Does Copyright Promote Culture And Creativity?

As an econ student: your analogy to land is stronger than you realize. Neither private landownership nor copyright increase the productive or distributional efficiency of these resources, both of these merely create monopolies that lead to increased economic rents, and in the terms of economics, intellectual property is a type of land.

I was waiting for that “how will creators pay the rent” to come in. Small content creators are already treated as a grazing ground by larger entities, relying on their financial inability to fight back to get away with theft (see how fast fashion lifts from individual designers and then blames it on an intern). We are in heavily unequal system, where creative work is already devalued. The “creative commons” concept works if there is a framework for creators to get paid, and we don’t have that. Even Patreon is now making several moves to ratchet up profit instead of insuring creators gets paid.

“Every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle – all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?” Some bearded man….no, not that one.

One thing you didn’t bring up here is the different power imbalances with art owned by large companies and small artists – there’s so many examples of big clothing etc companies nicking designs off small creators, who basically can’t do anything about it because they don’t have the money for lawyers. Even though the law is supposed to protect them in practice it only really protects big businesses

The Tragedy of the Commons My understanding is that this was basically made up and that the original paper sites no real-world examples of such a thing happening, where it wasn’t done on purpose so someone of means could maneuver to enclose it for themselves. It also assumes that people act like large corporations and can’t communicate with each other.

the original idea of Copywrite was to promote creation and innovation of culture/sciences/ect… by creating a short term financial incentive but the systematic increase in the length has in effect done the opposite by making it 95-120 years that creator no longer has an incentive to keep creating and no one else can generally create or innovate on the original work for at the minimum a lifetime

Great article, definitely an area that is interesting to question. The book Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang talks, in part, about how many powerful interests and countries have used copyright to further their own interests. Copyright is often used not to further the interests of creators or boost innovation, but laws are created and altered to benefit corporate interests in particular. Not 100% sure where I fall on this, but I can at least say the systems in place have to be drastically altered and focused on actual creators, particularly while they’re living.

As an artist myself, I am ambivalent about copyright law. It’s undeniably true that big corporations have been abusing it to empower and enrich themselves, but there’s also a pervasive trend of businesses and people profiting off art they have appropriated without compensating or seeking permission from the original artists. I have been the victim of such art theft at least once, and I’ve seen it happen to other artists multiple times. If we don’t have copyright laws at all, what will protect artists from this sort of predatory exploitation?

awesome article! i’ve never seen one of your articles before but you managed to say literally everything i’ve been thinking about copyright law! artists are already shafted by copyright law. in your example of Robin Hood, i doubt that anybody who actually worked on that movie creatively still benefits from Disney’s copyright stranglehold on it. and if they do, their benefit is infinitely more minuscule than Disney’s profit. so copyright law isn’t even helping independent artists at this point. i always have to laugh when people mention super-small independent artists, as well. for copyright law to be upheld, it has to be pursued. if i were to blatantly steal your article and use it for commercial gain, you would have to come at me in a court of law to get justice. who says that individual artists even have the money, time, or know-how to do this? it’s all a bit ridiculous.

commodifying ones art shouldn’t be required for meeting the basic needs. Artist deserve livelyhood and wage for their labour, not for their works. Thus from leftist perspective the question of copyrights is a false question. Artist both deserve a fair compensation AND copyrights shouldn’t exist as non-physical, privately own property. Any system of copyright should protect artists right for recognition of their unique achievment, not as a quantaree for market position. The consiquences of copying should first and foremost be social, and based around the copying artist failure to create their own, or build on the original, art. This way we could have some amount of meritocracy in art, as artists “copyrights” would exist as part of them in person, which, if their work of art is notably successful, should lead to rewarding, fame and future opportunities as funding.

A potential counterargument to the argument that any move toward copyright abolition could leave artists unpaid/uncompensated, imo, is that we could rethink the dynamic between art and pay. Artistic communal property could perhaps be crowdfunded and individual content creators or prosumers could be receptive to donations, and this could all be boosted with UBI. Or alternatively, there’s also the option of federal funding of art, like what was done with the Federal Art Program established by FDR.

