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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries

Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths... And that destroys our society's ability to self-reflect. "Superman" for example is a potent shorthand for a vision of what it means to be american, but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.

And in the end, the only people that benefit are middlemen, not artists. Fanfiction artists getting patreon money is proof that in a world without copyright artists could still make a living, but we only stick doggedly to it because copyright is the means by which corporations rent-seek.

(All the same logic applies to patents, by the way, and in general all ip law except trademarks. Trademarks can stay because impersonating other people or groups is identity theft.)

Copyright law also means that entire videogame libraries vanish into the aether every five years when a new generation of consoles comes out.

And the move from physical media to streaming has been brutal for the classics; Netflix barely has any movies from before 1970.

Books themselves only sell for a decade or two before falling into obscurity because it is not worth paying the author to print them but nobody else is allowed to make copies until they enter the public domain a century later.

Makes it hard to "engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old".

And books get junked from public libraries a lot quicker nowadays too.

I doubt if anybody under 40 has ever read Arthur Herzog's Heat or IQ 83, or Robert Silverberg's The Calibrated Alligator.

The classics are perfectly safe. Any classic movie can be streamed for a small fee on numerous platforms. If it's old enough, you can even find it for free on IA or YouTube since they're out of copyright.

Almost no such classic movie is even in DVD quality, although sometimes they claim to be 480p or 1080p but are actually upscaled from very low resolution sources. That one included; that's absurdly low resolution.

I skipped around a little and it didn't seem terrible. This one is maybe somewhat better. I don't really know how good a quality you can expect from a Russian movie from 1929.

You are correct.

For some reason if you load the page and don't play it, the still it shows is very low quality. If you actually play it it's fine.

I have in the past tried to get videos from archive.org and they really were poor quality, so I had assumed this was another instance of that. It seems that higher quality videos are more common now.

Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths...

"Cultural appropriation" is, strangely, an attempt to do this even to things that can't be copyrighted, by people who otherwise can't stop complaining about capitalism.

but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.

On the flip side we have no end to Superman expies: Homelander, Omni-Man, The Plutonian, Brightburn. They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character. Which may say something about the audience.

They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character.

In other words: not portraying the same values in the same package. I fail to see how this is anything other than agreeing with the grandparent post.

Most of those examples started as comics which have a much lower barrier to entry than AAA games or movies.

They became organically popular, at which point studios and corporations jumped on them for adaptations.

People did go out and make their own. And this is what they made and were rewarded for making.

Indeed, comics that did not portray the same values in the same package became popular.

This does not appear to refute the point.

Or may say something about the creators?

I agree wholeheartedly. Copyright in its current shape is a travesty.

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