The Transformed Wife wages holy war against witches, grumpy people

@Surplus:

Finally, which art tends to be better? Art motivated by whatever it is that motivates creative pursuits in people who don’t expect to gain financially by it, or art motivated by visions of dollar signs?

Yeah, the Sistine Chapel definitely isn’t that great. If only Michelangelo hadn’t expected to be paid! (See also: https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/david-willis-a-slightly-older-cartoonist39s-advice)

@Surplus

Nice to know that you think that I should stay in poverty rather than hope to supplement my income with my writing, because no one should pay me for it, and that my desire to be paid for it means that I have no real creative drive.

@ elaine

I have broken bones for it 

I used to train Krav with a ballet dancer and her feet looked like she’d been caught cheating in a mafia run casino.

There seems to have been a misunderstanding here.

I don’t object to artists making money from art, especially from live performances of any sort (in which there is fresh marginal labor being performed by the artist(s) for each appearance). Nor do I think art that got paid for is invariably bad. The art that is likely to be mediocre and derivative (not quite the same as “bad”) is art that is produced solely, or primarily, to generate revenue, rather than because someone had an artistic vision. That tends to be corporate produced stuff. The umpteenth Jaws sequel sort of stuff, and bland paintings for walls in hotels and government offices, and Muzak, and so on and so forth.

So: Art the artist would have made anyway? Likely good.
Art the artist wanted to make anyway, but was only able to actually make because they had at least supplemental income from it? Likely good.
“Art” made solely and specifically to convert into cash, that wouldn’t have even been a twinkle in anyone’s eye absent the prospect of cash? Likely mediocre, and arguably not real art since it lacked that creative spark as its first motivation.

The third is the main sort of art that likely would not exist, or would be greatly reduced, without copyright revenues. The first would exist regardless. The only real question is whether some of the art in the second group would not exist, and again I expect there are better solutions that don’t involve artificial scarcity, especially things we ought to be doing anyway like a basic income guarantee. And all of that applies to fixed, copyable works, not to live performances or on-demand production. Note that Michelangelo was commissioned to produce an original, new work, and did not get a copyright of any kind, as copyrights hadn’t been invented yet. Paying someone to produce something completely new does not involve artificial scarcity and does not create the problems I previously described. I likewise have no objection to artists accepting Patreon donations or charging for live performances or being commissioned to produce a work for a particular patron or etc.; I don’t even object to them receiving royalties, but I do object to the imposition of these by force. (Though, without that, they’d become more Patreon donations I suppose: voluntary donations.) I do also object to appropriating someone’s art without credit, unless they’ve specifically okayed uncredited use. (Which happens; CC-zero licenses, etc.)

Note too that copyright inherently reinforces a class division, between consumers and small-scale artists the latter of whom must navigate a minefield of e.g. Youtube copyright detection false positives, on the one hand, and large corporations and highly successful famous artists, on the other. Copyright can only really benefit someone who can afford lawyers, after all, and creates barriers to entry if anything is not 100% wholly off-the-cuff new rather than building on existing culture in any way. Barriers to entry and a benefit only the middle-class-upward can realize will then tend to lead to centralization and oligopolization, and we can easily see that it has indeed done so. Arguably that was inevitable in the past, when it took a sizable capital investment to mass produce copies of anything, but not since 1995 or so has that been needed, and the only reason for a few giant corporations to continue to dominate is the monopoly-promoting effects of copyright. Eliminate it and you’d likely see a huge creative ferment of indie producers and numerous smaller-scale distributors, as well as new kinds of producer-distributor arrangements being formed. Though again I don’t advocate just abolishing it cold-turkey and without doing anything else. I’d suggest phasing it out by setting an end date a few years in the future and introducing other things, like a basic income, at the same time.

TL;DR: the remuneration of artists is not in and of itself problematic. The current systems for doing so are, and need major reforms. (Reforms that, in combination with some judicious trustbusting, would reduce the degree to which artists get exploited by megacorps.)

With opportune timing, there’s a case out today that seems pretty apposite.

The epitome of punk*, the Sex Pistols rowing about commercial matters.

https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2021/2322.html

In summary, all the members of the band want to licence some Sex Pistols material for a TV series. John Lydon was holding out on agreeing; but they argued he was outvoted under the band agreement. Which the court said he was.

(*Well, insofar as any project by marketing guru Malcolm McLaren can be)

@ surplus

Free? No. Marginal cost?

I’m not sure I get what you mean there; but in any event I think I must disagree with you on this point:

I don’t even object to them receiving royalties, but I do object to the imposition of these by force.

The thing with that is, you’re essentially arguing that workers should only be paid at the the whim of the person benefiting from the work. I’m not sure relying on largesse is fair to the creators. What if Walmart took that approach with their workers? (I know they practically do).

Now, as it happens, I am giving serious thought to adopting a ‘pay what you think is fair’ approach to my legal work. I hate all the discussion of fees; I just find it really embarrassing.

