If the logic of copyright/trademark/IP law applied to everything, what's the most peculiar possible implication you can think of for it?
Was thinking of this after a conversation I had on a thread about dreams. Someone joked “I was dreaming of the events of The Matrix, then I was woken up by someone worried my dream was infringing the Wachowski’s copyrights”, and it turned into a whole train of thought in my mind, like violating IP law because you stole fire from Zeus which was his intellectual property.
Lineages could claim copyright of children and their works as derivative. Entire families could claim copyright of their descendants and all works related. Each new generation resets the timer on expiration if the copyright expirations still apply.
Planetary air is free as no one could prove in court that they had any hand in its design or creation.
However the air in contained facility such as a space station or mars habitat is copy protected. Each inhabitant requires a Microsoft 365 style license renewed annually to breathe. Special areas of the habitat or use cases such as atheltic activities require special temporary licenses.
That's basically a plot point in Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, where visitors have to pay for the amount of air they intend to breathe while visiting the moon.
Also, Idea: invent a copyrightable method of filtering or otherwise treating air. Release your "specially modified" air into the atmosphere. Start charging for every time someone inhales one of your AyreMolecuulz™.
Paying money every time you sit on a chair. Part goes to the owner, part goes to taxes, part goes to the chair maker's company, part goes to the chair desiger, a drip goes to the chair maker.
I actually think this backfires on most of you. Copyright law makes everything public domain after a period of time, Johnny Fires kids will be able to trade for all the first professionals in the world. But Life +70 years after currency is invented, anyone can print cash and trade falls apart and services and materials are the only thing if value. Copyright laws broken :shrug:
I think current copyright rules are already quite wild enough when applied to digital media, since digital media is literally just made of numbers. Anyone who makes IP automatically owns the number that represents it in a computer.
Plus it's not just that one number. What if you have different resolutions of an image or video? Different file formats or encodings? What if you compress or encrypt the media? Yeah, the copyright holder can enforce that nobody is allowed to use ANY of those numbers. What if you take media and divide it by 2? Probably still copyrighted. What if you divide it by 236832746589? Copyrighted? Probably, yeah, since it would be too easy to take a movie, divide it by that number, and give it to all your friends so they could reproduce the original. I don't even know how to estimate the extremely vast amount of numbers somebody implicitly owns every time they make any piece of IP.
So yeah, literally illegal to count high enough or perform certain forbidden math.
Memes taken down and replies deleted in conversations because they contain copyrighted text and images. Lyrics censored in online conversation. All video containing any image with a logo protected by trademark, or characters protected by international copyright, even when on T shirts and signs being taken down.
Sexual positions are locked behind tiered paywalls. The most basic ones are free, but as they get more interesting, you have to pay increasing royalty fees.
As much as I dislike Kapoor, technically Vantablack isn't a pigment or regular paint by any means. From my understanding it is actually carbon nano tubes with who knows what else mixed in it and I believe it's actually very dangerous to be around without proper PPE. So in that sense, it makes sense to me that he "owns" it.
He doesn't own it. He has an exclusive license to use it in art. Surrey NanoSystems Limited owns the patent on VantaBlack. Stuart Semple was so angry that Kapoor received that license that he had a blacker black material created and licensed it to anyone but Kapoor. When Kapoor obtained a sample anyway, Semple had a still blacker material created, to spite him.