The Surprising History of Copyright and the Promise of a Post-Copyright World
questioncopyright.org
questioncopyright.org
Something similar happens with books too, where books are only popular for about 10 years at most if they are still under copyright, but those that are in the public domain are popular for decades or more.
Maybe there should be a balance, but what we have now in regards to both patents and copyright is likely not it, in the sense that copyright terms need to be greatly reduced, their impact somewhat more limited (some DMCA stuff is really abusive), and patents need to be accepted much less often and for actual inventions rather than obvious stuff that anyone could've invented.
Have you ever been in a second-hand bookstore? The only way I can make sense of your comment is if I assume you don't read a lot of books.
Writers would have it even worse than musicians, since at least musicians can tour. When was the last time you attended a live reading of a novel?
I am not arguing that copyright is perfect as is, but so far I see nothing better that allows artists to actually eat. In a post copyright world, big capital would still own brands, distribution channels, networks, etc. It would actually be great for them: they could now monetize artists work any way they wanted without paying the artist anything. Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. would be big winners.
This stuff is yet another hard right wing labor busting idea masquerading as something liberal and progressive.
However, it is true that even the most famous artists might have to get used to their art "merely" affording them a comfortable life, instead of making them obscenely wealthy like it does through license sales today.
It's never been easy for an artist to make a living, but taking rights away just makes it harder. An artist can give away their work now if they want. You are talking about removing the other options, and I don't see much upside that outweighs the downside. Only big capital really benefits.
It's also hypocritical for engineers, who have the potential to become obscenely wealthy, to criticize others for this while advocating labor busting policies. Do people actually want a world where only a tiny handful of technicians and supercapitalists have wealth? All I see here is elitism. This is not a progressive idea. Please stop promoting it as if it is.
Artists can do the same. Both artists and engineers can become wealthy through this method if copyright didn't exist.
Also, the point the article is making is that the current system is the one in which "only big capital really benefits". I have not seen you make any counterpoints to this claim, just an assertion that it is in fact the opposite.
You're talking about the world we live in right now. The discussion here is about taking away the power that these "supercapitalists" already have.
I believe a new model that worked on protecting attribution of the work rather than copy-rights would be more adequate to protect authors from having their work exploited by large publishers without giving anything away in return.
As compared to the power that authors have in their relationship with publishers now?
At least the relation of an artist with their patron was on a one-on-one personal level; they could influence their patrons and convince them to have their way on an emotional level. Try that when you're paid by a corporation.
I predict a future of performing arts for writers as well. Roleplaying games show us that doing such thing is possible, and creative platforms for storytelling will allow artists to perform live experiences for an audience.
"Experience builder" may very well be the future of what we call "writers" now, and the media that will allow it already exists; in that media, it's not unreasonable to think that people will pay to have the experience tailored for them in real time, even if recorded copies of such experience are then instantly distributed for free to the world.
I predict a future of performing arts for writers as well. Roleplaying games show us that doing such thing is possible, and creative platforms for storytelling will allow artists to perform live experiences for an audience.
If I wanted to do live performance then I would have pursued a career in theater. The existence of other possibilities does not unilaterally justify the unilateral abolition of one economic mechanism (copyright) so as to privilege consumer interests over those of producers. Perhaps you don't enjoy reading novels or consuming stories with fixed narratives (rather than interactive games), but lots of people do enjoy that, and there is a distinct skill in the construction and development of such narratives.
Would you go to a farmer and say 'the food you grow should be free for the taking to anyone passing your field, after all the earth is bountiful and you can simply grow more food in the future so ownership of food is inherently meaningless. If you are just farming for the money, you could always go and work in a coal mine instead.'
Technology has changed for good; when almost everybody carries in their pocket a machine for creating perfect copies of any kind of information, it's basic economy that the value of a copy reduces to nothing. It's the world which has moved on, not a desire to inconvenience authors; legislation needs to reflect that change. The value of original creation is worth something, but forcing people to buy copies in order to sustain such original creation is a market inefficiency; better processes need to be found, which are more well adapted to the way people behave.
A more apt analogy to your farmer example would be if everybody would carry Star Trek matter replicators on them. The farmer would not have a right to send cops to tie the hands of everyone passing by one of their tomatoes, or near any copy of a copy of the tomatoes, so that the walker can't create a copy for their consumption and thus have no need of paying for the original.
It seems like the relationship between music labels and artists is more abusive than that between, say, book publishers and authors, so this may not be inherent to the problem.
If you count an artist sharing his work via CC-BY and making a living, then yes, it already happened. http://www.peppercarrot.com/
Now, you might disagree with the example as evidence of a workable post-copyright world, you still need to explain how this artist and others manage to thrive anyway.
