Proof that copyright and patents stifle innovation?
Proof that forever-copyrights stifle innovation.
It's a balance. No money and people who need to eat have to dig ditches instead of creating. A hundred years of monopoly when fourteen would have been enough and you're constraining third parties more than you're providing incentive to the original author.
I do think the original 14 years is a trifle short. Maybe 14 years, with a cheap 14 year extension, and then one more very expensive 14 year extension. Then you can get long-lived film franchises, etc, while works that are commercially irrelevant enter the PD relatively soon.
Which is why no creative works exist from before the invention of copyright laws. Walk into any library, concert hall, art museum or theater and you won’t find any works from before copyright.
/s
I don’t see this being tenable, not without a frankly absurd loss of diversity in writing.
* ~44k writers, with $50k wages. Note that this is below the current median earnings for authors.
Yes, not all art or literature would stop, but the number of people who could pursue it as a profession would drop precipitously.
That said it might not lead to the maximum benefits, but it should lead to the maximum diversity.
Expect the furries to have lots of fun with this. Is that innovation? Things are always more nuanced than they appear.
Well, yes. People associate innovation with good new ideas, but the process inevitably involves a lot of bad ones.
Look at fairy tales, Robin Hood stories or Aesop's fables. Not every adaptation is good, but every now and then, you end up with a classic.
What's annoying is how often companies like Disney take a public domain work, make an interesting derivative and then turn around and lobby to make it impossible for their derivatives to enter the public domain. They did, after all, benefit from the same public domain...
What public domain enables is for-profit adaptations of Winnie the Pooh.