prokopetz:

Alternative to the tired old wizard-with-a-sugar-daddy interpretation of the patron/warlock relationship in Dungeons & Dragons:

  • Clueless boss and long-suffering employee, whose powers are basically the magical equivalent of pilfering office supplies for personal use
  • Scheming master and duplicitous apprentice who are totally open about their loathing for each other and are keen to see who betrays whom first
  • Bureaucratic devil and soul-peddling diabolist with a contract a mile long, each honestly believing they’re getting the better of the other
  • Glowering quartermaster and loose-cannon operative, whose record for getting results just barely justifies the expense of employing them
  • Indifferent parent who pays their estranged offspring’s allowance like clockwork but otherwise prefers to deal with them as little as possible
  • Vast, slumbering god-monster and amoral parabiologist who knows which spots to poke with a stick to provoke particular autonomic responses

prokopetz:

I know folks mean well, but arguing that Article 13 will deprive media corporations of the free advertising furnished by Internet memes and fan media isn’t going to get you anywhere because that’s the entire point.

The whole idea of Article 13 – and the push toward copyright overreach more generally – is to make self-publishing (of all kinds, not just fan media) so onerous that only folks who operate under the auspices of corporate backers can afford to do it.

i.e., they’re trying to roll back to the pre-Internet status quo when a tiny handful of publishing corporations had absolute control over all non-local media distribution channels, and – unless the author was independently wealthy – media was permitted to reach a wide audience only with their explicit approval.

The mechanism is pretty straightforward: Article 13 and legislation like it would establish a presumption in law that the corporate claimant in any copyright dispute is correct, and place the onus upon the author as a private individual to prove otherwise. At the time of this writing, the average cost of bringing a copyright dispute to court is in the neighborhood of $200 000. What private individual has that kind of money?

It’s not just about fan media. This type of legislation would allow publishing corporations to claim that they own anything they please, and hosting providers would be obliged to block distribution of that content purely on the claimant’s say-so, unless and until the dispute is resolved in court – and unless you’ve got two hundred grand to burn, that resolution will never happen.

Of course, there’d be remedies short of going to court – like, say, signing on with a publishing company yourself, so that they can “protect” your intellectual property on your behalf. See where this is going?

Pointing out the potential for short-term harm to publishing corporations’ bottom line is a non-starter because no amount of loss of exposure could possibly outweigh the benefits to the publishing corps if the long game pays off.