On what basis do you dismiss an entire category of business models? Youtube, Kickstarter, Patreon: people are already living off of this model. In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that many of these people derive no benefit from copyright law right now; it certainly isn't helping them "actually eat".
The models you describe depend on copyright. It's why I can't go to Kickstarter, copy all the work of a successful artist, and then do my own fund raisers and take their proceeds.
I argue so hard against this stuff because I used to believe it. Then I thought it through.
No, they don't. Many of these artists receive their patronage and give all of their work away for free.
It's why I can't go to Kickstarter, copy all the work of a successful artist, and then do my own fund raisers and take their proceeds.
Why don't you try that and see how it works? Society operates on more than laws, it also operates on norms. Doing what you just described would make you a social outcast and open you up to widespread social retaliation; the legal system need not apply.
Why would readers want to tipjar a person who stole credits from the original author?
Also, it's pretty easy to identify who's the original author. Simply, the person who posted it first is very likely the original author. Especially so if the author has a portfolio of works that identify the author.
For example, there's a $10 million suit against Warner Brothers of the film Gravity. Tess Gerritsen, a writer, alleges that the film film depicts the major events in a book she worte in 1999 and optioned to a film production company. The problem is that in the meantime that company no longer exists after a bunch of acquisitions, mergers and so on, and although there's good reason to think her book wound up in the hands of the film's writer/director and that the film is indeed derivative o the book, her legal problem is an inability (at present) to prove that Warner Brothers is the ultimate beneficial owner of the firm she was dealing with back in 1999. The problem here is not so much copyright as a lack of transparency in corporation law.
Isn't this direct evidence against the claim that "copyright protects individuals against big corporations"? If it weren't for copyright, Warner Brothers would collapse and we'd be back to holding each other accountable on a personal level.
Kickstarter and Patreon fund future work, not past work.
This is actually what makes them so much better than the copyright-publisher model, because they prevent that exact scenario that you describe. If I record some music, sign it to a label, and then leave, the label owns the rights, and payments for copies of that music goes to them. If I record some music, give it away for free, and advertise a Kickstarter for my next album, nobody gains anything from trying to sell my previous album. You're not paying for a copy of a work that was already worked; you're funding the promise of me doing more work, and that promise has to come from the person who is actually doing the work. So the money has to go to the person actually doing the work.
Since there is no copy involved, copyright doesn't help. If I'm not funded and take some boring desk job, zero copies will exist.
I notice you're leaving out the part where the label gives you money in return for those rights, as well as your ability to negotiate the terms of the agreement you sign.
If I record some music, give it away for free, and advertise a Kickstarter for my next album, nobody gains anything from trying to sell my previous album.
What's better about that? You're not engineering an outcome in which you get paid, you're engineering an outcome in which nobody makes any money, and you think that by doing so you've now brought the publishers down to your level and so you've achieved some kind of economic parity.
You're basically saying that best strategy for people in the arts is to do a bunch of work for nothing, hope that it becomes popular (by doing additional unpaid work on marketing) and then go on strike.
The question should be how to monetize your labor? That answer isn't easily given but I can guess it would require a whole new method of payment. For example, a musician in the vast majority of cases lives from the money earned in performances as very few are writers of their own songs (that's where the current money is found in terms of the music industry). Thus, musicians would monetize as they always have, through payment for performances. It's when you get into writing lyrics or entire songs (sheet music plus lyrics) is where things may become complex. If the writer and musician are the same person then the person would have to default to performances to ensure some measure of payment. As for the song itself, that would be something left to the creator to figure out.
As for writing books, well that's even more complex at least in terms of reprints. But first runs would still go through publishers like Amazon which means there's some guarantee of revenue (just not to the projected sums you may assume). But today's small time writer isn't working the gravy train any more than the musician is. If anything, both musician and writer are just could/would be profiteers.
It's blind luck either profession finds success. Copyright doesn't offer much in the way of protection. What happens now is that human beings in general value your work. Thus pay you as we do now. Copyright is just the formality to prevent non-payment from other parties such as publishers. Copyright today isn't much of a benefit even there since many publishers write contracts to their advantage. What should happen is that copyright should largely (and in my opinion solely) apply to companies. And it should be by default that the majority of all proceeds be held in trust to the creator of the work even if the company in question offered the means to produce said proceeds. I think this approach would go further to ensure artists and content creators have a better chance at a livable wage. But it shouldn't include lifetime of the creator plus X years in any capacity. It should be up the creator of the work to register for the copyright as before the 1970s. And it should be easy as filling out a form on the web with a copy of the original work in question for verification with the US Copyright office or its analogs in other countries.
