[postingpals]

The argument a layman would make in favour of this is:

"if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual property and potentially make millions of dollars charging people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's going to motivate them to create really good work! Without this motivation, no one would create good work"

And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We have to coerce people into making really good work by not giving them the building blocks that they could use to make really good work"

[TheOtherHobbes]

What building blocks? Creative work is original. You can build on previous ideas - or not, it's up to you - but it's nothing at all like gluing together a bunch of frameworks that someone else created and patting yourself on the head for being a true original.

I'll accept that copyright is bad when developers who hate copyright give all of their work away for free - code, consultancy, equity, all of it.

Until then people earning six figures a year telling artists they should work for nothing - or perhaps some begging on Patreon which might cover the rent (but probably won't) - is insultingly naive and unattractively entitled.

This has nothing to do with academic journals, which are a very special and obnoxious example of rent-seeking and which absolutely should be replaced by open access - not least because the work has already been paid for by the public.

But that shouldn't be confused with the creative arts, where new work isn't funded by the public. In fact it isn't usually funded by anyone at all, except the artist.

If you want creators to work for free, you'll get what you pay for - which will be somewhere in the uncanny valley between nothing at all, and disposable filler of no real interest.

[namibj]

Are you saying e.g. a Rock cover of a classic piece isn't original work? Because last I checked, the composer can demand royalties (if it's not so old that it expired).

Of course you can sell physical things. You can even sell digital things, but transformative works are a way of creative expression. Or, say, a live streamer on Twitch doing an IRL (using a mobile uplink while out and about) getting their content (people seem to like it, so it appears to have some value) deleted/banned because a car with an open window waiting at the stoplight had the radio on.

And I don't know where you got that I'm making six figures. I'm just not aware of individual artists making a living by selling digital copies of their work. I'm not saying they should put a free-download button there, but having to keep track of who made which parts when (copyright and expiry) is a gigantic pain, especially for small artists who do transformative work.

I'm primarily attacking the rent-seeking model of software houses and (at least most of) the MPAA & RIAA.

I want to encourage work-for-hire (potentially payed by a collective) and Patreon-like models over rent-seeking business "propositions". The benefit is that all the censorship for reasons other than legality and bookkeeping for royalties would be gone. It would enable far better privacy, too.

[postingpals]

The idea that the alternative to copyright means artists working for free is an ideological conflation not even the wealthiest, most cynical person on earth could have dreamt up.

[namibj]

Well, see the AV1 codec? They made it because they were sick of patents and license costs for H.265, preferring to fund the development of a completely new one, primarily to avoid the fees.

Or see RedHat and their Linux development/support. They don't rent-seek via copyright. And no proprietary programming language has a large user base. The closest is probably Microsoft Excel, I'd guess.

[musicale]

> no proprietary programming language has a large user base. The closest is probably Microsoft Excel, I'd guess.

MATLAB still has a large user base, although GNU Octave is basically an open source version.

The Wolfram (Mathematica) language also has a large user base. I am not aware of an open source implementation.

Swift is open source but developed by Apple and mainly used on their systems.

[namibj]

I did indeed forget MATLAB. Wolfram isn't that big, and if Swift should count, C# should too.