[ccsnags]

An artist isn’t entitled to having their work funded unless someone voluntarily funds it. This does not require legal fiction.

Entire genres of music have been created from inexpensive musical equipment and free software. Art has never been more accessible to the people than it is now.

[falcolas]

> An artist isn’t entitled to having their work funded unless someone voluntarily funds it.

Then we simply never get their work. Some people would absolutely continue to create for the fun of it, but they'll remain the minority.

Movies you'd watch in a Theater? Completely gone. Commercially funded TV shows, gone. A vast majority of books, written by full time writers and researchers, gone.

And I'll also posit that most music would go away too. Even the amateurs I know expect to be paid for a gig. Most musicians are not willing to busk for a living.

And, don't forget, software development relies heavily upon Copyright as well (licenses, your work-for-hire, etc).

[breck]

If everyone who threatens to stop creating content if they can't enslave ideas, were to stop creating content, the world would be a better place.

The idea that people would stop creating is absurd. I work in Cancer Research and the absolute least contributing people in the medical industry are the ones obsessed with patenting and copyrighting their work, which is usually garbage and of frivolous value compared to the hard grunt work of millions of unsung heroes grinding it out for non-monopoly wages.

I was an engineer at Microsoft and the average code there was total garbage compared to the open source code powering top public domain projects.

And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.

Every letter we are using; every word; every bit of tooling; was made by other people in a long pyramid stretching back tens of thousands of years and billions of people wide. All of us are putting grains of sand on top.

[falcolas]

> the world would be a better place.

Really? Sounds pretty terrible to me. Few books. Few videogames. No movies. No TV shows. Most of the internet obliterated. Any content that is created is copied and regurgitated so much you'd be hard pressed find out who actually created it.

I personally like consuming entertainment. I work with the creative side of my brain all day long, and being able to go home and turn it off with some relatively mindless entertainment (my form is a combination of books and videogames). I'd hate to come home one day and only have a zero budget, poorly tested, game to play, or a book that I've already re-read enough to quote it by memory.

> And no modern epic is significantly better than Ἰλιάς.

Pure opinion. And in any case, there's only one Iliad. There's hundreds of other "modern" epics out there - many of which I find more entertaining, though they are not as literarily significant.

> the open source code powering top public domain projects

Is it worth re-iterating that all of the open source licenses is supported by copyright protections?

> All of us are putting grains of sand on top.

Which obviously has its own value, as aptly demonstrated by the entertainment industry as a whole being valued in the trillions of dollars.

[cwkoss]

You are also discounting the cost to society for all the works of art that are created due to copyright.

Copyright criminalizes remix culture and leads to evils like Youtube arbitrarily giving strikes because 5 seconds of a taylor swift song was in the background, suppression of criticism, and depriving the poor from access to modern culture.

[cwkoss]

> works of art that are created due to copyright.

aren't*