So, within a State we have to ask the question regarding how to best protect both labor and the products of someone's labor. It's not as easy as writing a computer program to be sure. I'm just pointing out that effectively all copyright doesn't effectively pay a proper wage as like all titled property it benefits those who can leverage the legal system to their favor. And historically speaking, copyright law has inevitably favored those who can pay the lawyers the most which is not the vast majority of creators (as labor).
Enforcement has always been separate, even before copyright and from the very beginnings of the Stationers monopoly.
Despite the existence of the High Commission, the reality of censorial control of the press at this time did not primarily lie with the stationers. Certainly, they had a role to play in the politics and practice of sixteenth century censorship,[24] but in fact it was not the stationers but rather "[t]wo long-standing institutions, parliament and the royal prerogative, [that] proved to be Elizabethan England's most useful means for effecting censorship" [Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, 19]
http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecord...
It really could just be as easy as writing a computer program. Spotify is basically a voluntary collection agency that honors IP contracts.
If we can make it so the legal and accounting services are computerized, with software both writing and enforcing contracts, we could make copyright registration and transfer settlement incredibly cheap. That's the main reason why copyright law has favored those who can pay the lawyers and accountants the most, they have always been necessary in order to make the entire system function.
The potential inequity of litigation outcomes doesn't mean that I would be better off without this property right.
It's not a 1-to-1 comparison to copyright of music and art but I think the principle still applies. Focus on making a product someone wants. If you can't price it property the first time then try another price or business model.
No, that's an economic decision you made to enter into a work-for-hire arrangement instead of selling your own product/service - whose assets you would own - and you are now trying to foist that economic arrangement on other people who don't want to enter into it.
But today's small time writer isn't working the gravy train any more than the musician is. If anything, both musician and writer are just could/would be profiteers.
Well, excuse me for wanting to create and sell my own literary product. WTF.
What should happen is that copyright should largely (and in my opinion solely) apply to companies. And it should be by default that the majority of all proceeds be held in trust to the creator of the work even if the company in question offered the means to produce said proceeds.
It seems as if you propose establishing a more equal playing field by abolishing the economic incentive for capital owners to invest money in the production of cultural goods.
It should be up the creator of the work to register for the copyright as before the 1970s. And it should be easy as filling out a form on the web with a copy of the original work in question for verification with the US Copyright office or its analogs in other countries.
Well, this is how it works now if you want to recover statutory damages. I create work, I pay $50 to register with the copyright office and supply a deposit copy, eventually I get a receipt and if someone infringes on the copyright I can recover punitive damages. Otherwise I'm limited to economic damages which are a lot trickier to recover, as many infringers can hide behind shell companies and just let them go bankrupt. In practice publication deals typically require that the copyright be registered in advance of the deal so as to avoid messy and expensive litigation at a later date over exactly when the work was created, likewise many publishers prefer to be approached by attorneys or literary agents rather than by authors, precisely because those professionals will have the legalities in order at the commencement of negotiations and publishers will know exactly what they're buying.
Nope, it's a reality. The majority of people who work are not business or capital owners. It's a fact of capitalism which is not immutable.
Well, excuse me for wanting to create and sell my own literary product. WTF.
Then deal with the hard reality that being a writer isn't always profitable just as being a programmer isn't always profitable. The market does not promise any ROI for any vocation or enterprise. You have to see it through like the rest of us.
It seems as if you propose establishing a more equal playing field by abolishing the economic incentive for capital owners to invest money in the production of cultural goods.
Capital owners are the problem with our economy, yes.
Otherwise I'm limited to economic damages which are a lot trickier to recover, as many infringers can hide behind shell companies and just let them go bankrupt.
And yet the primary target of copyright infringement these days are kids who torrent the latest Taylor Swift album. I'm sorry if I'm not sympathetic to your cause when the actual infringers have no money of their own or little of it to give to you.
In the end, you seem very much invested in keeping the status quo where it's impossible to achieve a practical method to recover losses. The current system is built with the assumption that one size fits all. The reality is that there is no one size fits all solution. If you want to recover losses from the teenager who torrented your work then figure out a monetization scheme. Don't go to a lawyer and bully a kid who probably doesn't even have a personal checking account. Figure out how to price it right for that kid. Otherwise, just get out of the market place because your reaction is like that of certain libertarians I've debated where they justify the killing of a kid who steals a stick of bubblegum from a news stand.
Copyright gives writers and other creators of intellectual property the ability to function in a market economy based on top of a legal system of private property, contract and tort.
Copyright lets people create capital that can continue to work for them after the initial labor, much like how a corporation works.
