What is, in your view, the best approach? Please enlighten us.
edit: I guess I should also clarify that I believe artists are entitled to total control over something they've created until they say otherwise. If they want to license it as creative commons and go live in a wine cask, great. If they want to milk it for all (the money) it's worth, also great, at least for as long as we're living under the capitalist ethic that celebrates such exploitation of intellectual property and provides no safety net for those who are unwilling or unable to extract value from what they have available to them.
While this can certainly be true, copyright itself doesn't necessarily follow-
Problem: Artists need to make money!
Solution: We'll make unauthorized use of certain material illegal for a fixed period.
It's certainly one approach, and it does mesh with the intuitive sense of "hey, it's fucked up to take somebody else's work and call it your own"- but it's not the only, or, in my view, the best approach.
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.
Honestly the whole idea of creators controlling their IP is fucked. Everywhere, everyone wants to get in on carving out a million monetizable use cases while the rest of us collapse under the weight of an entirely bullshit system of rights enforcement.
We should not have to walk on eggshells!
Here's an alternative: anything you put out there, isn't yours any more. It belongs to the public. Art, software, music, fonts... it is in the hands of the people. Your role as creator is limited to stewardship.
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.
I like your point, you are basically saying artist should sell things under CreativeCommons-like licenses (meaning you aren't restricting the rights of your consumers). Correct?
So treat Expressive works just like any other product, that can be bought, resold, copied, modifyed/hacked. Is that the logical conclusion of your position?
How do we (should we?) protect innovation? The patent system? the copyright system? Some other form of protection?
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.
In the absence of government-enforced monopoly, I think the next-best alternative for creatives would be to cartelize, trading new content for subscription fees covering a range of convenience services related to creative content, such as a recommendations engine, discoverability, favorites library, notifications, artist-specific storefronts, &c.
Pay $10/month or $100/year to the cartel, and from that, the cartel pays its participating artists a guaranteed stipend for living expenses, bonuses for each new work added to the cartel's library, a bonus for each work that meets a positive audience-review threshold, a bonus for each work that meets a positive peer-review threshold, and jackpot awards for works deemed particularly notable by peers and patrons.
The cartel spends heavily on advertising and promotion, to make new art be perceived as worth the cost of patronage, and portray patronage to the cartel as cool and fashionable. Paying patrons would get first shot at premium sales, such as concert tickets in favorable locations, or the opportunity to buy the original artwork or significant artifacts of the creation process.
So you might, through your account with the arts cartel, find a new band whose sound you like, add them to your personal favorites library, be notified that they are playing live near you in October, get pre-sale tickets for the front rows of seats, and order a patron-exclusive band t-shirt to wear when you go. Then you download their newest tracks, and maybe decide they're worth $X to you, so you hit the "tip" button on your app and pay the cartel $Y so that they pay Z% of that directly to the artists. Later, you might get the opportunity to buy the actual hair net that Leadvocal Rockstar wore at the concert in a patron-exclusive auction.
Meanwhile, your uncool non-patron friends are stuck listening to Top-40 format radio stations, because it's the most reliable curated content outside the arts cartel and the soulless corporate culture-for-consumption factories.
Disney has proven that a giant aggregation of art-producers can sustain itself on almost pure self-promotion. Disney is a humongous self-reinforcing advertisement for itself, carrying multiple viable brands, each targeting different audience demographics. Disney could certainly survive loss of copyright protection, but they would definitely make less money without it, and may have trouble adapting to the new cash flows due to sheer hugeness.
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’m playing a bit of devils advocate to see where you draw the line. For me personally I actually think nothing is creative enough to have the results owned or more to the point it’s not the effort that goes in but the literal act of creation is copying that makes something new property ie I’m against non contractual intellectual property altogether and so don’t need to draw a line based off of the action itself but instead ask what the people buying the art agreed to when they pay for an act of media creation. I’m not trying to convince you to adopt this position. I am just curious
I know a lot of artists and musicians (I work with them every day) and for considerable amount of them Copyright is absolutely NOT about money, it's about values. The work of art is a part of a creator which is at the same part separated but lacks its own will, so it's natural for the creator to wish some control over said part's faith.
They don't want their work to be used in ads, printed on cheap paper with atrocious covers, being used in a political context, heard in hold music or in elevators, and the list goes on and on.
