copyright is theft

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So recently Sony has began expropriating Users who bought content on one of their digital store fronts. People purchased specific Movies and TV-seasons and Sony said because a backroom-deal fell through, they have to revoke that content. Hence copy-right negates personal property in a literal legally effective sense. Some Sony shills were trying to make the argument that people voluntarily accept the terms and conditions in the purchase agreements. That is of course a lie, because people never got asked if they voluntarily accept the fucked up copyright law that these anti-consumer agreements are based on.

The reaction of many people was fuck it, piracy (not the one that involves capturing ships) is now morally justified, i tend to agree except that it was already justified because of DRM. Since DRM expropriates the user and the basic argument of copyright-shills is property-rights for me but not for thee. There also is a moral case against giving these terrible distribution-monopolists money, because they used to pay lobbyists that make copyright law even more hostile to personal property. From a strategic perspective sailing past the anti-consumer features works alright but it doesn't affect anything else. The fucked up distribution monopolies persist.

For video games there is gog.com which sells drm free games, and that's basically how vidja publishing should be. It's not perfect, most of the games are closed source still. It would be better if at least the game-logic was made free and open source even if the game-assets remain non-free, so that modding would be easier. It's not clear to me why there doesn't appear to be a gog equivalent for drm free video.

In Poland there recently was an even more egregious case of buying without ownership. A Polish city bought trains and when they gave the maintenance service contract to a different company, the producers put out a malicious software update that made the train have random bugs. With the logic of return the service contract to us or else. I guess Poland should download a train.

So what is at the root of all of this ? I think it's about control. 50 years ago capitalists didn't give a shit what people did with the commodities they sold. Even the media industry didn't, it would have been possible to lock vinyl records to special record players and implement all sorts of fucked up anti-consumer features, but that didn't happen. I wonder what changed this, and turned these companies into these unbearable control freaks.

Is there a fix for this situation? Or do we just wait until good quality procedurally generated AI content makes the concept of copy-right moot. I for one am looking forward to watch Star Tussle with Danny Devito defeating the dimmed-side with his light-ax and of course the death-ball getting imploded. I'm guessing that Polish city could accuse that train-producer of attempted terror attacks against public infrastructure, to restore their ownership over the trains that way. But what about personal property ? As in users having control over their things. How can that be restored ? What is the politically effective method ?

mostly unrelated blast from the past
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=IOqxarVWKRs

Anonymous 2023-12-08 (Fri) 04:14:42 No.477132

Copy right is necessarys for capitalism to function properly. I am not against piracy, obviously, because I am a communist not some dumb lib or an ancap, but, I am just saying with out it you will transform the economy into some kind of shanasta chinese copy cat economy.

Anonymous 2023-12-08 (Fri) 19:08:22 No.477140

>>477132
>Copy right is necessarys for capitalism to function properly.
Are you sure about that ? There are plenty of capitalist companies that do not rely on prohibiting copying.
The purpose of copyright is to create a distribution monopoly, it benefits monopolists and a few adjacent industries like the dedicated copyright lawyers and stuff like drm-makers. The producers are at best not harmed by it, which given the amount of copyright trolling that is happening, might no longer be true.

Look at consumer behavior, people are willing to pre-order stuff that means the monetization scheme that relies on paying money to reduce scarcity, doesn't require copyright. If people are willing to pay money ahead of publication in order for stuff to get made, the distribution monopoly is pointless, the scarcity in the system is that something people want simply hasn't been made yet. This makes for a simple business-model: Media gets released peace-meal once enough people pro-ordered in to make release profitable. And releases of thematically related media continues as long as people are paying for it. This takes out a lot of the risk for media producers and would avoid premature cancellations of fan favorite media productions. It also means the only thing that makes money is new production, which incidentally is what producers usually care about. Capital becomes the means to make new stuff and the channels that people use to pre-order.

>I am just saying with out it you will transform the economy into some kind of shanasta chinese copy cat economy.
I don't know what that means, it sounds like a prejudice against Chinese .
Also take a look at how media producers start out, they begin copying the masters of their trade. It's how learning works in that industry. At first people hone their skills by mimicking others and once they are able to do that they begin making original content. That's not a Chinese thing, that's a universal thing.

And you can't say that the current system is particularly conducive to originality, there are 3 formulas for superhero movies, so much stuff is reboots sequels and prequels, a huge part of the video game industry is producing the same games over and over with incrementally improved graphics.

Copyright isn't just affecting media, it's a massive innovation blocker in the technology realm, as a means for large companies to stamp out smaller competitors.
If you think i'm missing something, maybe give some examples where the copy-prohibition makes something "function properly"

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