Being a laborer is being in an unfortunate position in a capitalist society. This is why democratic capitalist societies are also very interested in giving ownership to as many people as possible. Getting as many people invested in our systems of law and order helps it to survive.
Artists who can't derive a living by these means should look into alternate means of making a living. Success as an artist is not an entitlement. Creative people who make creative works will succeed in proportion to their ability to be valued by society or a subset of it, not because society can correctly identify any objective or intrinsic value in any particular creative work.
It's also not comparable to the "wealthy engineers" you malign. If engineers worked under the same terms as modern copyright never a road or bridge or factory would be built because the next hundred years of paying royalties to all the engineers on top of construction costs would make it impossible to build anything.
Frankly, most engineers give up the rights to their creative works in order to be employed at all and recognize that they can't expect to make a living for their entire life just by designing one awesome bridge or skyscraper.
Neither is unlimited access to a person's artistic creation.
From an economic sense I've never understood trying to prevent piracy. I can understand not encouraging it or even encouraging buying the product but not acting like piracy is a heinous crime that robs them.
My favorite example is illegal anime fansubs that open up an entire foreign market to something they otherwise would not participate in. From purchasing merchandise (figurines, dakimakuras, DVD's, soundtracks, etc.) to telling their friends about the anime. It's business that these studios would otherwise not get and so many fansub groups are tolerated or even hired as official translators for studios.
This sort of black/white standpoints on piracy do more harm to both sides in many cases...people shooting themselves in the foot because they don't understand that potentially free marketing brings in more money than the imaginary "lost sale" (who says the person who pirated would even buy your product to begin with?)
What you're missing is that those things only exist for purchase because someone invested capital in their production, and you only learn about the original media because money was spent on marketing in its home territory.
If all you have is the IP and no capital, which is the position that most authors are in, then you can't easily cash in on the merchandising possibilities or purchase the marketing resources to focus public attention on your product at scale.
people shooting themselves in the foot because they don't understand that potentially free marketing brings in more money than the imaginary "lost sale"
Have you ever tried to sell a creative product? Maybe you should. The reality is that 'potentially free marketing' is a terrible bootstrap strategy for many creative products. If your only marketing option is to give it away free then the signal you are sending to the market is that 'this work has no value' and so nobody is inclined to pay for it. Piracy across market boundaries (like anime) only works because there is already a perception of value for the product - you want something that people in another market can easily buy but which you can't. They can easily buy it because someone invested in distribution and marketing.
Look, if you sat down, learned to draw, and made your own anime book and put it up on the internet for free without caring about copyright, do you think money just comes rolling in? It won't, even if it's good and popular. If you ignore copyright that someone else who does have capital sitting idle will just start producing and selling merchandise and they won't give you any of the money.
True. Most of the time at least. This is assuming it isn't some indie project, but for the most part I'll agree and say it is true.
>you only learn about the original media because money was spent on marketing in its home territory.
I hate to enter a semantic debate but I don't consider announcements to be marketing, although I can understand how one could interpret them as such.
People learn about the original media through the fansub groups who learn about the product through announcements of upcoming works from the studios and/or the native TV rippers (I forget their actual name). Only a small, niche market of foreigners who happen to also speak Japanese hear about it from marketing in the home territory. There are fangroups who, at the start of each season, compile the upcoming works from each studio. That is all the marketing that most of the pirating consumers get - and none of it is from marketing the product in Japan.
>If all you have is the IP and no capital, which is the position that most authors are in, then you can't easily cash in on the merchandising possibilities or purchase the marketing resources to focus public attention on your product at scale.
Which is why free advertisement from pirates is a benefit. Which is part of what I'm getting at...then there's the entire doujinshi market which runs counter to this claim. Many doujinshi artists become very popular because of a single sale that is then scanned and distributed to people who then pirate the work. The artist can gain a lot of popularity through this pirating of their work, which results in more sales in the future.
>Have you ever tried to sell a creative product? Maybe you should.
I have.
> The reality is that 'potentially free marketing' is a terrible bootstrap strategy for many creative products.
I already replied to this. >I can understand not encouraging it or even encouraging buying the product but not acting like piracy is a heinous crime that robs them.
>If your only marketing option is to give it away free
Nowhere did I say that.
>Look, if you sat down, learned to draw, and made your own anime book and put it up on the internet for free without caring about copyright, do you think money just comes rolling in? It won't, even if it's good and popular.
Ignoring your bad assumptions, do you think an artist would make money if their initial marketing, at some level, wasn't free? How many artists would make sales without a portfolio or free display of their work? How many musicians would get signed to a label without an EP?
