Hard News: "Rubbish" is putting it politely
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Once upon a time, copyright was for 14 years, with a renewal right of a further 14 if the author was actually still alive. That's fair. That's reasonable. I can live with something being tied up in a monopoly that's a fraction of the average human lifespan.
In practical terms, that sort of sucks for musicians (who frequently create their most popular works when they are young) more than it does for writers, who generally aren't any good until at least 30.
The big-time artists, like Metallica, get zero sympathy from me if, in 20 years' time, they've spent all the millions of dollars they currently earn.
Rock multi-millionaires aren't really the right place to calibrate your copyright stance though.
Your work is valued at the time and place it is carried out. The greater part of a creative work's earning potential may lie years after its creation. You need to be careful about arbitrarily cancelling that.
But anyway. I'm starting a copyright thread soon. C'mon over.
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Or do I not understand the etymology of the word "change??
I think 'change' currently means 'not Bush/completely fucking incompetent'. Whether McCain Palin will be that, is another question.
For the minor creators, if they cannot survive on what they make now, what would suddenly change in 30 years' time to make a work a viable income stream?
For a lot of visual artists, they do indeed struggle early in their career, and then near the end of their life their work, including their earlier work, is now very valuable. I presume you can make a similar argument for writers - once you 'make it', your copyright over your complete body of work becomes more valuable as a lot more people will buy your earlier works, and your upcoming ones.
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3410,
Goodness knows I wouldn't do my job for free. But I don't expect to get paid for it forever, unless I do it forever.
Matthew, I think you're comparing apples with oranges. Creating artworks is not like paid employment. You earn from the result, not from the work that goes into it.
A more appropriate comparison might be building a house. If you decide to do that, and then rent it out, you would expect to continue receiving benefit for that, essentially forever.
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A more appropriate comparison might be building a house. If you decide to do that, and then rent it out, you would expect to continue receiving benefit for that, essentially forever.
Yes, you would. But the supply of land is finite. You also can't stop someone else building a house that's kinda like yours (case law says that copying as little as four bars of a song can be infringing), for a period measured in multiple decades, or at all for that matter. I'll ignore copyright in building designs, which is a whole different story.
Given that copyright terms have extended every time Mickey's been about to come into the public domain (twice now, and counting, and retroactively both times), how much culturally poorer would society be if Shakespeare or Mozart had had bodies like the MPAA to push their case for (at the time non-existent) continued copyright term extension?
That's the real problem. Copyright isn't meant to be about ensuring a lifetime income for the creator. 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 if you look at creativity in the historical context of centuries, not just the narrow lens of the last 100 years, artists created regardless of the money to be made. People invented shit before patents existed. Books were written, music composed, artworks produced, etc. Money wasn't the reason - it was incidental at best - instead it was creating for the love of doing so. -
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.
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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.
Or they had day jobs. I've just finished the new P.D. James (which isn't exactly the best novel she's every written, but still pretty damn impressive for someone who's just turned 88), and the dedication reads, "to all my friends, old and new, at Faber and Faber, in celebration of my forty-six unbroken years as a Faber author".
And so she should. James is in the extraordinarily rare position that she's had extremely stable relationships with her British and American publishers her entire literary career, but that Faber has kept all her books (seventeen novels and two works of non-fiction) continuously in print. Even then, as (effectively) a solo mother raising two children, she was never making enough from her writing to give up work.
People invented shit before patents existed. Books were written, music composed, artworks produced, etc. Money wasn't the reason - it was incidental at best - instead it was creating for the love of doing so.
Tee hee... Perhaps I've done far too many art history classes, but Michaelangelo and Da Vinci spent as much time bitching about the ducat-pinching ways of patrons (at a time where bitching Borgias, Medicis and the Pope could be an extreme sport) and the extortionate price of pigment and marble as they did on the nature of the True and the Good.
And finally, I'd like to close with a passage from the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope -- who, infamously, knew the value of a shilling and knew enough about being poor (and how his mother kept the family barely solvent with her pen) to lack any sentimentality about art for art's sake.
