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You've retreated to generalities. The working artists, designers, and other creators I know, and no few I've worked with, don't want to abolish the legal regime set up to ensure them compensation. They don't want to trade what leverage they have for the dole, or for "universal basic income", which is much the same when you'd qualify for either. I've heard and read much the same from their guilds and industry groups. That doesn't mean the status quo. Many would reform or replace fair use and add orphan-work safe harbors. Others would make copyright protection entirely opt-in, as before Berne. Some would expand "moral rights", or implement them where they haven't been. Others want commonly negotiated terms, like portfolio rights for works made for hire, made defaults, under law. Views on term of protection vary. There's nothing terribly tired about arguing for copyright abolition, other than that we've heard it for decades now, and political prospects might be worse now than they were then. What is tired is portraying intellectual property as standing on no firm policy foundation, especially no economic foundation. Activists have been making a straw man of economic theory, pretending it got as far as 19th century industrial considerations and stopped, since the nascent years of Internet exceptionalism. The idea that low or no marginal cost of reproduction totally confounds public policy underlying property protection is emblematic. Low marginal cost of reproduction didn't begin with the Internet. It occurred to economists discussing intellectual property, and was well integrated by them, generations before. |
I went to music school. I copied CDs and sheet music from the school library. I also burned CDs and copied thumb drives from other musicians. My jazz class mandated listening to dozens of albums, didn't give us copies, and expected us to acquire them however. My professors taught us how to listen to the radio and reproduce what we heard. I played out of "The Great American Songbook," which is the tradition where you play what folks in the USA like to listen to, or you don't get paid for the gig. My compensation was per-gig and based on live performance, not based on royalties or licensing. Despite what amounted to a pretty good hourly wage, the actual number of hours per week was very low, and I had a day job. This was not atypical, but the intended route for the bulk of professional performers, and nothing has changed since I went to school other than that copyright infringement is cheaper and easier than ever.
Nothing is new under the sun. Making original music is incredibly difficult. We swim in such a massive sea of ambient art, and almost all of it is licensed in ways which forbid us from integrating that experience into our original artwork. The entire discipline of remixing exists as a proud affront to copyright, just like libraries once did and still do. And today's musicians are a product of a system which simultaneously requires them to continuously infringe in order to be productive, while using the law to punish them for infringing.
When I hear you talking about the folks that you know and work with, and imagine what kind of musician actually is lucky enough to receive royalties, I imagine a privileged few folks. They're not bad people, but they benefit from a system designed to compensate them at the expense of everybody else. And their actual benefit is relatively meager! Middlemen at the labels suck out nickel and dime, and even successful musicians find themselves flipping burgers. They're propping up a system which disenfranchises them.
And when I hear you talking about "their guilds and industry groups"! I personally believe that ASCAP is a plague upon practicing musicians, music venues, music lovers, and the entire tradition of making music. They have the audacity to take royalties on behalf of those great legends who are long since departed, and their entire justification is that it's a legal theft of the public domain, and why shouldn't they do what they're legally entitled to do? The RIAA's not any better, with multiple members committing acts upon their customers and artists that, in literally any other context, would be criminal. Imagine if I, an independent musician, published a CD with infectious malware on it, and used it to attack my listeners; I'd be convicted and thrown in prison!
The worst part of all of this is "political prospects". Yes, fascism is popular right now. No, we shouldn't abide by it. No, fascism isn't an excuse to avoid socialist reforms. No, we shouldn't just give up on what we the people want just because it's inconvenient for the ruling classes.