Sponsor my demons! Feed me the cash!

"I don't want to be a burden anymore", your hat answers. "You are always carrying me around, and I can't carry you. That's not fair."

"I don't mind carrying you, little idiot", you tell your hat, "you hardly weight anything at all, and you shelter me from the sun."

"But that's different", your hat protests. "I don't mind the sun scorching on me. That happens anyway. It's literally no trouble for me to shade you too."

...Hey anon, also in good faith, what the fuck?!

Like “sex workers” and “artists who do shit in any way touching the erotic” are a pretty big fucking classification to throw under the bus as “acceptable sacrifices,” in the same way as I hate the “anti-antis” for throwing victims under the fucking bus!

And, the idea that “Oh, well free expression is an acceptable sacrifice,” what the fuck?! That’s... more than a little absurd! I do not think you understand the horrifying implications of something that broad!

And, literally, “Private companies can ban whoever they want,” is like, the fuck?! You literally picked the worst fucking person to make that argument, given I really hate corporate power as a means of choking expression (See also, my opinions on copyright) and deeply stress we need community control to decide this shit because corporate makes the worst fucking decisions on this in the name of profit?!

And then you get into the technical aspects! Like, if non-governmental, this’d only be possible through the shitty monopolies that are making the worse in a million little ways, and be one more lever with which they have horrifying power over their users.

And, if governmentally mandated, that would mean mandatory filters on every site, which would be the worst fucking idea as every person who knows shit about the internet can tell you, for reasons including re-enforcing those fucking monopolies.

WELL SHIT, bad news, the KIDS Act with all those Scan Your Face To Use The Net bills (Including KOSA and the App Store Accountability Act) got past the House.

But, in a silver lining, they did get less votes in favor of it than expected. And it's gonna have a hard time getting past the Senate because it lacks a lot of things the senate really wants, even the fundie demons like NCOSE hate it!

So, find your senators, and tell them you want this bill gone any way you can, whether via phone, email, or even fax if you're some kind of pervert!

The EFF has a good list of reasons you can give to oppose it, but if you don't think they'll buy it, note specific ways those ID protocols would harm you, like be as directly specific to you as possible.

And if you don't think they'd care about that, bring up the lack of duty of care and how it's a big giveaway to big tech, pit them against each other and make them infight it to death.

And even if you're not in the US, you can still boost this, and not just to here but to other sites as well!

...But at the same time, I don't really think the whole "age up" phenomenon can be viewed as wholly benign either, and I think the phenomenon OP's talking about kinda leads into why that is in a way I can't quite articulate.

Like, people deny that bullying IRL for being into Childish Nerd Shit was A Thing, but from looking at the experiences of a lot of people, it's very real (Especially if you're on the spectrum), albeit often heavily varying by region from what I know, and not just from peers but also from like; parents and authority figures.

So, the people into Cringe Childish Media retreated towards online as an escape and developed that sort of "nerd pride," which then curdled and created its own toxic forms that lead to... well, the sort of noxious shit OP's talking about, and the even more noxoious earlier forms if anyone remembers old web culture.

And then by way of schismogenesis, the people mad at these toxic forms combined with taking inspiration from the works of people like Theodor Adorno (my beloathed) which're tailor-made for giving an intellectual gloss for bullying over taste began to push back, and then you know the drill, back and forth.

But like, while I get both sides of this and think there needs to be a balance, my sympathies are always going to lean towards the people crapped on for being into Kids Stuff because...

...well, partially because I've been there, but partially because they didn't take first blood, it was the extremely offline aggressively-Normal people who did.

Bad News: AI imagegen is not going to go away, with the amount of open-source models bouncing around and the fact they don't really require those horrible data centers to both generate images (they can be run locally on a normal PC) or even train models (China's shown they don't need those massive datacenters, the rollout's probably a combo of financial scheme and attempt to use them to spy on us).

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

To your first one, case law is how we determine both the limits and the use-cases of laws. That's what the courts are for, to elaborate on how the law is to be applied.

Multiple things I spoke of on the original post were decided not by democratic deliberation, but by case law. So there's your answer there.

On the second one, that's actually comically easy: Preservational piracy and fanworks. Like, under copyright law most of that shit is indeed illegal, and it only survives by deliberately having megacorps turn a blind eye to it when it's convenient for them despite the vital cultural function of both.

