The fact that nobody currently follows Shakespeare’s business model indicates that it’s not viable any more.

There are plenty of people who live off writing screenplays for movies and TV.

Plenty of those people depend on copyright law to prevent studios from stealing their scripts and producing them without paying the writer. Or are we supposed to against independent creators, and insist that artists return to the patronage system so we can eliminate copyright?

> Plenty of those people depend on copyright law to prevent studios from stealing their scripts and producing them without paying the writer.

Like that never happens now. How many independent creators did successfully sue a studio since copyright law has come into play? How many pitched a script to a studio, only to be rejected, and having the same idea rewritten on a spec by others?

Is it worth it to keep Steamboat Willie under lock and key?

Might as well tax the IP secondary sales and just give every living author with works registered in the Library of Congress a stipend.

I'll let the live theatre industry know they no longer exist.

Snark aside, I think there are people who make a living creating things that don't rely on copyright (music artists that make their living off merch and live shows, theatre as mentioned above), and even if there weren't, that's not particularly surprising because copyright laws exist - without them, there would be stronger incentives to discover other revenue streams.

Does live theater depend on having a resident playwright who doesn’t copyright their work? I missed that detail in the years I worked as a stage electrician.

Live theater absolutely depends on copyright. Do you think playwrights and musical composers just let all those theaters use their work for free and, what, work as cashiers at Trader Joe's?

Absolutely some people earn money based on selling rights to shows. But there's also profitable theatres that just do remounts, where copyright represents a cost, not a revenue source. At least where I am, the festival theatres remounting Broadway shows pull in more money than anyone producing anything original.

Where do you think those theaters redoing other people's shows get those shows? Do you think Broadways playwrights and musical composers do what they do so the show can run in one theater for a month then in every community theater in the country the next month, undercutting their market? Do you think the show producers would put shows on Broadway and in the West End if those were the economics of it?

According to this argument though, who would ever mount a Shakespeare play? The theatre down the street could rip you off at any moment.

Theatres remount things and profit from it. Theatres do original works without much intention of selling the rights later and profit from it. Obviously there are going to be a ton of examples where copyright is used to generate revenue, because it exists and why wouldn't you copyright something when there's no cost to doing it and potential upside. But there's plenty of evidence that live theatre would still exist without copyright.

I'm not sure you're fully understanding what copyright is. On the one hand, people see it as protection from unlimited copying. On the other, it's literally a way to allow others to license a work that society might otherwise decide belongs only to the creator or their patron.

Broadway might still exist. All the theaters, especially community theaters, across the country that don't have Eugene O'Neill or Richard Rodgers would have a terrible time pulling a full house if Bob's nephew wrote all the plays. If there was no way to protect the works made for Broadway, the incentive for people to spend the time writing, composing, arranging, designing sets, making costumes, and choreographing those shows largely disappears. The show can be redone down the street or in Omaha the next week, and all the money goes to the theater doing the ripping off. The show can be videotaped and shown on Hulu the next night, and all the money goes to Hulu.

Shakespeare's plays are beyond the time limits on copyright, which there definitely should be. They are also considered classics. The performance, believe it or not, can still be under copyright. You can't generally go in and record the performance and put out your own stream or DVD of it.

Don't most theater artists work at Trader Joe's anyway? It's not exactly a lucrative job, modulo Broadway.