8 ms·

I disagree completely. My older brother decided to go to art school. It wasn’t until he was 40 that his artwork started to be noticed and worth something. Hi

• franciscop 4y ago
  I think we mostly agree here, since for your brother those 10-30 years would work perfectly for him! China breaking copyright is NOT an argument that copyright is good, quite the opposite, it's a statement of how broken it is. About the inheritance I disagree, when you are a farmer and sell a potato you sell it once and then it's gone, if you are a carpenter you make a furniture piece and sell it and its gone. Why should art be a "legacy" that can be kept selling forever?
  • will_walker 4y ago
    To incentivize artists to create and distribute art. The way we conceive of art as an act of embodied novelty differentiates it from commodities which aim for predictable consistency. Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically. The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists. As an artist starting out in the beginning of my career, I made a rationalized choice to never post my work online - in retrospect this seems to have been the right choice. My work is no AI’s whetstone.
    • solarmist 4y ago
      Artist have always since classical times struggled to support themselves. I don’t think there is any system that would make this a viable career for the number of people who want to pursue it. Same with musicians. It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus. There will always be demand for it, but it is highly elastic and heavily influenced by trends and skewed by the top end.
      • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
        A social security system that supports all artists was put into operation since 1984 in my country of Finland, it's still functioning fine, the only struggle for artists here is substance abuse.
        • fauigerzigerk 4y ago
          How do people qualify for this support?
          • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
            It's essentially universal. They simply subtract income from it. About $10k/y. If you earn more than $150/mo, the excess is subtracted. The bureaucratic process is submitting an online form. Property owned (land, house, shares, w/e) may reduce it, I don't know, I don't own anything of substantial value.
            • RugnirViking 4y ago
              Can you elaborate a little on how this works? I have many questions haha, how they verify someone is doing art, how it's not the same as a basic unemployment, whether there is a maximum amount of people who can be on this programme, if so how qualification works etc. It sounds very interesting
              • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
                > how they verify someone is doing art Sorry if I framed it confusingly, this isn't only for artists, it's for everyone. They don't care what you do, only how much money you make. > how it's not the same as a basic unemployment It pretty much is, though unemployment has more strings attached. Anything you get from unemployment is subtracted from social security, and vice versa. For unemployment the online form is simpler and money comes much quicker, but you have to attend unemployment office events and stuff. > whether there is a maximum amount of people who can be on this programme The true maximum is of course however much the system as a whole can support, through taxing people's income. My back-of-the-napkin math puts the cost of the whole program at about $1/mo per taxpayer. So all artists and bums combined. Might not include basic retirement, which is slightly less. > how qualification works It's based on income/assets. If you make less than $10k/y plus $150/mo, the program covers the difference for living expenses. In practice, there are limits to how much they're willing to pay for things like rent and utilities. In my city the max rent is $560/mo. On this winter's coldest month they complained that my electricity bill was too high (electric heating), but still paid it in full when I complained back. To qualify, you have to attach to your application all of your bank accounts' statements from the past 3 months, so they can see how much money you've got. When you get a bill, you send the bill and they cover it. The social security program covers: rent, water, electricity, home insurance, Internet, healthcare, moving van, security deposit of new apartment. On top of that you get about $15/day for food and other stuff like clothes, cleaning products, what have you. In my experience food costs some $10/day to live comfortably so some $150/mo remains for everything else. Second hand clothing stores sell decent clothes for a few dollars a piece, sometimes less. You can request additional funds for infrequent, dire needs, like a new bed, vaccuum cleaner, etc. Feel free to ask more questions, I'm happy to elaborate :)
    • happymellon 4y ago
      Historically artists had a real job to fund their art hobby. The US has cultural poverty because it has decided to support litigation machines.
      • Veen 4y ago
        Historically, artists were independently wealthy (as were early scientists) or they lived off the patronage of the wealthy. Intellectual property and copyright laws allowed art to be a viable commercial venture without direct patronage.
