I find this mystifying. It seems that you're arguing that performative work is somehow deficient or inferior just because it can easily be reproduced. A painting or sculpture is solid and while copies can be made it is relatively easy to distinguish the original work. Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on.
If you had all the money you needed, would you stop producing screenplays?
Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it.
The classic example: for every loaf of bread a baker bakes, the variable costs (raw ingredients, fuel, labour) are approximately the same for each extra loaf baked, so his margin and profit per loaf don't magically increase by baking more.
Contrast this with someone creating a copyrighted work and receiving royalties per instance sold or performed. Here, increased volume does increase margin and profit per instance, because the real cost of labour the creator must put in to receive royalties on every new sale or performance tends to zero. (I'm discounting the cost of marketing etc., which in most cases has only a second-order effect and doesn't change the final result.) Add to this the income which copyright brokers receive from media distributors etc. without having any part in the creative process, and things become very unbalanced real quick.
The root cause of the problem is that it is extremely hard to put a realistic monetary value on the act of creating a copyrighted work, as it would have to take into account the real effort required to create it, as well as the total (mainly intangible) benefit to all who will ever get exposed to it.
It would be much better if the artist could make dealings directly with the audience, just like the baker does with his customers.
As Syd Barrett put it: "All middle men are bad."
Of course, but you have much higher up front costs than the baker, who can bake less during periods of slack demand. You can't paint half of a picture and sell it for half the price you wanted to get. I'm not sure why you think a commodity model is even relevant here. An artistic work has a lot more in common with the erection of a building, which involves large amounts of labor and capital up front, in exchange for an ongoing stream of economic rents over the longer term.
(I'm discounting the cost of marketing etc., which in most cases has only a second-order effect and doesn't change the final result.)
A very dubious assumption. Marketing matters quite a lot IMHO, and certainly as far as films go there's a pretty strong correlation between the marketing budget and the probability of making a financial return. You micht like to check out the reference sources in this article, particularly Vogel: https://storyality.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/storyality-24-on...
Add to this the income which copyright brokers receive from media distributors etc. without having any part in the creative process, and things become very unbalanced real quick.
But it's not just creative, it's administrative as well. If you're a writer you don't want to spend half your time trying to audit your distributors.
It would be much better if the artist could make dealings directly with the audience
That's not realistic in the case of literary works, because you're still up against the copying problem - the text of a book is very easy to copy and it is the product itself.
As Syd Barrett put it: "All middle men are bad."
Much as I admire Syd Barrett artistically, have you considered that he was a) literally incompetent in the mental health sense, and b) that his economic wellbeing was to a large extent dependent on the good will of his former bandmates who ensured that he received royalty monies from record sales? Without their efforts as middlemen he'd probably have ended up institutionalized or homeless.
There's a romantic viewpoint that middlemen in the arts world are all parasitic. They're not; usually the relationship is much more symbiotic, with different parties bringing different skills to the table. So people in Hollywood may grumble about agents in a general sense, but nobody who has one is in a hurry to go back to repping themselves unless they get so rich and famous as to set up their own production company, in which case they hire people to do a lot of the same work.
That's not at all what I'm arguing. In fact, the kinds of artistic work that I most enjoy (books) are easily reproduced with little/no loss in quality.
> Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on.
I totally agree that literary works are equally carefully crafted, but the rest of what you're saying is the economic context which I'm rejecting. You're saying that literature has value and therefore you deserve to be given money for producing it. I'm saying that I think everyone should have enough money to survive, and then they can and will do what they want to do. Doing things you enjoy is both productive and its own reward.
Your statements are based on a fundamental assumption that with enough rules, the monetary system will become meritocratic, rewarding those who produce with wealth and punishing those who don't produce with homelessness and starvation. But the fact is, monetary systems are not meritocratic--people's merits take time and nurturing to develop and monetary systems more often than not prevent that development from happening. I don't think this is possible to fix without a more fundamental overhaul of how we view the relationships between value, merit, and money.
> Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it.
This is spoken from a position of comparatively extreme wealth. You have a prospect of realizing income from working in film, but literally billions of people don't. Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis?
And this doesn't stop with literature and art either: I think that science and engineering are affected by this as well. How many Albert Einsteins and Margaret Hamiltons have starved to death before even reaching adulthood because there was no economic value to their survival?
The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities. The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers.
No I'm not. I'm saying I deserve the opportunity to set the terms on which I sell it instead of having it copied for profit by people with greater financial resources than I have.
Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis? [...] The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities.
WTF - you're placing the entire burden of economic inequity ont he copyright system? that's just nonsense, notwithstanding my skepticism about modern capitalist structures.
The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers.
Having those people buy the rights from people like me suits me just fine, because I would rather get paid and do more work than have to do all the business of distribution. It seems to me that you're essentially restating the Marxist Labor theory of Value, and I don't subscribe to that, notwithstanding that I am the laborer in this case. Wealth is not created from labor alone; capital-at-risk (the part put up by big studios) is also a necessary factor of production. If you gather 100 talented or skillful people together you don't necessarily end up with a product - they still need tools to work, raw materials to work on, and the product needs to be brought to market somehow. Digital technology assists with this but it is no way the panacea that some ideological folks imagine it to be. I can't tell you how many otherwise-decent creative micro-budget projects fail because the producers/directors haven't made the right decisions about final manufacturing options (in terms of exactly what they have to produce that distributors are looking for) and marketing (in terms of budgeting for PR or film market exhibition costs to get it in front of distributors). I absolutely think the distribution companies and various intermediaries create significant economic value - it's just not obvious to the general public outside the industry what it is that they do. You might as well say that bankers make a fortune for just pushing papers around or programmers get paid a fat money to sit around and push buttons all day.
I agree with your argument within the economic context in which your work occurs, it's the only thing that makes many works of art possible. But copyright is a bad thing because the economic context is bad.
If you had all the money you needed, would you stop producing screenplays? I can't answer for you, but I know the answer for me: if I had all the money I needed, I wouldn't stop writing code or performing music. I think the idea that people need economic incentives to do things, especially creative things, is bogus. People don't need incentives to do things, they need their basic needs met so that they can do things. More often than not, the need to fulfill their basic needs gets in the way of people doing the things that they want, and which might prove the most beneficial. I've certainly written reams of useless code to pay the bills instead of open source work that I wanted to do to further humanity. And I'm sure you've spent time doing things to pay the bills when you could have been working on your screenplay.
Of course we don't live in a world where people's needs can simply be met without effort. But the time is coming when no human will have to lift a finger to survive. What incentive will exist then? The structures we have built around the need to earn our survival will prepare us poorly for the world that will be.
I see two futures: one where the robots and artificial intelligences that meet all our needs are owned by the people who bought them and the rest of us are beholden to them, and another where, in the absence of value derived by economic need, we derive value from our feelings, our experiences, our relationships, and our creations. Copyright lives in the former future: the future I want is the latter.