Making copyright last 10 years only sort of solves this issue.
Don't we want art that is pure and that is made by people like us (when we are not trying to make money), instead of by people who live in some completely alternate reality?
Copying has been a thing since the beginning of evolution. I'm ok with people making money through selling art, just don't bother me with human-made laws around copying.
To my personal view, copyright is a good idea at the 7 year/14 year terms originally envisaged. Beyond that it becomes more of a harm to creativity and artistic cultural progression.
However, you do need to protect individuals from corporations. If I submit a book to a publisher, they say "no", then they hold it for 14 years and decide to publish it ... I'd still want to be protected. Visual artists, painters say, often become popular later in their career; should commercial interests be able to exploit that lag to sell the person's earlier work without the person getting reward?
The law automatically protects a work that is created and fixed in a tangible medium of expression on or after January 1, 1978, from the moment of its creation and gives it a term lasting for the author's life plus an additional 70 years.
When I originally licensed my Empire game back in the 80s, I put a clause in the contract that if they didn't put it on the market within so many months, the contract was automatically cancelled and all rights were returned to me. There was also a minimum royalty clause, and a clause against diluting it with bundling.
You don't need the government to get involved.
> However, you do need to protect individuals from corporations.
This is generally true, so much so that I think the only relevant action would need to be general, to protect individuals from corporations generally. Creators would benefit from protection regardless of whether the term is changed.
> If I submit a book to a publisher, they say "no", then they hold it for 14 years and decide to publish it ... I'd still want to be protected.
Presumably a much greater proportion of work would be prepaid (via mechanisms like the built-in ads on youtube videos) or self-published. Although they continue to add value, publishers are much less necessary at the moment than previously (as we can see from independent podcasts). The marketplace and output might be completely different if there are short terms, but it will not lead to a collapse in production or a failure to remunerate artists.
In any case, the authors of copyright material are not presently engaged in free and equal relations with corporations. If nothing else, a corporation is generally able to sue you, whereas you're generally not able to sue a corporation. And a corporation will write contracts that regularly get tested in courts and get tweaked and improved, whereas you will rarely write contracts and you will rarely have opportunity to improve them based on problems.
> Visual artists, painters say, often become popular later in their career; should commercial interests be able to exploit that lag to sell the person's earlier work without the person getting reward?
This doesn't happen because their work obtains some additional quality through the passage of time, as though it were a wine ageing in oak. It happens because of the reputation of the artist; by buying the work, the owner has some kind of a relationship with a well reputed person. If anyone is selling a print, the print that is personally authorised by the artist will have a higher value. Therefore, I would suppose this isn't a problem that needs to be fixed.
None of this means that everything would continue just fine. Reducing copyright to a few years would be revolutionary. It would result in actual cultural changes. For instance, right now you can use copyright to create artificial scarcity that lasts essentially forever. With a seven year copyright, the artificial scarcity only lasts a few years, so you need to make the most of it. That means that oldness is free and recency is expensive - a reversal of the current system (where oldness is expensive, because it costs more to get something that last a long time, but recency is cheap)
I'm sorry to say this, but this is (from my personal experience as a one man company dealing with corporations) complete and utter baloney. Including suing them.
I wrote my own contracts, and lawyers who looked at them later said they were pretty good, though I probably would have been smarter to use the lawyers in the first place.
There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER that would force you to accept terms from a corporation that YOU DON'T LIKE.
Just say "NO".
And yes, I have successfully sued a major corporation you've all heard of for cheating me out of 6 figures of royalties. I won't name the company because this was settled long ago. It was so blatant that my lawyer took it on contingency.
Ordinary individuals can and do successfully sue major corporations all the time. All you need is a solid case.
When the initial cost of production is very, very high and the marginal cost of each additional unit very, very low, copyright is the solution that has so far been found to “work” to incentivize investment- assuming you agree it works. Not that the current implementation is best, especially the length, but the concept.
An alternative, for example: we could take the same amount of money being spent on creative works, absorb it through taxes instead, and redistribute it through a state-managed endowment system. The amount of money we spend for one Mick Jagger would probably fund quite a few musicians with a 70k/year stipend and an obligation to perform shows/generate recordings/etc.
But to pull that off, you'd need some sort of formal arbitrator to decide who is "enough" of an artist/scientist/etc. to qualify for an endowment. I know there's a very strong attitude of 'you can't regulate what art is', seemingly used to justify charging seven figure prices for products that look suspiciously like they were fished out of the local preschool's recycling bin.
I've seen a lot of low budget movies that were better than the $200m ones. I don't need special effects to enjoy a movie, I need a plot. Check out "Dark Star", made for $50,000. It's far, far better than 95% of the scifi movies out there. Because it had an interesting plot. "Primer" is another example.
Otherwise, what is the incentive to do all the work and take the risk to make Primer if it is just going to be on YouTube for the benefit of Alphabet’s ad revenue?
Here's a good reason: the movie itself is an advertisement. For example, Michael Jackson hired a famous movie director to create his music videos. What where those videos for? Advertising for his live concerts which were huge money makers.
Movies might be advertisements in conjunction with just being a movie, but the creators’ multiple intentions do not seem relevant in this case.
For a related example, my dad wrote a book. The royalties were well into "not worth it", but he wrote the book to advance his professional prestige, and it worked for that.
Most authors of technical books, for example, fall into that category.
A director might want to make a movie to raise his market value in producing media for corporations, who have a constant need of such. Actors will do it for free just to be famous, which leads to all kinds of opportunities. Just look how the Star Trek TOS actors made a living off of their fame, and ST was a really low budget operation.
Eg. Product placement, patronage, or a subscription service
Because art takes time, effort, practice, talent, and the cost of materials. If someone produces something of value, they should be paid for that value. In order to produce art, the artist needs a roof over their head and food in their stomach. As a society, we value it enough to spend millions on it every year.
If you want art made by "people like us", buy it from them. If you don't feel like there is value in work by people who make their living painting or singing, don't buy it.
If you want people to do it for peanuts because that means they're passionate about it, that just shunts them off with teachers, CNAs, social workers, park rangers, and all the other folks doing difficult and demanding work where their compensation doesn't even begin to reflect their effort and the value they bring to society. But they should shut up and smile while they do it because they're passionate about it.
They produce so much better art than even equally talented people doing it in their spare time.
No need for artificial constructs like copyright law.
Without copyright, GPL and its deracinates have no leg to stand on to prevent it from being incorporated into closed source programs and forever locked away. Sure, you'll be able to copy the application without copyright protecting it, but you'd be unable to modify it. It would be the success of the free part at the cost of the libre values.
It's just basic fairness.
Art would be lesser if only wackos, hermits, trust-fund kids and ascetics were able to pursue it.
I'm not sure it's the best analogy, but I considered the protections given to real estate agents as something similar. Why can't people just go negotiate directly with the sellers? I won't go into all the obvious details but there's real work back there, just as with art, and the end result isn't protected very well on its own, hence the need for laws, even silly sounding laws.
They can, unless the seller enters into an exclusive contract with a real estate agent.
edit: to be clear, I don't condone that at all, I just mean that's what I considered in thoughts about why we need laws that cover such things.
However, if there was something so special about that particular photograph that compelled Warhol to use it even without permission, then the argument that it was a ‘generic’ Prince photo falls apart.
Or, god forbid, Warhol or one of his minions could have taken their own photo of Prince…