Like, fanworks create an ecosystem of small creatives that both support works (especially smaller indie ones), allowing for young and up-and-coming for creatives to hone their skills for whatever they might apply them to, and in general create the "third place" for artistic creatives that is currently quite lacking.

The fact that isn't cited as helping creators implies a hierarchy of who gets to be considered a "real" artist/writer/creative or not that places fanwork creators at the bottom, and uh, that leads to some really fucked up ideas about art and labor and I generally judge anyone who has them.

Preservational piracy is the only reason some works survive in the cultural consciousness due to "keep circulating the tapes," or even survive at all in regards to the ones hogtied in legal red tape.

In other words, they help the works of creators survive when they'd be buried by their megacorp owners, who let's face it would be making the majority of the money from it. We saw a lot of this in the HBO Max purges, to give an example.

Both of those could be crushed in an instant if the megacorps wanted them to be, I have little doubt even with the OTW's army of lawyers a large amount of fair use defenses could be absolutely crushed, and yet, they are both vital for creative ecosystem.

And, if we have to keep fudging the law to keep huge parts of art in society running, then maybe the law is bloated in a way that makes it unfit for purpose.

Because like, I know that Copyright Abolition Now as an idea has way more obstacles to it than a lot of people supporting it seem to claim, and there'd need to be a lot of infrastructure built before we can go that far/

There is no such thing as "preservation piracy." There's just preservation versus piracy. Archives have always existed and are not illegal.

Let me give you an example. Bishop-Accountability is the premier source for archival content about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It has thousands of archived news stories, reuploaded onto its own servers. In some cases, the original news article has been scrubbed from the internet and Bishop-Accountability is the only remaining source. The website has never been taken down because it is providing an educational public service, which falls under archival protections.

Ripping a CD and then hosting it on the internet for others to use, a la Limewire, is not archival. That's just piracy. You're not preserving anything. You're just stealing someone else's work and giving it away on their behalf.

Fanworks are perfectly legal when they are transformative and noncommercial. OTW's army of lawyers doesn't need to crush a corporation's complaints about fanworks because it has always fallen under fair use policy.

Monetizing a fanwork is illegal because then you are competing with the intellectual property of the copyright owner. Which is why AO3 has an army of volunteers checking complaints for potential monetization, requests for commissions, whole-cloth postings of IP in fanworks, and so on.

Purely transformative, noncommercial work? Not illegal. Trying to make a quick buck off of it? Very illegal.

This whole time, you have been completely ignoring the fair use doctrine and the transformative nature of using someone else's IP, dancing around it because you want to get rid of copyright. What you fail to understand is that you would fuck over a huge percentage of small creatives in your hopes of making "megacorps" mad.

Copyright law was first created in 1710 (the Statute of Anne) because of the very thing that would happen if you got rid of copyright, which was book publishers taking authors' books, printing thousands of copies, and leaving the authors themselves with nothing. Authors were not able to benefit from their own labor because of corporations.

Removing copyright would put more power into the hands of corporations, not less, and it's absolutely insane that you can't see that. I think you've been blinded by the "wah wah I want to use everything I see for my own use" and are cognitive-dissonancing yourself into thinking it's some revolutionary cause.

It's not. You just want to steal from people and not put in any work to do so.

And lastly, you keep ignoring how and why musicians, artists, other creatives actually get absorbed into a "megacorp." They sell the rights to their IP to the corporation. It's not just hoovered into the bowels of the company without the original owner's say. It is a business decision by the individual creative.

Musicians, authors, and others may enter into a non-exclusive agreement, where they permit use of their copyrighted material for a single purpose, or they may get royalties off the distribution of their work through a company, such as with a book publisher or record label. No one forced them to make that business decision. They were not required to enter a non-compete clause. They were more than capable of negotiating their own terms, and if they chose not to sell, they didn't have to. In fact, choosing not to sell and then having your IP stolen forms an even stronger basis for a copyright lawsuit.

I am not saying that the copyright system is perfect, but as an author myself, I'm pretty disgusted with the idea of there being "IP overreach." I spent hundreds of hours producing my books. The person who wants to lightly remix it and then sell it did not.

Copyright is labor rights protection for creatives. It allows us to own the means of our production, the fruits of our labor, and to determine how our labor will be used. Being against copyright is the most anti-socialist stance you could possibly have, but you've twisted it into a virtue so as to disguise your real stance, as well as the stance of everyone else who agrees with you, which is this:

"I don't want to work hard to produce something new. I just want to lazily chop together some music samples, throw them into an audio mixer software, call it a day, and make money. I don't want to try very hard, but I still want the attention and praise that people who try hard get.