For anime, it's produced for-profit, that's correct, but piracy arguably helps their for-profit motives more than it harms them. If they spent a bunch of money, time, and effort preventing all piracy of their IP - they'd lose out on countless international sales of merchandise... and for what exactly? Because they own the IP? That's nice. As long as it's profitable for them, why should they care? This is why Comiket is tolerated.
It's costly to sub an anime for a foreign release where it isn't guaranteed to do as well as it did in Japan. Often times unpopular anime from Japan is very popular overseas, so it can be difficult even choosing what to release overseas. They're essentially getting free labor from fansub groups which results in sales they would have had to pay for (by releasing their own sub/dub). That's a win-win for the studio.
This is less applicable to Hollywood movies that lack merchandise deals (e.g. anything that isn't superhero related) and music. I'm aware of that, but each form of media has its own arguments.
Over 1/2 of my music library was purchased only because I originally heard of the artist because a friend pirated their music or I was listening to their music for free (I use AdBlock, so they aren't making money off ads) on YouTube. I would not have discovered the artist or purchased their music without this method of discovery, which is reliant on my friends or other people pirating their music and "broadcasting it" to the world.
So it becomes an issue of "if 1 pirate results in greater than or equal to 2 sales, it is profitable to let the pirate pirate" and measuring (and quantifying) the pirates "free marketing" aspect. While I can personally quantify which items my friends have pirated and determine whether it was, in the end, profitable for the company to let them pirate or not.
The company has no way of measuring what sales of their sales occurred because of pirates. They only know that piracy means they "lost a sale"; which might not have happened even if piracy wasn't an option. This is where the problem lies and opinions differ.
I'm of the opinion that the free publicity piracy provides outweighs the lost sales that occur from piracy, therefore tolerating, but not promoting, piracy is an overall net gain.
This argument is different than one I would use for a painter or photographer. Where stealing is a lot more harmful to the artist, especially since attribution is almost never given for stolen works. In this form of media, piracy steals recognition and publicity rather than giving it. That's actively harmful and is more easily provable that it harms the artist.
Look, the existence of the studio and fansubs' awareness of it is itself a 'marketing debt' much like 'technical debt.' People only care because something from that studio has already been on TV in Japan, or they wouldn't know it existed. If you go to a fansub group ad say you (an unknown producer) have a great idea for a show that you will produce using an unknown artist, do you think people are going to send you money to produce the product?
>Have you ever tried to sell a creative product? Maybe you should.
I have.
And?
Ignoring your bad assumptions, do you think an artist would make money if their initial marketing, at some level, wasn't free? How many artists would make sales without a portfolio or free display of their work? How many musicians would get signed to a label without an EP?
But they are not giving away the copyright when they do that, and I think you know this. They retain their ownership interest in the work and then bargain for the terms under which they are willing to assign or sell it to a publisher in exchange for money and/or distribution services.
If I'm a record executive, hear a great demo, but don't like the look of the band, I can't just hire some photogenic actors to get a cover shot and start selling copies of the music without paying for it. I will get sued into the ground and possibly go to prison. The copyrighted work is an asset whose price can be bargained for. That's why experienced artists are very wary of submitting to contests and stuff like that, because some contest operators make assignment of copyright a condition of entry and people who submit to such a competition have no legal recourse.
In other words success is correlated with successful marketing rather than any intrinsic value of the work. So even if the work is great and popular, authors of said works hould not be allowed to have an economic interest in its distribution.
It's also not comparable to the "wealthy engineers" you malign. If engineers worked under the same terms as modern copyright never a road or bridge or factory would be built because the next hundred years of paying royalties to all the engineers on top of construction costs would make it impossible to build anything.
Utter, unmitigated bullshit. You're saying that there is really no such thing as original work, which is patently untrue.
Name one story in modern movies that doesn't follow at least part of commonly identified narratives. Name one painting that doesn't follow some common themes (Madonna and child comes to mind). Name one written work that doesn't have some intertextual references. Hell, name one superhero that isn't a knock off of another.
If you can't then will you admit that everyone borrows ideas from everyone else?
As I'm looking for passive income from copyright royalties, I'm biased but I will attempt to explain the counterargument as fairly as I can. I've read many philosophical arguments about copyrights.
Some arguments against copyrights start from a different premise than you do. Your question assumes the premise that the world "owes" artists the benefit of copyright. No matter how strongly you feel about that, if you want to engage with the other side, you have to temporarily suspend that premise.