I have no doubt that if I could poll American readers, or American Senators, or even American Representatives, if the polling could be unbiased, or American Booksellers, that an assent to international copyright would be the result. The state of things is crushing to American authors, as the publishers will not pay them on a liberal scale, knowing that they can supply their customers with modern English literature without paying for it. The English amount of production so exceeds the American, that the rate at which the former can be published rules the market. It is equally injurious to American booksellers, except to two or three of the greatest houses. No small man can now acquire the exclusive right of printing and selling an English book. If such a one attempt it, the work is reprinted instantly by one of the leviathans, who alone are the gainers. The argument of course is that American readers are the gainers, that as they can get for nothing the use of certain property, they would be cutting their own throats were they to pass a law debarring themselves from the power of such appropriation. In this argument all idea of honesty is thrown to the winds. It is not that they do not approve of a system of copyright, as many great men have disapproved, for their own law of copyright is as stringent as ours. A bold assertion is made that they like to appropriate the goods of other people, and that as in this case they can do so with impunity, they will continue to do so. But the argument, as far as I have been able to judge, comes not from the people, but from the book selling leviathans, and from those politicians whom the leviathans are able to attach to their interests. The ordinary American purchaser is not much affected by slight variations in price. He is at any rate too high-hearted to be affected by the prospect of such variation. It is the man who wants to make money, not he who fears he may be called upon to spend it, who controls such matters in the United States. It is the large speculator who becomes powerful in the lobbies of the House, and understands how wise it may be to incur a great expenditure either in the creation of a great business, or in protecting that which he has created from competition.
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3410,
... most artists have enjoyed a comfortable living throughout history...
I really think that's very untrue. I'd go so far as to say that "most artists", throughout history, have earned nothing or vitually nothing for their works.
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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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Peter Dunne is going to be elected president of the United States!
Please! Can he be?
It'd make him ineligible as an NZ MP, wouldn't it?
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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?
The Statute of Anne, which is generally regarded as the advent of modern copyright law, didn't come into being until 1709. It also only covered printed works, so "the artists whose names we know" weren't even covered by copyright at that point. Mozart and Beethoven both composed without any significant copyright protection. The great Italian painters and sculptors all did their thing without any legal protection against having their work copied. They created for the creation, not for some notional belief that their work would afford them an income for life. Once they stopped creating, the money stopped flowing. They couldn't produce one good work and be done with it. Even authors, who were the original protectees of the SoA, had to keep writing if they wanted the money to keep coming in in their later years.
Even then, as (effectively) a solo mother raising two children, she was never making enough from her writing to give up work.
She's hardly alone. Janis Ian, of whom I'd never heard before I first read that article several years ago, has been a musician for decades. "[I]n 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money." For musicians, except the very, very successful, the money doesn't come from albums, or lyrics, or music. It comes from touring. Getting out there in front of the fans. Ridiculous term durations don't help that situation.
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For musicians, except the very, very successful, the money doesn't come from albums, or lyrics, or music. It comes from touring. Getting out there in front of the fans. Ridiculous term durations don't help that situation.
It's actually the very, very successful that gain the most from touring -- hence Madonna signing a record deal with a concert promoter when her Warner contract expired.
Copyright is very important to smaller artists, __if_ they write songs. Rights fees and other publishing receipts are what keep many NZ artists going. Retail sales, not so much.
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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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Ridiculous term durations don't help that situation.
Well, Janis Ian is hardly the first musician/songwriter to get thoroughly fucked over by the kind of accounting that should have everyone concerned sharing a cell with Bernie Ebbers. And there have been -- and still are -- plenty of writers who are penny a word galley slaves.
You know what I find ridiculous, Matthew? Companies -- often enormous multi-national corporations -- treating the producers of the very intellectual property they rely upon like scum. I chose the example of Baroness James for a reason -- she's been a very profitable earner for Faber for almost fifty years. Why the fuck is it so unreasonable that she should hold copyright over her work, and have it generate income for her, for the rest of her life?
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Mozart and Beethoven both composed without any significant copyright protection.
Mozart appears to have been something of a copyright-cracker, thanks to his supposed faculty of "eidetic memory", which enabled him to commit a score to memory from hearing a single performance. The story of how he broke the Vatican's monopoly on Allegi's Miserere is briefly recounted here:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06E6DC163BF936A1575BC0A963948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all -
Mozart composed without any significant copyright protection. He created for the creation.
Um, dude, you have seen 'Amadeus'*, right?
Mozart and his financial patron, the not-entirely-penniless Emperor of Austria?
Dying penniless once he fell out of favour, and being buried in a paupers grave?
*yes, I'm aware it's not a documentary.
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It's actually the very, very successful that gain the most from touring -- hence Madonna signing a record deal with a concert promoter when her Warner contract expired.
