Why copyright over any digital media is a nonsense

All digital data are just numbers, a series of 1's and 0's, a long string of digits - in other words any digitalized media are just large numbers. If you digitalize a movie for example, you basically turn it into a large number. But if those data are just large numbers, how can you claim copyright over them? It is equivalent to trying to patent the number 10 and then require everybody who uses the number 10 to pay you royalties. Imagine if everybody patented a number and then schools would have to pay these patent trolls for being allowed to use those numbers to teach kids math. Ridiculous, isn't it? Well, the copyright of any digital media is just as ridiculous, since if you digitalize something, it becomes just a number. So claiming copyright of any digital data is basically just a number patent trolling. No one can own digital media, because you cannot own a number. Because you didn't create that number. That number always existed. It is part of the Universe. You merely wrote that number down. If you digitalized your movie, then what you did was just writing down a large number that under some circumstances can be used to reconstruct your movie. But does that mean that you own that number? Does that mean that you can claim ownership rights over that number? Of course not! That would be insane! That would mean that anybody could claim ownership of any number by simply writing it down! Would you really want to live in such a world? Well, you do live in such a world. Copying any digital data is never a theft. You are not removing anything from anybody, you are merely making a copy of a number. Just because that number can be used to reconstruct a copy of someone's movie, doesn't mean that person can restrict you from using that number. The concept of ownership makes sense only in terms of physical items. Extending it to the realm of ideas and numbers is pure madness. It is an unjust system and can potentially cause many unforeseen consequences.

That is irrelevant. There is an alien race out there and it will destroy us unless we destroy them first. With copyright we are promoting progress and increasing our chances of being ahead of them. Without copyright we get lazy parasites that sit on their asses all day doing nothing. Your philosophy is one of death. If you want to waste your life, then those that want to live - the people of the state - may as well rush it up for you and fuarrrk you while preventing you from contaminating other lives.

>>11759 > With copyright we are promoting progress and increasing our chances of being ahead of them. Silly utilitarian argument, that promotes an unjust law system in order to boost "progress". The laws should be about justice, not usefulness. > Without copyright we get lazy parasites that sit on their asses all day doing nothing. Absolutely ungrounded claim.

>>11759 Also I find your world-view that the life is all about eternal conflict where races have to annihilate other races deeply disturbing. And I won't even go into the obvious hypocrisy of yours talking about "lazy parasites that sit on their asses all day doing nothing" while you are well known on imageboards as a person who sits all day in front of a computer and spaming imageboards with storm user soykaf.

>>11759 Sorry, but um, what about the people we need to get rid of on earth first? You, for example, are an enemy of mine. I would side with aliens and willingly let them take resources from the earth if they would help me get rid of you and many of my other enemies. Why should I be their enemy? They aren't the ones who have slighted me like many people on earth have.

>>11757 Agreed. Copyright is a ridiculous thing that we accept only because its become normalized. Its fuarrrked up.

Remember certain combinations of 0s and 1s can put you in jail! You can make anything sound ridiculous with abstractions. >the laws should be about justice What do you think laws are for exactly? Some of us live in the real world; we have to. “An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU Emacs would never make a good program.” -Linus

>>11757 Using your logic we can also say that software license like GPL are also ridiculous. A programmer who writen some code isn't it's owner because all he done is write a really big number of 1 and 0. So using your logic it's OK for the big companies to just take that code and use it in there properity software. Of course the company shouldn't copyright that software(as it's nonsense) but it could produce a product that needs it monthly subscrbtion fee to work. So you end in a world were if you want to play your video game you have to pay, if you want to use your Windows OS you need to pay, and it's all build on free software. There could be a different outcome to this of course. Companies would just stop producing anything because a job of a companie is to make profit. If they wouldn't be able to make profit out of a product then they would just cease to exist. And that means all that money pumped in the industrie is gone, progress ia at a halt. There are always two sides of a coin, always look on the other side.

>>11757 Sorry for a double post but I would like to add that >But if those data are just large numbers, how can you claim copyright over them? It is equivalent to trying to patent the number 10 and then require everybody who uses the number 10 to pay you royalties. >Imagine if everybody patented a number and then schools would have to pay these patent trolls for being allowed to use those numbers to teach kids math. This argument is completely wrong, as we are humans and we understend the difference (most of us) between number 10 and a movie writen as a big number. The creators of Candy Crush Saga tried that (to trademark the word Saga to prevent Stoic from using that word in the title Banner Saga) and it didn't work so it won't work with copyrighting number 10 in that way to tke money from schools.