The counterargument says that copyrights for music, art, text is a quirk made possible by technology (Gutenberg press, vinyl & CD replication, etc.) instead of a fundamental economic right. They can point to other areas of creativity that don't enjoy copyrights and yet new ideas flourish:
Andrew Wiles spends years solving Fermat's Last Theorem. He will get no copyright or royalties from that breakthrough. He does get bragging rights. So pure abstract mathematicians can't get rich off of theorem proving and buy mansions and sports cars like Michael Jackson.
A chef or bartender inventing a new recipe for food or mixed drink can't copyright their ingredient list. (They can keep it secret but "trade secrets" such as CocaCola formula is a different concept from copyrights.)
An interesting economic situation is poetry. Poetry is copyrighted but hardly anyone can make a living at it. Poets have day jobs such as a professor of English at a University. The royalties from poetry books are miniscule. If they give poetry recitals, it's usually performed for free.
Does the world "owe" poets a living such that they don't have to moonlight as an English professor? Well, so far, that's what they've been doing. They can't buy mansions and sports cars, or even a middle class living with poetry royalties but they continue to write them. One of the greatest poems/stories of all time is The Iliad and that never had copyright protection.
What would a world without copyrights for musicians look like? Probably the non-performing musicians would have to moonlight with day jobs, or get sponsorships (patrons, crowdfunding). Etc.
That scenario looks "worse" because all of us discussing it were born after copyrights have been entrenched. Like I said, we'd to have erase that premise to imagine it differently.
I find the counterarguments fascinating but I continue with pursuing copyright royalties because that's the current configuration we live in.
No. They can't. But it's important to understand that they can't attain any measure of financial security even with copyright law in place. It just looks like they can. Only the superstars ever get financial security from copyrights.
Writers would have it even worse than musicians, since at least musicians can tour. When was the last time you attended a live reading of a novel?
Crowdfunding is another option. But I think it's useful to give up on the idea that artists will ever make any meaningful amount of money from selling their art after the fact.
I am not arguing that copyright is perfect as is, but so far I see nothing better that allows artists to actually eat.
If we force artists to make art in order to be able to eat, isn't the system already broken?
In a post copyright world, big capital would still own brands, distribution channels, networks, etc. It would actually be great for them: they could now monetize artists work any way they wanted without paying the artist anything. Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. would be big winners.
Maybe. But you'd also see a lot of free distribution through BitTorrent, Popcorn Time etc. In order for Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. to make money, they'd have to be able to add some value on top of content distribution... value that can't easily be replicated for free.
What we call "intellectual property" is really a public good. It's non-rival and non-exclusive in nature.
This stuff is yet another hard right wing labor busting idea masquerading as something liberal and progressive.
Maybe. But that doesn't mean it's wrong.
This kind of thinking about intellectual property is what led me to re-examine the nature of labor in general. Is it reasonable for us to expect the labor market to provide sufficient income to consumers?
Can you explain what you mean by that? I'm trying to put it in the perspective of other careers, and it doesn't make any sense to me. Like, "If we force doctors to heal in order to be able to eat, isn't the system already broken?" It doesn't sound broken. I'm a programmer. I have to program to eat. I can choose something else if I don't make it as a programmer, just as artists can. (And in fact, I do some art on the side, too.) But everyone has to contribute in some way to eat. (Well, unless they inherit a bunch of money, I guess.) Why is that worse for artists than anyone else? I think I'm missing some larger point, here. Sorry to sound dense.
But everyone has to contribute in some way to eat.
I disagree with this. And I actually would say that it's a problem if we're forcing doctors to heal in order for them to be able to eat.
I wrote an entire blog post about this issue:
Re: Google, Apple, Amazing, etc - In reality anyone who already has an organization or infrastructure to curate or the pool of funds to use and/or has the audience to promote to would be able to provide these services/do these tasks more efficiently.
Is this bad though? IMHO it's only bad if an unbalanced or unfair amount of resources are made or left with an organization or group of people - leaving others at a deficit and potentially suffering instead of all of this productivity increasing abundance and quality of life for everyone. You could apply same thought exercise to taxes.
Systems are only bad when there are frictions and inefficiencies allowed to exist to benefit one group more than another, otherwise you can create roles to reduce unavoidable frictions.
If an artist was able to travel the world freely (literally at no cost), the only real issue then is having space available for such an event - so then you'd have people who curate those spaces letting the artist in or not or based on criteria of how many fans they have in that part of the world, and perhaps it would become a celebration of that artist and his work, instead of simply entertainment or the artist trying to make enough to survive; sounds a lot like museums, why not more of this? Why not more startup co-working spaces that are social and not isolating and support creativity and connection?
There are of course ecosystems evolving that have more and more of this, culture breaking through systems of control and pressure - I'd like to see the world and cities designed as platforms to facilitate this kind of life - and not only because investment money is heavily funnelling into specific cities.
