Posts by Keir Leslie
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Not directly, no, but I've asked several times why the family of an artist should be entitled to this state-sanctioned income stream that isn't available to others who may be subsisting through their income-earning years.
Because artists are denied the immediate lump sum payment corresponding to the long term advantage that society derives from their work. In exchange, artists are promised that society will pay when the work is used. The artist earned the money at the point of creation, and then receives that over the life-plus-50.
That's pretty well exactly equivalent to buying a bond and living off the interest -- society is given something of value and then repays over time. The artist earned that money and can thus bequeath it, whereas the cleaner hasn't and therefore can't.
It's not a 20-year monopoly, it's currently a life-plus-50-years monopoly, and if we sign an FTA with the US you can be sure it'll become life-plus-70 or such longer period as gets passed into US law the next time Mickey is on the verge of becoming public property. It hasn't been 20 years for quite a long time. 20 years is for patents, and most people think that's quite long enough.
Yet you bitched about a scenario where 20 years after the author was dead, there was still a copyright.
Which raises another question: why are artistic works of greater value than inventions?
This is meaningless, by the way. It's like walking into a room, and being told that there's a prize A for pulling the black marble out of a bag of four white or a prize B for picking the red marble out of eight yellows and then exclaiming that clearly prize A is the one to go for.
No, not until you know the value of prize A and B.
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Consider that the House of Lords decided a couple of centuries ago that copyright isn't a natural right.
Oh, so the aristocracy has no respect for the rights of labour? What a surprise.
The families of artists who earn very little from their work are more important than the families of other low-income earners,
I don't think anybody said that; you may want to check your sources. Further, actually, yes, the families of successful artists are more deserving of inheriting dosh than the families of a McDonalds worker, inasmuch as money and/or inheritance are legitimate. Unless you're advocating giving all your money away to the poor rather than your descendants, this one's incoherent.
and this justifies the imposition of a statutory monopoly on an expression,
Well, that's the way we've decided to go -- would you prefer lump sum payments on the creation of works?
far in excess of a human lifetime
20 years isn't very far in excess -- that's about long enough to put a child through college.
In fact, what I am arguing is that art is a professional activity, a very highly skilled one in most cases, and deserves to be compensated like any other. Further, if you want to have art, you must provide for the living of artists. To do otherwise, especially if you claim that artists will do it out of love, and thus for free, is utterly despicable. The way that we currently pay for art is through copyright.
I'd also argue that further it's strange to have some forms of property that continue beyond death and others that don't, when the only distinction is between money and the promise of money.
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Ok, Matthew, what about shares?
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Yes, Matthew, the right to inherit is unique to artists.
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If it's about artists' control, why is it a "lifetime-plus" term? Generally, once a person dies they cease caring about what's happening to things they did or created while they were alive.
Yeah, because who cares about their children?
The point isn't that copyright is primarily non-economic. It is that there are lots of reasons apart from `to promote progress &c' to justify an economic right.
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Rich, the argument espoused to justify copyright is that if there's no money in it people won't create.
The number of artists who both created significant art and didn't get paid for it is essentially a rounding error compared to the number who did and got paid for it.
I can back that up, by the way, with a century worth of art historical research on the origin of paintings, and half a century of Marxist art history that focussed on the economic relation between the artist and society.
Finally, if you think modelling artistic livelihoods on van-bleeding-Gogh is a good idea what on earth are you smoking? Artists aren't resources to be exploited as cheaply as possible.
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That's a really fucking perverse take on the ostensible incentive to create that justifies copyright's existence.
You might want to justify why copyright is supposed to be an incentive scheme, as opposed to a recognition of an artist's inherent right to control their work.
And, uh, 20 years? That's widows and orphans territory, to be honest. It's the 50 years copyright that's a stretch, not the life + 20.
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Keir, how many had that lifestyle from their work, and how many because they came from families with lots of money?
Most of them; the arts were an accepted method of social climbing -- see da Vinci &c.
The great Italian painters and sculptors all did their thing without any legal protection against having their work copied.
No, they had something better, a technological protection. At the time they worked, it was quite hard to make cheap or good replicas of their work, and impossible to make cheap, good replicas.
Hirst probably doesn't care about copyright too much either, but he relies on very, very rich people just giving him cash. Copyright, arguably, democratises art in that sense.
Renaissance art was substantially paid for by state or para-statal groups -- certainly, the big set pieces tended to be. (I'm calling the Renaissance Church para-statal for convenience.) And, yes, you only got paid once on the sale of a work, but you got paid solid sums of taxpayer money.
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Um, no. If they earned little or nothing from their works, then they starved to death -- unless they had some alternate income source, which most didn't.
Art is a professional activity.
And when you look at the artists whose names we know, the seriously art historical ones, the fraction that didn't enjoy a pretty comfortable lifestyle is small.
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Money wasn't the reason - it was incidental at best - instead it was creating for the love of doing so.
Look, you feed me for free, and then we can talk about artists working for love, ok? (Or, less politely, fuck off, how stupid do you think we are?)
Also, that's just not true, most artists have enjoyed a comfortable living throughout history, almost always as a result of some hefty state/para-statal subsidy, except for some religious groups and some other minor exceptions. Even at that, they took economic considerations pretty seriously almost always.
What is unique about the past couple of centuries is the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, not artists getting paid.
It's about ensuring that they get some form of remuneration for their work, to encourage them to create things that will become available to all of society to utilise at a future time.
And that is just false; from the Berne Convention:
``The countries to which this Convention applies constitute a Union for the protection of the rights of authors in their literary and artistic works.''
That is the limit of the discussion of why, and note there's no mention of `to promote progress &c.'
Just because the US Constitution says x, doesn't, in fact, make x true everywhere.