4 ms·

Then what's the issue with copyright? There's more art than ever, but yet the ability to have a legal protection in order to make money on your art is somehow

• pmoriarty 5y ago
  Because people should not be going to jail for copying and sharing artwork (or bits, really). Throwing people in jail and ruining their lives is a tangible harm, and it's harmful to society to disallow the public to view, share, or remix art and literature unless they can afford to pay for it. Society and culture advance with the sharing of knowledge, while copyright runs directly counter to this. Meanwhile, there's no right to make money. It's an artificial scarcity model that mostly benefits corporations and middlemen along with a small minority of extremely popular artists, and once the artists die it doesn't even benefit them either but does continue to benefit corporations and middlemen. If creators want to keep control of their work they shouldn't publish it at all, but once they do there should be no artificial legal framework to imprison people that copy or share it. However, artists can still get paid by asking to be paid in advance through sites like patreon and kickstarter. For the rest, they can remain hobbyists.. and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I said before, there's no shortage of art. In the system I'm advocating for, no one gets sent to jail and no one's lives are getting ruined for copying or sharing bit, art continues to be made, and artists continue to get paid (though now in advance rather than a legally mandated system of artificial scarcity).