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> It seems that you're arguing that performative work is somehow deficient or inferior just because it can easily be reproduced. That's not at all what I'm arg

> It seems that you're arguing that performative work is somehow deficient or inferior just because it can easily be reproduced. That's not at all what I'm arguing. In fact, the kinds of artistic work that I most enjoy (books) are easily reproduced with little/no loss in quality. > Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on. I totally agree that literary works are equally carefully crafted, but the rest of what you're saying is the economic context which I'm rejecting. You're saying that literature has value and therefore you deserve to be given money for producing it. I'm saying that I think everyone should have enough money to survive, and then they can and will do what they want to do. Doing things you enjoy is both productive and its own reward. Your statements are based on a fundamental assumption that with enough rules, the monetary system will become meritocratic, rewarding those who produce with wealth and punishing those who don't produce with homelessness and starvation. But the fact is, monetary systems are not meritocratic--people's merits take time and nurturing to develop and monetary systems more often than not prevent that development from happening. I don't think this is possible to fix without a more fundamental overhaul of how we view the relationships between value, merit, and money. > Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it. This is spoken from a position of comparatively extreme wealth. You have a prospect of realizing income from working in film, but literally billions of people don't. Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis? And this doesn't stop with literature and art either: I think that science and engineering are affected by this as well. How many Albert Einsteins and Margaret Hamiltons have starved to death before even reaching adulthood because there was no economic value to their survival? The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities. The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers.

anigbrowl 11y ago
You're saying that literature has value and therefore you deserve to be given money for producing it. No I'm not. I'm saying I deserve the opportunity to set the terms on which I sell it instead of having it copied for profit by people with greater financial resources than I have. Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis? [...] The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities. WTF - you're placing the entire burden of economic inequity ont he copyright system? that's just nonsense, notwithstanding my skepticism about modern capitalist structures. The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers. Having those people buy the rights from people like me suits me just fine, because I would rather get paid and do more work than have to do all the business of distribution. It seems to me that you're essentially restating the Marxist Labor theory of Value, and I don't subscribe to that, notwithstanding that I am the laborer in this case. Wealth is not created from labor alone; capital-at-risk (the part put up by big studios) is also a necessary factor of production. If you gather 100 talented or skillful people together you don't necessarily end up with a product - they still need tools to work, raw materials to work on, and the product needs to be brought to market somehow. Digital technology assists with this but it is no way the panacea that some ideological folks imagine it to be. I can't tell you how many otherwise-decent creative micro-budget projects fail because the producers/directors haven't made the right decisions about final manufacturing options (in terms of exactly what they have to produce that distributors are looking for) and marketing (in terms of budgeting for PR or film market exhibition costs to get it in front of distributors). I absolutely think the distribution companies and various intermediaries create significant economic value - it's just not obvious to the general public outside the industry what it is that they do. You might as well say that bankers make a fortune for just pushing papers around or programmers get paid a fat money to sit around and push buttons all day.

anigbrowl 11y ago

You're saying that literature has value and therefore you deserve to be given money for producing it. No I'm not. I'm saying I deserve the opportunity to set the terms on which I sell it instead of having it copied for profit by people with greater financial resources than I have. Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis? [...] The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities. WTF - you're placing the entire burden of economic inequity ont he copyright system? that's just nonsense, notwithstanding my skepticism about modern capitalist structures. The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers. Having those people buy the rights from people like me suits me just fine, because I would rather get paid and do more work than have to do all the business of distribution. It seems to me that you're essentially restating the Marxist Labor theory of Value, and I don't subscribe to that, notwithstanding that I am the laborer in this case. Wealth is not created from labor alone; capital-at-risk (the part put up by big studios) is also a necessary factor of production. If you gather 100 talented or skillful people together you don't necessarily end up with a product - they still need tools to work, raw materials to work on, and the product needs to be brought to market somehow. Digital technology assists with this but it is no way the panacea that some ideological folks imagine it to be. I can't tell you how many otherwise-decent creative micro-budget projects fail because the producers/directors haven't made the right decisions about final manufacturing options (in terms of exactly what they have to produce that distributors are looking for) and marketing (in terms of budgeting for PR or film market exhibition costs to get it in front of distributors). I absolutely think the distribution companies and various intermediaries create significant economic value - it's just not obvious to the general public outside the industry what it is that they do. You might as well say that bankers make a fortune for just pushing papers around or programmers get paid a fat money to sit around and push buttons all day.