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.
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.
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.