These arguments also apply very well to another industry: software development. Copyright in the context of software restricts both its distribution, and its quality. Software is a very collaborative type of work, drawing heavily on previous work like your musical composition example. Copyright, then, inhibits the creation of new software by locking existing work behind proprietary licenses; they can’t be improved or used without the author’s (often a large corporation) permission. There are many, including myself, who voluntarily give up some of these rights and publish the source code we write (called open source software). Anyone can copy, redistribute, use, or modify it for free without permission. It’s much more like “grazing on an intellectual commons”, you draw on others’ work and others draw on yours, it’s freely encouraged. Copyright isn’t abolished, people can still create proprietary software like Windows or the Adobe suite, but copyright is often voluntarily waved (albeit partially) because it’s mutually beneficial. It often leads to a far superior product too. Linux is better in many respects than Windows, OBS is better than XSplit, Vulkan is better than DirectX, etc.

Thank you Tom for introducing me to the historical fact of IP being fairly recent ! As a a fan of classical music, I’ve always wondered how pre-classical composers often copy, re-arrange each other’s work as one of their own much more so compare to classical era. Now I’ve learned there’s actually a transition in the ideas of intellectual property duing that era ! The software industry IMO is a prime example of where abolishment of IP increase total benefit to society. The Linux kernel – the most successful software project in human is by nature free and open to everyone to use, modify, and make copy of.

I think it is part of a far larger problem, this is just one little symptom. You hit on it when you described how everything must be rationalized and calculated for economic gain. I think that has completely dominated our culture in every aspect for over a century now. Your worth as a human is determined by your economic status, everything else is secondary. Our core values are a big salary, big house and a big car. How you do it is not of great concern, even if you got those things through illegal/immoral means society will still value you more than somebody who lives a “poor” life. The same applies for musicians, it doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you don’t fall for the sin of being poor and thus “unsuccessful”. And the listeners value the same things. Almost everybody, even musicians and self proclaimed music lovers, only listen to music that is commercially popular. Popularity is directly associated with value, we can say a song is terrible but must have done something good because it made lots of money. Outside of that music barely exists anymore. Even something as innocent and nice as family/friends singing a birthday song is often seen as cringe. Art programs are often seen as a waste of money because if it doesn’t make money then it is worthless. A musician who doesn’t play in stadiums filled with people acting as if they are enjoying themselves but can “only” teach others has “failed”, he is as bad and dangerous as Adolf. Instead of art being a mirror, as you called it, it now serves to enforce the systems of society, life is about how you can make the most money the most efficient way, that is what art instructs us to believe these days, from top to bottom.

I would love if you did a article on how we could accelerate the vaccination process and potentially save so so many more lives and shorten the pandemic if not for companies keeping the vaccine patents for themselves to maximize profits. While vaccines could be produced by manufacturers all around the world if not for that.

We really need to drastically shrink copyright law to half to a quarter, more so for corporate intellectual property as fan works really do drastically feed sales and fan base while most movie companies get massive tax incentives. 25 years for corporate, 50 years for individual should be the very high end there. Insterad disney helped move all to 95 years in the US, so there are creations we should have been using now in public domaine that they were able to use that would have been impossible in the past. bill Gates however will fight you tooth and nail over that and his entire religion involves intellectual property. Limiting scope of what qualifies as infringment would be also essential and save so many hours in court battles..

Here is my take: intellectual property should be owned by individuals, not corporations. Corporations aren’t entities capable of creative production, humans beings are. If we study the history of the copy-right law, it is pretty clear that its only intention was to benefit the corporations who lobbied for it.

Really great article. I recently did a paper for college on the ethics of sampling in house music with regards to race and a lot of these questions surrounding copyright and IP cropped up. It seems more relevant than ever to look at how we view IP and ownership today not only with digital tech allowing us to distribute music/art for almost no cost but also how sampling, reiteration and repetition are mainstream modes of expressing ourselves creativity. Super relevant to new music but also even thinking of how important memes have become in our culture and how copyright laws are starting to affect peoples ability to do a bit of simple meming. So many problems and no easy solution unfortunately

