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> If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money bei

by api 1y ago

> If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art. How do artists eat? It is true: art made only for money is usually not very good. But good art can, does, and should make money. “Information wants to be free” is another way of saying “labor wants to be free” which means only rent extracting owners of scarce capital and assets get to make a living. Everyone else is a serf with 5G Internet. If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.

fedeb95 1y ago
literature was born without copyright. It won't vanish
- api 1y ago
  It was born when physical books took years to copy, and thus could be sold for a lot of money. It was also often done, like many arts in ancient times, under patronage.
  - fedeb95 1y ago
    not exactly. Literature existed way before physical books, as is the case of the Odyssey and other texts.
IAmBroom 1y ago
Ridiculous. I have several friends who are self-published authors. They don't make most of their money from their art; they do it for the fun of it, and the joy of connection with their readers. It literally costs nothing to write and publish short or long-form literature these days. If you want a physical book, the cost is small.
- api 1y ago
  Writing an actually good novel can take a year or more, which translates to a significant amount of money. It also requires a lot of focus, which makes it hard to do with a "day job." This kind of out of touch "why do they not eat cake?" mentality is a big reason there's such a deep tech backlash right now. Yeah, we can just land six figure jobs no problem, but other fields? Yeah, they should just do it for the passion. They don't need to get paid. Of course authors have a passion for it. Nobody would get into that field without a passion, and people tend to not get good at anything unless they like it. That doesn't mean they don't deserve to earn anything. This is just gross.
rpdillon 1y ago
> If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth. This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.
- api 1y ago
  Yes it’s a terribly hard thing to make a living doing, so… let’s make it impossible? Very few athletes make pro, so we should stop paying any athletes?
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    You're missing my point: copyright is not an effective solution to the problem. We all wish it were, because it has so many terrible side effects, but it's just not very good at getting artists paid, whether that be art, music, or literature.
    - api 1y ago
      What would a better solution be?
      - rpdillon 1y ago
        What a great question! There is no complete answer, but I've been studying this for years. My position often comes off as anti-artist, because folks combine "I want artists to get paid" with "Copyright should be respected": this is a cognitive error: wanting to solve a problem is different than advocating for a particular solution. I'm particularly prone to criticizing solutions that have proven ineffective. But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air". https://lewishyde.com/common-as-air/ https://lewishyde.com/common-as-air/ In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that. William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as: > Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work. Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as: > The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199760098 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199760098

by api 1y ago

fedeb95 1y ago

literature was born without copyright. It won't vanish

api 1y ago
It was born when physical books took years to copy, and thus could be sold for a lot of money. It was also often done, like many arts in ancient times, under patronage.
- fedeb95 1y ago
  not exactly. Literature existed way before physical books, as is the case of the Odyssey and other texts.

IAmBroom 1y ago

Ridiculous. I have several friends who are self-published authors. They don't make most of their money from their art; they do it for the fun of it, and the joy of connection with their readers. It literally costs nothing to write and publish short or long-form literature these days. If you want a physical book, the cost is small.

api 1y ago
Writing an actually good novel can take a year or more, which translates to a significant amount of money. It also requires a lot of focus, which makes it hard to do with a "day job." This kind of out of touch "why do they not eat cake?" mentality is a big reason there's such a deep tech backlash right now. Yeah, we can just land six figure jobs no problem, but other fields? Yeah, they should just do it for the passion. They don't need to get paid. Of course authors have a passion for it. Nobody would get into that field without a passion, and people tend to not get good at anything unless they like it. That doesn't mean they don't deserve to earn anything. This is just gross.

rpdillon 1y ago

> If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth. This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.

api 1y ago
Yes it’s a terribly hard thing to make a living doing, so… let’s make it impossible? Very few athletes make pro, so we should stop paying any athletes?
- rpdillon 1y ago
  You're missing my point: copyright is not an effective solution to the problem. We all wish it were, because it has so many terrible side effects, but it's just not very good at getting artists paid, whether that be art, music, or literature.
  - api 1y ago
    What would a better solution be?
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      What a great question! There is no complete answer, but I've been studying this for years. My position often comes off as anti-artist, because folks combine "I want artists to get paid" with "Copyright should be respected": this is a cognitive error: wanting to solve a problem is different than advocating for a particular solution. I'm particularly prone to criticizing solutions that have proven ineffective. But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air". https://lewishyde.com/common-as-air/ https://lewishyde.com/common-as-air/ In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that. William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as: > Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work. Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as: > The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199760098 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199760098