But copyright has never been about regulating the medium by which media is produced with. Copyright law isn't about awarding people the rights to a big number, in the same way that Shakespeare wouldn't have been awarded the exclusive rights to paper, ink and all the words he put in order to make his plays. This is a really dumb argument Lain. A better argument is the following: Copyright law in the modern age is outdated as most of the handling for copyrights is NOT done by the producer of the work, whom these laws are supposed to protect, but rather are handled by corporations that abuse copyrights laws to award themselves monopolies and diminish the concept of fair use wherever a grey area lies. The result being the producer needs the legal might of a publisher in order to protect themselves from copyright litigation, in exchange for hugely reducing their rights to their own work. Meanwhile, the consumer has their rights removed by things like DRM, the inability to move purchased digital media between platforms, the inability to make backups where possible over re-purchasing media that the consumer was already licenced to view and finally enforcing profiteering on the consumer when the media typically creates its initial profit on consumption outside of internet downloads (TV shows are already profitised by advertising when first broadcast, Musicians get most of their money through gigs, Films are shown exclusively in cinemas for the first few months). Internet piracy should be decriminalised (or publisher rights severely diminished) because the concept of Copyright was created before the internet was even something imaginable, and media still gets most of its money through other means anyway. Digital Copyright laws serve only to harm the producer and the consumer, for the benefit of media profiteering rackets.

LIGHT AND LIFE Lars Olof Bjorn 1976 Page 197 "By writing the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain order one may put down almost any message (this book 'is written with the same letters' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Winnie the Pooh, only the order of the letters differs). In the same way Nature is able to convey with her language how a cell and a whole organism is to be constructed and how it is to function. Nature has succeeded better than we humans; for the genetic code there is only one universal language which is the same in a man, a bean plant and a bacterium." I understand what you are saying, but it's not the numbers themselves that are being copyrighted, it's the creative and unique way someone organizes them that is.

One step further: IP itself is in complete contradiction with the way ideas fundamentally work. There isn't a way to get around this fact. There are no original ideas. New ideas require theft and recombination of old ideas. 100% of the time. Always have. The system of IP only adds an artificial delay to the progress of ideas by making people wait for patents to expire, prices to drop, estates to die off, etc. etc. for the sake of mass-scale RIGHTS HOLDERS (not inventors or creators--inventors very rarely hold the rights to their own ideas) to make a soykafload of money off work they didn't do. The idea that IP protects the livelihoods of the actual creators is just a rationale to sell this obviously flawed system. The inventor making money off their own patents is a mythical creature that hasn't been around in significant numbers since the nineteenth century; a truly profitable musician that owns their own IP instead of giving them up via contract to a label in exchange for management is almost nonexistent. IP is a grift, a con; always has been. Almost all of humanity's IP is held by a few billionaire hoarders and conglomerates and shady east Texas patent troll sociopaths. It's a crock of soykaf and was never meant to work for the betterment of society through meritocratic hard work and innovation.

>>11759 lol. How is copyright promoting progress again? Oh yeah, because it's the incentive that makes smart people create new things--some load of utter dog-cock like that, right? Asinine. Brilliant creators always do what they do out of something akin to mania; they feel compelled to pursue their art, and the lucrative career it becomes is often just a tertiary bonus to them. You realize there's loads of technology that suddenly comes into the spotlight the second some old VC's (secondhand) patent expires, right? Like the VR/AR revolution that's been happening. That's my line of work right now. There have been a few nice new bits of electronics that help out, sure, but we've had 6dof tracking systems and flat-panel displays and optics like this around since the late nineties. I worked with a prototype in 2002 that was almost as good as what we have now. Wanna guess why nobody did anything with it for twenty years and then it suddenly blew up everywhere at once? A patent expired. That's it. Utter shame. This happens fuarrrking constantly. You'd be amazed how often tech that seems to laymen like a revolutionary black swan is actually something that could have had decades of polish by now, but really everyone was just kind of sitting on their hands waiting out a patent held by some idiotically greedy troop of lawyers who set the price of licensing the ideas way too high. Ideas, by the way, that the current owners had nothing to do with. They just buy them at a fire sale from some tinkerer's startup when they got fed up and wanted to try something else. That's usually how it really works.

