Your spouse works so you can write your book. You publish your book and it's a success, you die the next year. Work is immediately public domain and your spouse gets nothing?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
(This is not an argument in favor of extending the lifetime of copyright, which IMO is way too long. But the duration should be constant from the time of publication.)
Separately, society ought to not force artists to starve or sacrifice or be spouse-supported simply to be artists.
They need to find alternate business models, like getting paid in advance by fans through something like patreon or kickstarter.
However, while the copyright system still exists its damage to the culture should be minimized by letting cultural works go in to the public domain upon the author's death. The public good far outweighs the earning potential of people who didn't even create the work to begin with.
It's a messy business and there is no single way it should be done. New authors need to prove themselves somehow. And they should be compensated for their works.
They'll need to make a pitch and show me some of their work, then if I like it and I can afford it, then yes, I would.
Getting one's work out there has never been easier.
It used to be that in order to be a photographer you had to buy an expensive camera and have access to a darkroom, or at least spend money to get your photos developed. Now you can take high quality photos with your phone, that everyone has, and no development is needed. So more people than ever are taking photos, many of them artistic. There's no shortage of photography and unless civilization collapses, never will be. If anything, there'll be more and more photography every year, and sharing it has gotten easier than ever.
The same is even more true of video, which used to be even more expensive to create than photos, but now is just as easy and virtually free.
Same with desktop publishing ever since cheap personal printers became available. It used to be that you had to either own a printing press or pay to have someone print your work for you. Now you can print it yourself on your personal printer, or just put it up online, skipping the printing step.
Digital art creation programs have made creating visual art way more affordable, as now you don't have to pay for expensive physical art supplies.
Same with digital music creation tools, etc...
The many digital distribution platform, from Facebook, to Instagram, to Etsy, to Amazon have made publishing one's art super easy too. There's less need than ever for agents, publishers, or other middle men.
All together, this has led to an enormous amount of creativity and art creation, with probably hundreds of millions of people becoming creators compared to what existed just 40 years ago, before the personal computer revolution or the internet boom.
So I'm not worried in the least about art. There'll always be more than enough of it to go around.
I'd love it if creators got paid for their work, but it's not at all essential for art to live or thrive. More than enough artists will continue to make art regardless.
There's more art than ever, but yet the ability to have a legal protection in order to make money on your art is somehow a problem? How?
Meanwhile, there's no right to make money. It's an artificial scarcity model that mostly benefits corporations and middlemen along with a small minority of extremely popular artists, and once the artists die it doesn't even benefit them either but does continue to benefit corporations and middlemen.
If creators want to keep control of their work they shouldn't publish it at all, but once they do there should be no artificial legal framework to imprison people that copy or share it.
However, artists can still get paid by asking to be paid in advance through sites like patreon and kickstarter.
For the rest, they can remain hobbyists.. and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I said before, there's no shortage of art.
In the system I'm advocating for, no one gets sent to jail and no one's lives are getting ruined for copying or sharing bit, art continues to be made, and artists continue to get paid (though now in advance rather than a legally mandated system of artificial scarcity).
Outside a very tiny proportion of best sellers you need to expend significant efforts on promotion if the income matters to you.
This is not new, or unique to literature, and never has been.
Which brings us back to the question of whether you'll back someone you have no knowledge of.
Because you're basically asking them to do some work for you for free to start with. And if they can't afford to do free work, etc, etc.
It's just a cycle.
And while there is a lot of material being produced, not all of it is good. Publishers and the like used to act as curators to a degree. Now I have to do my own curation from not just what's passed the previous barriers, but from everything.
Sorry, no one has time for that.
You don't need to be your own curator. There are plenty of curators out there that aren't publishers, but just people who choose to promote or feature art based on their own personal taste -- which is pretty much what traditional curators like publishers did, but now that power is no longer concentrated in just a few hands, but anyone can do it, and many do.
So you just have to find those curators whose taste is compatible with your own.. those could be friends whose taste you trust, or even people you don't know who like the sorts of things you do.
We no longer have to bow down to the whims of those who live in an ivory tower. Curation has been distributed.
