Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
The existence of copyright ensures that the public has more products to buy.
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You'd think it to be basic economics. And yet this
National Bureau of Economic Research document I previously linked gives quite a bit of evidence in the other direction.
What I think is that the existence of copyright gives the public not more art, but better art. My Exhibit A is Sir Walter Scott, who, after
Ivanhoe, wrote too fast because lack of international copyright protection meant he had to churn out books to pay bills. Anthony Trollope, one of my favorites, genuinely liked his day job as a Royal Mail trouble-shooter, and clearly only wrote for money. Between the people who don't write, and the people who write too quickly, it may even out as a sheer question of artistic production.
My link above explains that ineffective copyright shifts artists' motives from making money to winning a stardom lottery. The link authors see this as an artistically neutral development, but I'm thinking otherwise. At best, you will see more Mark Twain types who take out a lot of time from writing to make lucrative personal appearances. And it may become impossible to be a serious writer without spending half your time teaching undergraduates.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Namekuseijin
Writers have this urge to write, to tell stories, to reach an audience. I'm not sure these would go away if there was no profit involved whatsoever.
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I apologize if I am way out of line here, but I wonder how many biographies of great novelists, or other artists, you have read. Hardly any great nineteenth century noivelists would have written for free. Harriet Beecher Stowe would have written
Uncle Tom's Cabin for free, but that's an exception.