Through patronage and performance. And since reproduction was difficult, you had to have these people around. You couldn't pick and choose among a thousand SoundCloud composers to find a song you liked. You needed a Mozart or Bach. You needed orchestras because recordings don't exist.

But now, it is dead simple to propagate someone's work once they've finished the act of creation.

And this isn't a discussion if others are getting their fair due. Even if they are not, it does not mean we should shaft everyone. Everyone should be fairly compensated for their work. But not enforcing some level of protection for the creation of art is pretty much ensuring no one is compensated for their work. Fairly or not.

  > That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work?

what i find really interesting is, why is it that a company owns what i make there automatically?

afaik i didn't sign any copyright assignment in my work contract...

i wonder what the legal basis is for that?

You most probably did. At least I know I did. And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends. You will have trouble using your creative outputs when moving between companies. Unless you start all over again and from that perspective it is a weird motivator for creativity, albeit one oriented to getting you where you started from rather than one step further.

  > And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends. 

on that note, there are some proposals (superdistribution - brad cox, xanadu - ted nelson, etc) that would allow any works to be licensed from/to anyone via micro transactions.... but i've never heard of anyone actually trying to do such a thing at scale.

sounds super cool if it could work... all the stuff i made, when reused somewhere by a company, i get a residual... the more valuable, the more used, and the more i get... that could be pretty awesome (hypothetically)