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Originally Posted by Iphinome
You are either misinformed or making it up as you go along, the first copyright law was 1709....
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Sorry, you're correct. But it is worth pointing out that creativity did not come to a screeching halt when the Statute of Anne went into effect.
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Originally Posted by Iphinome
Also I was answering the question of what would Shakespeare not be able to write if encumbered by today's copyright laws.
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Since you missed it, the answer is "almost everything." Do you really need me to list the names of all the history plays?
E.g. Romeo and Juliet had antecedents including Xenophon and
Il Novellino by Masuccio in 1476, as well as contemporary sources. Many of the comedies also drew from ancient, folk and/or medieval sources as well as contemporary works. Many of those contemporary sources were, in turn, borrowing from folk tales, histories and/or medieval sources.
Copyright laws did not prevent Sergio Leone from adapting
Yojimbo as
A Fistful of Dollars. They haven't stopped countless musicians from doing cover versions of recent songs, it hasn't ground hip-hop to a halt, despite a heavy reliance on sampling copyrighted recordings. It hasn't prevented a half dozen "police procedurals" that all use the same formula from flooding the airwaves, and occasionally drawing from the same real-life events.
And again, the absolute worst case scenarios are that he'd either license the original material, or just write something else.
This is, of course, aside from the fact that not only was he allowed to rewrite contemporary works, he was practically
required by the economic realities of his day. It does not make sense to suggest that Shakespeare was
only (or even primarily) able to write such high-quality work because he was reusing existing works.
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Originally Posted by Iphinome
So I take it your argument is that uses that can be censored at the whim of the copyright tyrants are good enough because most people out there won't meet your subjective standards of what's good anyway?
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Well, I would say that a degradation of quality is
one argument in favor of copyright laws.
Another perspective on this aspect is: If we removed copyright laws, the almighty Disney would lose exclusivity over Mickey Mouse -- but would then gain the ability to create movies and toys based on any franchise in existence. Name your favorite, they could do it -- Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, whatever -- without reimbursing the original creator(s). Big companies wouldn't go away in a copyright-free world, as they'd still be able to leverage all kinds of resources that small companies could not. How is that preferable?
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Originally Posted by Iphinome
People like Shakespeare? Walt god i hate him for what Mickey Mouse has done to the world Disney? The Brother's Grimm? Andy Warhol painting soup- cans? You can't honestly think a story a painting or a movie pops in out of nowhere. Everything builds on what came before.
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Yes, yes it does.
Fortunately, copyright rarely bars anyone from relying on the works of their predecessors, including the examples you cited. I can probably count on one hand the number of instances of an "appropriation artist" who genuinely got busted for copyright infringement. FWIW, none of it is terribly impressive work.
The argument that "copyright hampers creativity," as implied by the claim that "Shakespeare couldn't write his plays today," is clearly fallacious.