It’s not that straightforward though. The rule here is losing party pays winning party’s legal costs. But there’s a thing called the indemnity principle. That is, they are only obliged to pay what the other party was legally required to pay under their retainer with their lawyers. If they can find a loophole the client could have used, they can rely on it too.

So the problem is, can they turn round and say “Well, you could have offered to pay nothing, so that’s the same for us.”?

@ surplus

Charging for this is the bit that is problematic

That’s an interesting argument. I’m afraid I must still disagree though. I think it’s only fair that everyone who benefits from the work should pay for that privilege. And I think that applies regardless of numbers.

Consider the following, an artist does a live performance on stage. Can they charge everyone in the audience? There’s still the same amount of work involved whether one person is watching, or the venue is packed.

So currently they are rewarded proportionately to how popular they are; and that’s the same with royalties.

It seems to me that, under your view, once one person had bought a ticket and thus there was an obligation on the artist to perform, everyone else who wants to pop along should be able to do so free. After all, the artist will be doing the labour anyway.

I do very much get your point about how IP protection is seen as the province of the big players. I talk a lot about this in the art world. Now obviously I have a vested interest in recommending people at all levels use the law to protect their interests; but I also genuinely believe that to be the case. I, and some colleagues, do give lots of free advice to aspiring artists. And for our part if they ever do become rich and famous and can afford exorbitant legal fees I hope they remember who gave them all that free advice (I do actually say this explicitly at the seminars; maybe I should get them to sign something to that effect?)

As for collecting royalties, there are all sorts of issues there. Under EU law artists have resale royalty rights. That is to say, when a work is sold, they get a share of the proceeds. California had a similar scheme but that was ruled unconstitutional. How to enforce and claim those royalties is an issue. That’s one area where people are looking at smart contracts as that can be made automatic. (Although there is a massive loophole there too).

And the misunderstandings continue.

The live venue case is more complex than you are suggesting. In particular, the venue has a finite volume in space, and thus a finite capacity for audience. That makes places in the audience naturally scarce, and the venue can charge for places in the audience. The artists in turn can charge the venue as much as the venue can bear while still expecting a net profit.

This is not affected at all if copyright is abolished.

On the topic of supporting Allandrel’s writing, etc., ideally there’d be universal healthcare and a guaranteed basic income making all of this easier.

And the notion that everyone who benefits from something should pay appears to be zero-sum thinking, and impractical besides. Consider e.g. a carwash. Someone pays to have their car cleaned. Later on, they don’t get into a crash because their windows aren’t too dirty to see through. A bunch of other people don’t get hurt. Should they have to pay additional amounts to the carwash on top of what the car’s owner already paid? What about people who like seeing the car go by, all shiny and clean, and would have been ever so slightly worse off if it had been filthy instead? Do they have to pay? Where does the line get drawn? And for how long? Should we be paying the descendants of the pyramid builders a royalty to view them? Or even to see a picture of them on the internet somewhere?

The every-beneficiary-pays idea also seems to suggest that every view or re-reading or similarly ought to be paid for, rather than every copy, the implementation of which would quickly become a nightmare for everyone but the fatcats. It’s an idea that leads ultimately to madness.

All of this can be put into a different framework, where the same conclusion will get drawn. Benefiting from the product of someone’s labor long after the labor was done (and paid for) is a positive externality. Just as taxes and other public measures are used to make polluters internalize the costs of negative externalities, public policy can be used to subsidize activities that result in positive externalities. In effect this can be done by taxing the populace, in one way or another, and paying the producer of the positive externalities. Copyright can be viewed as such a tax, but it has key problems, starting with its being, essentially, a regressive sales tax rather than a progressively-funded tax where the wealthy pay more. Worse, it’s one that can only be implemented by surveillance and censorship to make sure nobody is distributing unpaid-for copies. Worse still, it lets each author set the “tax”, or just refuse permission for a use, rather than setting a fixed and sensible rate per word, or per minute of audio or video, or whatever (except in a few cases of “compulsory licensing”). Worse still, it varies a fair bit by jurisdiction, and everyone tries to claim jurisdiction over uses anywhere in the world, or else uses geoblocking to try to avoid that, which in turn results in even worse artificial scarcity problems, where someone in e.g. the UK might not be able to legally watch a film produced elsewhere even if they’re willing to pay.

We can also question whether payment should be proportional to popularity, rather than fixed above some threshold level of popularity. Art is supposed to be about expressing something, not entering a popularity contest. Popularity-proportional remuneration punishes authors of niche works and promotes the overproduction of works aimed at a general audience. This in turn is why there is a relative paucity of science fiction on a typical bookstore’s shelves, but 80 million Danielle Steele novels and imitators reading any three or four of which will pretty much obviate any reason to read any of the other 79,999,996 or so, and six hundred highly predictable and interchangeable romcoms for every film as innovative and thought-provoking as The Matrix or Inception. It’s why every specialty TV channel eventually gets overrun by wrestling, random popular-six-years-ago movies, and Big Bang Theory reruns, and then smothered by the super-cheap-to-produce “reality TV” kudzu, before succumbing to collapsing ratings and going out of business.

