I agree, the best thing we can do is to try to create new works outside of the current media industry/copyright system. It's increasingly dangerous to do that however. Part of the reason copyright law is so aggressively enforced and expanded is to make it more risky for people to create and publish their own works.
While I fully agree, we should try to support independent creators when possible, but even then people are still left with nothing but terrible choices. Should they cut themselves off from fantastic pieces of art and massive parts of their culture? Should they financially support the broken system and greedy industry holding art, culture, and progress hostage? Should they risk increasingly severe legal penalties for accessing content without authorization?
I think ultimately the answer is going to be a combination of everything. Right now, the media industry has the lawmakers working exclusively for them. Until we can get representatives who'll represent us we'll likely have to resort to increasingly creating, sharing, and consuming art outside of copyright law.
I don’t think we need to use the legal system to encourage creation of new content! That’s a natural thing people do. In fact there’s a lot of artistic remixing that is illegal or ambiguously legal under the current copyright regime that can be a powerful form of expression.
I really don’t think we need government policy to encourage artists to create art. (At least not of this sort - I am all for art grants.)
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.
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.
Creative people need to stop relying on the broken system of copyright to earn money.
They need to find alternate business models, like getting paid in advance by fans through something like patreon or kickstarter.
However, while the copyright system still exists its damage to the culture should be minimized by letting cultural works go in to the public domain upon the author's death. The public good far outweighs the earning potential of people who didn't even create the work to begin with.
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.)
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.
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.
Thanks for your response. I think there are two distinct points in your paragraph, so I'll respond to them one at a time:
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1) "The Promoting of the Arts Argument"
Wherein if we don't work to provide a significant
amount of funding to artists, they won't be able to
create expensive works.
It is true that, unless studios can see a significant amount of return on their investment, they won't have an incentive to create massively expensive content. But there are more than a few problems with this line of reasoning.
First, is there any evidence that technology and innovation will cease if piracy continues? The mount of illegally-acquired content is increased dramatically in the last 10 years, but artistic progress hasn't stopped. In fact it's increased. We still have expensive and technologically-groundbreaking blockbusters like Avatar being produced. And there are more self-published authors and independent filmmakers than ever before.
Secondly, where do we draw the line? There has to be a cutoff point. We could theoretically create laws that force people to buy movies, guaranteeing that the film industry has $100 million in funding for every movie it makes. Or $1 billion. Or $10 billion. But would that really be justifiable? At some point, you're going behind "promoting art". There are plenty of movies that cost 1% of Transformers to make, but contributed much more to society by almost all accounts. I don't think it's the government's place to guarantee the financial success of the artistic industry. And if they're going to do that, it should be done via taxation, and the public should own some stake.
Third, why can't artists rely on supply and demand? If the public values art so highly, it will pay for it. Louis C.K. released his new standup online in an easily-copyable way, and he made millions. People still go to see movies in the theater. They still see plays. They still go to art galleries, and live concerts, and book signings. Hell, they still buy books and even e-books. This is how artists have survived for centuries, and how art will continue to progress. If you're good enough, people will want to see you and your work.
Fourth, why should anyone be guaranteed success in the digital marketplace? The downside to the digital world is that file-sharing, which will obviously be a problem when audio and video are converted to bits. The upside is that you can easily reach billions of people, so the potential for exposure and revenue is huge. But as an artist, no one is forcing you down this path. As I pointed out above, there are plenty of other ways that you can succeed. So how is it justifiable for us to have laws that limit the populace's digital freedoms, just so artists and companies can make business decisions with less risk?
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2) "The Consequentialist Argument"
Wherein piracy must be bad, because it ultimately
results in less income for artists.
I don't think this argument is as strong as the first. We live in a capitalist culture where nobody is guaranteed to succeed at any business venture. I don't see why there should be an exception just because the business is related to art.
Your argument implies that, if the ultimate consequence of a decision is a reduction in someone else's income, the decision is unethical. If that was the case, then early car owners would have been immortal for failing to support people still in the business of selling horses. And it would be unethical to share a lawnmower with a neighbor instead of buying your own. And it would unethical to borrow a friend's DVD (or copy its data) instead of buying a new one.
This doesn't seem sufficient to me. It not that you deprived someone else of income: it's how you did it. Compare all of the above to, say, copying DVDs and selling them.
You have really hit the crux of the issue. We shouldn't allow corporations or individuals to control something that has become part of our shared culture. Beyond shortening copyright lengths to the absolute minimum required for the statet purpose of encouraging more creation we probably also need limitations on author rights for works that have gained widespread public adoption similar to how trademarks can become genericised. At some point you shouldn't get to decide if and how your creation is distributed even if you can still demand royalties for a while.
I’m going to pile on, but it’s important that it’s part of the copyright discussion:
Current copyright is dramatically limiting culture and cultural growth.
Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not inadvertently copying anything from their entire lifetime, and that of their parents.
It’s rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists taking one of two paths: 1) working in secret, trying desperately to thread the needle between making a living creating and losing it all by being discovered. 2) Forgoing the idea of true creative expression altogether, and limiting themselves to samples that they can pay for up front.
I agree that it would be great if creators get to eat. Right now though many people don't get to eat (enough) no matter what, many other people don't get to make use of creative work, and a small number of big players walk away with all the money.
IMO pretty much literally anything else would probably put us in a better situation. At this point after several decades of experience, I think even just outright abolishing copyright law could possibly actually be a net improvement (give or take). But surely it should be possible to come up with a better system by now!
I also have hope for more independent creation, especially since I prefer indie / weird art to blockbuster stuff. But as much as I like your scenario, copyright still plays an important role in it to enable creators to live doing this.
I wonder if people's attitudes will change when The Pirate Bay is ripping off these independent artists, as opposed to the Big Evil Cos.
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.
You have a point if you ignore that under the "anything goes" regime, vanishingly small amounts of new content were created regularly. Now that we have a legal framework whereby you can potentially get rewarded for your output, we literally have more creative output than any one person can ever even understand. That's a situation many of us would like to see continue, despite the constant attempts to make it seem like the current copyright regime is somehow suppressing artists.
Plenty of those people depend on copyright law to prevent studios from stealing their scripts and producing them without paying the writer. Or are we supposed to against independent creators, and insist that artists return to the patronage system so we can eliminate copyright?
In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.
But then we need a way to decide what is or is not worthy of funding.
The effect of copyright is to create a market-based approach to this, where something similar to the familiar economics of trading goods allows us to direct money to those who provide value.
A move to publicly funded creative works would prompt the kind of debates we have today about public service broadcasters in particular and about pork barrel politics in general, but on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. I find it hard to imagine how that could possibly be as effective as what we have today. The power wielded by the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded financial support would be immense and inevitably deeply corrosive.
Copyright mainly funds corporate bureaucracies. It's not actually helping the vast majority of artists, except in the perverse way that destroying the public domain means less competition for new works to face.
Anyway, there's other ways to fund creative work from patronage to grants. Yeah, it's hard, yes there are challenges to address. No, Copyright is not a reasonable solution or incentive, it's primarily corrupt and working in opposition to the public interest.
While I fully agree, we should try to support independent creators when possible, but even then people are still left with nothing but terrible choices. Should they cut themselves off from fantastic pieces of art and massive parts of their culture? Should they financially support the broken system and greedy industry holding art, culture, and progress hostage? Should they risk increasingly severe legal penalties for accessing content without authorization?
I think ultimately the answer is going to be a combination of everything. Right now, the media industry has the lawmakers working exclusively for them. Until we can get representatives who'll represent us we'll likely have to resort to increasingly creating, sharing, and consuming art outside of copyright law.
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