A restaurant is a small manufacturing facility that produces a physical product. It’s not the same at all.
An artist is a small manufacturing facility that produces a physical (canvas, print, mp3, etc) product, no?
What is different about the production of Micky Mouse cartoons? Why is it normal for industries to compete in manufacturing of physical product, but as soon as you can apply copyright, now you exclusively have rights to control anything that produces a similar result?
Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid?
Musicians I suppose can tour, which is grueling but it’s something. Authors, programmers, actors, game studios, anything that’s not performed live would immediately become non-viable as a career or a business.
Large corporations would make money of course, by offering all you can eat streaming feeds of everything for a monthly fee. The creators get nothing.
>. Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid?
I've purchased books that were in the public domain and without copyright. I've paid for albums I could already legally listen to for free. I've paid for games and movies that were free to play and watch. I'm far from the only person who has or would.
The people who pirate the most are also the ones who spend the most money on the things they pirate. They are hardcore fans. They want official merch and special boxed sets. People want to give the creators of the things they love their money and often feel conflicted about having to give their cash to a far less worthy corporation in the process. There are people who love music but refuse to support the RIAA by buying albums.
There are proven ways to make profit in other ways like "pay what you want" or even "fund in advance" crowdsourced models. If copyright went away or, more ideally, were limited to a much shorter period of time (say 8-10 years) artists would continue to find fans and make money.
You’re talking about individual piracy. I’m talking about huge scale corporate piracy, which is already happening (laundered through AI algorithms and other ways) and would happen a lot more if copyright vanished.
Part of what muddies the water here too is that copyright lasts too long. Companies like Disney lobbied for this successfully. It should have a time horizon of maybe 25 years, 50 at most.
Well technically it wouldn’t be piracy once copyright banished. It’d be remixing, appropriation, derivative, etc., all legal.
So make copyright like patents. That’s what a lot of the copyleft movement has been arguing for forever. Make a copyright holder demonstrate their idea is unique, manifests into a tangible output, and if so protect the creator for a limited time. Everyone is free to use the work in their own provided they pay royalties at a reasonable rate for the duration of the patent.
But the status quo now with basically perpetual copyright controlled by large media conglomerates 100% stifles culture and is a net negative on society. It’s not the right to copy that needs defending, it’s the first right of a briefly protected enterprise, a reward to the creator, that needs to be protected. Copyright is like trying to cure a cough by sewing someone’s mouth shut.
> Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid?
A couple of years ago, I would have agreed that this would be a big and complicated issue. But do we all really think this is a problem in 2025? By now we actually have proof that it isn't impossible.
First of all, there is already, today, a plethora of FOSS projects where the developers get regular salaries without relying on royalties. Good experienced people work, make a career, yet the end product is free. We have hard proof that it won't "become a non-viable [...] career". The field might shrink, or at least change, but it won't die entirely. There is still value to be gained, so someone somewhere will pay to have it created.
Furthermore, now a days there are also websites such as Patreon, Kickstarter, and the like that have clearly demonstrated that the same can also be applied to creative endeavors such as art, music, or writing. You just pay people as they work, monthly salaries, rather than afterwards based on royalties. Yes, it comes with other issues, and for many years it was hard to say if those would be crippling. But by now we can actually see, with real world examples, that it's a feasible way to fund creative projects, and the people working on them, even if the digital products were released for free after completion. It turns out that millions of people are willing to pay for these things, to speed up the development presumably, even though they would have gotten the same product for free later, it's no longer a hypothetical.
I also think that the future will show us even more ways to finance creative intellectual work without making things into 'intellectual property' that you have to guard fiercely with copyright as if it was in short supply.
Yes, it would probably become very hard to earn really big money, millions or billions, in the industry if everyone was working for salaries rather than royalties. The distribution would presumably be less top heavy, and more similar to other industries where "going viral" isn't really a thing. But is that such a bad thing? And it's not even a guarantee that this would change, after an artist goes viral their next project would presumably have a lot more fans and investors willing to ensure they continue working, since they loved the first album/film/etc so much.
1. There are an infinite number of careers that do not currently exist, because their business models do not make sense. I do not think it's a great idea to keep laws on the books, that limit the creativity and rights of hundreds of millions of people, just to keep a few professions afloat.
2. You greatly underestimate the creativity of a capitalistic market. For example, on the web, it's generally difficult and frowned upon to copyright designs. Some patent trolls do it, but most don't. If you make an innovative design for your website, you're bound to be copied. And yet many programmers and tech companies still have viable business models. They simply don't base their entire business model around doing easily-copyable things.
How does copyright limit creativity? If you want to write a new story about a boy wizard going to school, no one can legally stop you. If you want to make a new Mario-inspired platformer, no one can legally stop you.
But if you want to make money and do it from riding the brand name association of Harry Potter or Mario, they can.
It looks like you're being purposefully ridiculous. There is an obvious difference between the two; cost of reproduction. For something with a cost of reproduction near zero (book, music, art, etc), IP restrictions matter. For something like a restaurant, factory, etc; the cost of reproduction is high.
It's not obvious at all! You are citing the only difference that typically comes up. A quesadilla is beyond trivial to reproduce and most people have the ingredients readily available. 3D printers make it trivial to reproduce things that would have been obviously hard to reproduce a few years ago. A book is hard to reproduce if it's not in digital form. Is MIDI a song or a set of instructions? Source code is easy to copy but hard to reproduce. Source code is just a recipe telling a compiler what to do. And we've already established that recipes aren't copyrightable because it was "so obvious" at the time copyright was established that you shouldn't be able to copyright the creative process.