i have a copyright related question that i was hoping you could help me wrap my head around, because i agree with you basically all of the time on that matter, but something about this specific scenario is giving me a bit of a hangup (not that we should KEEP copyright because of this specific scenario but that i dont know what should be done instead). i also apologize in advance there definitely used to be a post about this that i wish i could link to but i cant find it so this ask is going to be very long. the long and short of it is there used to be a "band" called new jersey weather report. they released an album and some other stuff, there were related side projects too. they sold their stuff on bandcamp one of my good friends has 1 of 12 cassettes ever produced by them. they were part of a virtual festival in minecraft, and the vod got flagged for copyright infringement for a completely different band. as it turns out, all of new jersey weather report's (and all of their side projects') music was completely stolen from other groups - i know white oak and the planet you were 2 of them but there may have been more idr. and by completely stolen i mean absolutely no editing, just changed the names of the songs, and no attribution to the original artists at all. and i know this kind of thing happens legally all the time under the current copyright system anyways and we dont have any recourse for it now either. but it seems like... disingenuous to say that under a copyright-less system that it would be perfectly acceptable to do exactly that? like if we didnt have copyright, and njwr did what they did, but this time just no one ever found out. does that make it ok? and like im framing this around njwr because its something that i know happened but i guess it would apply to anything subject to copyright - if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just... fine?
if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just⦠fine?
i mean, i don't think that's fine--because you are lying to people. the copying is not the morally fraught aspect of this--i think it is completely morally fine to print the shining and evne to make money off it; it's when you start lying about the authorship that you start causing harm. i think this sort of deception has three direct and evident harms:
you are denying the original author credit for their work. it is natural, when you have made something, to feel proud and want to be recognized for it--it is hurtful to see people enjoying your work without feeling credited. depending on the context, being denied credits in this way can also be a material harm; in many artistic industries, credits and reputation are crucial to finding jobs and opportunities
you are denying those who enjoy the work the opportunity to understand its actual context. if someone reads the shining, they can go on to find the rest of steven king's ouvre; they can see what he has cited as his influences and go back and read those. the circumstances of a work's production, its position in an artist's broader body of work--all this epitext is shorn off completely when you deceive someone about the origin of a work
you are committing an act of vandalism against the culture more completely; if your version of the work becomes more notable than the original, you build a false citation into the history of the medium. you create a dead end, a cul-de-sac of the rich interconnectness of culture where something is put into a position it doesn't actually occupy. in the worst cases, where this behaviour mixes with e.g. colonialism, racism, etc. you participate in actively writing oppressed peoples and their culture out of cultural memory
but this has nothing to do with copyright; none of these harms are caused by the act of reproduction. an opposition to plagiarism is completely in line with a copyright abolitionist stance, because the harms of plagiarism stem from a particular intentional deception around crediting rather than from breaking copyright laws