I think it’s a question of when, not if. You fantastically explained it, but copyright does come down to restricting ideas once you sort through the complex wording. Before capitalism took hold, human civilization as it was had taken shape almost solely because ideas could spread and be replicated easily and freely. There were no copyrights or patents on the wheel, or on shelter from the weather, or on canals or farming or textiles. And no copyrights on folklore. Modern “culture” is stifled by copyright, allowing culture to be controlled and dictated by the owner-class, the capitalists who own everything. And society strains against it. Because it’s unnatural. We should have an eye toward moving away from copyright, toward individuals not needing to greedily guard their creations and demand money in exchange for a story or a tune. We need to aim for a post-capitalist world, because one way or another we’re headed there. Either we can prepare and have some pretty good systems in place (I think some form of socialism) or we can collectively drag our feet and deny that capitalism is falling apart and wind up in chaos.

The tragedy of the commons is what started my interest in politics. When I had no idea about politics, an anarcho-capitalist asked me where would people be more likely to throw trash around: a public space or a private space? To which I answered (much to his surprise): the private space. Because if you litter a public place, you will be fined and receive the disapproval of others, whereas a private place is the the kingdom of the owner and they can turn it into a trash pile if they so wish. He still managed to convice me to read Atlas Shrugged, which amazed me of how much a terrible piece of philosophy, economics and literature it was, that it made me want to learn economics starting with Adam Smith and all through Karl Marx.

the question is indeed who gave them the right to own the immaterial with such control on the material so as to destroy or remove from publication such material works of individual labor (cause companies have armies of lawyers at the ready and forces to muster a counter-response) when it comes down to copyright. or in other words, “so copyright trumps private property rights by being counted as private property”? huh?! how can you stop an idea without use of force, and even then, how so effectively? also when an idea is sold(or given), cat’s outta the bag on that one… why is it that we believe it is fine to hold hostage (and yes with lifetime of the author + 75 years that is the case) an idea and punish people for violating said copyright? oh BTW, did you know that copyright could be stretched if it is a TV show or something similar, but if not, it is the original work that gets that treatment; yes… “Steamboat Willie”, the cartoon episode got out now because copyright was lengthened and that doesn’t allow you “mickey mouse”, because that name is a trademark, not the individual drawing created in said motion picture… that, has the copyright. the history of copyright also further states that it was more an effort of censorship by the Queen of England for unification purposes (Scotland and Britain) at it’s core and was in fact not actually progressing any artistic medium or science by being in favor of artists/authors, but stifling it instead {maybe the copyright clause in the us constitution is a sarcastic comment because of the need to progress the useful arts and sciences being a part of it and how copyright doesn’t allow for that}.

I think a fair compromise would be to retain a copyright system, but drastically lower the length of time it takes for something to enter the public domain. And close the loopholes that allow companies like Disney and Nintendo to keep things out of the public domain that, under the current system, absolutely belong there by now.

The flaw in the “Tragedy of the Commons” argument is that it assumes an unregulated commons. The commons of the middle ages and early modern period was never unregulated. There were traditional and customary limits to the use of the commons that were firmly enforced. The commons were sustainably maintained for hundreds of years before enclosure deprived the common people of their use.

Intellectual property is a major problem, even outside the arts. As James Bunch says, the means of production for creative works is generally the record company, the publishing company, the film producers, not the artists. Signing over copyright or associated rights is often a condition of publication. But this is even more extreme in industry, where most innovators work for a corporation that will own the IP. Increasingly, this includes universities, as the corporatise. It stops some corporate theft, but ultimately alienates the innovator from their work, and undermines the principle of Free Scientific Information (FSI).

To the point of artist compensation, I’d like to note, that this is a very week point to me. First of all, you mention Disneys Robin Hood as an example, yet the artist involved in it don’t get paid by alimony (at least I suspect that to be the case, as that is very rare) and instead got paid a fixed amount by the company. Thus the actual artists in such cases dont really profit from the copyright, making the point, at least in those cases, hollow. As for independent artists, if we go by cultural impact, they rarely get their fair share anyway and I’d argue, that that is not a sensible way to messure the revenue they deserve anyway. Nobody can know what impact their work will have or how popular it will be. Artistic worth is entirely subjectiv anyway, so I don’t think there can be a fair metric to decide what whose art is worth. But as the world is now, only those, that manage to profit from their art, are encouraged to make art, essentially disencouraging many potential artists. My solution for this would be a reasonable high UBI. That way the only people that make art, will be the ones, that want to make art. Rather than those, that do so as a lucrative career, potentially creating more and more dedicated artists.

