It’s not my place to tell you how to feel about Obama. He was certainly competent and effective in many ways, and if you feel that makes him, “good,” fine. However, he used drones to assassinate American citizens, he created an opaque drone warfare program that Congress has no oversight over, and he prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all other presidents combined, none of whom were actual spies.

Whether you believe he was justified in these actions or not, they have downstream consequences, all of which benefit Trump. When Obama criticizes Trunp for attacking journalists, it is more than fair to point out that hypocrisy. We have an authoritarian president right now, and if we’re ever going to take back power from him, we’ve got to acknowledge how we got here and take corrective action.

Nothing happens overnight, and it’s not being edgy to point out how we got here. Bush got us accustomed to an unending wat on, “terrorism,” Obama used drones to target terrorists in any nation without national approval, and now Trump will deport protesters for aiding terrorism and bomb Yemen over signal.

Bush attacked the Press for, “giving aid and comfort,” to our enemies, Obama prosecuted leakers and publishers under the Espionage Act, and now Trump will openly bully publications he doesn’t like with frivolous lawsuits and threats of prosecution. History didn’t start in January.

It didn’t even need to take someone’s job. A summary of an article or paper with hallucinated information isn’t replacing anyone, but it’s definitely making search results worse.

Maybe if a service isn’t ready to be used by the public you shouldn’t put it in every product you make.

Maybe that’s because every time a new AI feature rolls out, the product it’s improving gets substantially worse.

That’s definitely part of it. I would say the trucks that are literally becoming unglued (while the CEO is figuratively) are causing equal, if not greater, damage.

I think that’s true for some of them, mostly the Wall Street folks who have enough diversified wealth to buy a lot of stock during the crash and wait it out. But I think the start-up folks, who’s companies have often never been profitable, and rely entirely on investors over-inflating their value to survive, are freaking the fuck out right now. And I think Trump is just legitimately dumb, doesn’t understand that a trade deficit doesn’t mean America is losing money, and genuinely doesn’t understand tariffs.

Yeah, for sure, fascist regimes have a pretty short shelf-life in general because of cronyism and incompetence. I’m just saying there’s nothing inherent to fascism that should be tanking the economy right now in the way, say, a communist revolution would by causing capital flight. If he wasn’t pushing the worst, most unnecessary trade war in history, Trump could have a strong economy right now.

I find it deeply funny that fascism is completely compatible with capitalism (it’s arguably its end-state), but they’re still tanking the economy because Trump doesn’t understand tariffs.

The Proud Boys are more like the Brownshirts: useful for the rise of fascism, but ultimately, a disposable group that was never going to get any real power under the regime. The way ICE is acting is more analogous to the SS or Gestapo: an unaccountable group of government goons that disappear undesirables and dissidents.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, I play three of these systems regularly.

I really don’t understand why they’re simultaneously arguing that they need access to copyrighted works in order to train their AI while also dropping their non-profit status. If they were at least ostensibly a non-profit, they could pretend that their work was for the betterment of humanity or whatever, but now they’re basically saying, “exempt us from this law so we can maximize our earnings.” …and, honestly, our corrupt legislators wouldn’t have a problem with that were it not for the fact that bigger corporations with more lobbying power will fight against it.

Almost everything you’ve said is just factually incorrect. We know why Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t franchised; in Bill Waterson’s own words, he wanted to, “write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration,” not, “run a corporate empire.” His publisher had no worries about copyright infringement though, and pressured him to franchise.

Also, there was no chance he would have run into trademark issues because that’s not what trademark means. Trademark is a name, copyright is the content. Trademark is why I can open a restaurant called Spider-Man, copyright is why I can’t publish my own Spider-Man comics. While we’re at it, Nintendo is suing Palworld for Patent violations, not copyright, so this has nothing to do with the similarity of the characters, it has to do with some game mechanic that Nintendo believes is proprietary technology.

Finally, the average working class person wasn’t writing, but they were consuming printed media, and that’s why publishers were making so much money off of authors. That’s why copyright mattered. Copyright only lasted 14 years, with the option to renew it for another 14, and its sole purpose was to break up the publishers’ monopoly. The idea that it was designed to create an artificial scarcity of ideas is an ahistorical conspiracy theory that you’ve dreamed up.

