Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Of course people won't stop making art if you took out copyright! It'd just be harder for anyone to be a *professional* artist, who makes art full-time, in any format that's easily copyable and time-intensive. So, you're left with 1)people who can get patrons to support them, 2)people who can do it full-time because they don't have to work, and 3)amateurs/hobbyists (there's nothing wrong with art as a hobby! but typically skill has some correlation with amount of practice).

argumate answered:

Yes. And coordinating large groups of people to make art that requires significant investment (say, movies) would become substantially more difficult.

(Which isn’t necessarily a downside, arguably movies don’t make our lives any better, especially those that require immense budgets. But still).

[ranma-official]

“The only way anyone can ever be a professional artist is if they can own other people’s ideas and force them to not have them! Otherwise they will all go bankrupt! Bankrupt, I say!”

I see that your anons are especially stupid today

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s a pretty uncharitable reading.  The issue with copyright isn’t that it exists at all, thus allowing a shift in the risk for the creation of the work from some parties to other parties (how many kickstarters have failed to deliver?), but that it doesn’t reflect more organic uses such as fanworks - and that it has been extended indefinitely.

In a copyright system, some of the burden of risk can be shifted from the consumer to the publisher, since the consumer can purchase the work after it has already been completed with a near-100% confirmed chance of the work existing.

In a no-copyrights system, the cost of creating the work is shifted to before the work’s creation or completion, as there is no way to be sure that donations will match anywhere near the amount of money from payments/purchases.  (And let’s be honest, here, donations will not match the amount of revenue from payments/purchases.  Less revenue brings up opportunity costs, the money for resources has to come from somewhere, and thus less time since it has to be spent on earning money via other means.)  That puts the risk of the work primarily on the consumers dedicated enough to fund its creation.

In some cases that’s going to be crowdfunding, but in many cases it’s going to be wealthy patrons - the opposite of democratization.

Speaking of owning other people’s ideas, works can already be willingly released into the public domain.  For some reason, that mode of production doesn’t appear to be dominating.