It's all about distributing resources to get tasks done - governance. Whenever you remove friction then productivity can increase - however if you allow oil to be burned until we pollute and damage our ecosystem to be so unstable as life is threatened then that is bad governance. Determining who gets access to resources needed for different types of creativity will be the interesting piece to figure out..
It is not made to ensure that you will in fact make money from selling it or that others have to pay to listen/enjoy it.
How is that even remotely fair?
What about Voluntary Collective Licensing?
Spotify is basically doing this right now. People pay $10/month and then it is (in a incredibly inefficient and dangerously opaque manner) distributed to the rights holders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Collective_Licensing
Copyright with enforcement means using violence against someone who only prints some copyrighted characters.
Spotify model is good, but Patreon model where customer decides how much to pay is better.
Same thing happens to open source software. Yet, programmers write open source software, and some even make money from open source software, however indirectly.
Which is great, because they had the choice to do that. Whomever is doing the creating should be the one to make the choice.
(Patents don't cover this, as at least under modern patent law, they only cover inventions, not ideas.)
Somebody else came up with the idea that you can put letters on paper. Another person came up with the idea that you can put paper together in a collection to form a book. Why are you stealing these ideas, making money and keeping the profits?
The only reason this isn't an issue for you right now is because these ideas were created up a long time ago, and the ideas have become "public goods" that anybody may use. But what if you could inherit intellectual property in the family just like physical property? After all, if a farm can be kept in the family for hundreds of years, why not an intellectual piece of real estate?
What sort of free society would say "okay, after you have created a good, you may keep it for 70 years and then it belongs to the public"? And yet we do this for intellectual property, and I suspect, the truth is, because we don't really truly believe it's real property. And I'm very happy for that.
In the past I've sold parts of my rights to a publisher, in exchange for cash, who then was incentivized to go out and licenses some songs for obscure commercial purposes. It made both of the publisher and myself some money.
It's kind of a fantastic way of doing business. Publishers work as speculative investors and help to spread the risk of creating intellectual property. It only works if we treat the "song" as the item of property, and not "me". I can't be bought and sold on a marketplace, rather my songs are.
In the time of patronage, it wasn't the intellectual property that was bought and sold, rather the artist. Slavery and patronage are very related systems of organizing human capital. They're both based around primitive ideas of the relationship between labor and capital.
What we developed in the subsequent five hundred years is really much better than what this article is arguing for a return to.
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EDIT: I haven't been able to comment for the last 40 minutes or so with a "too many comments, slow down" warning... I think it is a bug...
so patcon:
As soon as you consider a "song" an asset that can be bought or sold, you're dealing with the notion of copyright.
What you're describing will only work if there are certain fundamentals in place, namely, that the "song" in question is generating profits either through royalties or direct licensing.
So in order for a futures market to develop, the assets in question need to have the ability to create earnings so then investors can discover a speculative price for the underlying asset, based on the profits they think the song will generate.
In order for this to happen we need people and software to honor the notion that the author and whomever he sold assets in his "song" are due said royalties and other types of direct or indirect payments. That is, we need to honor their rights as to how copies are distributed and paid for.
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Still can't comment...
ThomPete:
We're building a solution on top of just that kind of unnatural artificial scarcity, the Bitcoin blockchain:
We're still working on pretty much everything and are somewhat close to a launch (~2-3 weeks? but we've been saying that for 3 months, you know how it is...)
Anyways, in the meantime we've been publishing a lot of code, so most of this stuff does in fact work as intended, just there's a decent amount of moving parts that had to be invented from scratch and devilish details abound...
Anywho, take a look... but please, be kind about the existing copy and lack of documentation... we'd love some feedback as well! Spelling mistakes, etc.
Marketing Copy:
http://blockai-front-page.herokuapp.com/
Code:
https://github.com/blockai/openpublish
https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast
https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client
https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain
https://github.com/blockai/react-image-publisher
https://github.com/blockai/react-published-images-list
https://github.com/howardwu/react-openpublish-assets
https://www.npmjs.com/~andrewmalta
https://www.npmjs.com/~howard.wu
https://www.npmjs.com/~williamcotton
Screenshots:
https://bitstore-test.blockai.com/mqMsBiNtGJdwdhKr12TqyRNE7R...
https://bitstore-test.blockai.com/mqMsBiNtGJdwdhKr12TqyRNE7R...
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/Potential_DAC_Ideas#Asso...
So as in, you pay a bit to create a market, and buy a bunch of shares low (because you think your song is awesome). Those who find it early and think the price will go higher will buy more shares, and share the song widely so as to increase the chances of others buying in higher. You eventually sell your original shares when you think your song is at it's peak, and make a pretty penny.
