| >What's moral about saying that you should get the works of others without paying their asking price? // Art, which copyright protects, has a unique place in culture. Cultural works owe much to their use, an anthem becomes an anthem after it is penned because it is adopted by the culture and used as an anthem. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. Yes, when a creator, such as myself, creates a work they deserve to get recompense for it if it adds value to society - just as any other worker deserves recompense for their value generating work. But creators operating in the cultural space demand something from the demos, they demand protection, through the creation of laws, in order to ensure they can exploit their works for financial gain. There is nothing wrong with any of this so far. And use of copyright to stimulate creation in the field of the useful arts is noble, it is right to ensure those adding worth to society get recompense. But copyright has been corrupted far beyond that aim, it has been used as a rod to beat the demos with until it both accepts not being able to access culturally significant works and having to pay many times over for the work of the creators - often not even too the creators. There's no reason that we, the demos, should support legislation that stops us using works where the artists/singer/composer has received many 10s of years of average wages already. That's not a fair deal. And we certainly shouldn't be paying for completely unrelated executives to mint it because their predecessors bought the rights 70 years ago; that doesn't stimulate artistic creation. We're being ripped off and those who suppose to represent the demos instead represent the interests of media corps and their own retirement opportunities. The copyright lobby needs to go first in demonstrating they have a moral high ground because the default is no copyright. Copyright is supposed to be a contract with society, where we gift them a limited term monopoly, without that gift the creators of copyrightable works have no recourse in law to ensure their works aren't duplicated ad liberandum. That may be morally void, but that's the default - a strong case needs to be made to maintain the status quo without returning to that default. |
In other words, what's moral about what you're talking about, but isn't moral about me getting you to paint my house and then stiffing you on the payment?