Who did the work?
Mar. 24th, 2006 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootCopyright. The right to copy.
It's really fairly simple, or at least it was until the web came along. Now those of us who deal with text and images are all stuck with laws that were developed to address paper and ink, trying to stretch them to fit pixels and server-client function. What a mess.
But, however the medium changes, the motives hold pretty steady.
The motive of copyright is to protect the income of the creator of some product.
That's it, really. I mean, we can argue all we like about intellectual property and the ethics of idea-theft and the integrity of artistic work, particularly. But the practical issue it's all based on is the money. (See the last entry about practicalities and ethics.) That's the part that makes me laugh when some artist sets up a howl about how their story or characters have been tainted by fanfic, and what makes me wince when I see another contract saying that some company owns all the ideas their R&D people have for five years after leaving the company.
Ideas are true public domain. It's only the development that can be proprietary. It's the development that time and money and the resources of thought and research are invested in.
And that is the understanding that the concept of "fair use" is based on. The more development that's invested in a derivative product, the more it becomes the property of the 'secondary' creator. The specific threshold between "enough development invested, this is yours" and "nope, not enough, you stole that" tends to be extremely circumstantial, but the principle driving the decision is consistent.
Copyright says that the creator has the right to determine whether and how her/his work will be reproduced and distributed, and the right to be compensated by the recipients. The definition of "creator" that copyright laws give us, though, is "someone who did the work". There's no Holy Mantle of Creator-ship involved, and I think that's a good way to look at it.
Of course, the fact that it's all down to money also means that copyright law dabbles in areas such as "trademark dilution", which I consider an abomination. Questions of trademark recognition, and the importance of it, have entirely to do with advertising, which I believe is a truly evil thing that no self-respecting human being should have truck with. It's rank propaganda, at heart, brainwashing by another name.
So I think the real question, the useful question, to ask yourself, the next time the issues of copyright and intellectual property come up is: who did the work?
Who, all, did the work?
.
It's really fairly simple, or at least it was until the web came along. Now those of us who deal with text and images are all stuck with laws that were developed to address paper and ink, trying to stretch them to fit pixels and server-client function. What a mess.
But, however the medium changes, the motives hold pretty steady.
The motive of copyright is to protect the income of the creator of some product.
That's it, really. I mean, we can argue all we like about intellectual property and the ethics of idea-theft and the integrity of artistic work, particularly. But the practical issue it's all based on is the money. (See the last entry about practicalities and ethics.) That's the part that makes me laugh when some artist sets up a howl about how their story or characters have been tainted by fanfic, and what makes me wince when I see another contract saying that some company owns all the ideas their R&D people have for five years after leaving the company.
Ideas are true public domain. It's only the development that can be proprietary. It's the development that time and money and the resources of thought and research are invested in.
And that is the understanding that the concept of "fair use" is based on. The more development that's invested in a derivative product, the more it becomes the property of the 'secondary' creator. The specific threshold between "enough development invested, this is yours" and "nope, not enough, you stole that" tends to be extremely circumstantial, but the principle driving the decision is consistent.
Copyright says that the creator has the right to determine whether and how her/his work will be reproduced and distributed, and the right to be compensated by the recipients. The definition of "creator" that copyright laws give us, though, is "someone who did the work". There's no Holy Mantle of Creator-ship involved, and I think that's a good way to look at it.
Of course, the fact that it's all down to money also means that copyright law dabbles in areas such as "trademark dilution", which I consider an abomination. Questions of trademark recognition, and the importance of it, have entirely to do with advertising, which I believe is a truly evil thing that no self-respecting human being should have truck with. It's rank propaganda, at heart, brainwashing by another name.
So I think the real question, the useful question, to ask yourself, the next time the issues of copyright and intellectual property come up is: who did the work?
Who, all, did the work?
.