>Most Japanese artists don't care about publicity or popularity. They draw for the sake of drawing and expressing creativity. A lot of artists will either go private by locking their work behind a locked Twitter account or a paywall like Fantia or Pixiv FANBOX or quit drawing all together when they see things like their art being reposted elsewhere, like Americans who repost it to a booru site. They really hate that. One of my favorite artists I follow basically purged their entire Pixiv/Nijie catelog when they saw people reposing their art and now only draws for a select few fans. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=5094858

I could argue people are just atoms in motion. Not any more significant than the ground you walk on. Murder should be legal. Not the most perfect comparison, but you get my point.

>>11920 I'm gonna go ahead and say that although I don't think IP should be a thing, people are significant and murder shouldn't be something you're allowed to do 🤷

>>11920 >Murder should be legal. Not the most perfect comparison, but you get my point. Wow, someone have some strange moral ground in here...

>>11920 Wow yeah I think taking a human life isn't even similar.

The simple answer is as thus : If you own it. Protect it. If you make it. Protect it. If you want to sell it. Protect it. If you dont.... someone else will. And never in the way YOU want. Is it the best system? No. Art should be free in all forms. Is it the next best thing in today's world? ....No. But I don't see any ingovernment right now trying to fix it. .... Guess we should just be happy that there even is a damn copyright system huh? God forbid the morning we don't have it .... gonna be hell for the art world. .

>>11757 >If you digitalized your movie, then what you did was just writing down a large number that under some circumstances can be used to reconstruct your movie. It's about the concept of emergent property.

Intellectual property is not the problem, DRM is. Goods should be able to be sold, gifted, rented or loaned. Any license that is not perpetual should provide clear and precise conditions or date for the expiration. Because IP law is good when it protects from exploitation by a non right-holder. However, non lucrative sharing is not exploitation and within the purview of your full enjoyment of the product you acquired.

>>11968 It really wouldn't be hell for the art world. It would be hell for large rights holders, and by hell I mean they would be slightly less lucratively rich. As someone who pays the rent with art--and has had IP stolen--it really doesn't hurt my bottom line. The only people who would ever buy it still do. Only now some people who would have never been exposed to my stuff occasionally get to, and I guess some guy in Vietnam made a few bucks passing it off as his own. Whatever, kinda silly but it's honestly not killing me.

>>11977 >As someone who pays the rent with art--and has had IP stolen--it really doesn't hurt my bottom line. The only people who would ever buy it still do. I don't know you so I will guess that we are talking about some digital art in this case and that the people who still buy art from you (event that it was stolen before) are companis that just don't want to have any legal problems. So for them it's easier to give you a few bucks and legaly be allowed to use the art you made. Now lets think about a situation where a company is given a choice: A. Buy the art from the author B. Take the art and do with it anything they like for FREE and LEGALY! How do you think that would end like? OK, but lets say that this company really wants to give the artist some money to show that he done some grate job. And lets assume that there is a person that isn't as nice as the company. He can take the art that the artist created, pose as the author and sell it as if it's his creation. Again all of this would be legal and the real author could even try to fight this. I'm not a artis but this is my take on the situation. Overall I would agree with >>11970 that DRM is a bigger problem then copyright.

>>11977 How do I commission lain to work for me? I got my best design so far off 4chan. But whenever I go into art communities on any website (including 4chan) everyone seems to hate each other so it's hard to communicate in an honest way.

>>11880 Which is why their art is crap most of the time. There are plenty of non-Japanese people who actually learned from a teacher, draw for others and in professional environments, and guess what, their art isn't crap most of the time. Training and sharing is the source of progress. That a bunch of autists are so protective of their art that they don't mind drowning in mediocrity is laughable, not wise. Googly eyes are not enough.

>>12001 That's really more a function of terrible shoestring budgets and a culture of extreme overwork than anything else. But either way, they don't own their work and don't get paid enough--yet they still do it. IP is a sham.

I would rather die than share anything will the likes of you.

