[zeroonetwothree]

Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse).

I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.

[rtkwe]

That's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.

[layer8]

The media you cite are still copyrighted, meaning that it’s illegal for other people to distribute them or make money of it without a corresponding license. If that weren’t the case, creators might be more reluctant.

[rtkwe]

They know full and well they're unlikely to ever make money on there art so the protections such as they are aren't material. In fact their copyrights are often roundly ignored online with copies spreading freely a thing that's success for most of the people posting things for free!

If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.

[thaumasiotes]

The Fortress of Doors blog had a good article on the history of flash game development. That article included an overview of the process, in which an explicitly-considered step was "after you upload your .swf file to the site that paid you to display their logo, every other site rips off the file and republishes it themselves".

That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.

[ninalanyon]

My relativity professor W. G. V. Rosser wrote a textbook on special relativity (An Introduction to The Theory of Relativity) which I very much doubt paid him back enough in royalties to compensate him for the time it took to write and also to issue revised editions.

It seems unlikely to me that he ever bothered to think about copyright

[RobotToaster]

Copyright didn't exist when Shakespeare was alive, clearly there was no incentive for him to write.

[bell-cot]

Disagree:

- In Shakespeare's day, the physical ordeal of setting type, printing, binding, etc. were a non-trivial moat against copying of printed works. Not so now.

- Shakespeare was closely associated with London theaters and companies of actors. Selling tickets for performances (of plays he'd written) was a far better way to make money than trying to sell scripts.

[fluffybucktsnek]

The most basic incentive is for the fun of it. There are plenty of people who publish stuff without hoping to get directly compensated for it. Even otherwise, ideas have a nasty habit of breaking free from the first authors, specially without laws to prevent such.

Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. Authors are basically an afterthought.

In regards to countries with weaker copyright enforcement, I think there's a bit of an inversion. Most countries that fail to properly enforce copyright do so due to a lot of structural issues, which also hamper creative thinking for independent reasons. China would be an example of a country with weaker copyright enforcement but also with good infrastructure, and it seems to be overtaking (if it already didn't) the US in terms of creative production (both for copyright and patents).

[layer8]

> Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers.

That depends on the country. There are moral rights [0] which are usually non-transferable from the authors. That’s especially the case in the European tradition of copyright: “In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even broadly waive their moral rights. This follows a tradition in European copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which cannot be sold, but only licensed.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

[fluffybucktsnek]

Interesting for a later search, but moral rights aren't about compensation though:

> The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. [...] Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.

Also from [0]

[Forgeties79]

same reason so many people contribute for free to open source projects, I imagine. Same reason tons of musicians put out music for free online as well. Both successful and amateur alike at that.

I’m not saying we are entitled to those efforts but clearly people are willing to do it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated?

Do you think no one was publishing anything before the year 1500?

I mean, your question is basically right. People won't do things if they won't get compensated. But copyright isn't even a large portion of the compensation people get from authoring works.