alt text: “the state of the animation industry”
“you’re pirating that show? don’t you wanna support the creators?” “I AM the creator.”
“haha the only way I can show future employers my work is to send a link to a bunch of pirated copies of it haha what a nightmare haha”
If pirating even works. Kiana Mai has a similar haha-this-sucks post about how some of her best work is forever locked behind an NDA.
Which is fucking bullshit.
I don’t feel much need for a more detailed or formal argument, on that point. I don’t need to fly a diagonal flag and declare workers must etc., in order to say, copyright doesn’t mean keeping a fucking cartoon secret… forever.
I will say copyright only exists to provide the public with new works. Businesses are entitled to most of the money and some control. Not all. And if you don’t want the money, we still get the result, assholes. The art belongs to us. Copyright is only an incentive for there to be more of it. It is our gift to you. It is not an exchange. Give us what is ours, and either take the money or don’t.
Except if you actually want to get any of those changes made you’ll run into a problem: money is power, and they wield that power to create artificial scarcity in order to make more profits. They also rely on keeping workers poor and disempowered so they can keep them subservient and make them agree to arrangements where they own none of their own work.
The profit motive is directly implicated in this shitty behaviour, and every single time power has been taken from the capitalists it has been because the working class has mobilised and threatened their power, and they have been forced to release their grip a little bit.
You may be right about what copyright should be for in a perfect world, but that doesn’t get results. Worker power does.
New works could be paid for without the use of copyright, but the people with the money are scared of that idea.
Copyright only protects the copyright holders from other people getting to play with the thing they own.