So would creativity really dry up without copyright & artists not making money?

I am not arguing with you about the intent of copyright law. My question is whether or not the current term is onerous or so excessive that it undercuts that intent. I don't see it as a problem, moreover I don't think it is virtually perpetual. In fact it is quite finite.

 

Right, and that's precisely how the majority reasoned, although they did suggest thats if they had been examining a pattern of continually extending the period -- a kind of slippery slope scenario that plantiffs advanced as a likely outcome -- that's something they might have viewed as a problem, but instead they just had this one instance before them. I think Breyer overstated his case to try to come to a constitutional reasoning that would support striking down a law that few on the court liked, but only two were willing to try to find a reasoning -- and I agree, it was a stretch -- to try to strike down. Though I do think the question of what public interest was served by extending the term on pre 1978 copyrights is a good question.

 

So would creativity really dry up without copyright & artists not making money?

Patently, No. Creativity will be just fine. Creativity doesn't have anything to do with copyright. Copyright is mostly about monetary returns and ownership - it's not about the creative process at all. I know the record business like to roll their copyright mantra's into the same ball with creativity - but I'm sorry, it's plain wrong.

Of course, a musician should benefit from his/her work and creativity. So a copyright law that provides for him/her a lifetime of monetary return is the right and proper thing. I get a bit fuzzy when the creator has passed on though. There are good arguments for his/her spouse and kin - but it's not as strong a link for me.

Of course, this argument is a lot simpler if you just look at the legal situation. Trouble is copyright has been used mostly to hinder creativity in the way we consume music - it's a tool constantly used against people. So basically, it's easy to get fed up about it.

 

this is all correct but there's another troublesome area within IP that's uniquely troublesome where art is concerned, namely the protection of one's art from damage to reputation or intent caused by persons other than the author. this overlaps slightly with areas within trademarks and branding when names too similar to an existing product are used and the natural worry is that these new products will create confusion. for a work of art, however, it's not unreasonable for an author to not want to see imitations, mimics or re-workings that tarnish his/her original work. a great many people have applied for copyright extensions on their work on the basis of protecting others from bastardizing it. I'm not sure if this justifies overriding copyright limits, which, ipso facto, are intended to prevent people from creating impermeable barriers, but it's an interesting discussion.

 

As I said earlier, there is a great amount of academia devoted to demonstrating that would said above is not the whole story, and it started well before there was such a thing as "the record business." While I don't know if we could ever prove that the existence of intellectual property law serves to make people more creative, there's a few hundred years of technological advancement that, not coincidentally, exploded with the advent and expansion of intellectual property law. Is that to say many brilliant people suddenly were creative because laws were enacted to protect their work? Not necessarily, but it does suggest they were that much more willing to (a) bring their work to market and, perhaps more importantly, (b) continue cultivating their creativity in the years beyond.

 

I've seen a few things about the subject matter that I found thought provoking:

#1: a book called Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity - Lawrence Lessig.

#2: a youtube vid:




The Lawrence Lessig book was really good. And the RIP! A Remix Manifesto vid was good too! It goes hand in hand with the book.

 

Hard to compare people "willing to bring work to market" in, say, the days before the industrial revolution, democracy in the west, and laissez-faire capitalism, and the days after. No doubt technology changes enabled more people to get more material to the public....never more so than now. But whether or not that technology or those legal developments led to creative people making more art than they did before or being more willing to try to share it more, or whether through it -- together with a lot of other variables and changes -- the creative work people did once less formally and visibly just became visible in a more modern way with the advent of these new technologies and social structures is pretty much impossible to pull apart. I'm generally of the opinion that human civilization hasn't changed all that much in 3,000 years of recorded history and that people's urge to create, to perform, to share in an artistic experience, etc. is pretty much as it always was. It's just the modes of how we do it that changes.

 

not really impossible to pull apart as finer minds than ours have tackled the issue for a very long time. whether or not you choose to agree with them is something else. personally, I do recognize the need for a means of protecting intellectual property and a commensurate increase in the willingness of innovators to innovate. I'm not entirely sure how applicable the same concept is to music that it would be, for example, to the guy that invents widgets, but I do recognize that you can't bring people into a market that resembles anything like we have without providing those people incentives to enter the market in the first place. one of those incentives is knowing that their work can't be stolen without legal repercussions.

 

I'm just saying I doubt that people create more, or even have the urge to share their creative work more, on the basis of legal changes. Technological changes given them different means for doing it, but even then I doubt the underlying human urge changes. I think we humans pretty much have the same urge to create that we had at the dawn of recorded human history 3,000 years ago, and we pretty much do that kind of work in the same quantity as ever, copyright law or no.

 

something like 95% (or more) of all mankind's innovations have taken place in the last 100+ years and most of those within the last 50 or 60. this is not intended as a hard and fast metric of mankind's sudden verve in the face of patent law or his laziness for those few hundred thousand years without patent law, but merely to show that in terms of sheer output (in aggregate), virtually nothing was created before very recently.

 

Agreed - and all with patent law giving exclusivity for 20 years or so - way shorter than any term for artistic copyright.

 

There's also a lot more people on the planet in the last 250 years than there was say 2,000 years before that, been a huge spike in population with the advent of industrialization and fossil fuels and people being able to live in big cities, longer, without spending their time hunting for an growing food. Plus there's millions of years of human history we don't have a record of, thousands more that we have a spotty extant record of. And how are we quantifying those "innovations," I'm thinking in the context of copyright law of artistic works and works of the mind.... I think technology changes, and that changes the mode of what we do artistically, but I don't think it changes the nature of what we do, our urge to do it, or even that much the amount we do it per capita. But there are 7X as many people on the planet now than there were at the beginning of the 19th century. Sure, humans make more stuff now.