I don’t like the idea of abolishing copyright all together. Creating content is a work and it wouldn’t be right for someone to just take it and make money out of it with no effort after the author poured insane amount of hours into making it. But I can imagine it becoming a less strict. Most importantly, we should get back to shorter time during which the work is protected. Perhaps a tiered system could work – in the first stage, the work would be fully protected as it is today for a few years (say 10 for example), then become available for use subject to payment for another few years. This would mean anyone can use it subject to a certain fixed fee. And finally in the stage 3, it would become public domain (much earlier than it does now). This would allow creators to make money of out their work while also allowing derivative works to be based on previous ideas. Of course it is far more complicated than one paragraph of a YouTube comment but I would like that to be the general concept.

At it’s heart, copyright is a tool to incentivize the invention and improvement of things that our society feels are important. People still need to be paid for their work that’s being sold commercially. Though, severe limitations on the artist’s rights should really be upheld with fringe cases. Society doesn’t benefit in any way I can see when pop music is protected to the extent it seems to be.

29:15 As an artist, myself, you might as well toss Copyright Law anyway. Copyright doesn’t protect individual/small-time artists, only corporations. In some cases, corporations have even stolen an artist’s work, copyrighted it, and then sued the artist for infringement. *Cough Disney* I stopped producing art because too many people online were stealing and merchandising my work and there was nothing I could do about it.

As someone with many friends who are composers and artists it seems to me that, as you discussed, it is not enough merely to abolish copyright. What we need to do is abolish copyright AND create a society in which people’s basic needs are met. In the short term, this could be as simple as a universal basic income, universal healthcare, and heavily subsidized (if not free) education. In the long term, I’d love to see us build the organizations and institutions needed for an anarcho-communist society.

hello, intellectual property attorney here. all my clients are small artists and content creators. we should not abolish copyright, but we should make it illegal to transfer a copyright. most of the problems my clients face come from larger publications using their leverage to muscle them into selling their copyright, which is always a terrible idea for the artist. copyrights should only be able to be licensed, with ongoing royalties, never sold. we also need to really revamp how we deal with music sampling but i primarily work with visual artists so i don’t have much perspective there.

How do you motivate investment in new technologies, medical or otherwise, with their long development times, high risk of failure and potential liabilities? Most (>90%) of the foundational work has been funded by government investment, due to its risk and lack of clear payoff. I actually thought the governments should start investing in the idea of licensing for their research paid for by the public. They cover the training (hospitals, scientist, doctors, engineers, etc) and their published works, and more often than not the preliminary proof of concepts. Recent vaccine development and testing for COVID have illustrated these shortcomings and we have yet to deal with distribution and access.

Intellectual property and copyright laws have also lead to some pretty authoritarian side effects. Take the Australian government, for instance, who have taken it upon themselves to ban individual websites from being visited at all, due to “copyright issues”. Of course, it’s like they’re playing whack-a-mole, because every time they take a site down, they put up a new site with a different server. Which as an Aussie who is addicted to an American show that is about five months behind, and isn’t available on any legal streaming service… I appreciate how quickly they get those sites back up and running. But this was a continuation of previous law, where they force ISPs to block certain sites- the original reasoning was to block instances of child pornography, which seemed okay. Except they aren’t very good at determining what was and wasn’t legal, and ended up blocking websites of dentists and other perfectly legitimate people and businesses. This was also connected to the government ordering ISPs to keep a detailed log of everything Aussies were doing in the net, and to hand it over when asked (the metadata laws). Then there is the government demanding that all device creators build in a back foot for Australian authorities to be able to access any device at any time, even if they were locked. So it’s become increasingly authoritarian and police state-ish. Quite scary really. It makes me long for the days of the “don’t steal intellectual property” ads they’d put at the start of articles and DVDs- you know “you wouldn’t steal a car!

