I thought science is funded by the ability to market it, what is it now, make up your mind 🤪

Einstein had a job at a Federal Department. Which is unusual, as a matter of fact (so be free take someone else if you like as an example), because – I don’t know if you have heard about this – usually science happens at something called a university. Which is payed by something called taxes.

And now please go and waste someone else‘s time, clown

Yeah, that’s just plain wrong. Science isn’t just engineering, you know. Again, outside of the actual „applied sciences“ (engineering, pharmaceuticals, etc) rarely anyone produces something that can be marketed, and even if so, it’s by chance. Einstein did not develop his theory of relativity to „market it“. Many areas are only producing results to further our understanding of the world, and we as a society pay them to do so.

Ah, patents, finally someone opens the next pandora’s box… 😅

Well, that’s a bit what someone else tried to argue with the idea vs implementation of an idea argument.

But it’s different here, you cannot have a patent on „science“. You cannot patent the theory of relativity or Newton‘s laws of motion.

What you can patent is a product or a process or a technology which uses science, so you can have a patent on some gps technology which uses Einstein‘s work. Nobody gave old Albert a dime for using his theory though (okay he was also already dead).

But how would you like to transfer that to music? Do you want to patent the performance but the composition (the science) can be „quoted“ by anyone? Not sure where you’re going with this.

And btw you are already paying someone to be able to use the colour pink. You cannot patent the colour itself, but you can patent the product and the process. Producing reliable colours is an industry, they’re not for free.

Edit: we also have many, many areas in science where creating a patent based on the results is not the motivation nor expected because in many areas it’s not even a possibility.

No, we absolutely do not need tougher laws, we already have ridiculously tough laws.

The problem is that people can not and probably will never agree on what is actually copyrighteable. And if you look into the respective laws you’ll always find rubber words, like „elements of originality“, in Germany it’s „threshold of creation“.

I pointed out two cases in some other comment here, but here are two more:

European newspaper publishers (lead, of course, by the Germans) established a EU law that it’s infringing their copyright if you take a snippet of a news article, even if you directly link to the newspaper in question. They were salty about google doing that, so they made it a law. Then google said, „well fuck off“ and threw them out. I don’t know what the current status is, I think the publishers realized they fucked up and now everybody acts like nothing happened or something.

Or: there’s a legal dispute going on between the German hip-hop producer Moses Pelham and the band Kraftwerk, about a 2 second (!) Kraftwerk sample Pelham used in 1997 (!). This thing ended up IIRC five times in front of Germany’s highest civil court, once in front of Germany’s constitutional court (freedom of art, you know), and a few years ago it was handed to the EU court, which handed it back and the last thing I heard is that they need to bring it to the EU court again because they still have questions… And all of this revolves mainly around the question „when is it okay to sample someone else’s work?“. For 25 years courts are trying to find a definition, and every decision is full of ridiculous money quotes.

Edit: I guess it has long passed the point of being a legal dispute, it’s become more like an extremely elaborate discussion of platonic idealism or something.

So, no, I disagree, we need less laws. And we can do that. Take science: yeah, we have creator’s right, but it’s treated as a moral failure to outright plagiarise someone without attribution, and you will lose your „scientist“ badge. Other than that reusing other people’s work is not just okay but a fundamental principle of science, you know, „standing on the shoulders of giants“, like that.

We could treat art the same, yet somehow we don’t.

you cannot copyright ideas

I don’t know about US law, but in Europe you certainly can, and it’s an issue over and over again ending up in courts.

simply mentioning Zaphod Beeblebrox doesn’t trigger anything to do with copyright

Yes it does. Fanfiction e.g. is considered infringement of the creator’s right, and that doesn’t extend to the exact verbatim text but to general plots, names, etc. It’s even infringement if you write a story about „Härrie Pötter“, since it’s immediately obvious that it’s based on Harry Potter.

Some years ago a German discounter sold a costume that was an obvious reference to the TV depiction „Pipi Langstrumpf“, a famous character by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Mind you, in essence it was just a really cheap wig and a dress somewhat resembling a tv character. The company owning the rights on the character sued and won.

Edit: oh! I missed the part where there were two courts that decided it was infringement but in the end the highest court overruled that and said it’s not: https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bgh-urteil-pippi-langstrumpf-romanfigur-urheberrecht/

Which only proves that all of it is completely arbitrary and just a matter of opinion. /Edit

In another case, someone took a photo of a soldier, cut out the soldier, turned it into an outline, and printed and sold t-shirts of that. If you took the shirt and put the photo next to it, it was immediately obvious it was based on the photo. Here the court had no issues, because in their opinion it was too far away from the original work to be compared with it. 🤷‍♀️

So, it’s quite impossible to draw a line between an idea and an implementation, and that’s why thousands and thousands of infringement cases are ending in front of courts, and in the end the only relevant factor is the opinion of the court.

Yeah, but honestly that doesn’t work too well either, does it.

In my opinion, in the majority of cases copyright only helps those who are already famous and the companies that own the copyright*.

I don’t know much about books (but from what I have read, authors here also get scraps), but the film industry is all over the media right now, so I think everybody is aware that even actors of really successful shows get literal pennies for their work: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/orange-is-the-new-black-signalled-the-rot-inside-the-streaming-economy

I do know a lot about (parts of) the music industry to confidently say: it’s the same.

Sure, you have some people who are doing well, extremely well as a matter of fact, but the vast majority of artists have a really hard time getting by. And I’m not talking about the local band playing in the pub with nobody listening, I’m talking about people who tour around the world and play in front of thousands of people.

And unless it’s some really major case of infringement (like taking a song and publish it as your own) they’re neither helped nor do they care much about copyright.

Who does care is, e.g., the German GEMA, a company who watches public performances of copyrighted work, so if you’re playing a song from another band, or playing copyrighted music in a mall, you have to tell them. Allegedly they’re there to ensure fair compensation of artists, in reality they only pay themselves most dearly.

*) This is a bit complicated for me to write about, because under German law you have a creator’s right, which you cannot ever sell or lose, and a copyright, which allows temporary or permanent reproduction of your work. „Stealing“ a song, as mentioned above, wouldn’t be a copyright infringement, but a creator’s right infringement.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusion, very likely eating meat is less bad than drinking e.g. Coca Cola (but FWIW I’m not a nutritionist), but your premise is wrong: just because we evolved doing something doesn’t mean it’s not bad. It’s a classical „appeal to nature“ fallacy.

Nature doesn’t care about your „health“, it just needs you to be able to reproduce. Now with regard to humans we’re able to reproduce at age ~11-14y, but we also do need to take care of our offspring (roughly) the same time, so that would put the needed lifespan of any given human being at ~25y. Give or take, just trying to make a point here.

But we are able to live much longer than that, in industrialised countries we’re clocking in at >80y, so being and staying healthy at that age is not something that evolution prepared us for.

Having evolved to eat meat doesn’t mean anything beyond the reproduction timeline.

(Also, the poster above was making a point about industrial animal husbandry being one major factor to climate change, so it goes beyond human evolution.)