>>11983 Well most of my work is custom-made for a specific application, so they need to contract me for the specific product they need to come into existence at all. So they can't really steal it anyway. A lot of IP pans out like this. I mean the argument isn't entirely academic--there are countries that don't respect our IP laws and rip off our stuff and sell it as if IP didn't exist. Yet the world still works. IP serves to enrich rights hoarders like Disney far more often than it defends the livelihood of individual creators. It does more harm than good, but the people it does good for have tons of lobbying power as special interests so you see them unfairly acquiring more rights without proper process (See Getty Images. They shamelessly steal from creators and sell to legit companies who you'd think would want to avoid legal problems all the time, yet nothing comes of it.) and extend those rights to cover absurdly long time periods (Disney again). The common-sense explanation for IP as something that defends individuals is actually way more insignificant than we give it credit for, and it slows us down terribly as a society. Ideas have to be free and open to multiply and improve. For instance without open-source software we'd be way behind where we are today.

I agree that copyright and patents shouldn't exist. I don't really like trademarks, either. Currently, the best way to fight against this is to spread the idea and use extreme copyleft, such as the AGPLv3, I suppose. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is proof that playing the game by the rules simply leads them to attempt to change the rules, however, as there was a clause specifically attacking copyleft in it. >>11984 >How do I commission lain to work for me? I got my best design so far off 4chan. But whenever I go into art communities on any website (including 4chan) everyone seems to hate each other so it's hard to communicate in an honest way. If you're interested, I create abstract art and I may be able to do design work. Here's my main display: http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-02-12 I have my email attached to this post or you can simply reply here. It would be nice of you to turn me down explicitly, if you don't like it, rather than ignore, so I can know for certain. Attached is my favorite piece.

>>12068 Not much call for abstract, but I bookmarked it. Thanks!

>copyright of any digital data is basically just a number patent trolling You are conflating things that are totally different. You don't own a copyright in the same way you do a patent. A patent is first to invent wins. If we both invent an airplane independently, but you have the patent, I cannot sell my airplane without paying you royalties. A copyright is different. If you and I both write the exact same poem, we both have copyright if it can be proven that one was not copied from the other. Look into clean room designs. The problem you typically have with this is that it's very hard to prove you didn't copy a work and created it independently. You need a mountain of evidence to support your claim, because it's so unlikely that we would produce the exact same work independently.

>AGPLv3 I have sent many emails asking for the source of a AGPLv3 web app, yet no one replied. Even if they did, why should I trust that it wasn't tampered? The author would rather sell a copy instead of pursuing a judicial claim for infringement. This license is bullshit.

>>12132 >I have sent many emails asking for the source of a AGPLv3 web app, yet no one replied. If they provide a link to the version being used, they're not required to. The requirements are generally lesser if an unmodified version is being used, also. >Even if they did, why should I trust that it wasn't tampered? That's a good point, but if the program offers functionality not present elsewhere, then this is evidence. >The author would rather sell a copy instead of pursuing a judicial claim for infringement. If the author requires someone using it without following the license to buy a license exception instead of following the AGPLv3, that's their right, even if it's unfortunate. With regards to the positives, it's effectively a license that requires you to buy such an exception for certain uses, if one is even offered, which is better than permissively licensed software that doesn't do anything to prevent proprietary software and doesn't get paid for it. >This license is bullshit. The license seems legally enforceable, considering there are much stricter licenses that are easily enforced. At the least, large corporations are afraid to use it, which is nice. If you dislike the AGPLv3, then what do you recommend? I agree that copyright and patent law should be abolished, but do you have a different suggestion?

ye basically copyright is a stupid concept that we had to create because we can't fuarrrking behave ourselves well enough to get to enjoy the beauty of sharing. I guess that's like all of capitalism really.

This is what happens when you copy other's people stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkEUAhrV2lI

>>11757 That could be said for anything though. A book is just a series of letters, a drawing is just a collection of lines, music is just a series of tones, ect. It's not the numbers that are being copyrighted, it's what is produced when those numbers are fed to a computer. A company isn't only going to go after people who share mkv files of their movie, they're also going to go after people who share webms because, again, the number isn't what's being copyrighted.

>>12155 I used to think that until I became an artist myself. You can't do art full time if you're not making money off it. I agree that paying for digital media is silly, but I have bills to pay. The best compromise I've found is to keep my art timed exclusive to my patreon supporters and then release it for free a month later. I'd prefer to get payed simply for making art, but that's not real life