There is a vast gap between "able to make a living" and "able to stifle culture, censor citizenship, and lock up works for longer than a lifetime".
TBH, it's probably better to create a post scarcity society where a living isn't dependent on holding something hostage. Some variation of a basic income, that would support artists to create. But we don't have to go that far to say, copyright as it stands now is over-mighty and should have its claws harshly trimmed.
"The whole idea around copyright is to encourage the creation of intellectual property. If there is a fundamentally better way to do it that idea should flourish but I have yet to hear a realistic alternative."
How about a basic income so the artists stop starving?
It should work with a universal basic income. Everyone has enough to eat and a place to live. Then you price your efforts based on not needing a subsistence. It would make it easier to dismiss the notion of intellectual property, since you no longer need to artificially limit copying so that creators could survive.
They'll probably want some kind of job to afford art supplies, but it's an option rather than a mandate.
This is oversimplified, of course, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible.
You seem to think there are only two options: Piracy and artists living in poverty, or no piracy and artists not living in poverty.
Personally, how I want things to be is that authors freely release their content and still make a nice living. That's not necessarily natural and certainly not easy but you asked how I want things to be.
If you touched the lives of millions at 18 you probably already made significant profit. Not only that but you can likely publish more work and all of these people will be happy to pay for it.
I agree that the purpose of copyright should be to encourage production of work and culture. I don't think encouraging people to coast on one great artwork for their entire lives does that. At this point you are extracting value from society without adding anything new back.
Of course this starts interacting with other policy decisions in interesting ways. I don't think you should struggle to live because you don't want to become a slave to making more, I think you could pair this with some sort of Universal Basic Income so that you will be assured basic comforts no matter what. However you are still encouraged to work more if you want more luxuries.
The best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to make people not depend on salaries for living.
Because else, all other things like talent being equal, a lot of the best content will be from those that have the income/time (afforded by income)/resources (afforded by income)/practice time (afforded by income)/etc to create it, and thus be given for pay, not with a permissive license.
Especially true for things that have different "production values" that cost money (movies, music, animation, and so on) - might not apply to e.g. poetry or other arts, or, in your example, to someone drawining comics (which can be done on the cheap).
Copyright should not exist, but artists do need support somehow and doing away with copyright without other radical changes to economy/society leaves them high and dry. Copyright not existing should pair with other forms of support such as UBI or worker councilization, instead of ridding it while clutching capitalist pearls and ultimately only accelerating capitalism at their expense
Monopoly is not the route we should be taking to achieve that. Copyright only manages to support a select few artists. It does so by making it more difficult to create art in the first place!
The overwhelming majority of copyright benefit (in dollars) goes to "others who are rich enough to exploit" the system itself, not to the artists who are in need of "a living". Those absurdly wealthy groups make it more difficult and more expensive for artists to compete with them. The tool they use for anti-competitive behavior is copyright. Copyright is only useful for anti-competitive behavior, because copyright is literally defined as monopoly.
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If we did not have copyright, people would still be free to financially support artists. There would only be two major differences:
1. Artists would not be able to compel people to financially support them.
2. Giant corporations would not be able to compel artists to give them monopoly over their art. Artists would be entirely free to create new art, and to seek direct financial benefit from that art.
I argue that the second effect is by far the greater of the two, particularly in respect to artists who need a living wage.
Until we have an economy where people don't starve to death from lack of food or die of frostbite from being homeless, we have to figure out ways for people who actually make things to benefit from that work. Copyright is currently protecting people who rely on the product of their labor to make ends meet. Until we have the fairy tale economy you envision where artists can have the work stolen and still live, this is the best we've got.
And yeah, wild to think people feel entitled to own their own work thanks to silly things like the entire body of copyright law.
I do agree that artists are going to create no matter what. I do suspect we'd have less works if nobody could make a living doing it though. Especially things like film and animation which historically required crazy amounts of money up front. People were willing to fund those efforts because they could expect a likely return on their investment which without copyright protections wouldn't be possible.
We've gone way overboard, but I do think some level of protection for creators is for the best even now when it's easier and less expensive than ever to create.
Given that (1) most people are or are becoming "authors" now that the tools to create and distribute have become much more distributed then ever before; that (2) the way copyright works at the moment is to reward only popularity, not original creativity; that (3) for any author obscurity is a much larger problem then infringement ever could be; that (4) creativity may not need encouragement as becomes obvious seeing how much is intentionally produced to be widely distributed for free (open source, creative commons, youtube, etc)?; that (5) only a very tiny percentage of authors will ever get "rich" of their work.
So perhaps we need to look at another solution?
An unconditional basic income for all would support authors/artists/anyone exactly at the moment they need it to do their work. It will not make anyone rich, but it will enable works that can't be created at the moment (because the artist needs to do other work instead). When an author does become populair they will not have been forced into an unfavorable contract with a publisher when they where broke, working poor.
An unconditional basic income would enable people to be creative, it would pay just enough so that money isn't an issue anymore. This would be more effective way to promote the arts and sciences then copyright in its current form.
Copyright allows artists to operate in a capitalist society.
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.
Let's advocate for robust protections and support systems for artists, ensuring they can secure a sustainable and comfortable livelihood from their creative work.
Once they hit the tipping point of broad cultural absorbtion (think Banksy) AND/OR raking in absurd amounts of cash, move their IP into the public domain more aggressively (think Disney, NYT, etc.). How exactly this would work should be debated.
They'd still own the IP and have all the rights to use it commercially, but other's would be able to use it as inspiration, remix and maybe even resell it if attributed (or cheaply licensed).
In other words: "IP-Tax" the unproportionally successful.
Whenever anyone discusses this topic, to shut down anyone who is strongly against copyright, they come up with "Oh, I don't see a way the artists get compensated." Maybe that's right. Maybe art needs to lead the way toward a sharing style pay-what-you-want economy.
Although you could argue that without some piracy control the creative person will just have their content ripped off anyway so can't make a full living.
Creative works are incompatible with capitalism. We’ve create a thin finicky interface between them with copyright laws, but it hardly works. I’m not saying artists and creators shouldn’t have financial security in this system, quite the opposite. I don’t have a better idea, but I hope we can come up with something that doesn’t conflate ownership with attribution and also protects the livelihood of people who want to share their creations.
The status quo for artists is pretty dismal. Across industries you have a few ultra-successful artists, a small group who can make a decent living and then a long tail of people who can't pay the rent.
Gaming things out, I don't think copyright is really helping any of those artists or society as a whole. If it didn't exist, you'd still have breakout artists who make money through endorsements, live shows, and selling original copies of their work.
I agree I’d like a world full of great art, and a decent fraction of human energy put into art-making seems good.
I grant that copyright plus free markets is one decent way of achieving this.
Now that I try to elaborate the downsides of copyright I fail, other than to say I want to keep legal barriers in the digital realm to an absolute minimum, so as to speed progress.
When I was younger I thought that great art was made by either starving artists or artists with wealthy patrons, but I guess much of the art I enjoy is made by professional artists participating in the copyright economy.
So I suppose agree, though I’d like to see more public dialog analyzing the issue, considering modifications (like you propose in another comment) or alternatives (such as public funding for the arts, tax breaks for patrons, etc.).
(I guess I let my contempt for the patent system bleed into my thinking on copyright.)
TBH, it's probably better to create a post scarcity society where a living isn't dependent on holding something hostage. Some variation of a basic income, that would support artists to create. But we don't have to go that far to say, copyright as it stands now is over-mighty and should have its claws harshly trimmed.
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