I'm not talking about cave paintings. When Livy wrote Ab Urbe Condita, when Chaucer wrote Centerbury Tales, who were they planning to sell the rights too?
Professional/career writing didn't become the default until the middle of the 19th century, when a rise in literacy made it financially viable.
Even as recently as the first half of the 19th century, most of the literary greats were not professional writers.
Leo Tolstoy was a nobleman born into wealth, financially set for life, and wrote purely for the intellectual stimulation. Chekov saw himself first and foremost as a physician, continued to practice with a full patient panel even after he encountered massive success as a writer, and famously said "Medicine is my wife and writing is my mistress." Nathaniel Hawthorne was a low level government bureaucrat throughout his life. Henry David Thoreau alternated between running a pencil factory and being an indigent. And yet no matter their financial situation, no matter their day job, no matter how much or how little income they derived from writing, they all wrote, and they wrote good stuff.
Professionalization of writing in the second half of the 19th century directly coincided with the rise of doggerel and dime novels. The volume of new works went up, but the average quality went down - not up as you suggest. When the financial incentive is central there is a push to optimize for quantity over quality.
Livy: Uniquely without a patron, so uniquely able to write without fear of reprisal -- he was independently wealthy
Chaucer: Dependent on patronage
Tolstoy: Yep, wealthy people can make art in their leisure time
Chekov: Yep, wealthy people can make art in their leisure time
Hawthorne: Registered his works with the copyright office. Lived with very well-off relatives throughout his youth. Had his college paid for by well-off relatives.
Thoreau: Went to Harvard and was the grandson of a very wealthy Boston merchant -- had plenty of access to money. His indigence was a philosophical decision he made.
I never argued that no good art is produced outside of commercial incentives, I didn't argue the "average" quality would go up or down. I believe that overall volume and diversity of art increases with commercial motivation, as artists can produce art without a direct attachment to existing wealth and power structures. There are more great pieces of art across a more diverse range of styles, perspectives, formats, etc. This is readily apparent in the historical record, and outliers like Livy are the exceptions that prove the rule.
We've never had a problem producing high-quality art from the perspective of and at the whims of the rich and powerful.
Your initial argument was "art is not a charity" - i.e. people don't produce quality artistic work unless there is a financial incentive, for which copyright is an essential requirement. Now you have carved out three or four different exceptions to that rule and seem to be reshaping your argument into some sort of class-struggle narrative between wealthy authors and middle class authors. That is very different than what you were initially asserting.
If anything, you're presenting an argument for a universal basic income so that people have leisure time that they can use for creative purposes, not an argument for copyright as an essential catalyst for creativity.
Let’s say someone proposes that all code any individual or company writes must be made publicly available immediately upon authoring. After all, some people choose to write OSS and do so voluntarily.
Are you also confused by the statement, “software engineering is a profession, not a charity” in the context of that argument? I’ve found the only people who claim to struggle to understand this are motivated in a particular direction (the “we should be allowed to profit from others work” crowd).
I’ll restate it more specifically for the literalists: art is both a profession and a hobby (as clarified in my second comment and as is self-evident to everyone on the planet). If you’re using the existence of the hobbyist creator as an excuse to capture the economic value of the professional creator, you’re 1) an asshole and 2) likely to destroy much of the incentive that allows professional creators to get as good as they are today and in such diverse forms, from such diverse perspectives (especially in the memetic diversity sense, which I care most about).
> some sort of class-struggle narrative
The history of funding methods is one of the most informative lenses one can apply to art history. It literally distorts the historical record (oh it turns out the only good artists in the world were those painting church stories eh!). The economic history is real and isn’t changed by your dismissive reference as “some sort of narrative.”
> you’re presenting an argument for UBI
No I’m not. I’m presenting an argument for forbidding AI companies from rent-seeking on other people’s work and destroying the incentive to continue producing original work.
We get higher quality art via professionalization, as is readily apparent in the historical record (not many hobbyists in there).