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| Fear the Walking Copyright Reformists. |
It looks like WTFU is going places. Specifically to
discuss copyright and what changes it needs to the copyright office itself. For the first time in basically 40 years, it looks like there are other voices in the copyright discussion table besides the copyright maximalists and entertainment industry lobbyists that haven't made copyright last forever because they can't.
So obviously you expect some backlash. The backlash is that we're cheating, thieving cyber terrorist zombies.
According to an article on the Huffington Post, the last minute submission of thousands of requests to the copyright office to amend the DMCA cannot be described as
anything but cyberterrorism. After all, the amount of petitions going on at once DID crash the servers. Probably because of how many people suddenly entered because we did not know about this until literally that day.
"There’s really no other way to describe these kind of actions than
coordinated cyber bullying campaigns built on distorted information to
incite an angry online mob. A mob that mobilizes and then disappears
quickly back into the shadows." said William Buckley Jr, like a jackass.
Now, this is a romantic image. Mobs going in there and dissapearing ,
Fuente Ovejuna Style, so no individual can be identified.
But there are no secret mobs. This mob is quite public. It is what the entertainment industry has always really been afraid of: people, willingly becoming involved with a copyright that is supposed to, by design, supposed to benefit said people. Loss of control thrives fear.
"Section 512 is where the battle line is being drawn between online
businesses that use a loophole in the law to reap enormous profits from
using copyrighted material without permission and the copyright holders
who have seen their careers crater and their earnings evaporate. It is
nothing less than a life and death struggle for the future of art in
America. A battle whose outcome is yet undecided."
Oh, yeah? Which copyright holders have seen their careers crater and their earnings evaporate? Who are you talking about? Do you have any examples?
You see, for big entertainment it's important to draw that starving artist card every time their humongous earnings and complete control over all elements of production and distribution are threatened. Because if they said that the same guys who don't want to pay their performing artists for using their music in ads, and the same ones who tell David Prowse that Return of the Jedi
didn't make any money so they can't pay him any, are the ones advocating for copyright laws with even more teeth, then well, that's not as appealing as saying "poor Jim Artist, how's he supposed to make a living if he can't take down copies of his work forever and then nuke the site from orbit? {8(..."
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| It's like looking at this guy and saying he needs bodyguards |
This is a fight for FAIR USE. And as much as they'll tell you they love themselves some fair use, the actual real life
says other wise.
Lives ARE on the balance. That much is true. Freedom of Speech is being trampled. Up and coming businesses, the same ones copyright was supposed to protect, are being put in danger. Nobody loses their job because I uploaded an anime music video of Batman v Supermen, but whenever The Nostalgia Critic can't upload a video because there's no godamn nuance in the system, it means Tamara Chambers, Malcolm Ray and Jim Jarosz might have to go hungry that day.
Fittingly, then, second article described the entire situation as a
"Zombie Apocalypse". You see,
Keith Kupferschmi, of the Copyright Alliance, says that even though ove 900000 people expressed that, "yeah, the DMCA is broken", and that's certainly valuable insight..."These 90,000 comments are all identical submissions generated merely by clicking on the “I’m in” button at takedownabuse.org"
First of all, no it wasn't. It certainly had a prewritten post and function, but individual people could edit it to their heart's content. Secondly, it was almost 100,000 individual responses FROM people. That they weren't all original, "from the heart" responses is unimportant, because these thousands of people agreed that the DMCA is broken.That's what the Copyright office was asking, and that's what we answered.
It's funny, though, that the article does it's preface by drawing heavilly from The Walking Dead.
"My family knows not to bother me from 9 to 10 pm every Sunday night. That’s my
The Walking Dead
time. While the show is about zombies and what happens after the
zombie apocalypse, those who watch the show know the real danger to our
protagonists, Rick, Michonne, Daryl and the rest of the crew, is not the
zombies all all. The real threats come from the living -- terrifying
villains like the Governor, Gareth and now the charismatic Negan."
Funny. The Walking Dead only exists because the copyright on "Night of the Living Dead" fell through, thus allowing TV stations to run it for cheap, thus lots of people seeing it and being inspired by it, thus creating the Zombie Horror genre that allowed Robert Kirkman to create a comic about it without having to pay George Romero for it. In turn this allowed the TV show to exist.
That a copyright maximalist, the kind that would unironically argue the "Forever less One Day" mentality that caused 2 retroactive extensions to copyright and the complete lack of any works entering the public domain until 2019, to use The Walking Dead to argue FOR the continual enlenghtening, engirthening, and enwidening of copyright is perhaps delicious irony.
One more thing.
"If there are problems with the DMCA the best way to understand what those problems are, and to attempt to address them, is for those with concerns to voice them in detail and not file yet another zombie comment. As we’ve learned from The Walking Dead, those zombies are rather easily disposed of."
A single zombie is no threat, just like a single Lawrence Lessig was no threat to the selfrighteous Sonny Bono act of 1998. But that's the thing about zombies. There rarely is just one of them. And their infectious. They don't just destroy those that oppose them. They make them join their ranks.
Things aren't ever going to go back to the way they were. You won't just be able to launch a sneak law attack and get away with screwing everyone anymore. You can't just tell everyone you know what's best for them. You're not the only game in town.
The infection is only begun.
