Then most people stop writing books because they can't get paid for their time/effort and ~every child will be stuck with outdated knowledge within a decade.
There are already many writers making thousands of dollars a month by publishing free serialized web novels, via Patreon. Some are using their own websites, but most are on Royal Road (or scribblehub, webnovel, wattpad, AO3).
A random example from Royal Road[1], the author makes $12065/month. Mind you, the text is not gated, it's free to read, the patreon only offers early access...
What do you think authors feel about this? Despite many people on this site thinking we're the first generation with new technology, the issue of copyright, and technolgie's impact on it, has been discussed for centuries.
The "patronage" model is great (and I personally am a Patreon supporter of lots of creatives). But it also has a lot of flaws in it, both for the author and the public. Most authors will be happy to tell you both the good and bad of the model, in my experience.
The biggest flaw for the public, btw, is that this model only supports art that "rich people" find worth supporting. This is bad, both because sometimes art isn't "deemed worthy" immediately, and because art for non-"rich" people is also very valuable.
Patronage was art for rich people in pre-internet days. Now we can make it easy for anyone to contribute a dollar to an artist they like.
As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.
Contributing a dollar to an artist they like is beyond the ability of many people in the world. Both in technical terms (actually being able to reliably send someone a dollar), and monetarily.
And very few artists are out there surviving on patrons giving them a dollar a month, I imagine. Most of them survive on larger pledges, and as far as I know, very few of them reach anywhere near the amount of money traditionally-published authors can make.
> As for art that isn't "deemed worthy immediately," that doesn't immediately make money in today's system either. If the art can be freely distributed, it's more likely to find its audience.
Yes, it doesn't make money immediately in today's system. But many authors collect a back-catalogue of works, which might pay out only a bit of money at a time, but over a career can be enough. If I publish a novel every year for 20 years, even if every novel only brings in a sprinkling of money per year, by year 20 I'm getting 20 sprinkling of money, which could be enough to sustain me.
Very few of these "middle of the road" authors are popular enough to survive on patronage alone, I believe.
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At the end of the day, you think that "the internet" somehow made possible something that wasn't technically possible before. I think that's mostly not true - the technology was never the problem. That's why copyright exists in the first place - to make sure that, despite books being almost-zero-cost to reproduce, we put an actual limit on it in order for more books to be published.
If you want a different system, that's your prerogative. But you have to grapple with the tradeoffs here. If less money flows to authors - which would happen if you abandon copyright - then there will be less books. That's almost a law of economics. If you think that somehow you can make something like patreon scale up to the same amount of money that exists in "the system" today, then a) I disagree, and b) you'd still have to content with the issues I mentioned.
Exactly. Take music, for example. Increased capitalist exploitation [1] is what allowed people to spread their creativity far and wide, rather ironically for genres like punk. There's still nothing stopping people from giving away stuff for free, and indeed I do that myself with both FOSS code and CC-BY media (not music), but I'm under no illusions that I'll ever make more than beer money from it, and I do not fault anyone else for going the all rights reserved route
[1] I use that term in the neutral, economic sense
This model is clearly not viable for any sort of economy at scale. Far fewer people can make a living wage under patronage models than traditional models because people simply pay less (far less) for things where they're not compelled to than for things where they are.
420 thousand people work in the US film industry alone[1]. I doubt that there's that same number of people making ~living wage across every online patronage site in the United States (excluding advertisement-driven ventures, of course).
Your "random" example is currently the #2 ongoing fiction on there, and was #1 until a couple days ago when the guy who wrote Mother of Learning released his new fiction.
It was random in the sense I clicked on trending and then clicked on the first thing I saw. Sure, the amount is an outlier, but there are more that are making over 500 or 1000/month, that's not unusual. Most authors are not making any money, of course, just like in the current system.
Is this some kind of pwn? Stephen King makes millions, JK Rowling likely a billionaire, Grisham, Patterson, Joan Collins, the list is endless. Didn't the 50 Shades of Grey author initially start with free fan fiction? Do you think these people are going to take a pay cut? And if your "random" author gets noticed by a publisher and is offered a book deal, do you think it will continue to be free?
The government charges a tax on everyone. Revenue is handed to authors based on how many times the work is used.
There are some questions around how to weigh things like societal importance of the work.
(“Not melting down nuclear reactors for dummies” seems like it should get more money per view than “poodles in outer space vol XXXII”, despite likely having lower readership)
Isn't this the opposite of what the people against copyright are seeking? They want more art to be unprotected, instead, in the public domain, free to use for all. You're making things even more restrictive financially by attaching a tax to all books/songs/movies etc, plus creating a government-controlled, universal monitoring and enforcement system.
This makes even less sense than the previous guy. When you've figured out how the world will work without people incentivized by money and power, get back to the rest of us
Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.
The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.
That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
> Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.
Please cite a single lawsuit.
> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that.
Virtually everybody is "like that." The world works well because tons of people are working hard, toiling in difficult, dirty, boring, frustrating, or tedious jobs (or all of the above) behind the scenes to make it so. What are municipal waste workers seeking, if not money? Bus drivers? Construction workers? Police officers?
> That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Any author or songwriter or photographer can proclaim his work to be freely copyable, just like programmers release code under MIT licenses. The fact that so few actually do, should clue you in on their incentives.
> Suing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor.
Who is suing anyone for reading a book?
> The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us.
Please get me in contact with your dealer because apparently the “legal” stuff I’ve been getting is not as potent as I thought.
> That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
Sure I’ve painted things that are on my wall and created lots of utility apps that I use personally but I keep them to myself. If I thought they were something that could get me some extra pocket money or better then I would be looking for ways to monetize. I have zero interest in sharing my potential intellectual property for free.
How does the digital age change things? Copyright was invented when copying became easy, and hence arrived due to the printing press. A book is no different to a digital download in that the cost to produce it is tiny, and you're paying for the intellectual property, not the physical production of it
> The economic argument goes like this: “I want to get rich (usually described inaccurately as ‘making a living’), and if you don't allow me to get rich by programming, then I won't program. Everyone else is like me, so nobody will ever program. And then you'll be stuck with no programs at all!” This threat is usually veiled as friendly advice from the wise.
> I'll explain later why this threat is a bluff. First I want to address an implicit assumption that is more visible in another formulation of the argument.
> This formulation starts by comparing the social utility of a proprietary program with that of no program, and then concludes that proprietary software development is, on the whole, beneficial, and should be encouraged. The fallacy here is in comparing only two outcomes—proprietary software versus no software—and assuming there are no other possibilities.
I personally feel our copyright laws are too rigid, but that doesn't mean copyright shouldn't exist.
After x years, any book should be free to read, after y years, it should be free to be incorporated into AI models, after z years it should be in the public domain.
Because it's not. It is trivial to buy a book on the Kindle store, and while it may be trivial to us here to go and pirate a azw3 and transfer it, it's not to most people
People always forget the pareto principle when it comes to anti-piracy. No, they don't stop everyone, but a minor hurdle stops a hell of a lot of "ordinary" people
annas-archive.org, search and download, open it on your computer. functionally as trivial as purchasing a book on amazon. reading on a kindle is a niche case.
