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by sophrosyne42
11 days ago
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Copyright is not a way to compensate for innovation. Innovation is compensated by being first to market. The specific rent that copyright causes is due to holding the copyright and restricting the produced supply. Copyright provides compensation even while mantaining the status quo and not doing any innovation, just by holding the intellectual property. Without copyright, there is a specific revenue for bringing something to market, and that revenue disappears as the new becomes old. Since the specific revenue is bringing something new to market innovation is compensated. Intellectual property creates compensation without a corresponding benefit to the public. Edit: to add to this, the existence of copyright today does not show it has been effective for creating innovation. You need a counterfactual for that, which you did not provide. |
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That argument works if you're talking about something like a patronage model where most or all of the compensation for the creative activity comes from a single source. But it makes no sense at all for creative work that has a small value to each consumer in a large market. Copyright allows the cost of production to be amortised over a large market.
Intellectual property creates compensation without a corresponding benefit to the public.
No - because numerous members of the public benefit multiple times every day from the amortisation effect I described above.
You need a counterfactual for that, which you did not provide.
I'm not sure I really do. We can see clearly how finances flow in creative industries supported by copyright work. We can see the scale of both individual works and the cumulative production supported by copyright. And it doesn't take great insight to see that if everyone were allowed to copy and redistribute any work as soon as they had access to it then the whole model would collapse - again for the same reasons as above.
In any case if you'd like counterfactuals then I'll cite pre-copyright history, community-driven initiatives like FOSS and Creative Commons, and artists who have offered their work on a "pay what you think it's worth" basis. In each of those cases there have been some excellent works produced and enjoyed by many people - and the number of those excellent works is barely noise compared to the scale of production in modern creative industries supported by copyright.