• pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    First of all, no, publishers don’t necessarily own the copyright. Most authors do a licensing deal with a publisher, but they retain the copyright to their work. My understanding is that music industry contracts vary a lot more, since music is usually more collaborative, but lots of artists still own the rights to their songs. But even if that were true, artists being forced to sell their rights to cooperations isn’t an issue with copyright, it’s an issue with capitalism. It’s like blaming America’s shitty healthcare on doctors instead of a for-profit system controlled by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

    • blazera@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      A licensing deal for rights to make money off an intellectual property. I.E. a way to use their wealth to profit even more off something they didnt make. Music industry has fun examples of musicians having to rerecord songs because an ex-record label still owned rights to the original. So there’s situations where a musician entirely created and recorded a song and isnt allowed to sell that recording. And authors and musicians are the closest to owning their work they make a living off of. Any kind of industry visual artist has no ownership of anything.

      Copyright is an issue with capitalism. It only exists for wealthy to profit off of.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I’ve run out of ways to tell you that’s not correct. The explicit purpose of the copyright law in the constitution is to allow creators to profit from their work. If you’re arguing that we should live in a pure communist society, where the products of all labor, including intellectual property, belong to community, fine, but we don’t live in a communist utopia. We live in a capitalist hellscape, and you’re looking at one of the only protections artists have, seeing how it’s been exploited by capitalism, and claiming the protection is the problem. It’s like looking at the minimum wage, seeing how cooperations have lobbied Congress to keep it so low it’s now starvation wage, and coming to the conclusion that the minimum wage needs to be abolished.