> A longer exclusivity term makes it possible to recoup more investment costs

I go to the bank. I ask for a loan. I tell them that I will small marginal profits after 75 years. I do not get the loan.

Even if in some cases this was actually possible. Still, we need to evaluate if it is worth it. All the stories, movies, characters that are part of your formation and your culture will be privately owned and restricted until way after you are dead.

Characters, music, and other cultural assets only become free when nobody cares anymore about them.

We are evaluating the possibility of the creation of some cultural assets against the reality of other cultural assets that are not created because the government sets monopolistic restrictions on them.

There is a sweet spot where creators can live out of their creations. And were citizens can make their own vision of characters that personally meant a lot to them.

What if record companies finance artists in ways that banks wouldn’t?

The main argument I can accept for copy right is that it allows for people to pool their tiny amount of money to vote for the kind of music they like so it is more democratic than a patron-focused model where authors and musicians would need to cater to a few patrons' tastes.

However, even though most of the money remains concentrated at the top, we no longer have this problem. It is fairly easy to support your favorite artist with a few dollars every month and indeed there was a big discussion here when Patreon said they could no longer support adult entertainers. None of them makes a big payout but historically not many do anyways.

I'd argue nobody deserves the huge payout that artists get. What we need is a sustainable way to fund a universal basic income so those who want to pursue the arts can do so without a fear of starving.

I'd even argue that we can afford to take copyright down to five or ten years and eventually eliminate it. Imagine the innovation at Spotify if there were no copyright! Copyright holds business down.

> Imagine the innovation at Spotify if there were no copyright!

None, because Spotify would go out of business overnight as people stole their source code.

The value of Spotify isn't in the source code just like the value of Google cloud or AWS isn't. Someone still needs to offer it as a service.

Why? Icecast is open source and it does the same thing.

Spotify's value is not running many Icecast servers.

if we're talking about the music industry, sure, more investment enables the machine to make bigger stars and more money. but if we're talking about music as a cultural good, how much money is really needed to make a top notch studio album? no more than a million dollars in most cases. maybe you need to multiply that by a small integer to make a really good music video for a couple of the singles.

is the purpose of copyright law to enable billion dollar stars, or million dollar albums?

This would be a good point, if either a) if were backed up by data or b) data weren't available yet.

I wish people would stop posting these "could be" arguments when real data is already available and either supports an "is" or doesn't.