Mad Moth Ramblings @aster-in-july - Tumblr Blog

Bunny from My Pet Hotel

i have a copyright related question that i was hoping you could help me wrap my head around, because i agree with you basically all of the time on that matter, but something about this specific scenario is giving me a bit of a hangup (not that we should KEEP copyright because of this specific scenario but that i dont know what should be done instead). i also apologize in advance there definitely used to be a post about this that i wish i could link to but i cant find it so this ask is going to be very long. the long and short of it is there used to be a "band" called new jersey weather report. they released an album and some other stuff, there were related side projects too. they sold their stuff on bandcamp one of my good friends has 1 of 12 cassettes ever produced by them. they were part of a virtual festival in minecraft, and the vod got flagged for copyright infringement for a completely different band. as it turns out, all of new jersey weather report's (and all of their side projects') music was completely stolen from other groups - i know white oak and the planet you were 2 of them but there may have been more idr. and by completely stolen i mean absolutely no editing, just changed the names of the songs, and no attribution to the original artists at all. and i know this kind of thing happens legally all the time under the current copyright system anyways and we dont have any recourse for it now either. but it seems like... disingenuous to say that under a copyright-less system that it would be perfectly acceptable to do exactly that? like if we didnt have copyright, and njwr did what they did, but this time just no one ever found out. does that make it ok? and like im framing this around njwr because its something that i know happened but i guess it would apply to anything subject to copyright - if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just... fine?

if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just… fine?

i mean, i don't think that's fine--because you are lying to people. the copying is not the morally fraught aspect of this--i think it is completely morally fine to print the shining and evne to make money off it; it's when you start lying about the authorship that you start causing harm. i think this sort of deception has three direct and evident harms:

you are denying the original author credit for their work. it is natural, when you have made something, to feel proud and want to be recognized for it--it is hurtful to see people enjoying your work without feeling credited. depending on the context, being denied credits in this way can also be a material harm; in many artistic industries, credits and reputation are crucial to finding jobs and opportunities

you are denying those who enjoy the work the opportunity to understand its actual context. if someone reads the shining, they can go on to find the rest of steven king's ouvre; they can see what he has cited as his influences and go back and read those. the circumstances of a work's production, its position in an artist's broader body of work--all this epitext is shorn off completely when you deceive someone about the origin of a work

you are committing an act of vandalism against the culture more completely; if your version of the work becomes more notable than the original, you build a false citation into the history of the medium. you create a dead end, a cul-de-sac of the rich interconnectness of culture where something is put into a position it doesn't actually occupy. in the worst cases, where this behaviour mixes with e.g. colonialism, racism, etc. you participate in actively writing oppressed peoples and their culture out of cultural memory

but this has nothing to do with copyright; none of these harms are caused by the act of reproduction. an opposition to plagiarism is completely in line with a copyright abolitionist stance, because the harms of plagiarism stem from a particular intentional deception around crediting rather than from breaking copyright laws

graciousfemme

most intimidating scary butch you've ever seen: hiii :3

most beautiful angelic femme you've ever seen: i need a fucking cigarette

slimetony

Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away

slimetony

Why does staff still allow people funnier than you to leave tags on your posts. They should have fixed that by now

thegneurshk

falazaria

@greypaw

sarahiscoffee

Always forget that after a period of heightened stress there is The Comedown. A period where there is no longer something ambiently spiking your adrenaline and there is the temptation to fall into general malaise. You can allow this to happen for up to three(3) days but after that you must firmly get your shit together

aster-in-july

what happens when the comedown happens WHILE you're in the middle of the stuff that's stressing u out though

ssegundosombra

"Artists do however have a degree of freedom. A writer has little power, but he does have freedom... Think very carefully about this. Do you want to be merely the spokesman for accomplished power movers? The more power, the less freedom. A politician has almost no freedom at all. I am frequently asked, 'What would you do if you were President? What would you do if you were the dictator of America? What would you do if you had a billion dollars?” In the words of my friend Ahmed Jacoubi, 'This question is not personal opinion.' A prior question must be asked: 'How did you get to be the President, a dictator, a billionaire?' The answers to these questions will condition what you will do. For one is not magically teleported into these positions; one gets there by a series of discrete steps, each step hedged with conditions and prices.”

William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Collected Essays

helenvaughans

📢📢📢

zulashur

Cider is like if beer transitioned and stopped hating herself

philcollinsenjoyer

explained to an 8 year old that once a fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon and she said so i'll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? no and there are about a million pieces of art for you unrelatedly

pastperfectcontinuous

I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft

partywithponies

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

partywithponies

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

partywithponies

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

dizzyghoast

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case

dasloddl

op disabled reblogs but I think the point still stands

eepyenbyfox

reminder that the books themselves also suck ass actually. there's an entire plotline endorsing slavery. the one character who advocates to end slavery is bullied and made fun of. the one slave who doesnt like being enslaved is bullied and treated as an outcast. the bankers are the picture of racist stereotypes of jewish people. the one asian character is named fckn Cho Chang. the worldbuilding SUCKS. fuck harry potter and fuck rowling. stop giving her your money.