AWKWARD ZOMBIE

What

Can you guys please link to your sources? It's not that hard.

Yeah sorry bout that on mobile. Here

The genocide remark I'm willing to chalk up to a poor choice of words coupled with a possibly stereotypical "actor" level of airheadedness, but if thousands of people screaming at you is so unnerving you should maybe consider a different career.

I don't see a problem as long as the property is registered to be public. You still own it. It's just that people can use it in the public domain without either having to go through legal bullshit or be considered bootleggers. What's so bad about that?

The problem is that the way that draft is right now (according to the summary, at least), an artist would have to go through and copyright every single piece of work through a company to make sure that someone else can't steal it (maybe alter it slightly), and then charge royalties wherever they're paying attention. The current law allows a creator to have at least some control over how their work is used online, even without having to file an official copyright claim for every single piece. I think the only thing you can't do is charge for an unfiled work, but you can have it removed from usage (don't quote me on that, though. It's been a while since I read anything on it.)
Also, companies with competent lawyers can basically say "well, we TRIED to contact the owner of the image, but nothing turned up" and then just use the image without paying anyway. As far as I understand it, this particular point (the bit about "good faith" borrowers, or whatever) is the biggest problem.

For artists who have no intention of ever trying to make cheddar off their artwork, and don't particularly mind if it's used and spread that way, it's not really a problem.

For people who are actually trying to make their artwork account for part of their income, it does become an issue.

HOWEVER, that being said, I am withholding any anger at the moment for two reasons:
A) It's still in a pre-bill, rough draft, recommendation stage. There is every possibility that this will go nowhere, or get changed so many times that by the time it gets to the floor, there will be a whole different set of things to look at.
B) There is also every possibility that this summary is at least partially inaccurate. I'm not trying to talk shit about the poster (I know nothing about them), but I am hesitant to assume that they are knowledgeable enough in law to be able to give fully accurate translations, when they themselves said that it is a stupidly long and dense report.

From actually reading link, seems to me the problem is that this removes the duty of people stumbling across content to actually contact the original author and getting their permission before republishing the work, instead limiting it to a "best effort". Effectively, what will happen is artists will publish contents, assholes will strip them of watermarks and repost them on sites like 9gag and funnyjunk (this part already happens obviously), corporations will stumble across it, print it on a tshirt and make a profit without the original artist seeing a single cent. Since there's no watermark they can claim they couldn't find the author without contact details (even though a simple reverse image search would turn up the source, but proving that leads to a lengthy and costly lawsuit).

Now, you can avoid this by paying to register every single one of your works in a registry, adding a lot of extra costs and tiresome bureaucracy for small independent artists, who usually already struggle to make ends meet. Additionally you would still have to actually make sure no one is voiding your copyright, which is again costly and time-consuming. All of this is of little consequence to corporations, who have lawyers to deal with this stuff.

Basically, this screws over small independent artists in favour of the convenience of big business, who would no longer have to worry about "accidentally" violating someone's copyright.

Excuse you, I at least read the secondary source tumblr post that was linked. How could I have formed a counterpoint from a one sentence post of "artists are getting fucked out the wazoo"?

Anyway, what independent artists are affected by things like reposts on the Internet? Internet meme creators? That's really the only thing that I can think of, and those are already used without permission constantly. KC Green complains frequently about the use of Dickbutt without his permission, and do you remember the crap that the creator of Trollface went through at the expense of those hacks at Ninja Pig Studios, creators of shovelware Meme Run?
Maybe Webcomic artists might be affected too, I guess? Or at least the ones that use original content and don't just make video game jokes. But most of those people get quite a bit from donations and sales of books of their content to be able to register their content.

Meanwhile people who make real art like paintings and shit aren't usually discovered by any big companies or social media reposters. They'd just have that one guy who was browsing Deviantart and thought up a way to make a quick buck. As long as they can manage to deal with that one asshole without any problems, or never encounter an asshole like that at all, they're fine. Then they can set aside some cheddar for registration and then they'll be totally protected.

Less popular artists are pretty protected by the fact that their work is just that, less popular.

And what about independent artists who make physical artwork? What's someone going to do? Take a really close up picture and post it on the Internet?

I don't see this as favoring big businesses at all. Big businesses who protect their IPs like Fort Knox would be hit pretty hard by the fact that they can't take action against every Harry Whoever who makes a YouTube video that every Asshole McGee flags for copyright.

Well, if you'd actually read my post, you'd realise that wasn't my point. Reposts already happen, this bill doesn't affect that (though they're still a problem, even if you think the victims aren't "real" artists, whatever that means). The problem with this bill is that reposts cause a lot of "orphaned content" to float around the internet without watermarks/contact deals. This makes it very easy for an ill-intentioned infringer to claim they couldn't find the artist, thus falling under the bills' "good faith infringers" and being free to use the artist's work however they like.

Additionally, I wonder how this bill will affect artists outside of the US? Will they have to pay to be protected from US companies infringing on their copyright?

So, basically the same exact thing happens as now, but if the bill gets passed the big companies with tons of cheddar are protected from the little people without enough cheddar for a proper lawsuit...like they pretty much already are.


I'm pretty sure neither of us has any idea how international copyrights work, so neither of us can expand on that hypothetical situation.

Are you purposely getting everything backwards and being offensive about it or what. You're being needlessly haughty. Who are you do declare what is and isn't "real" art and thus deserves legal protection? Currently (unless I'm mistaken), people automatically get ownership and copyright on everything they create. It doesn't matter if it's the Mona Lisa or a two-gamers-on-a-couch webcomic. If it's something that you created it is your intellectual property, period. That bill would mean that wouldn't be the case anymore, and in order to claim copyright on anything, one would have to do paperwork and possibly pay a fee. This would be terrible.
This makes no sense and shows no understanding of the current issue and of how the legal system works.

Yes. Things being already bad doesn't really justify passing legislation to make things worse, now does it?

It's a really backwards idea to charge people for something that should be a basic right.

Oh, so Syobon automatically assumes I didn't read the source post because I don't agree and I'm the one being offensive. Okay. I see how it is.


How am I choosing what deserves legal attention?
Yes, I would say there's a difference between someone who worked very hard on a painting as opposed to someone who drew a stickman comic, but that's not the point I was trying to make at all. If you're going to argue about what is or isn't art, that's based on opinion.


Are you even reading what I post? I'm saying that if someone isn't seen by anyone intending to ripoff their work like Syobon was referring to, then what is the problem? That they might get their art stolen? We could pose hypothetical situations all day. Doesn't make them reality.


Gun licenses work the exact same way, and the right to bear arms forms the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Difference being that people aren't paying for guns that they themselves created. They are paying a fee to capitalize upon the ownership and yse of a deadly weapon. Not only are artists creatig this art that they would have to pay for, but art does not kill people and therefor does not require the same level of control and precaution. Your comparison makes little to no sense.