"I'm going to call creatives the 'petit bourgeosie' and rail against them because them working hard makes me feel bad, and it makes me feel very intellectual to use a fancy Marxist term. Dressing this up as an anti-capitalist argument will make it harder to argue with me, because then it seems like whoever is arguing with me supports large corporations.

"I don't really give a shit about small creators who use copyright to protect their work because I'm jealous of them being able to produce anything, and angry that they have protections against me stealing from them. Copyright law makes me feel bad because I don't have anything to copyright."

So yeah. Maybe try making something actually transformative and you won't have a problem with copyright? Because it will likely fall under fair use?

And the funny thing is that if you actually reached out to a small creative and asked to sample/access their work, they probably would let you. I've given away copies of my books for research purposes or for personal enjoyment. Musicians let people sample their things all the time.

It's a book I imagine the person I'm reblogging from would hate, but I recommend you all read. That book also talks directly about how the copyright system's expansion expanded the cut corpos took without benefiting artists, and the fact that they had chokepoints over the places to sell one's work allowed them to do this.

Secondly, my sweet baby ray's, I am well aware of free and open resources, because I use a lot of them in my photomanip work. A lot of my own photos too. I spend fucking months working on physical IRL sculptures for my Kaijune project. I'm not one of the shiftless moochers you seem to loathe is the point.

I'm also aware about the history of copyright, like how the precedent predates the Statue of Anne and how it was primarily used for state censorship, and how even then it was only fourteen years in duration and required registration, far more limited than now!

But it's crept up over time, even as conditions for conventional illustrators and writers have gotten worse, as Raymond Biesinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" talks about.

@giovanh has a good article on it too if anyone wants to read it, it's one of the best defenses for the original intent of copyright from people like the one I'm roasting.

Thirdly, I think this idea is telling of how ignorant you are:

There is no such thing as "preservation piracy." There's just preservation versus piracy. Archives have always existed and are not illegal... ...Ripping a CD and then hosting it on the internet for others to use, a la Limewire, is not archival. That's just piracy. You're not preserving anything. You're just stealing someone else's work and giving it away on their behalf.

Like, there are so many pieces of software, especially video games, doubly-especially licensed games, that were abandoned by their owners and that they think would be economically unfeasible to republish, despite no royalties, but copyright prevents anyone from using them regardless.

I think that, in this age where preservation is just a copied floppy away, letting these works succumb to bitrot; or other works disappear due to their own versions of decay in the name of proper procedure is a societal act of deliberate destruction, and I think that you think property rights trumps that says a lot.

Like... I fucking hate the "petit bouregois" label when it's applied to poor disabled and trans people working in art scared of the threat of AI who've got no other options.

But I will happily apply it to you specifically because of how you have such contempt for the public good over property rights, fetishize the Protestant Work Ethic enough to make Max Weber use you as exhibit A, and think the only viable protection for creatives is the fucking Castle Doctrine even when the corpos bring mustard gas and napalm to that shit!

Like, people like you who're the sort of authors who bitch at people in the Global South pirating their books rather than their dogshit publishers for wildly overcharging them for it in a way that leads to piracy, or the people who think a game should rot on the cartridge it was printed on rather than hurt the precious holding company that doesn't pay royalties' fee-fees.

I find this very funny because, yeah that strawman would be a terrible thing to think if I actually thought it!

"I'm going to call creatives the 'petit bourgeosie' and rail against them because them working hard makes me feel bad, and it makes me feel very intellectual to use a fancy Marxist term. Dressing this up as an anti-capitalist argument will make it harder to argue with me, because then it seems like whoever is arguing with me supports large corporations. "I don't really give a shit about small creators who use copyright to protect their work because I'm jealous of them being able to produce anything, and angry that they have protections against me stealing from them. Copyright law makes me feel bad because I don't have anything to copyright."

That last part is fucking hilarious because like, I put so much of my shit out under Creative Commons licenses, like I overtly opt it out of there because I think the audience should be able to remix and create.

And I've argued with copyright abolitionists over how they don't have a fucking plan to replace the shitty protections with something real, and how that would be a much longer process (One worth pursuing, but still)

I also proposed solutions we could do while copyright still exists in a reblog of this post, specifically to clarify for people who kept asking, which you clearly did not read!