Of course, you might still have to curate the curators, but there are curators of curators too.. like articles on the "best blogs" or various awards to content aggregators, or, again, friends who can recommend you stuff.
The core problem is information overload, and no one has an ultimate solution to it yet, but I'd much rather have today's world of an incredible amount of information, cultural production, and content, than yesterday's world of relatively little content trickling through a few gatekeeper priests.
"you're basically asking them to do some work for you for free to start with. And if they can't afford to do free work, etc, etc."
I'm not asking them for anything. Many artists naturally make art, writers write, etc.. and it's just a fact that a huge amount of them publish their creations for free.
Artists now realize that because of the information and content glut their problem is mostly one of getting noticed, so they'll release plenty of work for free.
I'm not asking them for it, but many are almost trying to force it on me (and everyone else).. trying to get more eyeballs on it, because they realize that once they've got an established fanbase they can monetize it and become more famous and successful... and once they are then the patreon/kickstarter model becomes viable.
Not everyone can do it, but, too bad. If they can't then they can remain a hobbyist or just keep their art to themselves (as I have throughout most of my life).
I'd love to have a utopia where every artist gets paid to create and do nothing else, but copyright has absolutely failed to bring us there, and it's becoming less viable as a means of helping the vast majority of creators every day. It's mostly the lucky few and the middlemen that get to successfully play that game. Instead of propping up this broken system we should be working to find new alternatives which don't rely on artificial scarcity or putting sharers in jail.
Finally I think it would greatly decrease the quantity and quality because frankly your time would be better spent elsewhere on things that can support you financially.
Thankfully, it's never going to happen so it's a bit of a hypothetical conversation.
Disney shouldn't own Star Wars now, to pick one example. Everyone should own it. Any person or company who wants to try to make a go at financing and selling a new entry, or a re-make, should be free to. Film-makers who grew up on it and want to put their spin on it without having to get permission first, should be able to try.
Companies still making sequels to or remakes of 80s games should have to face competition from others trying to make better sequels or remakes of those games.
The best recorded version of the Beatles' oeuvre might well be one that won't ever exist now, because the person who'd have made it couldn't have made made any money at it, and died or will die of old age before the copyright expires, even though they weren't born when Let it Be was released.
I hesitate to name a number (14 seems fine, though, and 28 not catastrophic if you want a longer duration that covers a large portion of a normal person's working adult life) but what we've got now is way too long.
So no thanks.
Years later, someone takes it now it's free from copyright, uses it and achieves popularity. The original creator is still alive and has had nothing back.
Even further, if it has no copyright huge companies like spotify would not have to pay any royalties at all to sell or distribute music, pocketing everything themselves.
I'd rather the creator got the money.
I'm not seeing the part where the possibility that one's work might flop for a decade or three and then be made a smash-hit by someone else keeps people from creating almost exactly as much original art as they do now. I'd expect the effect on behavior to be negligible, especially with terms closer to 30 years. Meanwhile it would free up an awful lot of material for creative inspiration. I have no doubt that would result in more good art, overall.
I'm not disputing that it would give an increase in creativity, but it would open countless doors for huge corporations to completely exploit creatives. You're encouraging a situation where it becomes completely nonviable to be an artist commercially. It's already bad enough as it is at the moment with Spotify et all pocketing the vast majority of proceeds.
It's shocking to me that you're willing to completely overlook the fairness of the system in return for 'more art'. It is not appropriate whatsoever to strip ANYONE of their ownership of a piece of art they have created. Why do you feel entitled to that?
Are you genuinely unaware of the arguments that got us the invention of copyright in the first place, or are you aware of them and just asking me to quote them?
[EDIT] in case it's the former, let me just note that it's very much not obvious or in any sense "natural" that a person who hums a tune they just thought up gets to keep anyone else who heard them from humming it, in any context or for any reason, including for pay. That we, collectively, will it so (with laws) is precisely to encourage more art to be both created and shared. The enhanced level of creation is the entire point. Copyright lets you put an idea in someone's head and then prevent them from doing much with it. That is also an imposition, and a pretty damn extreme one, at that.