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Comment by will_walker | Hacker News Reader

To incentivize artists to create and distribute art. The way we conceive of art as an act of embodied novelty differentiates it from commodities which aim for predictable consistency. Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically. The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists.

As an artist starting out in the beginning of my career, I made a rationalized choice to never post my work online - in retrospect this seems to have been the right choice. My work is no AI’s whetstone.

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Artist have always since classical times struggled to support themselves. I don’t think there is any system that would make this a viable career for the number of people who want to pursue it. Same with musicians.

It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus. There will always be demand for it, but it is highly elastic and heavily influenced by trends and skewed by the top end.

A social security system that supports all artists was put into operation since 1984 in my country of Finland, it's still functioning fine, the only struggle for artists here is substance abuse.

How do people qualify for this support?

It's essentially universal. They simply subtract income from it. About $10k/y. If you earn more than $150/mo, the excess is subtracted. The bureaucratic process is submitting an online form. Property owned (land, house, shares, w/e) may reduce it, I don't know, I don't own anything of substantial value.

Can you elaborate a little on how this works? I have many questions haha, how they verify someone is doing art, how it's not the same as a basic unemployment, whether there is a maximum amount of people who can be on this programme, if so how qualification works etc. It sounds very interesting

> how they verify someone is doing art

Sorry if I framed it confusingly, this isn't only for artists, it's for everyone. They don't care what you do, only how much money you make.

> how it's not the same as a basic unemployment

It pretty much is, though unemployment has more strings attached. Anything you get from unemployment is subtracted from social security, and vice versa. For unemployment the online form is simpler and money comes much quicker, but you have to attend unemployment office events and stuff.

> whether there is a maximum amount of people who can be on this programme

The true maximum is of course however much the system as a whole can support, through taxing people's income. My back-of-the-napkin math puts the cost of the whole program at about $1/mo per taxpayer. So all artists and bums combined. Might not include basic retirement, which is slightly less.

> how qualification works

It's based on income/assets. If you make less than $10k/y plus $150/mo, the program covers the difference for living expenses.

In practice, there are limits to how much they're willing to pay for things like rent and utilities. In my city the max rent is $560/mo. On this winter's coldest month they complained that my electricity bill was too high (electric heating), but still paid it in full when I complained back.

To qualify, you have to attach to your application all of your bank accounts' statements from the past 3 months, so they can see how much money you've got. When you get a bill, you send the bill and they cover it.

The social security program covers: rent, water, electricity, home insurance, Internet, healthcare, moving van, security deposit of new apartment. On top of that you get about $15/day for food and other stuff like clothes, cleaning products, what have you. In my experience food costs some $10/day to live comfortably so some $150/mo remains for everything else. Second hand clothing stores sell decent clothes for a few dollars a piece, sometimes less.

You can request additional funds for infrequent, dire needs, like a new bed, vaccuum cleaner, etc.

Feel free to ask more questions, I'm happy to elaborate :)

>Sorry if I framed it confusingly, this isn't only for artists, it's for everyone.

Ah, OK, that was what I was wondering. Some social security schemes for artists that I am aware of require proof that you are in fact an artist, which can be problematic.

This is a is a fundamental change of how we relate to work and the economy. So I hope it catches on and I've seriously though about emigrating because of that. That weather though...

I think it doesn't go quite far enough though. I still believe a universal basic income would do better and be easier to administer.

>It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus.

What is your career, precisely?

I mean no aspersions when I say that. For example, all research would fall into that category as well. So does most of tech, but not all of it.

My point was that it's a career whose demand is dictated by fluctuations in the economy and trends. And can be almost completely shut down (in theory) if the situation dictates.

By historical standards, most of what is sold today in developed countries is "surplus". The share of GDP that goes to art and entertainment is not constant as your historical comparison suggests. It is growing and will continue to grow. It will eventually outgrow most other industries.

Wherever you stand on copyrights, it would be a mistake to underestimate the central importance of this issue going forward.

Yes, we have a lot of things supported by surplus. All research is one example.

I don't think my comment implies that at all. I'm not convinced it'll ever grow that large though. See: Content is not king [1] for a good explanation of why.

I think it's natural that it grows now to levels never seen before.

What am I underestimating? I agree it is an important issue; my comment is orthogonal to it though.

[1] https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742

>Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically.

Can you explain this position? My understanding is most artists don't thrive economically because there's not much demand for the art they make. I'm not sure that's correct, but "lack of IP protections" seems even less likely for most artists. What protections do you think would help?

It seems to me that the current system primarily benefits corporations who acquire a vast library of IP and can afford to legally defend it all as necessary.

I agree that a different set of policies would result in more art being created and more artists who are able to support themselves doing art, but my immediate assumption of what that would look like is more like funding art educations and exhibitions (of various kinds).

in Japan, company can't buy the copyright from author, obviously this give artist advantage.

And that may be a bit helpful, but still everything I've heard indicates that drawing manga is absolutely hellish for one's body and mind. Look at the famous schedule:

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-53ec1e395a4b59adb8391...

Yeah, the law may be more on their side, but overall it seems unless you're somebody on the level of Akira Toriyama you likely barely managed to retain your sanity while cranking out your world famous works, and even the famous ones suffer greatly during the process.

yes, but this can make sure they get money of their part, we can thinking about novelists have better condition.

Historically artists had a real job to fund their art hobby.

The US has cultural poverty because it has decided to support litigation machines.

Historically, artists were independently wealthy (as were early scientists) or they lived off the patronage of the wealthy. Intellectual property and copyright laws allowed art to be a viable commercial venture without direct patronage.

Well, no, I mean if you want to get specific, IP and copyright (copyright specifically) created a structure for government to register and track written output. Our current conception of "the artist" is relatively new, and patronage models/gift economies strike me as...well, still pretty relevant despite IP. People seem to be focusing on the Artist and not the artist's intermediaries (publishers, for instance) and that IP was also meant to protect and promote industry, for which it has been successful (maybe too much).

I mean a good thought experiment here would be to replace "artists" with "entrepreneurs" or "founders" ("historically, [...] were independently wealthy" would expose some of the myths we attach to the idea of "self-made" which we rarely attach to artists and authors) here and rethink the history of Western commerce from that perspective.

> Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically.

You think we should have 1000x more artists than we do? I think there's another economic problem with that idea...

> The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists.

The USA has the largest market in the world for creative products and the most rich artists.

> My work is no AI’s whetstone.

Are you the same way with juniors? "I paid dearly to learn this technique - you should too!"

Aside from overtraining issues, the AI can't store your work anymore than you can store representations of everything you've trained on, it's vastly smaller than the sum of its training data. It distills out features and their combinations.

Some bigname artist is upset because he thinks he's the first one to put certain bat and lizard features on a dragon and that he now owns that entire sort of creature. Turns out though, that given an old picture of a dragon and that single sentence of mine that he could be copied by almost anyone. The only way to keep the AI from "copying" his work is to make sure that, even if not trained on his work, nobody asks it for those features. To satisfy these people it'll have to have a big red sign that says "Dragons are off limits, Bob owns them because you might put claws on the wings!".

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