The company behind Trump Watches prominently features an iconic image of the presidential candidate on its timepieces. There’s one big problem: It’s not allowed to.
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According to the Associated Press, though, TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC advertised a product it can’t deliver, as that image is owned by the 178-year-old news agency. This week, the AP told WIRED it is pursuing a cease and desist against the LLC, which is registered in Sheridan, Wyoming. (The company did not reply to a request for comment about the cease and desist letter.)
Evan Vucci, the AP’s Pulitzer Prize–winning chief photographer, took that photograph, and while he told WIRED he does not own the rights to that image, the AP confirmed earlier this month in an email to WIRED that it is filing the written notice. “AP is proud of Evan Vucci’s photo and recognizes its impact,” wrote AP spokesperson Nicole Meir. “We reserve our rights to this powerful image, as we do with all AP journalism, and continue to license it for editorial use only.”
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Sure, until you become a creative professional and you see someone with a lot more money than you making even more money off your work, and then you might instead say “fuck that guy”!
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A few do, sure. Not a lot, though. Pretty difficult to make a living if you’re giving away your work for free.
So don’t make your career locking away human creativity from others. The idea that culture is now monetized is a huge problem for our species.
It is very difficult to make money in a market economy if you cannot sell the products of your labor. And to be able to do that, you need to have some ownership over said products. Ownership means exclusion, no way around it. Then you can transfer that ownership to an employer in exchange for a salary, or trade in an open market as a freelancer. Or create a collective wherein you share ownership. There are different models, but culture, to an extent, has always been monetized one way or another because creators have always needed to make a living, so they can continue to practice their craft while sustaining themselves and their families.
Copyright abolitionism sounds cool until you’re a professional creator with mouths to feed in this economy.
Of course there are smart ways creators can make money while also waiving their rights under copyright, but this does not work for everyone and many really just need to be able to sell the product of their labor to make a living.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, not by a long shot. But there’s no easy solution either.
We don’t need “professional” creators.
What you are saying is you don’t want creators to be able to make a living off their work. Because that is what “professional” means.
Most people say things like “fuck copyright” because it’s currently set up to benefit employers, large companies, and wealthy people; creators are an obstacle in copyright law. Current copyright law hinders creativity and centralizes wealth. Fuck copyright.
If copyright law was creator-centric, there would be a lot fewer people saying “fuck copyright”.
Personally I’d probably still be against copyright, but only if there was some other way to take care of artists, like a UBI or something.
I understand the sentiment, and you are right, that copyright is an obstacle to some forms of creativity, especially anything that involves direct reuse of somebody else’s work without their consent. It has also enabled a marketplace for content that has, like many other markets over time, led to the concentration of market power in a small number of business concerns, who effectively dominate their fields with extensive content libraries and armies of lawyers and lobbyists to promote their interests.
However, one should still not forget, that if you’re just an independent creator who depends on their creativity to make a living and at some point manages to create something of great value, it is more likely than not that other small or big fish will try to take that and sell it without giving you a penny. And your only recourse will be copyright law. As in this case here. Saying “fuck copyright” without critically engaging with what is actually at stake in a specific case, can lead to a problematic stance where you may find yourself defending grifters against honest creators trying to make a living off their work.
You’re not wrong, but, like with critics of other “abolish such-n-such” statements, you’re missing a core part of it: replacing “such-n-such” with something better. Copyright has a few important purposes, and I don’t think anyone would want to eliminate it without covering those — and the need for creators to survive, and maybe even flourish, is chief among them.
(Same thing with “defund the police” — the intention was to redirect that funding to crime prevention and “alternative policing” (eg send therapists to mental health emergencies instead of cops). That was arguably the biggest PR fail of the century.)
Also, very very minor point, but as a librarian:
I think “content collections” would be a better term, to preserve the free-to-share subtext of the word “library” — and “collection” has more of a hoarding context, which fits.
Since some commenters on here seemed a little too eager to go with “fuck copyright” and outright dismiss the particular copyright claim the story was about, I thought I’d help make sure they understand that it’s not all bad. Too often have well intentioned people been too quick to dismiss a setup, only to replace it with something worse - or without really having any idea what to replace it with. You seem to understand that copyright serves a useful function in the current market-based economy, warts and all.