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Comment by blehn | Hacker News Reader

How do you know what the value of the art will be before it's created? Guns N' Roses is a top 40 artist on Spotify nearly 35 years after producing an album. Should they not have been paid after 1991? If you argue that they were a popular band and therefore should have been paid accordingly up front, well what about their debut record, which sold 30 million copies? How would you predict that value before its creation (or even after)? If you're saying that only the labor has value, and all labor is valued equally, that sounds sort of like marxism, which could be fine, but it's hard to say how well artists would be supported in that case.

In the US, the original copyright length was 14 years, and then 28, and eventually the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I think the intent of the law is economically justified, but the current length is outrageous.

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You should be paid the accurate value of the labor. The pay should not scale more when no additional labor takes place.

This is how art worked for millenia; someone commissions a chapel roof painting, someone commissions a concerto, someone commissions a statue, someone buys a chair, etc.

Artists still do this today, and there is no issue determining value beforehand. Artists list their commission prices, or their hourly costs, etc. This is a perfectly normal thing that happens everyday.

Exactly. Somehow this idea that you keep getting paid for literally the same thing over and over again for work you did once is the absurdity. And ridiculously greedy.

It seems to have been invented by laywers, for lawyers. Nobody else really benefits as much as they do. The whole entirety of society vs. a single profession of dubious morality.

>Somehow this idea that you keep getting paid for literally the same thing over and over again for work you did once is the absurdity

meanwhile, most tech is moving towards subscriptions?

Art is getting paid "non-greedily". People buy a song or art piece, and then people 10 years later buy a song or art piece. That's not one person paying twice for the same song, it's two people buying the same thing.

If people still value that art for that price later, I don't see how this is a "greedy" thing. is art magically supposed to turn open source CC0 after 5 years? Tech sure doesnt work like that.

You didn't answer my questions at all.

But ok so I'm a young musician. Nobody's heard of me and nobody wants to commission a concert or album. What do I do? Quit?

@Vicinity9635 It's not just lawyer greed, it creates economic fairness by preventing others from profiting from your creative work.

You do other things to make money and continue to make art for it's own sake. If you get to the point that others want your art you get commissions. Just like most artists in the current system.

Alright, so then you're NOT going to pay artists for their labor?

In the current system, artists might work for many years on a single work, or work many years perfecting their craft before anyone wants to pay for their work. Copyright gives them a way to earn money in the future that compensates them for the work they did in the past. It incentivizes creativity. Don't get me wrong, I don't think copyright is perfect, but you really ought to think more about the system you're proposing, because it's not making much sense.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain these things to techies who only see the world in their one-sided startupy way. The fact that there’re starving creatives who have already been massively marginalized by the likes of Spotify of this world, means nothing to these tech workers who only see everything as numbers, or a “business model” to “validate”.

(full disclosure, I’m a techie who’s gradually woken up to the idea that the tech might just be the most abused way to exploit people)

I'm in games, where art and tech crossroad. I 1000% empathize for the fact that art exploits, abuses, and underpays even if they at times may be doing more work than a junior web dev.

It's a bit ironic, because a lot of tech offers partial compensation in stock. Something else that really doesn't happen in games unless you work for like, the 3-4 largest studios. So they should at least understand that your compensation is not all based on labor for time worked.

True that! And game dev is a notoriously brutal industry in general, sadly

>You should be paid the accurate value of the labor.

that's gone out the door in the digital age. Compaies at this point have spent centuries trying to enfoce this model while witholding stuff like stock and royalties to take a part of what the company enjoys by protifting for decades off of a single (underpaid) piece of labor.

I don't exactly sympathize with a robot now trying to do the same. Pay your labor.

> How do you know what the value of the art will be before it's created?

I don't know. Anyone funding the work is accepting a risk.

> Should they not have been paid after 1991?

They definitely should get paid for their shows and live performances. The band itself can't be copied. Artists are extremely scarce.

Their art, however, is not. Once created, the scarcity of their recordings is artificial and fundamentally time limited anyway. Even if I were extremely tolerant of copyright, I'd argue for a term of only 5-10 years maximum with absolutely no possibility of extension.

In other words, even if we accept copyright as legitimate, they sure as hell shouldn't still be getting paid for some late 80s album. They've already been adequately compensated for those creations. If they want more, they should have to keep making new stuff so that they can benefit from new copyrights which will also expire after a short time.

Creators are not supposed to be able to strike gold once and then enjoy eternal royalties. Copyright must have short time frames or it's in breach of the social contract. The reality is we're doing creators a favor by pretending that it's hard to copy their stuff so they can make some money. We do this because they assured us that eventually all of it would belong to us: works would the public domain.

The copyright industry isn't keeping up their end of the bargain. They continuously pull the rug out from under us by extending copyright to the point we'll be long dead before our culture is returned to us. It's offensive and we should all stop pretending. They need reminding that public domain is the natural and default state of all intellectual work.

> How would you predict that value before its creation (or even after)?

I'd look at the artist's past work. If there is no past work, then I don't know.

> If you're saying that only the labor has value

I'm not saying that at all. Creations are valuable. Creators are valuable. The labor of creation is valuable.

Value is assigned to stuff by humans. Obviously humans value art. The price however is given by supply and demand. The fact is that supply of intellectual works approach infinity after they are created and therefore their prices approach zero. So it makes perfect sense to assign prices to the labor of creation but zero sense to assign a price to the product of creation. Copyright is an exercise in denying reality.

> and all labor is valued equally

I definitely did not say that. All labor is different. I value some creators a lot more than others. Some creators I don't value at all.

> that sounds sort of like marxism

I must apologize if I gave that impression. I hate marxism.

>In other words, even if we accept copyright as legitimate, they sure as hell shouldn't still be getting paid for some late 80s album.

Why not? The fact is that even if the album is free, there will be people paying spotify $10/month to listen to it on demand. How is it fair that Spotify can profit from it for decades to come because they offer convenience, over the artist who made the music 10 years earlier and now relinquishes their art not even a quarter into a typical career?

Copyright is abusrd now, but it's not a bad concept. I think the original copyright law of 14 + 14 worked well enough. Life expectancy increased so I'd increase it to 14 + 14 + 14 (or 10 years after the death of the original author, whatever comes first). You fund an artist for their typical career length (if they choose to extend twice) and once they are (near) retired the song is free to work off of. In the meantime you simply negotiate if you want to use their work.

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