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Art advanced along fine because there was no way to copy paintings and sculptures. There was no way to record a play or orator. But that, of course, is no lon
by dhimes 9y ago
Art advanced along fine because there was no way to copy paintings and sculptures. There was no way to record a play or orator.
But that, of course, is no longer true. The advent of technologies to capture and distribute art has led to new forms of art, and with that an amazing situation where people have unparalleled access to the works of genius. However, those new forms also have a drawback: they can be easily copied and distributed without compensating the originator. So in order to keep being able to support filmmakers and novelists and musicians we need to shield them from this. Otherwise, they will stop making their works.
Who is going to spend 5 years writing a novel if they can only sell one copy?
- conanbatt 9y ago> Who is going to spend 5 years writing a novel if they can only sell one copy? Hopefully no-one. Apparently there is no value to that novel unless resources are spent protecting it. We see today things that in a non-copyright world would not exist. But we dont see the things that would exist instead ,so its hard to know.
- dhimes 9y agoApparently there is no value to that novel unless resources are spent protecting it. That is a non-sequitor.
- conanbatt 9y agoWhy? If the argument is that a novel would not exist because the author cant collect value from it without copyright protection, then the value he is collecting is based on the copyright protection costs.
- kbutler 9y agoEconomists call this the "Free Rider" problem: people are able to derive value from a common good without paying for it, so there is less incentive to produce the type of good than would be optimal. Roads. Infrastructure for sewers. Defense. Fire suppression. These are all cases where a purely free market fails to provide optimal levels of the good or service. People are evidently willing to pay for novels, so we know they have value. The question is whether the current copyright system gives copyright owners too much power to extract rents at the cost of the public domain.
- conanbatt 9y agoIsn't the author a free rider on the states legal infrastructure? Writing books, making movies and composing music are some of the things that should we should never have an interest in creating externalities for.
- kbutler 9y agoNo, assuming the author pays taxes, the author is not a free rider on the law enforcement infrastructure. The act of publishing the book has positive externalities (people derive benefit from reading it). Copyright is an attempt to allow creators to capture some of those positive externalities to promote more production of books. Your position that the creator should not have a mechanism to capture any of those benefits is rather extreme, as is the position of the copyright maximalists that assert they should capture all of the benefits.