The mom and pop capitalist is not your problem, Limited Liable Corporations are the problem.
Copyright
I often find there is a lot of confusion wrt copyright.
The goal of copyright is to protect musicians, authors, programmers, painters …. and help them earn money through the derivatives of their work mostly.
I was always a fan of this essay http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/license_free.html
Well there’s the rub of copyright law, what you can’t do without the copyright holder’s permission:
you can’t redistribute the software
especially, you can’t redistribute modified versions of the software
Those limitations are also sound I think. You can always distribute patches, under your own copyright. The issue is not private distribution but public distribution.
User can always download original software from the authors site + patches from your site. You can also charge money for your patches. People did this before open source was coined.
I also think having a domain restriction can help people make sure only authentic copies are distributed.
What then is the problem with copyright as such ?
Limited Liable Companies buying authors copyright for perpetuity and screwing the original authors.
A simple reformation for copyright law could be something along the lines of
1. Authors keep the copyright for perpetuity. If deceased it will pass on to their legal heirs.
2. Companies only get non-exclusive rights to distribute and the author can revoke them at will.
This should keep companies in check or any AI training data centers.
Authors and their heirs never lose their copyright.
Let’s call this copytop.
Patents
Often the rhetoric suggests, well what if you patent an addition and sorting aren’t they fundamental ?
Floating point addition has patents. If people spend their time and energy on it, they should get a patent and earn some royalties for it.
The problem is not “patents” but corporations that buy and sell patents as if they own it. They don’t, people own things. The same rule as the above can be applied here as well, no one can rob the inventor of any patent. Most inventors can charge a reasonable fee for that. Price can always be calculated in terms of how much salary-months you have put it and negotiated on demand.
Artificial scarcity is created by exclusive distribution rights.
Trademarks
Trademarks ensure business integrity is maintained and you don’t get fake products. Its really for helping business people maintain their brand and for consumers to know what they are getting is correct. Trademarks are an important part of being a part of a franchise, like Red Hat Training center / VideoLAN partner or Mc Donalds. Trademark can apply to any non-profit as well so that no one can steal funds. I think its a a great legal mechanism. Words like license only make sense with trademarks and franchises, not software licenses which is another sham.
If you don’t own a trademark – any one can start a business / charity in your name and operate it fraudulently. A bitcoin scammer can do that as well. Without a trademark there is no legal way to enforce anything. Real world doesn’t care about domain names or manifestos or GitHub licenses. Self policing only works in a small unit.
What does the business stand for ?
The same also applies to a community, what does a community stand for ? How can it be maintained ?
DRM / Trusted Computing
FOSDEM 2018 – Sancus 2.0: Open-Source Trusted Computing for the IoT
It’s really not that bad. Hardware based public key basically.
Copyleft
Its a sham. Every piece of software must “open”. Critical software can’t be open … otherwise thieves. The corollary … every database should be open ?
Whether it is capitalism or communism or any other ism …. people are selling a vision of a potential future, a post death insurance scam in certain cases. It fundamentally creates a hierarchical relationship between managers of the vision and the people who put in the work …which again is exploitable. So many people put in the work for that vision only to feel cheated in the end.
The “Now” is apparently unbearable, but in the future it will all be fixed.
I truly think lowly of 18th century intellectuals who can’t do spreadsheet math. Europeans were using Roman Numerals till 16th century so should we really be learning economics from 18th century intellectuals ? The entire world must forever and ever listen to those clowns ?
I think a new form of “open source company” can sort problems with corporations. I could probably justify that using Anarcho-Syndicalist literature or pagan sources. It doesn’t require much work. You can give it enough incentives in the government to make people abandon Limited Liable Corporations and opt people to do Liable Open and Transparent Companies. Guilds but modernized.
One can imagine a market place where people of all kinds can register their copyrights, trademarks and file complaints all for a straightforward fee, protected by a central authority.
Of course one can also consider that the central authority is corrupt and awards fraudulent copyrights. In which case, what next ?
Frankly the word Anarchist is a bad name. I prefer the word Autarchy.
- Self-sufficiency
- Responsibility
- P2P or Group to Group
but then again I would be selling a vision of the future. Well I think its worth a shot.
Music Industry
Music is full dr*gs, pimps, fakes, lip syncing and people-in-it-just-for-the-money. I have actually seen supposedly indie artists, hit the play button and lip sync and fake the guitar. So many unnecessary deaths.
So many famous people ghost write, steal songs and take ideas from other cultures.
DJs have somehow become rockstars, the people who don’t even compose music but merely play latest hits. And now there is PJ .. people who will just enter prompts.
Frankly AI has its uses … it is a new way to search + summarize. It’s great in small bits and pieces but it doesn’t touch an Artists creation and their handiwork.
Not to mention venue people who pay as low as they can because its a buyers market. Artists who don’t understand what a buyers market is, shouldn’t enter the industry at all. Of course thanks to AI more jobs might enter the buyers market, artists being doubly pressured.
How can we sustain Art in a post-AI world ?