| copyright |
[Sep. 3rd, 2009|07:26 am] |
I was reading my copyright law textbook the other day and in the intro it was saying that copyright was important because without it people couldn't make money and if they couldn't make money they wouldn't create. The idea being that copyright increases the social good because it encourages production of arts. But is money the proper motivator for the production of arts? It seems to me that if your sole goal in crating is to make money, you will deliberately create something designed to make money, and not something designed to be as 'artistic' as possible. This is why the world is subjected to crap like Britney Spears albums and Stephanie Meyers novels. There is little if any artistic merit to their work, but they bring in a pile of cash. I once heard that Stephen King said that he could write much more literary novels if he wanted to, but he writes scholck because schlock is what sells. Limiting (or getting rid of) copyright law wouldn't stop people from making money from their creative work, because even if there is copying and plagiarism going on, some people will still buy the original from you. However it would stop people from making obscene amounts of money from their work, because the only thing that gets copied in large quantities are the things that are the most popular. Perhaps if the law was such that you couldn't make an obscene amount of money from your work, people would stop trying to create works designed to make an obscene amount of money? Sure, there might be fewer creative 'arts' produced, and you'd have to do a little research to find them, but I think the overall quality would be higher, and maybe that would maximize the public good more than the current system which awards appealing to the lowest common denominator? (Side note, if you really want to make money you should probably be getting an MBA, not an English degree.)
I say this and put my money where my mouth is. All of the creative works I've made, including two novels and the comic strip are public domain. I retain no copyright on any of them, not even a Creative Commons license, and have probably given away more copies than I've sold. I created them because I wanted to create, not to make money. I suppose you could argue that they are pretty poor quality so I wouldn't make money anyway, but hey, at least I'm trying...
In other publication-related news, I just found out yesterday that one of my law articles was accepted for publication in an environmental law journal. That's pretty exciting I think, even though, like all scholarly journals, they aren't going to pay me a dime. Like most academics I'm interested in getting my scholarly articles published to impress the ladies, not to make bank. |
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