Oh, of course. The bigger you are, the greater the base of fans willing to pay to see you perform and the higher the ticket price that can be commanded. But that doesn't change the fact that minor artists get utterly shat upon with albums and make their money from touring. I assume you're familiar with Steve Albini's exploration of record company accounting?
Copyright is very important to smaller artists, if they write songs. Rights fees and other publishing receipts are what keep many NZ artists going. Retail sales, not so much.
Sure, but that doesn't justify locking up their works for 100 years or more. Again, I'm not against copyright, or against creators getting paid. What I am against is society being deprived of access to make free derived works from something that was produced by a person who's been dead for 20 years, or from, say, a book that hasn't been through a printing run for three decades. The author ain't making a damn cent from those things, but nobody else is allowed to take those works and derive from them. That's a really fucking perverse take on the ostensible incentive to create that justifies copyright's existence.
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Um, dude, you have seen 'Amadeus'*, right?
It was a long time ago - Tom Hulce, straight from Animal House to portraying Mozart as manic boofhead, then into well-deserved obscurity. If that's the take on Mozart that you're content with, hey, don't worry, be happy.
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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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Rich, the argument espoused to justify copyright is that if there's no money in it people won't create. I'm calling bullshit. You'll point to a Mozart, who had a rich patron (but still got shafted in the end). I'll point to a Van Gough, who survived on his brother's charity, and it's only now, long after his death, that his works change hands for sums that could pay off the national debt of a small African nation.
I'll also point to Linux, and the BSDs, industrial-quality software that's primarily produced by people who do it for love, not money. For the money-is-required-to-encourage-creation argument to hold water, that software wouldn't exist. But it does, and even though there are not-insignificant numbers of contributors to those projects who do it for their employment (Linus, Theo, the primary driver of FreeBSD's security framework, to name three) there are many more who contribute code for which they've never been paid a cent. They write it because they enjoy writing code.
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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.
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.
The only way you can justify terms that extend beyond life is if it's about money, because ego and dignity die with the creator. So we're back to the titular economic justification.
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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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It was a long time ago - Tom Hulce, straight from Animal House to portraying Mozart as manic boofhead, then into well-deserved obscurity. If that's the take on Mozart that you're content with, hey, don't worry, be happy.
The fact that it appeared in a movie doesn't make it inaccurate.
Mozart was a court musician in Salzburg, but he went somewhat AWOL searching for better opportunities and pay, and was eventually fired. While at Vienna until his death he continued to suffer financially, despite his rising fame, and had to borrow money and move in order to survive. He also took on a lot of work which was well below what he was capable of as a composer - sale of dance music, keyboard performances etc.
What I am against is society being deprived of access to make free derived works from something that was produced by a person who's been dead for 20 years, or from, say, a book that hasn't been through a printing run for three decades.
I don't see any reason why, as a principle, rights to a work shouldn't inherit to immediate family. If you were the partner of a writer/artist etc, and that person died, you sure have the rights to collect income from their work, in much the same way that you might inherit their superannuation asset etc. Artists die with young children and partners left behind like anyone else.
Apart from anything else, if copyright only lasts for your lifetime, then we have a rather gruesome reason to kill off 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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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.
Once upon a time, copyright was for 14 years, plus a further 14. Like him or loathe him, Dickens wrote under those terms. Twain wrote with a term of just over 40 years. Two of the most-recognised writers in the Western world did it with the knowledge that they may well live to see their works pass into the public domain.
Pardon me if I cry "boo fucking hoo" to your "widows and orphans". If I'm working a minimum wage job and raising a family, and I die tomorrow, they're out on their own. They'll get the same state support as anyone else, but they've no entitlement to an income stream from my employer. Yet again, I'm left to ask why are artists so much more special than anyone else?
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If you were the partner of a writer/artist etc, and that person died, you sure have the rights to collect income from their work, in much the same way that you might inherit their superannuation asset etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the right to a person's national superannuation die with them in this country? I'm pretty sure it's not a transferable income stream.
Artists die with young children and partners left behind like anyone else.
Yes, but we no longer live in a world where every job comes with a super scheme. KiwiSaver isn't exactly within reach for low-income earners, especially if they have families, since every cent they earn is going on just keeping up with basic cost-of-living issues.
So you're saying that artists' families should be somehow afforded a right that is available to nobody else?
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