My view, at its core, is that people should be free to remix work made within their lifetimes without it being treated as lesser by the law, that art should be accessible to all, that no piece of art should disappear due to copyright, that the legal ability to remake and remix and archive is a contested question based around power and should be treated as such rather than a set of moralizing guidelines, and that an artist's ability to make a living wage is far more important than property rights because art is not the same as a fucking gas station.

See also: How people talk about how the whole dialogue about fandom racism is too shrill while ignoring/not-meeting-in-the-middle or; far worse; actively being awful to the people of color who do make that honest effort towards politeness and civility, so the conversation gets pushed towards mutual yelling while nothing gets done.

Like, most successful protest movements have very specific methods, purposes and end-goals, I'm thinking about how Daniel Hunter's talked about this sort of thing.

A lot of the spontaneous attempts to "hold them accountable" have none of these things, leading to stochastic harassment even after attempts have been made to reconcile (Which can't be treated as an end-goal because there's no way to compare it to that end goal) in a way that makes everybody miserable and worse and leads to nobody learning anything.

I feel like that needs to change.

Note I am white and relatively privileged, so take this with a mine of salt and feel free to (respectfully and politely) point out holes where you see them here, but I think this black creator talking about that specific controversy said it best when saying it's not the end of the world, but also, it's not a nothingburger either.

Emphasis on the second part.

Because, I think that in-between space is what makes it hard for people to figure out what that theory of change looks like.

Because, I've talked before about how we know "throw the Nazi out of the bar" and "defend the skeevy porn artist in court" at the two extremes of discourse over public speech, but we have no idea about the stuff in-between, and I think that applies here too.

It's why I think the term "microaggression" hits so weird for people, that dissonance of whether the solution should be "cancel them 100%, mob them until they leave" or "just ignore it" when really neither applies and we need a process in-between.

Like, I've heard of people saying that "I made a heartfelt apology, I tried to make up the best I could, and I'm still getting constantly harassed" and we gotta figure out better processes than the way that the path of least resistance seems to naturally roll towards "harassment forever with no demarcated endpoint" as the sole conception of seeking accountability online, despite how it doesn't work at its posited goals.

Note I don't mean this as an excuse to do nothing or to police anger, but rather, spur thought about how to direct it towards Getting Shit Done.

Be mad, vent on your blog, again not every aspect of human life needs to be run like the Navy, I speak purely in terms of the very specific process of seeking public accountability.

And hey, sometimes someone doesn't want to be a better person. I think about how the "restorative justice" process towards Warren Ellis after he did all the awful sex-pest shit failed because Mr Ellis basically totally rejected changing to not be awful.

I think a process like I talk about should account for that too, know when to fold them and all that.

But like, I leave a question for the readers, including my readers of color, what do you think that process would look like? What do you think I missed, whether it be due to my own privilege or to other factors?

And, correct me if I'm wrong (I'd be interested in hearing what I missed) but in my observation in hindsight, there were basically no positive changes resulting from that.

Like, people were peer-pressured out of watching/talking about the show positively for any aspects outside of it out of fear of being Bad, nobody changed their minds for the better on the production staff, and on the flipside it lead to people in hindsight dismissing any issues with the show whatsoever even though I'd argue again that, while it wasn't the end of the world, it wasn't a fucking nothingburger either.

I may be projecting, feel free to tell me, but in my observation it looks like nobody became a better person, nobody learned anything, everyone was more miserable and isolated, and it feels like that's repeating here.

And I feel like it's related to that larger lesson that we should have learned from 2010s activism, which is relying on spontaneity instead of having a theory of power and a fucking plan is what fucked us!

Like, in all those methods I saw it got a foot in the door, but then lead to a big noisy mess that didn't do shit to positively change anything!

Like, it happened at large scale with protest movements, read the book Fire Next Time for more on that with shit like Occupy, but also I think it happened with fandom activism at small scale too!

Not having a plan and just relying on spontaneous mobbing and creating an atmosphere of malaise meant that there was no means of change and no end goal!

Like, don't mistake me as defending the things Goose's done that people're talking about beyond that inciting incident, there probably needs to be some apology for that if that ship hasn't sailed too far!

And, ideally since under socialism we'd have a lot more robust small-scale widely distributed 3d printing production for the majority of super-niche stuff like that, I'd imagine it'd shift to more rewarding forms like action figures and such.