> Pretty sure the person who wrote the trashy Harlequin novel in your example has to grind pretty hard to earn enough to buy their, let's say, diabetic medication.
So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous. Copyrights lasting as long as patents gives an artist plenty of time to monetize their work. It then becomes public domain to serve the public that gave them that monopoly in the first place.
Billions of dollars changed hands every year due to patent licensing. If two decades wasn't enough time to monetize something that wouldn't happen.
The length of copyright protections in the US are ludicrous. It's especially egregious as the company that's done the most to extend copyrights, Disney, made their fortune absolutely pillaging public domain fairy tales. Thousands of pop songs have been riffing Johann Pachelbel for nearly a century.
There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
> So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
1. Why should the plumber be paid-per-flush? A toilet is infrastructure, a permenant part of a house. You may as well argue that we should pay a carpenter, a landlord, or a bank to use our front doors.
2. I actually don't have a flushing toilet. The compost toilet I have was not installed by a plumber.
> As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous.
When a plumber installs a toilet, they get paid. When a musician releases a song they might hope to get enough money for a beer, if they're lucky. Nobody requires art. Try and get a house plan through planning without a toilet. So plumbers and other trades have a certain expectation of being able to make a living. Artists do not, and the very, very, very that are lucky enough to just make a minnimum wage are doing better that 99% of their peers.
I do art too. Yeah, I'm never going to get money for it, and I do it for my own entertainment and my friends. If society values my art, and wants me to release it out to people, you better believe you'll be paying for it. Plumbers don't install toilets as recreation. They do so to get paid.
Artists have the option, at any time, of releasing their works to the public domain. If they felt strongly that they should profit from their works for only 20 years, they have the absolute power to make that happen.
> There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.
So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.
As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous. Copyrights lasting as long as patents gives an artist plenty of time to monetize their work. It then becomes public domain to serve the public that gave them that monopoly in the first place.
Billions of dollars changed hands every year due to patent licensing. If two decades wasn't enough time to monetize something that wouldn't happen.
The length of copyright protections in the US are ludicrous. It's especially egregious as the company that's done the most to extend copyrights, Disney, made their fortune absolutely pillaging public domain fairy tales. Thousands of pop songs have been riffing Johann Pachelbel for nearly a century.
There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.