Privacy. I have the right to make something, not share it, and prevent others from sharing it without my permission. Or I may share it only with those who I choose to share it with.
But you don’t need public copyright for that. If you share something with a limited set of parties just draft an NDA. If you publish to the public with which you can make no prior agreement you use copyright.
The fact that copyrights are automatic is a gigantic reason why NDAs aren't a good solution for this. The people who are in the best position to abuse someone's creative privacy are often the same people who won't sign NDAs.
What if I want privacy in matters that are not copyright able? Clearly copyright is for commercial property, and privacy is an entirely separate matter that should be dealt with by anti-stalking laws, etc.
Strong disagree. If I choose not to share something today, I do deserve, at a minimum:
1. the right to commercially share it later
2. the right to prevent others from commercially sharing it without my permission
3. the right to share my creations with a limited group of people, commercially or non-commercially
Say for instance, you share a creative work with someone in confidence. They should not have the right to freely copy and publish your work without your permission.
It is very common for people to create works which are private and or shared with small groups of people, and it is important for our laws to protect people's rights to keep those works private or semi-private.
Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to share and/or monetize that breach of privacy.
> Or to put it another way, a 'leak' of a private work shouldn't be a free pass for the rest of the world to share and monetize that breach of privacy.
I half-agree with you on this. On the one had when you share information with others, people should have some kind of right to share with others when you shared with them. On the other hand I don't think that someone has the right to profit off of something you created without your permission.
IMHO, there is no kind of privacy when it comes to sharing something unless there is a meeting-of-the-minds agreement that all parties agree to before hand.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public.
> * Someone sharing with another party in a situation with a large power imbalance (and so they refuse to sign an NDA with anyone)
Don't share it with them until they sign. If they sign and violate the NDA, you got your payday.
> * Someone sharing in a social situation where NDAs are not practical (romantic, familial, or personal relationships)
If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The other categories aren't special.
That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with. Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these concerns are silly to me.
No, an artist absolutely should have a reasonable expectation that their improv at a coffee shop won't be ripped off next week by a billion dollar publisher.
> Don't share it with them until they sign.
Which would be possible in a situation where someone has the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In industries where there are large negotiating power imbalances between creators and others they work with, you will typically find that creators have little to no negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal protections in many parts of the law outside of contract law.
> If you don't trust your spouse then get a prenup. The other categories aren't special.
A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary, I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring NDAs to a first date.
> That said, if your work is so easy to copy it probably wasn't (or shouldn't have been) valuable to begin with. Implementation matters more than ideas. So most of these concerns are silly to me.
The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary value.
> No, an artist absolutely should have a reasonable expectation that their improv at a coffee shop won't be ripped off next week by a billion dollar publisher.
Nah. There's no way for that artist to know if some other artist did the exact same bit a week earlier. If they happened to have done so, tough luck! Doesn't matter that you came up with it independently on your own.
> Which would be possible in a situation where someone has the power to do so, but this isn't always the case. In industries where there are large negotiating power imbalances between creators and others they work with, you will typically find that creators have little to no negotiation power. There's a reason we have many legal protections in many parts of the law outside of contract law.
So don't share it with them if you don't want to take the risk and you also don't want to enter into an agreement.
> A spouse is the most formal of the examples I listed. And a spouse in many places is someone you've already entered into a formal legal agreement with. But to the contrary, I don't think it is reasonable to expect people bring NDAs to a first date.
So don't share it with them if you don't want to take the risk and you also don't want to enter into an agreement.
> The concept of privacy isn't predicated on monetary value.
Indeed, it's predicated on privacy. Don't share what you don't want to share.
> Nah. There's no way for that artist to know if some other artist did the exact same bit a week earlier. If they happened to have done so, tough luck! Doesn't matter that you came up with it independently on your own.
If this should happen, this previous artist would be able to claim copyright on his creation. That is what copyright is about, protecting your creative creations. If you write a song and perform it on the streets for free, no one should be able to just take the song and perform it themselves without your permission.
...so are terms of use, which often include "you can't share this without my permission" so even if copyright law weren't so awful, the people who would be doing the sharing would still be breaking an agreement to do so.
Most things in life aren't software and don't have a TOS. I know this is a tech forum, and people are usually thinking about tech, but most of what copyright applies to is still not software.
It's not strictly commercial vs non-commercial though, I could sell the only copy of something for a lot of money... and copyright ensures that it can't be legally reproduced.
copyright has nothing to do with commercial protections, it gives you the exclusive right to have control over of creative work you produced. If you have copyright no-one is allowed to copy your work without your permission, no matter if it is for commercial use or private use. Its about intellectual ownership, not commercial usage.
