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Basically rent seeking behavior, expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income) Why stop at paintings, what renders a painting

• AnAfrican 3y ago
  The logic is really about helping starving or struggling artists. They sell their work for "cheap" while broke because they're struggling. Later (often too late) their talent is recognized and the same work is re-sold at a huge markup. The idea is to give the original artist (or his heirs) a part of that new value.
• FrontierPsych 3y ago
  Because fine artists are something cultural that adds beauty and a new way of looking at the world around us. The Mona Lisa is different from a 1982 Ford Escort. I mean, maybe you don't see it that way, but most of humanity does.
• basisword 3y ago
  >> Basically rent seeking behavior, expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income) Sounds like most SaaS companies. >> Why stop at paintings, what renders a painting more deserving of payments in perpetuity for the author over, say a chair or some piece of furniture. Or a car, or any of the other myriad of goods people make. The fact that those things can be replicated and/or mass produced? If it was a one-off handcrafted car or piece of furniture then I agree, it should be covered under the same law.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    >> Basically rent seeking behavior, expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income) > Sounds like most SaaS companies. Most SaaS companies have perpetually recurring costs of their own (e.g., storage, compute, bandwidth, security updates).
    • egypturnash 3y ago
      Most artists have perpetually recurring costs too: rent, subscriptions to digital tools, food, etc.
      • mcculley 3y ago
        Indeed. An artist should set the price of a piece sold with these costs in mind.
        • AnAfrican 3y ago
          A struggling artist may not be in a strong position to negotiate. When rent or food are needed now, you take what you can.
        • clipsy 3y ago
          An art buyer should negotiate the purchase price with droit de suite in mind.
          • mcculley 3y ago
            Certainly, if the transaction takes place in a jurisdiction where it applies.
        • nine_k 3y ago
          These perpetually recurring costs are not directly connected to rendering an ongoing service. They are very understandable though.
• blargey 3y ago
  People need land. Nobody needs that one painting. It’s pretty clearly a way to allow the artist (or their heirs, in the event of their passing) to benefit from their works being labeled Valuable long after they parted with it for a commodity price, instead of solely profiting some “art investor”. The exact opposite of serving the smarmy capitalist class that your label of “rent seeking” conjures.
• clipsy 3y ago
  > Basically rent seeking behavior, expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income) So just like copyright, then?
• dataflow 3y ago
  > expecting perpetual payment for work completed in the past (aka passive income) I'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with this. Imagine if you made a car and "sold" it to me for $100, on the condition that I pay you $30k if/when I resell it. I'd think that would be actually incredibly nice of you. I wouldn't think you're somehow a worse person for selling it under those terms rather than demanding a $30k payment today. You're lowering my initial barrier at the expense of recouping some of the payment when I resell it. That's not inherently bad. Of course you can do this in an exploitative way too; no doubt about that. But determining this requires analyzing many more factors than just the licensing or pricing model.
  • hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Why something like a piece of furniture for this example? Why not the infamous Nike logo? Designed for $35 by student Carolyn Davidson. She was later compensated heavily, and so she should have been. It was the morally right thing to do, regardless of how "simple" or "meh" you think the logo may be, there's no denying how effective and recognizable it is. Would it have been "rentseeking behaviour" for her to ask to be compensated? No. It'd have been reasonable. At $35 and a student, that would have otherwise been exploitation. Artists and artisans are exploited constantly. I don't think laws like these are unreasonable. If the object still commands value, and there's only one of it, why shouldn't the artist be compensated? They can only create x works in their lifetime, at some point they must retire.
• llsf 3y ago
  Are all rent seeking bad by essence ? For art, I see it more as a way for the artist to focus on his art, and allowing to sell (even cheap) his art, and still be rewarded (e.g. 5%) each time his art changes hand if it does hold value. It does not have to be in perpetuity as explained in the article, it can stop after the death of the artist or 50 years (to prevent incentive to kill artists). You do not have to stop at paintings. Some NFTs implement royalties too. It would be more difficult though to implement on fungible items (cars, etc.) but some chairs are unique piece of arts and could probably benefit from the Droit de Suite.
  • CharlesW 3y ago
    > Are all rent seeking bad by essence ? In the actual sense of the word, it's arguable that it is. However, this specific example is not rent-seeking behavior because the artist created the thing and its associated value. People in this community tend to misuse "rent-seeking" to mean anything they don't believe its creator should be making money from. An example of this is, "Apple's cut of app sales is rent-seeking."
• version_five 3y ago
  This is exactly correct, I'm surprised to learn there is a term for it, and it makes no sense whatsoever outside of some unsustainable attempted monopoly. This is exactly why intellectual property should not be recognized.