• Grimy@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Here’s a scenario: You make a song but your YouTube channel has 6 subscribers. It’s a good song and the views are slowly going up, this might be your big break. A week later, just when the views start inching towards the 5 digits, Drake comes out with the exact same song. Your version fades into obscurity, he never even mentions you, he makes millions off your single. It’s not exactly fair.

    I think copyrights are currently much too strong and easy to abuse. Fair use should be expanded and the time limits greatly reduced but doing away with the whole concept isn’t the best solution imo.

    • masterspace
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      5 months ago

      Absolutely fair scenario, I’m not advocating to abandon copyright with nothing to replace it.

      The fundamental structure of copyright right now, is one based around granting ownership and exclusivity rights, but only the second part is flawed, the exclusivity rights part.

      A copyright system that makes sense in the digital age is an ownership and attribution system, whereby in that scenario, Drake would acknowledge that it’s your song and then a certain portion of his proceeds from that song would end up going to you automatically. If he didn’t he would face a regulator / court / arbitration system that could impose massive penalties to disincentivize non acknowledgement.

      It doesn’t really change any of the economics of live art, but for digital art, rather than everyone paying for different subscriptions and having all the profits go to enriching middle men with exclusive, non competitive contracts, everyone would always have free access to everything and you’d have the streaming and viewership numbers etc influence how much money the government or an arm’s length arts agency / crown corporation is paying out to artists.

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Well said. Realistically we need a completely new system that’s more in tune with the digital age and puts society first while incentivizing small time artists.

        The best would probably be to couple it with profits, so any artist which makes more than X amount using an other persons work needs to hire lawyers and figure out who he has to pay or get sued.