Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Most of the time, creating property entails that you invest money to do it; sometimes a lot of money, and that money will be at risk, more often than not.
Writing a book nowadays costs only time, and after you're done, you can drop it onto the market through self-publishing. No risk at all; the only thing you need is a bit of luck (and maybe some promotion) so that it becomes a hit.
Nowadays, the arts are one of the easiest ways to create property with regard to risk and investments. The only reason why so few people are doing that is because it's not guaranteed to sell. Labor *always* sells, because other people ask you to do something. In the arts, you do something and then try to convice others to pay for it.
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You have just explained why copyright exists. If a person has a certain amount of time they could choose to spend that time to write, or they could sell that time as labour - earning money they can pass on to their heirs. Without copyright the work potentially has no financial worth, greatly reducing the incentive that anyone will risk the time it takes to create it.
And "costs only time" is a curious way to phrase it. Even if we assumed that people only read ebooks (which is far from true), the amount of time to create a published work is significant. The saying goes that it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert. If there is not even potential value in the end result, why would anyone bother? Then there is the difference between the initial creation and what gets published. There can be as much, or more, time spent editing and refining a work to get it ready for an audience as there is in the initial creation. If a writer writes because they want to, where is the incentive to put in the work required for publication if there is no possibility of financial reward at the end? Then there are the out-of-pocket costs of editing, cover design, formatting and marketing. "only time"?
"No risk at all"? You explained the risk yourself. A person has spent all this time becoming an expert, creating the work and refining it for publication, and all they have is the possibility - the very slim possibility if you look at the stats - that it might sell. It is possible the work, even as things are now, will never recover actual out-of-pocket costs, it is very likely that the work will never repay the time investment at all, even at burger-tossing labour rates.
Yes, copyright also protects the works of those that don't spend the time to become an expert, but how many of those are the ones whose works become valuable? "the only thing you need is a bit of luck" doesn't bear much resemblance to reality.