Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit

As far as society is concerned, society’s resources (police, courts, etc) should only be given up to the point that the incentive to create works of art exists.

At zero copyright length, we can say artists (and media creating/owning businesses) have less than a desirable amount of incentive to create (from society’s perspective).

At 100 years, we can easily say there is too much incentive to seek rent and rest on one’s laurels.

The most expensive works of art covered by copyright right now are big budget Hollywood movies and tv shows. If these businesses would continue to make them with a 20 year copyright term, then 20 years should be the max. And I might even say they would continue to make them with a 10 year term.

Copyright will kill millionaire artists.

Currently the system has poor artists and millionaire artists. The millionaire artists will be hosed. The poor artists are already poor so not much changes for them.

Most music is produced by people at home and with friends chilling. Look at guitar center and all those stores. Lots of instruments sold. Same for art supplies.

There are only a few thousand wealthy artists.

We have at least one corner of the universe where we've defeated scarcity. We can't run out of music. Hell, we can't even run out of a specific recorded performance, if even the most trivial efforts of due-diligence backups are performed. We should be proud-- we're at least one step on the way towards Star Trek replicators and universal abundance.

But the current system is so tied to the idea of "markets" and "ownership" that only really make sense for scarce physical goods, that we ended up having to force everyone, under threat of law, to treat a limitless resource that's part of our shared cultural experience, like a rare physical widget that must be owned, sliced up, and sold under restrictive covenant.

We should be taking all the money going into the content business-- all the funds being spent on the production of movies, music, novels, art, potentially even software-- and use it to bankroll an enormous centralized endowment for the creative community.

This immediately silences all "but how will artists eat?" strawmen. Even if you're not a live-show performer or merchandising expert, you get paid by the endowment on a predictable stipend basis, rather than having to hope you can effectively monetize a package of "rights" while dealing with an industry full of middlemen out to rip you off.

This would ensure that many, many more artists can live their passion-- how many great but unknown bands could spend their lives touring, if we took the money that bankrolled Taylor Swift's tour and sliced it up into 50k-per-person-per-year grants? How many sculptors could we keep on the books for the price of one Anish Kapoor? It would also be interesting to compare efficiency of funds delivery-- replacing a bunch of for-profit publishers with a single cooperative or state-run entity probably results in more dollars actually reaching artists overall.

It also avoids the perverse incentives on the other side-- if you make one world-breaking hit, you can't ride it forever. Just because you sung White Christmas once doesn't mean you get out of ever having to work again. If we eliminate the opportunity to slice and subdivide "rights" to a work, then there's no incentive to hold back maximum utilization of it. Imagine the improved utility of modern content services if they can get legal access to all the things-- Netflix and Hulu would have to compete on the best infrastructure, UI and tooling, rather than "only we have Futurama".