Maybe you sold too soon, or too late, but you learn for next time. Maybe you should've kept some for a decade later, at which point some future DJ samples your song and it becomes popular again and the share price starts inching up. Maybe you, as the artist, farm out this speculation part, because -- hey -- you're just interested in making music, and that middleman music trader takes a cut of your earnings :)
Doesn't that give most of the positive effects you mention, but without the notion of copyright?
This is absurd. Paying for expert services is not the same thing as slavery. I work as a consultant. Am I a slave?
Why can billions of people go to work each day and earn a paycheck with no expectation of getting paid ever again for that day's work, but with artists, the world owes them a living based off of work they did years ago? And if they must continue to work to get paid it's tantamount to slavery? You won't win any friends with that kind of logic. Most of us earn paychecks, dude, not royalties.
I would hope that most people are striving to put themselves in a position where they can invest their savings in to equities and real estate because everyone needs to prepare for a future where their ability to labor to produce capital might not be enough to support the basic necessities of life.
It might not be immediately obvious, but home ownership and 401ks are pretty much based on the idea that people will be able to keep living based off of work that they did years ago.
Copyright is based on similar principles but for those people who produce intellectual works. They can't take advantage of home ownership or financial investments if they didn't have any capital to begin with. It's an interface between ideas and markets.
We're not just talking about music here, we're talking about any and all ideas and how we as a lawful and orderly society decide to deal with opportunity costs.
We can have the government pay for it blindly through blanket taxation, or we can have private individuals pay for it driven by various personal motivations, and in fact we can invent complex financial instruments to structure the incentives. We've used governments as executive enforcement to police marketplaces to try and create level playing fields.
What's really interesting is how services like Spotify are showing how natural it is for consumer software to honor complex royalty contracts and (in a rather inefficient and tragically opaque manner) route money to rights-holders through an opt-in service.
That is to say, we don't need people burning books, smashing printing presses or prosecuting individuals for circumventing digital rights management controls in order to create ways for capital to flow from consumer to creator.
Royalty systems and direct licenses are the building blocks of these financial instruments and the main reason why we don't have a futures market for digital is because we've never bothered to track these things or put them on modern digital exchanges. Tracking copyright registration and transfers is a total mess right now.
It's no coincidence that the sorts of people who oppose copyright, and believe that we can live in a utopia where it's not necessary, tend to also believe in post scarcity, basic income, automation, etc. They just need to realize that there is a necessary ordering here. You get post copyright the moment you get post capitalism.
We should argue directly for reasonable copyright terms that still benefit the creators while also respecting the consumers. Everything else just muddles the issue.
But as technology advances, markets for certain types of goods tend to collapse as those types of goods one-by-one become abundant. The markets for copyrights and patents haven't collapsed because we have laws propping up those particular markets.
Is this arrangement useful?
Does copyright really allow artists to operate in a capitalist society? What do you mean by "operate"? We have the stereotype of the starving artist for a reason.
That wasn't really my point, but now we have:
a -> b & ~b => ~a
It allows them to sell the products of their labor for money. That's a pretty fundamental requirement of capitalism, no?
Sort of. There are plenty of things we can produce that nobody would want to buy. Capitalism doesn't really describe those things. If there's no market for pre-existing art, then it wouldn't be useful to look at it though the lens of capitalism.
That's a new one.
Easily copied art that was supported by a capitalist model, where the artist paid for rent, food, etc. by selling the products of his labor?
Correct, that didn't happen.
Yet art still happened ... thus art doesn't depend on copyright.
An artist that paints a picture and sells it or performs a concert and sell tickets is a very different thing than someone who mass-produces posters or record a song once and sells it.
And so you need to look at this from two very different perspectives to understand whats going on.
An artist who make songs on Spotify available is nothing more than a businessman trying to sell a commodity as if it's a scarce resource.
An artist who sell a painting can decide what price they want and is in many ways the extreme capitalist having the potential to sell a product that is completely disconnected from the labour that went into making it.
The reason why we have copyright is so that I can't sell someone elses work as if it's mine and that has nothing to do with post scarcity, basic income or automation.
Successful artist are successful business people. Nothing more nothing less.
A writer cannot host a concert. There must be a way to derive value from your work when your work isn't physical or temporal (a live concert).
They are selling a product not a piece of art and so of course they are going to be affected by the same technology as it renders that product a commodity more and more. Just as the truck drivers lost their jobs when the CDs didn't need to be transported back and forth anymore so will the artist loose the ability to re-sell what is fundamentally a commodity.