I really enjoyed this article! I think you laid out some interesting arguments in a manner that was easy to understand. And I think the topic is really important. While I haven’t thought everything through, I’m pretty solidly in the fold with people who find intellectual property to be rather abominable – although I don’t have the immediate solutions as to what should be done instead. If the main problem with abolishing IP rights would be that creators wouldn’t be compensated for their work or wouldn’t create in the first place, one could perhaps counter with universal basic income as a perhaps viable option (or artist stipends as is already done – or patreon, as you already mentioned), with the fact that a lot of artists etc seem to be screwed over by corporations already, and with the fact that a lot of people seem to create and find enjoyment in creation regardless of whether or not they are getting paid. I mean, Minecraft is a thing, but numerous other examples could probably be found. But again, thanks for the article! And for what it’s worth, I find longer articles to be perfectly fine when they are this good 🙂

I do like some of the points raised here, though I do not support the wholesale repeal of laws regarding “copyright” and “intellectual property”, though I think the term “copyright” (which, according to the text of the Statute of Anne, was instituted because publishers were reproducing books without compensating the authors) is outdated, since merely producing copies of a work is not how authors profit from it, and “intellectual property” casts a broad net over things that ought not to be conflated. How patents and trademarks are handled is, I agree, something that ought to be considered separately. To get my biggest “real-world” issue out of the way — abolishing copyright would allow any big company to adapt any creator’s work in any way they chose, without the consent of, any input from, or any compensation given to, the creator, bringing us back to the problem the original Statute of Anne was designed to address. And how much harder would it be, with Disney and Nintendo and their ilk being so much larger now than they were then, to remedy this new problem once it was created again? This, consequently, cannot be our answer. My next issue is that, while the Romantic idea of creatorship is certainly a bit, well, romanticised, it is also not entirely *wrong*. The idea of a work of original creatorship (an original piece of fiction, for example), is also relatively new — in earlier times, people recounted the oral tradition or common matters (such as those of Britain, France, and Rome), to which they added, but which, in many ways, inhibited truly novel things being created, because new things could be grafted onto old ones, rather than a wholly original and self-contained creation emerging.

Intellectual property, such as copyrights and patents, are implemented because they create a certain amount of leverage in the market, which can be used to extract more value. This type of value is created without human labor, meaning other than administrative tasks no labor is expended to create and retain this value. Laborless value is always created by the threat of government violence. For instance, if you try to use someone’s patented idea the government could enforce their property claims, and exact fees or maybe incarceration (both of which are violence). When violence is used to create value it is immoral. Chattle slavery used violence to create value for the economy (one for all), but copyrights and patents enslave an entire population to one person’s ownership claim (all for one). There’s a reason why physical labor is considered to be an honest living. Relying on government violence for your daily bread should cease.

The duration of copyright can be outrageous. Nintendo for istance is among the wealthiest companies in Japan, does it still need ownership of the first Legend of Zelda. Why are 16 bit properties locked in private ownership when we have reached 4k and virtual reality. Disney can definitely create new IP, why is it allowed to hoard so many when it’s so rich that it can influence governments and get away with pretty much anything they do. Harry Potter has made JK Rowling the richest writer on earth at one point, with enough money for 6 generations, why can’t fan fiction about it be published now or 10 years from now. Sure, the best argument I can find against that would be the fact that cheap imitators could flood the market, hundreds of poorly written or produced work seeking a quick cash grab using the IP. But we kind of still have that anyways, like those pathetic HP games released for mobile phones…

Hardin seems to miss the general principle he himself (probably mistakenly) introduced. just like the cattle is a subset of the pool of the communal land, the privately owned piece of land is a subset of the pool of all available land in the world. Hence, this critique of communal ownership can be principally applied on the private ownership as well.

The whole ideology around IP is ridicules. The human species is the most social creature on the face of this planet. The more we cooperate, the more we excel, and the greater our personal satisfaction as well. In times of great peril humanity always pulls together to solve problems. Regardless of race religion or stature. Yet here we all are locked into a social structure where everyone is out for themselves in a glorified game of King of the Hill. And where everything including life itself has this mythical association of monetary value attached to it. And people wonder why we have a mental health and addiction crisis?