 

And since the laws have been in place, they have been abused - never more so than now. But people still create, try to innovate, and do their thing. I don't see creativity as being linked to anything more than a desire. If you're talking about the business aspects, the monetary gains, then I think your point stands.

 

Yeah - I can't say I agree with that. What you've seen in modern times is a lot more patents, a lot more things being swept up with the broom of copyright - but that just means that prior to that, inventions and ideas were not recorded in the same way. Plenty was discovered and invented before there was ever copyright. In fact, without them, you wouldn't have todays innovations. How many new patents are simply new ways of doing the same thing, for example? Where do you get the numbers to support this sudden increase? Does it take into account that there was a time when people didn't feel a need to run to their lawyers first and foremost......?

 

frankly, nothing I said in the post you quoted is even really up for dispute. you can easily research this information for yourself and see that innovations will include things like simple tools, the ability to write and converse with (and without) language, printing, etc., etc., up through the present day. and much of that activity doesn't involve intellectual property attorneys or anything resembling even patent law as known in 1790. you can probably find a scatter plot or something along those lines where you'll see certain very meaningful and notable innovations over a period of 100,000 or so years, all fairly widely space and isolated, and then a massive swarm of activity in the last 100+ years. in a sort of made-to-scale plot, this would look like we achieved virtually nothing until the 1900s. obviously, that's not true, but even without the redundancies you alluded to, the sheer amount of new creations in our recent past relative to our recorded history is staggering.

 

If artists were no longer able to use their creativity making money via music, I think they would channel their creativity into whatever their new chosen livelihood might be. It's also difficult for me to imagine any hard working successful artist of any discipline being able to devote enough time to his art, after a full day of pounding nails, or teaching school or fixing toilets or whatever blank might keep the wolf from the door.

 

Why start it at 50 years, or 75 years, or 100 years? Why not make it retroactive? Bach is arguably the most influential composer/musician ever. Don't his descendants deserve to earn money from his genius as much as, say, Sean Lennon deserves to earn money from his Dad?

 

I think you start moving the discussion (and most of our civilization) into foolish territory if you want retroactive legality. Should probably confine things to the period in which the laws existed and the copyrights were recognized.

 

I was being facetious to illustrate a point.

 

and that point was?

 

See previous posts.

 

Music would be much simpler. Of course, artists would be forced to tour constantly, to pay back the loans incurred to produce and distribute music, since everyone would just download. Records would be more along the lines of "items" for fans to purchase; manufactured in limited quantity on colored vinyl, picture discs and the like.

In order to make enough to leave an estate for their heirs, they would need to charge more for live shows (concerts would no longer be viewed as promotion for an album - the album would be viewed as promotion expense for the show, where the real money would be made). They might even distribute an album free to fans to promote an upcoming tour. They might charge wealthier fans for good seats, signatures and the opportunity to meet them. Older, Established acts may even decide to forego recording new material entirely and instead spend their time touring their old songs, as the relative economic value of time spent touring would be much greater than recording.

Hey wait a minute. That's exactly what's happening today.

 

You're missing some important distinctions between a trademark (which can be the distinct visual depiction of a character), a copyrighted work, and an unprotected idea.

Trademarks are a distinctive mark (usually visual, but not always) that can be perpetual. Their purpose is to associate goods with the trademark owner. So trademark would probably protect Disney from knock off t-shirts in perpetuity.

Copyrights are limited, and this is an intended feature. Copyright law recognizes the value of allowing works to enter the public domain, and the va.lue of providing incentives for artists (or corporations) to create works. These competing goals require a balancing. In this sense it is completely different from trademark. For what it's worth, patent terms are far shorter than copyright terms. Although design patents exist, patent law is generally unimportant with respect to artistic creativity.

The distinction between trademark and copyright is why it doesn't matter very much to Disney in purely monetary terms if Steamboat Willie (a black and white short film with limited appeal except as a historic artifact) enters the public domain -- Mickey Mouse will remain a trademark of the Disney Company. Steamboat Willie entering the public domain will not give merchandise manufacturers carte blanche to put Mickey's trademarked image on their goods. That is why the 1937-1942 classic animated features are such a big deal -- they are copyrighted works, not trademarked characters. And they are among the rare copyrighted works that have serious commercial power 75 years after creation. By this I mean that the works (i.e., copies of the animated feature films themselves) still sell a huge number of copies.

Note that the Disney-created depictions of the characters in these early films can be (and undoubtedly will be) still subject to trademark.

It sounds like you are skeptical of the value of works entering the public domain. Consider this, then: Many of Disney's most enduring films are based on stories that were in the public domain. Disney was able to adapt them as he saw fit, for free. Both these points are important. Artists are often reluctant to license derivative works because they think their own work will be trivialized, mocked or, worst of all, surpassed. They often try to control the way their story is adapted. This genuinely limits the range of derivative works that can be made. To cite a well-known example, if the estate of William Shakespeare or Globe Theater Corp. owned an eternal license to Romeo and Juliet, the right to create West Side Story would have been provisional.

Having public domain works be free means that even a poor or beginning artist can grapple with familiar stories, themes and characters.

Interestingly, the only WORK featuring Mickey Mouse that still is a money maker is Fantasia. The Warner Brothers animated shorts (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Roadrunner) are orders of magnitude more profitable than the Mickey Mouse animated shorts. Mickey is still an immensely valuable trademark, of course.

TL;DR -- creative works eventually entering the public domain is intentional and a good thing.

 

No, a song is not written out of necessity...

 

EXACTLY...it cannot be quelled.