The smart thing to do is replace the whole boondoggle with a scheme for subsidizing the production of art that is funded out of general tax revenues, progressively obtained ideally, and is only somewhat sensitive to popularity. Perhaps works passing some minimum threshold of attention would result in a payment, supplementary to the afore-mentioned basic income, that was scaled to the size of the work and indexed to inflation but otherwise constant for a given type of work. Or to make the total payout more predictable, an amount of money would be set aside annually from the general tax revenue that was set by the legislature as some amount multiplied by inflation since that amount was set, and then divided up among the year’s eligible recipients with the proportions based on the cumulative sizes of their works that surpassed the eligibility threshold that year. Or something like that.

I expect any such system would need more thinking, research, and tweaking before it could be called mature; and that it would be vastly superior to the current one somewhat before that point of maturity was reached.

@ surplus

I mentioned the live performance point by way of analogy, rather than an example of copyright in action. But to take your response further. What if the performance was screened on a pay per view basis? Then the issue of artificial scarcity wouldn’t arise. I still think the artist could expect everyone who wanted to benefit from their labour to pay.

I would also disagree that royalties are like taxes. Taxes are compulsory; and you don’t get much of a say on what they’re spent on. Libertarians pay for health care, pacifists pay for nuclear weapons.

But as Allandrel points put, no-one is obligated to buy art. If you think all the sweat, time, and effort Allandrel put into producing a book isn’t worth the value they put on themselves, you are free to take your custom elsewhere.

As for your other point, I’m all for state funding of the arts. However I wouldn’t want it to be the only source of income for artists; nor leave it up to the government, or even majority public, to decide who gets to create. Whilst there have been some great public art projects, I wouldn’t want the government dictating what art is acceptable. That has a sordid history (although ironically, Goebbels’ display of degenerate art is the best attended exhibition in art history).

But take Soviet Russia. Under the regime video games were only licensed if they fulfilled one of three conditions:

• Encourage enrolment in the military.
• Promote health and fitness.
• Celebrate Russian culture.

Tetris was able to slip in under No 3 by adding that music and the background elements.

But imagine if that was the US. Would (think of a video game) have been improved by the addition of the star spangled banner? Also, what sort of public art would get approval south of the Mason-Dixon line?

Personally I am both in awe, and grateful, that people like Elaine, Stacey, and Allandrel put in blood, sweat, and tears, sometimes literally, in producing works. And for that they deserve total control over them. Whether that’s deciding who gets to see them; or how much those privileged to see them have to pay.

But as for government sponsorship of arts; I don’t think this can be beaten.

I’m all for state funding of the arts. However I wouldn’t want it to be the only source of income for artists; nor leave it up to the government, or even majority public, to decide who gets to create.

You’ll note that the scheme I suggested would divide up a pool of funds to every work that received more than some threshold-sized audience, without reference to the contents of that work (beyond its size). The objections about state control are obviated if the legislation explicitly doles out money in a content-agnostic manner.

A basic income guarantee is even better there, since it pays everyone some regular amount, and is thus inherently unbiased. If it lets some people quit their day jobs and pursue art full-time, it will do so independently of who would or would not approve of the resulting works.

Meanwhile, what’s the status quo? You can’t get a work published to a large audience if it offends the sensibilities of private-sector corporate suit-and-tie types (I still have no idea how Roddenberry managed to sneak a nearly-overtly communist utopia past these guys, but I doubt it was easy) and in effect the majority public does get to decide who gets to create by voting with their wallets. They don’t like Waterworld? There goes Kevin Costner’s career … took about seven years for him to recover from that, didn’t it?

The internet promises to upend that status quo, but the gatekeeper corporations are fighting tooth and claw to delay that. Their biggest tool? Copyright laws.

Meanwhile I will note that there is a strange, almost right-wing streak in many of the responses I’ve gotten here. A lot of what amounts to “claws off my property!” (we’re technically talking about a revenue stream here only — i.e., future earnings, nothing that’s in one’s pocket already right now) and “no one should get any benefit they haven’t paid for or otherwise done something to specifically deserve”, which is basically what conservatives say when opposing public assistance programs and the like.

It feels a lot like turf-protecting, of a distinctly capitalistic and authoritarian flavor. Unusual for WHTM. The arguments for “control” especially disturb in that regard. I don’t agree that art should be used in a way that makes it look like the author is endorsing a position they don’t endorse, but there are non-copyright ways to deal with that edge case, namely trademark-type laws. The ideal outcome would be not to forbid display of a work (i.e., censorship) but to require a disclaimer in certain cases that the originator does not, or does not necessarily, endorse insert-thingy-here. Such disclaimers are already seen occasionally in various places anyway.

@Surplus

Yes, not wanting to starve is so very capitalist and authoritarian.

I hope that things are smoothing out for you soon, @contrapangloss <3 Things, they are tough!

With a nice bit of synchronicity, a friend had just posted this. It covers some of the topics we’ve been chatting about about how art is funded, and the implications thereof: