I don't think we want to go back to a world where artists are funded by rich people because in that world, the rich decide what works get created.

Copyright is the only proven way of producing an abundance of art CREATED FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC, not for the Church or some nobleman. Just look at how many books and songs we got in the 20. century. Thousands of consumers each paying a small amount is a fundamentally democratic idea.

I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work -- not from concerts, book signings or t-shirts. I don't see why so many people seem to wish for a world in which a hairdresser gets paid for his work, but a composer or software developer gets nothing. Do we really want a system which rewards the creation of tangible products like tables and haircuts, but not the creation of ideas? In the 21. century? Seriously?

To those who ask "why create artificial scarcity?": For the same reason we have environmental regulations. Environmental regulations also create artificial scarcity. We make it artificially expensive to release CO2 into the air or to fish cod out of the sea above a certain limit. Why? Because this is necessary to ensure continued abundance.

Unless someone proposes a better model which enables people to make a living by creating reproducible works, I will remain a (critical) supporter of copyright. In general, I think we should strive to create a system which rewards contributions to our society.

Even if the former is true, I don't think the latter is.

"I don't think we want to go back to a world where artists are funded by rich people because in that world, the rich decide what works get created."

How is this not the situation now? Musicians and filmmakers work at the pleasure of large corporations, who have neither the general enrichment of the culture nor the livelihood of the artist as a priority.

"I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work..."

That's not really the way capitalism works, though. They don't have a natural right to be compensated for the work they want to do. If they did, I'd sit at home and write essays on my blog for 40 hrs/wk instead of going to my government job. Artists have to figure out how to get paid just like the rest of us. Copyright isn't working. See Amanda Palmer for a model that's an alternative both to being owned by a corporation and to starving. It involves a lot of direct relationship with audience.

(You'd think HN of all communities would get this.)

Environmental regulations are not really artificial scarcity, though. It's more like trying to internalize tragedy of the commons externalities. I think of it like an insurance policy, where you charge people who are having a negative effect that won't be felt until later, so you can pay to deal with it when the time comes.

In short, I see the big label problem, but the problem was never copyright. The problem was expensive production/distribution/promotion.

"They don't have a natural right to be compensated for the work they want to do."

Copyright does not give people the right to get compensated for what they want to do. It compensates people if they make something that other people want to use.

I don't want to talk about "natural rights". I find the notion fuzzy and suspect. I think it only complicates the issue at hand.

I would like to live in a world where people get rewarded when they contribute to society. (Someone who writes a song or book or software program that a lot of people like is a contributor to society.) Either you find that vision desirable or not.

"Copyright does not give people the right to get compensated for what they want to do. It compensates people if they make something that other people want to use."

Fair point. But the economic argument I'm making is that copies of music, for example, is a commodity at this point, because of the ~0 marginal cost and more or less substitutable.

My point is that I believe that artists will figure out how to get compensated for the contributions to society. Charging for copies isn't going to be part of it.

Excuse me, but that is bullshit. You seem to have exactly zero clue about the origins of copyright. Since I've explained this countless times here already, let me just quote myself from an older comment of mine:

The fact is, copyright was never meant for creators. It was invented by distributors for distributors. The first copyright law was a censorship law to limit the amount of books printed when the printing press was was getting widely available in England that gave a total monopoly on publishing to a guild of publishers, without even attributing a book to the original author, but instead to the guild member who registered the book, attaining its newly invented "copyright".

So no, copyright was never meant to "make it possible for an artists to make a living".

>Copyright is the only proven way of producing an abundance of art CREATED FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

Proven? Your throwing around fallacies here. There's nothing proven about this, it's quite the opposite already. Unlimited sharing has enabled the creation of more art than ever before.

>I think it should be possible for a writer, musician or developer to make money from ACTUAL creative work

If he or she can find a way to make money from it, sure why not. The point is, you cannot make that money with distribution anymore. That's a reality and there's nothing you can do about it.

>Do we really want a system which rewards the creation of tangible products like tables and haircuts, but not the creation of ideas? In the 21. century? Seriously?

Again your throwing completely unrelated things together.

- A table is indeed a tangible good. You make one, then you can sell it, and have to make another.

- A haircut is not a tangible good, it's a service. The hairdresser gets paid for the work he/she has done.

- The creation of art isn't a tangible good either. It's best likened to a service, except many people do it proactively instead of waiting for someone to pay them to create art.

Yes, we as a society should find ways to reward the creation of art. Copyright is not, and never was, the solution.

>Environmental regulations also create artificial scarcity.

Except there already is scarcity in nature. If there would be an infinite amount of fish, it would make no sense to regulate catching. Huge abundance != no scarcity. With reproducible art, there is truly no scarcity.

1. "Copyright made it possible for an artist to make a living without having a wealthy patron" 2. "Copyright WAS MEANT to make it possible for an artists to make a living without having a wealthy patron"

You seem to think that by disproving (2) you also disprove (1), which is false. (1) is true. (2) may well be false, it doesn't matter.

Your comments about a haircut being a service, not a product, have no bearing on my point that we are approaching a situation in which a hairdresser is rewarded by society for his work, but a songwriter is not. I'm sorry, but pointing out mistakes like this (and if you'd applied the principle of charity you would've seen that it is not quite a mistake) only distracts from the actual discussion.

I'm glad you agree we should find ways to reward the creation of art. I am open to possibilities other than copyright. But so far all I've seen is a lot of handwaving and no workable model.

Who is "we" and when did those "we" give you the right to make claims in our name? Neither you nor anybody else can decide what "we" want. Only we can decide what we want. Let stop making assumptions and simply have a vote on copyright policy.

2. Maybe piracy is here to stay. I just resent the sneaky suggestion that its only the lumbering, dinosaur labels with their outmoded industrial apparatus that are going to suffer. It's not true at all. The people with the most to lose are the artists themselves - especially the more intellectual ones, eg. authors. In your brave new world, The Beatles would have continued touring pub venues and only the lucky few who got to see them would realise how much they stood out from the 10,000 other bands doing the same thing.

Oh and religious and aristocratic patronage as a primary 'business model' royally sucked - that's basically why the copyright model and the arts have thrived over the last few hundred years. Its why we get to watch 100MM budget movies. It's a bloody good system and it's a crying shame to throw it away just because of piracy.

I'm really not sure I agree with that.

"Civilisation is built on mutual respect of rights."

Which rights are you talking about in this case exactly? The only one I can detect from your position is the right to be compensated for your work, which doesn't sound like a natural right at all.

2. Well, my position is that a lot of artists are suffering now, under the thumbs of the dinosaurs (to mix metaphors) you're trying to defend. In the future, those artists (as well as those industry players) who cannot or will not adapt will suffer.

"In your brave new world, The Beatles would have continued touring pub venues and only the lucky few who got to see them would realise how much they stood out from the 10,000 other bands doing the same thing."

But in my brave new world, I actually get to take part in deciding who stands out and who doesn't, instead of waiting for big labels to tell me, and I can rapidly communicate my decision to many other people very quickly. I take a more direct, decentralized stake in my cultural heritage. I find this pleasing.

"religious and aristocratic patronage as a primary 'business model' royally sucked"

I wasn't saying it was great. I was saying that artists adapt to the circumstances. They will continue to do so.

"why the copyright model and the arts have thrived over the last few hundred years"

I neither grant this premise, nor understand the causal connection you present.

"Its why we get to watch 100MM budget movies."

I've found that by my own measure, in the last couple of decades, the quality of a movie has had a generally inversely proportional relationship with the size of its budget. My theory explaining this is that with a larger investment, you need a broader base audience and relatively "safe" content, which translates to bland, soulless, lowest common denominator fare. I'll be happy to see this die.

"It's a bloody good system and it's a crying shame to throw it away just because of piracy."

I really don't think it's a good system at all. Its primary purpose was to promote continued innovation and creation. I've yet to see convincing evidence that it has done so, or that innovation and creation would suffer in its absence.

BTW: Thanks for indulging the argument without resorting to the ugliness that so many of these threadsd tend to devolve into. Even if neither of us convince the other, I find this exchange meaningful and clarifying of my own thoughts. I hope you feel the same.

Now while a fatted arts industry will always contribute a lot of bloated, formulaic works (although I think people would have to admit that even the more braindead hollywood titles have a lot going for them beyond the plot and script), it also allows big money to spent on worthwhile projects. Think of all the great movies that have been made in the last 70 years - they may not have been the most expensive for their time but they were generally still pretty damn costly to make. And even the shoe-string budget attempts probably would not have been made if the possibility for a massive pay-day did not exist (eg. Blair Witch Project).

I think people have got their priorities mixed up. Accessing art is not the problem. We have limited leisure time to spend, so even if we could, we would not want to buy every album/movie/book we could. These items are cheap, though, so since price is not really a concern, our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles. And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?

You keep saying this and I keep not believing that that's all there was to it. It was also a matter of people having way more disposable income and leisure time than ever before, as well as the means of production becoming readily available to the masses.

You're also mostly talking about an era during which the marginal cost of distribution was significantly greater than zero. That's not the case anymore.

"our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles"

I disagree with this. I think most of our enduring works of art come from a time before copyright. Some, e.g. works of oral tradition like Homer, the Ramayana, the Bible, Gilgamesh, etc. actually depend on the unrestricted free exchange of ideas.

We just passed through a historical window in which the confluence of surplus disposable income and leisure and scarce distribution models made a few artists very rich (but a few corporations even richer). I would argue that this was never an optimal distribution. Anyway, it's coming to a close. Art will go on.

"And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?"

The only Spanish works I'm familiar with are Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and various films by Pedro Almodovar. They were better than anything on, for example, this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Mo...