waste your life perusing that or spend your life perusing your art. You cannot do both. Paying someone else to peruse your “rights” doesn’t change this equation, you’d be creating to fund the protection. Enforce it too hard and your fans will turn on you, as the original post here illustrates.
There is no winning move via copyright that leads to the land of riches. That’s the problem. That’s what copyright is bullshit.
It’s not designed to protect us but so long as the monied interests can convince us otherwise, we’ll go along with it like temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Always convinced if we’d play the game too, we could win.
The system is rigged and it’s not in your favor. Whatever appears to favor you is a facade meant of not to keep you playing the game.
Sincerely, thank you for explaining this perspective. You make a lot of really good points!
You’re right that it’s a mess out there and stuff will always get stolen. And no, I never expect to coast on anything for a lifetime, but I still think if we were to abolish copyright as it stands, there should still be something enforceable that benefits creators of works.
One who publishes a book or a game should accept piracy as a reality, but having zero recourse for say, anybody uploading your exact work a dozen times on Steam under their own names would be pretty terrible wouldn’t it?
If it were abolished out in the open, yeah, we’d basically need to not have to earn money anymore. Otherwise, there would simply be no point to anybody making anything.
We’re already seeing such a threat from un-checked ML scraping everything in existence.
Thank you so much for the valuable discourse. I hope you have an awesome day :).
(P.S: I think you meant “pursue” rather than “peruse”)
This meme’s older than the latest yuzu thing. I’m pretty sure I saw it on reddit, and I haven’t been there in months. Nintendo’s been like this forever.
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