        • mold_aid 4y ago
          Well, no, I mean if you want to get specific, IP and copyright (copyright specifically) created a structure for government to register and track written output. Our current conception of "the artist" is relatively new, and patronage models/gift economies strike me as...well, still pretty relevant despite IP. People seem to be focusing on the Artist and not the artist's intermediaries (publishers, for instance) and that IP was also meant to protect and promote industry, for which it has been successful (maybe too much). I mean a good thought experiment here would be to replace "artists" with "entrepreneurs" or "founders" ("historically, [...] were independently wealthy" would expose some of the myths we attach to the idea of "self-made" which we rarely attach to artists and authors) here and rethink the history of Western commerce from that perspective.
    • jamilton 4y ago
      >Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically. Can you explain this position? My understanding is most artists don't thrive economically because there's not much demand for the art they make. I'm not sure that's correct, but "lack of IP protections" seems even less likely for most artists. What protections do you think would help? It seems to me that the current system primarily benefits corporations who acquire a vast library of IP and can afford to legally defend it all as necessary. I agree that a different set of policies would result in more art being created and more artists who are able to support themselves doing art, but my immediate assumption of what that would look like is more like funding art educations and exhibitions (of various kinds).
      • melagonster 4y ago
        in Japan, company can't buy the copyright from author, obviously this give artist advantage.
        • dale_glass 4y ago
          And that may be a bit helpful, but still everything I've heard indicates that drawing manga is absolutely hellish for one's body and mind. Look at the famous schedule: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-53ec1e395a4b59adb8391a5ac942bee1-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-53ec1e395a4b59adb8391... Yeah, the law may be more on their side, but overall it seems unless you're somebody on the level of Akira Toriyama you likely barely managed to retain your sanity while cranking out your world famous works, and even the famous ones suffer greatly during the process.
          • melagonster 4y ago
            yes, but this can make sure they get money of their part, we can thinking about novelists have better condition.
    • LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      > Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically. You think we should have 1000x more artists than we do? I think there's another economic problem with that idea... > The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists. The USA has the largest market in the world for creative products and the most rich artists. > My work is no AI’s whetstone. Are you the same way with juniors? "I paid dearly to learn this technique - you should too!" Aside from overtraining issues, the AI can't store your work anymore than you can store representations of everything you've trained on, it's vastly smaller than the sum of its training data. It distills out features and their combinations. Some bigname artist is upset because he thinks he's the first one to put certain bat and lizard features on a dragon and that he now owns that entire sort of creature. Turns out though, that given an old picture of a dragon and that single sentence of mine that he could be copied by almost anyone. The only way to keep the AI from "copying" his work is to make sure that, even if not trained on his work, nobody asks it for those features. To satisfy these people it'll have to have a big red sign that says "Dragons are off limits, Bob owns them because you might put claws on the wings!".
  • jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Art is not the same as potato’s or furniture. What is the market price for a potato? What is the market price for a chair? What is the price of developing an art career over 40 years? Unless you believe that art, music, poetry, literature, and the rest have no value to society then IP protections are what incentives a portion of humanity to do something crazy like go to art school… …instead of you know doing the “responsible” thing and getting a CS degree so you can one day get an AI gig stealing “training data” in the name of profit
    • vidarh 4y ago
      If we go by the average income of a creator, then society indeed considers most of it less valuable than flipping burgers. The average writer for example earns well below minimum wage from their writing. If you want to encourage more creative work, maybe look for other mechanisms, because going into creative work in the hope of making it is pretty much gambling with awful odds.
      • derangedHorse 4y ago
        Your reasoning is faulty. If the average wage for a writer is "well below minimum wage" that doesn't necessarily imply people don't value creative endeavors. It could alternatively imply, for example, that the average creator doesn't produce creative content that others find valuable. With that thesis, if burger flippers do get paid more it could be a result of there being less variance in the value of the work performed.
