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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

information and art should be free, and authors and artists should be entitled to decent living

Those two statements can't be reconciled in any viable society.

sounds like hardened political rhetoric to say simply that it's not viable. even ahistorical if you look at recent eg wengrow and graeber research. where's your intellectual curiosity for possible alternatives to status quo? but sure, enjoy your current "viable society"

It should work with a universal basic income. Everyone has enough to eat and a place to live. Then you price your efforts based on not needing a subsistence. It would make it easier to dismiss the notion of intellectual property, since you no longer need to artificially limit copying so that creators could survive.

They'll probably want some kind of job to afford art supplies, but it's an option rather than a mandate.

This is oversimplified, of course, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible.

The limited monopoly isn't just for survival though, it's supposed to be an incentive.

Lots of creators like to create for fun. The type of work is different but it's not necessarily any less productive overall.

Historically you had patrons that provided for artists and the like. They weren't necessary paid for particular works.

Which was universally shitty way to live to all creators in world on average. Sure, top1% maybe lived acceptably, but majority just starved without proper business models. (it's not based on numbers, just a guess based on how humans lived centuries ago)

They can and should. Every time this discussion comes up in HN I describe how this could be viable. In the past it was done through something called patronage: a rich guy paid an artist for a painting or art piece.

Nowadays with crowdfunding a writer could be paid by wannabe readers before the book is published, and only publish when he has obtained a FAIR compensation for his time working writing said book.

There are undoubtedly creators who are operating on that model today. (Many Kickstarters for content, board games, etc would qualify I think.)

It seems like most are not using that model. Maybe it’s not lucrative enough; maybe they’re not aware of the possibility.

That would fail spectacularly.

Kickstarters only work for known authors, so the newcomers would be excluded automatically from the beginning, but we consumers won't feel this for a few years.

Then it will stop being a novelty and hip thing to do (in about a week, given current attention economy), and the money streams will start to dry out, while the number of kickstarters will only increase while every existing author will switch to it.

Then Kickstarter itself and other portals will start promoting "better" authors, making it a sort of an unofficial ranked contest. Promoting will be based on different metrics, fairly as far as reviewers will think. Mostly it will be based on popularity and track record of previous products of those authors.

So the motivation to be seen on top (which equals - seen at all, due to the number or creators), will be releasing popular and catchy products, and as often as possible to generate a track record of good releases.

Over a few years this will shift people to create a common as possible popular and simple products, mandatory oriented on kids and ya because that's a gigantic market, so the lowest common denominator products will be the most successful and popular.

And so all kickstarter money, slowly drying out because more and more people will be tired of seeing this clown show and paying for inferior products, will be even further concentrated at the top kicktarting creators, while leaving "long tail" with zero money. Also audience will shift, while adults will stop participating in general, their kids will participate and will fund whatever is most flashy and predatory.

Thus this perpetual machine will go on in circles eventually producing only garbage.

Basic guaranteed income model aside, centuries ago artists lived off mecenates - affluent people who chose to support works of specific people.

We see a renewed interest of that with Patreon and other services.

Of course they can. Step 1: institute a basic income for authors and artists. Step 2: abolish copyright laws.

(To simplify step 1, you could skip the thorny problem of defining who an "author" or an "artist" is by instituting a universal basic income.)

But then attempts at supplementing that basic income with additional income -- i.e., gainful (self-)employment -- won't include being an author or artist. People wanting to do those things would be incentivised to do other things instead. People interested in living on exclusively the basic income while watching most other people live on that plus optional income would be few, I think.

step 1 can encompass all people. lots of people with idle time choose to do art and not only for profit, this is very common and many of our valued cultural products have come from those kind of conditions (which no longer exist like they did in places such as england).

You don't think anyone would hire a band to play an event, or a muralist to paint a wall?

Yes, but I meant people primarily interested in making things that are readily copyable. We can just as easily say being interested in that is an obsolete mindset without also saying basic income goes hand-in-hand.

> Step 2: abolish copyright laws.

I thought we were talking about viable societies?

How can you expect any form of R&D investment if the investor can't expect to see an ROI? Sounds great if you want to stagnate but personally i dont.

Are you perhaps thinking about patents?

If not, could you explain where you see a connection between copyright and R&D?

you're repeating political rhetoric saying that advancement is exclusively achievable through capitalist investment. and no i'm not talking about communism either.

In the current system, the percentage of artists who become wealthier than average from their creations is vanishingly close to zero.

Almost all the money is skimmed by the huge range of industries that have arisen to capture the marginal proceeds created by copyright law.

Maybe you could argue that all artists are motivated by the folly of dreaming that they will be the next unicorn who actually gets rich, but I don't think most of them are that naïve. They find creating fulfilling. They would still do so with a UBI.

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