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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Sure it does. Talking about the book market, however, those small creators make up what, .5-1% of the market, if that? I'm very sorry for them, but I'm not going to accept as necessary laws that are said to "protect the little man" when 99% of the benefits go to maybe 100 publishers, if not fewer (considering recent consolidation of the market).
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Uh huh. Except that right now, you are witnessing the "little man" (read: artists) use copyright laws to protect their interests from the major labels -- who I'm fairly sure would've pulled these kinds of exploits regardless of copyright laws.
Should we now abandon copyright and watch the artists get screwed and go broke, because you haven't been in a position to observe copyright laws utilized by anyone other than large corporations...?
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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
but imo copyright does far more bad than good, while it's not even proven that it works for 5% of the [known? good?] authors (mind you, I don't want to talk about revenues here, I'm talking about literary success).
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Uh huh. Normally I don't like to rely on anecdotes, but again: I've seen many photographers protect their IP from abuse, by organizations of various sizes due to copyright laws. And yet again: we're seeing artists protect their royalties using copyright laws.
Another point is that shorter copyright terms would not necessarily lead to better behavior. For example, patents are relatively short, but patent abuses abound -- ranging from pharmaceutical companies charging high prices for patented produces, or making a slight variation to an existing drug to get a new patent; to Intel, whose chip designs are patented but they still bash the competition with monopolistic practices; companies that buy patents with the hope that they can enforce the rights and collect payments.
And what about abolishing copyright altogether? If that happens, then the moment an artist releases any content -- even just sending out a manuscript or screenplay to try and get it published, or sharing a short story in a class environment -- anyone could take it and do whatever they want with it without sending so much as a single red cent to the artist. I won't go so far as to say "no one will ever create anything again," but it would be extremely difficult to produce anything that requires more than $500 and a lot of elbow grease, as you'd have absolutely no way to enforce payment for what you've done.
Last but not least, there is no requirement on the part of any artists to exercise any specific copyrights. As an artist, you are fully within your rights to release your content to the world, to copy freely and at will.
If you have some alternate method of protecting an artists' rights, let's hear it. Offhand, while I see room for improvement in copyright and in record labels paying what they owe, I don't see how tossing out the entire system will ultimately be beneficial for anyone.