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0 pointshakfoo2y ago0 comments

I think we can go further. Copyright is a terrible hack. Creative works are not scarce, but they're subject to front-loaded costs. (Write the game/book/song once, and then every subsequent copy is essentially free).

Copyright said "let's force everyone to pretend this non-scarce item is scarce, so we have a way charge a non-zero price and recoup costs." It allowed us to continue to use market-economics tools, because we couldn't think of anything better. However, it also creates an ugly and immoral distortion of how we handle the precious commodity of knowledge, and ends up creating only a few winners at the expense of everyone else in society.

But it's by far not the only way to answer that question. Why not bail on using the market at all? Massively expand the public funding for creative works. Hire armies of software developers and artists to earn a decent wage creating, and we'd probably still spend less overall because we could eliminate the opportunity for a few short-tail bazillionaires and the parasitic industries parceling out "rights".

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cultureswitch2y ago

Disconnecting the economic rent from the value of a piece of cultural to each individual is a horrid idea.

Culture, like everything else, is subject to the pareto principle. A handful of works are so much better than the rest that they capture almost all of the money that the public is willing to part with. This is true regardless of economic system.

hakfooOP2y ago

I question the ability of the market to measure quality. Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality. Even though they made bazillions, will students in the high schools of 2523 be reading through scripts of Friends and Breaking Bad the way we slogged through King Lear and Othello?

What makes it to market is already a constrained selection. It has to make it through a bunch of commercial filters (investors and publishers who'd rather do a predictably bankable franchise product over a new whole-cloth one), and then you have the issue of only hearing from those who are financially and physically stable enough to create cultural works in the first place. How many potential writers can't start their novel because they're working three jobs, or hiding for their lives in Gaza?

Copyright itself also produces a huge filter by discouraging iterative creativity. It silences people whose talent is building on or expanding existing work. See the guy who is being ordered by the courts to destroy his LOTR derivative product. Perhaps there's a chance to make better Tolkein than Tolkein himself, but we won't know for another 50 years or so.

I'd rather we tell artists "go crazy, you're guaranteed 70k per year, whether you make the next Iron Man, or something so avant-garde only six people actually get it, and four of them are just claiming they do to fit in." We'll at least get more diverse products, and let history decide what's meritorious.

pbhjpbhj2y ago

>Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality.

Thanks for giving us your position; I think I'm generally in agreement with you.

Here though it's good to note that [at least] one type of historic importance develops over time.

Die Hard, to take an arbitrary example, might not have been an important film as far as its art or technical quality [I don't know, it's not important to my point] but its enduring nature and position as an icon -- as a sort of mainstream but somehow counter-cultural part of Christmas for those of us of a certain age and certain bent -- makes it important when otherwise it would not be. It's not intrinsic to the artwork but emerges out of the societal response to the work.

In the UK we've been paying for the BBC to make culturally responsive TV for decades, yet somehow it all got tied back up in copyright when really it should be publicly owned and free-libre to anyone who will pay the download costs [and, perhaps, has a "TV License"].

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