        • vidarh 4y ago
          Even far above average creators, who win awards and sell far above average earn next to nothing. The average full time traditionally published author still earn below minimum wage in the UK (the median household income of full time authors in the UK is above the UK average; most UK authors are able to be full time because of their partners rather than their creative output) Sure, we can say that still isn't "good enough", but that kinda proves the smaller point that the actual creative output of most creatives is not valued, and at the same time ignores that the main point I made above is that it is irrational for people to gamble on being valued, because the vast majority of "successful" creators as measured by relative rank within their peer group has no realistic prospect of that happening today.
• ipaddr 4y ago
  You are in favor of hundred plus years copyright so something your brother created in his 20s can support a generations after his death. And society should grant this because it will encourage more works from him? The point of copyright is to encourage more work. At this point he is rent seeking.
  • jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Good point. Every entrepreneur should also be forced to sell their business instead of passing that equity to their children. No more rent-seeking, multi-generational family businesses. Matter of fact, let’s force the same on anyone with a 401k, IRA, or Roth as well because at the end of the day it’s all equity, right? All equity stakes much be converted to cash upon death and either returned to the state OR given to charity. That’s the way to make “Single serving wealth” happen and put an end to rent-seeking.
    • ok_dad 4y ago
      Man, that would be great. Imagine how society could change when you cannot accrue an outsized wealth via inheritance, and instead everyone can have food, shelter, healthcare, and more. Maybe people would do things to help humanity rather than just their own interests.
    • ttjjtt 4y ago
      If all of the inherited wealth upon death was put into the education system, and only education, then yes I would back this 100%. It would be a way to maintain level playing fields, and allow entrepreneurs to congratulate themselves for creating a better society.
    • BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Maybe not all, a progressive tax should apply : consider small multigenerational family-only/mostly businesses ! (Note that when none of the children are available they already often have trouble finding buyers they can trust.)
    • dale_glass 4y ago
• choeger 4y ago
  > His images have been bootlegged endlessly by Asian companies placing them on t-shirts and selling them for $5 on Etsy and every other marketplace. And why not, really? How does that affect your brother? Why should your brother have a say on what people can or cannot put on a T-Shirt? Creating pieces of art professionally should be paid for. But having some weird right of ownership on what is essentially just a huge number is, frankly, a clutch at best and outright criminal at worst. Digital artwork can be copied at zero cost and artists have to deal with that, not the world has to bend to one particular model of generating revenues for artists. We need to stop with these schemes at one point and shift to a better market or we will effectively have to ceed all control of data and computing to copyright-control companies.
  • 8organicbits 4y ago
    At one extreme you have Disney corp squeezing money out of copyrighted material they created/bought/licensed. On the other extreme, without any copyright, you have Disney corp squeezing money out of any material they can find. Copyright is a moat that works both ways. Without copyright, profit from art goes to the most efficient t-shirt screen printer. What's the happy middle ground?
    • deadbeeves 4y ago
      Why a middle ground, though?
    • account42 4y ago
      > On the other extreme, without any copyright, you have Disney corp squeezing money out of any material they can find. Of course they will. But so can others. Without copyright Disney won't have a legally enforced monopoly.
    • dTal 4y ago
      Be careful what you optimize for. Clearly the thing you actually object to is Disney squeezing money out of things. Maybe just make that part illegal, and forget the copyright?
  • 4y ago
• scotty79 4y ago
  > It wasn’t until he was 40 that his artwork started to be noticed and worth something. Does the system really work if he had to invest in himself for so long to even start having hopes if sustaining himself with his creative output?
• jongjong 4y ago
  I agree. Intellectual property is not so different from any other kinds of property. At the end of the day, everything is intellectual property; your ownership of anything is merely a record written on some piece of paper or stored in some computers. If we didn't assign value to abstract concepts, ownership contracts for tangible assets would only be worth the paper they're written on. Abstract ideas are inherently valuable.
