Copyright’s explicit purpose is to encourage new works.
Any form of “unpublishing” is theft from the public. You wanna say a guy can’t make money on a thing? Great, fine, go nuts. But nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.
Copyright is only an incentive to create new works for the public. For us. Once you’ve sold it, it’s ours. That’s what the money is for. If thirty years isn’t enough then it’s just not gonna happen.
People have a right to culture. Anything you grew up with is yours to build on.
In their worldview, there is The Hierarchy,™ and everybody’s role is to do as they’re told by people above them. There is no other force in their moral universe. Nothing else decides what is real.
People stuck in this mindset are vicious when they have so few opportunities to be the boot instead of the face. It’s identifying with the aggressor.
In 1997, Mindscape fired the entire Lego Island team the day before release. The team that just made a custom engine for their much-hyped and soon best-selling game that would garner sequels for years to come. The painfully obvious reason was the promise of giving people more money if the game did well.
Nothing has changed.
Unionize and fuck these corporations.
Even outside unions - pro-rate everything. No more hard cutoffs where some bastard can promise the world, get 99% of what they promised it for, and then give nothing.
It’s okay, native speakers only caught that one because it’s in the chorus. Some people still think “Born In The USA” is a patriotic anthem. David Bowie called it the most anti-American song he’d ever heard. Davie Bowie co-wrote “I’m Afraid Of Americans.”
Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year. But they’ve decided to make everybody miserable, for a “business” that still won’t cause enough misery to turn a profit.
Meanwhile creators are censored worse than broadcast TV. Nevermind the effective ban on swearing - they can’t even reference concepts without a surveillance program declaring that their latest video doesn’t count, even though they’ll still slap ads all over that bitch.
Those people have things they want to share with an audience that wants to see. Any middleman can either help, or become irrelevant. Bandwidth is cheap. Some creators are just in it for the money… but the money is bad, on Youtube, and it’s getting worse. Patreon is more direct and far less stupid. As with all these lumbering ruins of 2010s internet media, the network effect of being the default will keep them relevant for a while, no matter what they do. Twitter’s on fire and it’s still not dead. But its prospects sure aren’t getting better… and not because people changed.
People are sadly predictable. These idiot robots exploit that masterfully, to a point, and then act bewildered when more pressure stops making more money. Like they forgot we can just leave.