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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

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 :)
  - mold_aid 4y ago
    >It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus. What is your career, precisely?
    - solarmist 4y ago
      I mean no aspersions when I say that. For example, all research would fall into that category as well. So does most of tech, but not all of it. My point was that it's a career whose demand is dictated by fluctuations in the economy and trends. And can be almost completely shut down (in theory) if the situation dictates.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    By historical standards, most of what is sold today in developed countries is "surplus". The share of GDP that goes to art and entertainment is not constant as your historical comparison suggests. It is growing and will continue to grow. It will eventually outgrow most other industries. Wherever you stand on copyrights, it would be a mistake to underestimate the central importance of this issue going forward.
    - solarmist 4y ago
      Yes, we have a lot of things supported by surplus. All research is one example. I don't think my comment implies that at all. I'm not convinced it'll ever grow that large though. See: Content is not king [1] for a good explanation of why. I think it's natural that it grows now to levels never seen before. What am I underestimating? I agree it is an important issue; my comment is orthogonal to it though. [1] https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742
- 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.

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 :)
- mold_aid 4y ago
  >It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus. What is your career, precisely?
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I mean no aspersions when I say that. For example, all research would fall into that category as well. So does most of tech, but not all of it. My point was that it's a career whose demand is dictated by fluctuations in the economy and trends. And can be almost completely shut down (in theory) if the situation dictates.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  By historical standards, most of what is sold today in developed countries is "surplus". The share of GDP that goes to art and entertainment is not constant as your historical comparison suggests. It is growing and will continue to grow. It will eventually outgrow most other industries. Wherever you stand on copyrights, it would be a mistake to underestimate the central importance of this issue going forward.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Yes, we have a lot of things supported by surplus. All research is one example. I don't think my comment implies that at all. I'm not convinced it'll ever grow that large though. See: Content is not king [1] for a good explanation of why. I think it's natural that it grows now to levels never seen before. What am I underestimating? I agree it is an important issue; my comment is orthogonal to it though. [1] https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742
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.