First of all, literacy rates were about 70% in 1710, so the average commoner could absolutely read (at least among men, but copyright law isn’t to blame for patriarchy). This is about 300 years after the printing press, literacy had gone up.

Second…I just don’t know what to say to this anymore. You’ve created a strawman artist who believes their work is entirely original, even though no artist would claim they had no influences. You’re pretending that copyright is an edict that says ideas can never be shared, as though the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and fair use didn’t exist, or Substantial Similarity didn’t have to be proved (which, by the way, is the reason that Hobbes isn’t infringing on Tigger). And worst of all, you’re acting like artists who want to be paid for their art are greedy capitalists, not artists that live under capitalism. How is an artist who wants make a living by creating art all day, every day, somehow less worthy than an artist who works 9 to 5 at a crappy job and then does art when they have free time?

You seem to think abolishing copyright will lead to some sort of artists’ uptopia, but it’s pretty much the opposite. Let’s say copyright disappeared tomorrow. First, anyone making a living on Patreon will basically be done. If their videos or podcasts are now public property, there’s nothing to stop anyone from uploading their Premium Content to YouTube within minutes of publishing, so no one’s going to subscribe. Some of them will keep producing things, but since they’ll need a new source of income, they’ll definitely produce less.

Then there’s the cooperations. They’ll gobble up everything they can. Sure, you’ll be able to make your own Spider-Man comics, but if any publisher likes them, they’ll just sell them, along with any original IP you have. Of course you’ll be able to sell them too, but since they can afford more advertising, higher quality printing, and merchandising, they’ll out-sell you easily. You’ll be lucky it anyone’s even seen or heard of your version, even though you’re the author. It’d be like trying to compete with Coca-Cola by opening a lemonade stand, and Coke is allowed to use your lemonade recipe.

I’m not saying copyright is being done well now; cooperations have an outsized ability to enforce copyright claims, they’ve manipulated the law to retain IP for an insane amount of time, and they have far more power in negotiations over licensing and rights than artists do. But your solution to that is, “What if artists had no rights? That would be better!” and I’ve just…I’ve run out of ways to react to that. It’s truly insane to me.

intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests.

It’s literally the opposite. The first copyright law was passed in 1709 in England to give authors rights to their works instead of publishing companies. The Stationers’ Company, a guild of publishers, had a monopoly over the printing industry, and they we’re deciding amongst themselves who would get to reproduce and publish books. They took the labor of authors, changed it however they saw fit, and reproduced them for profit. Authors never saw a dime, and instead had to find wealthy patrons to subsidize their work.

Yes, for the majority of human history, people used to create art with no expectation of ownership, but for the majority of human history, there weren’t methods to mass reproduce art. Owning the rights to your books didn’t matter when the only way a second could get made is if a monk decided to hand copy it and bind it himself. When the only way to reproduce your painting was to have someone create a forgery, ownership of the physical copy was all that really mattered. If the only way you could get paid for a song was to sing it at the local tavern, it didn’t really matter if you got writing credits.

We’ve already seen a world where the cooperations that control media production can use any work they want. They carved up artists’ works like mobsters dividing up a town and kept all the profits for themselves. Maybe if we lived in a post need, post currency society, you could make an argument for abolishing copyright, but in the system we have, copyright is the only protection artists have against cooperations.

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.

Right, but as I said to someone else in this thread, the fact thar copyright can’t protect 99% of creators is a problem with capitalism, not copyright. The fact that our courts favor the wealthy isn’t the fault of copyright law itself.

Also, you’re correct that most art is created for pleasure, not profit, but that doesn’t mean the need to protect artists’ rights to their creations isn’t necessary, even beyond capitalistic reasons. Bill Waterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, refused to merchandise his art simply because he didn’t want to ruin the image of his characters for a licensing deal. Without copyright law, any company could have slapped his characters on t-shirts and coffee mugs to make a quick buck off of his labor. But because of copyright law, he was able to refuse his publisher’s attempts to franchise his characters (reportedly, he even turned down Spielberg and Lucas’ pitch for an animated series based on the strip).

Well, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. To me, most of the updates have been set dressing, not significant changes to the formula or gameplay. But I guess that’s a matter of opinion, not fact.

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.

Literally everyone who’s ever written a book, recorded a song, painted a painting, or created any other artwork.