>>7670

It's kind of sad and amazing that people don't have a basic understanding of the reasoning behind copyright.

The idea of intellectual property is one of incentive.

It used to be that most great works of art were paid for by the rich, who would hire artists to paint portraits or make sculptures or whatever. The poor didn't get to hear symphonies, they sat around with their fiddles and shared their art freely, such as it was.

Someone like Vincent Van Gogh, who painted without patronage, could be doing art for the sheer love of art - but he lived and died in poverty and it's only by chance that anyone now recognizes his work for its greatness.

The idea of copyright is to give financial incentive for someone to create new work. If you write a book, and the moment you release it anyone can just make their own copy for free, then why would you put in the work to make your next book? This is what would happen before copyright - wealthy people who owned publishing companies would copy and print and sell books, and not give the actual authors a dime.

Copyright is designed to give creative people a means by which to create, and profit from their creations so they can support themselves from their creative efforts instead of having to work on the farm or in the factory, giving them the time and incentive to create more work to enrich society.

Copyright has, admittedly, been expanded far beyond its original bounds. It was once a period of 20 years, 40 if you filed an extension. Enough to give someone time to earn money from their work, but not so much that someone could just sit around and live off one single work. Now in the US it's the life of the author plus 70 years, and that's because of pressure on Congress by large corporate interests. But corporate abuse of copyright doesn't make the concept of copyright less moral.

The real "kindergardeners" are the ones who see all art as something they're entitled to, to just reach out and grab with their sticky hands, who throw angry tantrums at artists who dare to suggest that they be rewarded for creating art with something other than empty praise.

I believe what we are headed for, if this trend continues, is not an era where everyone makes art and gives it out for free just because nobody allows them to turn a profit from it, no, this communist fairytale is not going to happen. Sure, there will be some people who continue to make art for free, just for the sake of making art. But that will be the equivalent of fiddle music. It won't be the BEST art. It will be average, rough and sketchy.

The ones who take pride in their skill and talent will move to whatever venues reward that skill and talent. We'll go back to a time where only the very rich will be able to afford art like that, where the rich will hire the best artists to make art only for them, and they will hold it on private servers or in vaults and otherwise hoard it and keep it for themselves.

I know from experience that some of this is already happening on a small scale.