I'm conmpletely split up on the issue. I'm pro-pirating when it comes to academia papers and textbooks, pro-copyleft, anti-streaming, wholeheartedly support freedom of information, and all of that, but I deeply respect the notions mentioned in the first part of my post and I don't know what would be a sound combination of these views.
Of course, I'm not opposed to people being paid- I commission art regularly, I've got too many friends as artists to count, and the startup idea I've spent ages working on is based on the idea that artists currently don't charge enough for their work, and deserve more.
But you don't avoid that by retaining tight control over your IP. You do that by providing a product people genuinely want, and giving them a way to pay for it conveniently. No one thing is an instant solution, and the possibility of your original artistic work being outright stolen for someone else is incredibly rare, as people naturally want to see more from the original author.
It's called paying copyright owners -- artists. The economic model can be worked out, but it's not the status quo, where software companies take all the profit and artists are left with nothing.
People should have control over their creations long enough to make it worth the effort. I might as well go do something more profitable if I can't make a living from my own creations in the way that's most efficient (licensing). Encouraging creation is the point of copyright. We shouldn't throw the whole system out just because a few rogue organizations are abusing it.
In my eyes, your take on things is very far from the live-and-let-live stance that you appear to want to adopt. It's more like social engineering.
You continue to be free to do your art for free and without concern for profit; in no way does someone else doing their art for profit affect your ability to make your choice. So what gives you the right to champion something that 'removes economic concern from the art'? How does your desire not to have your output be property - totally your choice - square with your desire to deny choice to others?
Another point oft-heard is that 'people won't stop making art' - which is a selfish, parasitic argument if I have every heard one. For years I worked producing independent musicians - you might not pay for art that you experience, but I assure you someone does - there is no free lunch.
I have seen indie musicians burn tens of thousands trying to monetize their art; have seen marriages and relationships end - and careers end. My point here isn't about piracy - a much more important point is for consumers to respect the work that goes into the content they consume. The art you consume 'freely' may appeal to your idealistic side, as though you are removing commerce from art - but all you are actually doing is turning a blind eye to the cost. There is always someone paying a price so that you might have it for 'free'.
Once upon a time, people grew their own foods, hunted them - people worked with their hands -people had an intrinsic sense of the burden of production. I think one bad side-effect of the internet is that it has removed people so far from the means of production that they are incapable of appreciating the work that goes into what appears in front of them.
I am not trying to be too pejorative, but it really is like a child who is used to just stating their urge - whether for food, drink, or sleep - and having a benevolent force [parents] provide those things on-demand.
We have fair-trade products from a to z and yet the work of artists isn't worth .01. Really??
Think of your favorite musicians. How many of them give attribution to where each musical idea came from?
The concept of art as exclusive property is very new. Throughout history, artists have built on one another’s works with no attribution or provenance. It’s really just the past 100 years — Disney, specifically - that have created the cultural mindset that the first person to express something owns it forever and everyone else has to pay them for the privilege of building that next work.
BTW I’m old enough to remember people decrying the rise of desktop publishing (“WYSIWYG”) as the automation of creativity.
I share your disdain for the geriatric political class, but I strongly disagree that this is a situation that needs to be managed. I say we let the arts return to the free for all they were for the fist 80,000 years or whatever.
If they want to be immortalized as a contributor to the common culture, they will have to relinquish control sooner or later.
This doesn't make sense to me. You can allow people to consume your work but not replicate it or consume it for free. The philanthropic nature of the artist is different than his creative ability.
copyright contains ownership, control, consumption, usage. It should be for the creator to determine.
artists have made more money via licensing than anything else. even indie bands nowadays can make bank if they license a song to a commercial or movie or what have you. In that respect copyright is a winner. I firmly believe that if someone wants to use your art to support their product in some way then the artist should be compensated. whether or not the artist gets to say yes or no to the licensing of his or her work is a whole other debate.
edit: I guess I should also clarify that I believe artists are entitled to total control over something they've created until they say otherwise. If they want to license it as creative commons and go live in a wine cask, great. If they want to milk it for all (the money) it's worth, also great, at least for as long as we're living under the capitalist ethic that celebrates such exploitation of intellectual property and provides no safety net for those who are unwilling or unable to extract value from what they have available to them.
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