  • franciscop 4y ago
    "your ownership of anything is merely a record written on some piece of paper" This is a very young/naive way of seeing it, as the Spanish saying dutifully notes, "physically having something is 9 parts out of 10 of the law for ownership" ("La posesión es nueve décimas partes de la ley"). Meaning ownership is not as much what is on paper but it is having something, claiming it's yours, and no one else claiming it's theirs basically (not always, but that's why the saying says 9 out of 10). https://primaveraeuropea.eu/la-posesion-es-nueve-decimas-partes-de-la-ley/ https://primaveraeuropea.eu/la-posesion-es-nueve-decimas-par...
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > as the Spanish saying dutifully notes, "physically having something is 9 parts out of 10 of the law for ownership" ("La posesión es nueve décimas partes de la ley" This is already an English saying. "Possession is nine tenths of the law."
  • mirchibajji 4y ago
    This is clearly not true. There are term limits on how long the society is disallowed from using an idea. If I take good care of it, my table does not disappear in 5 years, nor can I sell the same table ten times. The bigger issue with IP is how they are used to prevent others in the society from using the idea they see right in front of their eyes.
• geocar 4y ago
  > have allowed him to move out of my parents, get a place of his own, pay down debt and buy a house > Intellectual property is how he takes care of his family. Art is how he makes money. Money is how he takes care of his family. People have been making these things forever -- they are older than human language itself! "Intellectual property" otoh is a relatively new idea, and so can't have everything to do with it. To think "Intellectual Property" laws are corrupt and benefit the already-rich should not be incompatible with saying some copyright term might be good: If copyright terms were half what they are, your brothers' story would be exactly the same, but Disney's would be a lot different!
• mold_aid 4y ago
  This is one of the earliest arguments for copyright protection: "Look at the poor grandchild of [famous author], begging in the streets. If we had attached exclusionary rights to his works, she would benefit from his works!" I'm not saying it's a good argument (it's sentimental, for starters, not that OPs is much different - "proprietors" didn't invent IP law, and Disney is apparently giving its pound of flesh back to the powers that helped it game the system), but I'm pretty sure the same one was used in defenses of generative work and, notably, NFTs - "this will help the poor artist, who would otherwise have no market." Rogers v Koons put paid to that argument (indirectly), and I'm hoping the current class actions succeed, your brother notwithstanding.
• rglullis 4y ago
  I don't think it's our job as a society to be banking the bets of everyone who believes to be talented (and lucky!) enough for their works to be worth anything. For every case like your brother's, how many people out there are throwing their lives away chasing the illusion that they will ever "make it"?
  • kaoD 4y ago
    In what way is copyright "banking the bets"?
    • mold_aid 4y ago
      Publishing is generally speculative, and the common perception of "the author" as an ordinary individual with an interesting expression of an idea is inaccurate. A more useful analogue is "student who has just taken out a loan." Non-dominant publishers, meanwhile, bet that the large advances they do give (way too large) pan out into a property that can claw back some market share and cultural attention from major franchises, who should in this metaphor be known less as a copyright holder and more as "the house." For the general expression of ideas in a corporate setting, copyright is an asset that is backed by a legal team. You're betting that a property gives you a competitive advantage.
    • rglullis 4y ago
      Do you think it's reasonable to keep all the legal/political apparatus required for enforcement of copyright and IP laws just on the basis of "we need to protect the people who want to go to art school and hope that their art will be worth something one day?" I don't.
      • kaoD 4y ago
        No. I think we need to do that regardless of whether their art will or won't be worth something. I don't think my open source stuff is every going to be worth a penny. I still want it to be protected so that its license is respected. Mine, and everyone else's.
• JohnFen 4y ago
  I agree that copyright is not bad in concept. But current copyright law is, in my opinion, just insane and harmful and seems to be getting worse over time.