Extremely disappointing article tbh. I was really hoping I’d be convinced, but you focused on some peripheral stuff and didn’t answer the most crucial question: HOW ARE ARTISTS GOING TO MAKE MONEY. By your own admission, you can’t propose anything satisfactory, and as long as people advocating for abolishment of copyright laws just avoid the most glaring problem in their proposal, I will be vehemently against it. Sure, maybe it would work under communism, and I sincerely hope that we can get there soon, preferably before the climate catastrophe. However, calling for abolishment of copyright laws specifically (as opposed to laws or capitalism in general) means the goal is to abolish copyright even while capitalism still exists. And under capitalism, artists need to make money. Preferably not by begging for less than a minimal wage (judging by the statistics you’ve shown). Until you can provide an alternative, I find the whole idea to be yet another repackaging of the disgusting, anti-worker notion that the artists don’t deserve to be paid for their work repainted with some leftist buzzwords.

No. Because the creative industry is horridly competitive. No intellectual property means nothing creative has any value. Especially in the digital world. But copyright should be overhauled to reduce predatory activity over intellectual property. Which is easier said than done, but so would be abolishing copyright. 25:20 The scarce resource is time. For instance if a writer writes a book then that takes time. If someone else copies the contents of that book, and sells it then the original creator gets undercut which devalues the time spent writing the original work. Time is almost always the scarce resource in creative pursuits. If you can’t make money to live on because someone else is making the money on a copy of your work then you don’t have the time to continue creating because you have to spend time seeking other sources of income besides creating. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what constitutes property necessarily. It’s more like if you can’t sell something then you make no money which provides less time to make more of that something. So if copyright was abolished the commons would not become the intellectual works, but the intellectuals themselves would become the commons. Which is downright weird in a kind of vulture economy kind of way. Time as a resource works that way. Which is why we are offended by things like slave wages. We feel bad because it’s time that’s wasted for very little recompense for added value, and not necessarily because something was stolen.

23.56 what a sadly cynical man…not all humans are solely focused on gain n more gain…without (especially if the land would then start to suffer) considering other aspects. In this case caring for that common land so it can continue to sustain life. And sharing it, all interested would have to come to some agreement on how best to use it. Make parts with fruit trees, plant other crops, stop focusing on cows and keep a few chickens, plant some potatoes around their house or whatever. People aren’t that stupid, as to stand by n watch their possibility of sustence just be ruined. Well, some greedy detached people…who probably aren’t living off land themselves may be thinking they are separate from nature. And the way we live now also makes it possible for many to not even reflect on where food comes from. But subsitance farmers care about their soil, seed etc. I grew up on a small farm…still handmilking etc my grandfather thought me everything from weeding out to assisting breach births. And they used to barter in a very open but reciprocal way with neighbours to help each other. Money wasn’t a big thing, nearest shop was FAR away….so. 25.12 good

One point you mentioned is that “a fan work of Darth Maul doesn’t diminish the quantity of Darth Maul”. However I think that this could be the case: imagine a children’s show character who becomes increasingly used in pornographic derivative works. The desire for the character to be shown to children would be reduced, including any who would’ve supported the original. Another might be cartoons such as Pepe the frog whose iconography became associated with horrible views, which decreases the appeal of the character.

Amazing article! In a small work I made for college a couple of decades ago I looked at this issue from the marxist categorization of technological abilities / economic relations / superstructure. Technical abilities like “reproducible products” (products that can be copied from another finished product without the skills or resources of the original creator) are a challenge to the existing economical relation: selling each finished product to pay for the initial investment of creation. This type of products have a very steep initial cost (99.9%) and a minimal copy cost (copying a disc, offering a streaming connection). Copyright from the point of view of protecting creation was a law included in that superstructure to protect the economical relations of the time. But the advent of new technological abilities (books, music, article, software… and more recently mechanical design via 3d printers) will challenge more and more the business model. And that’s the issue you explain at the end that is difficult to solve short term.

Thanks for the article. I have been wondering for a while (with no one giving me a straight answer): Is it okay for me to take screenshots from movies and use those pictures on my website where I review those movies? I won’t be selling any merchandise with those pictures, but the website will generate ad revenues and will contain affiliate links.