Hacker News Reader

Comment by Caracas288 | Hacker News Reader

Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money. It is not a 'job' where effort goes in and product comes out. It's more like a religious calling, they often have no other option. That's true, but it's also the reason people are paid less than their technical peers.

It is difficult in the current climate to prevent industrial actors from cultivating genetic lines instantiated by Artists in Art. In a different future, the seperation between small and large-scale genetic agriculture would be recognised, and the abolition of copyright may proceed.

In a world where money is devalued, genetic lines and mental constituency will become even more powerful.

See: the mental constituency of sci-fi books in E. Musk's brain

View on HN

>> Author: I spent six months writing this story.

> Authors and artists are not (and souldn't be) making Art for money.

Hmm...

> Author: I spent some years researching a topic to write a book about it.

Authors don't just make art.

Neither do Inventors, which arguably make much more contributions to society, yet their work is only protected for 20 years tops.

What excuse do artists have?

As with academics, inventors and artists should be paid for their labour long-term, not for their result.

Not sure if you really mean it, but you're kind of making the argument that a person that mindlessly shovels dirt from one hole to another in a circle should be paid. People are paid for the result, not for their labor.

Not at all. You're presuming that nobody can be taken off this hypothetical salary once they're on it, and that they would be placed on it indiscriminately.

Simple safeguards are already in practice in today's economy to prevent such circumstances.

Academics don't collect any royalties, they're paid prior to publication, not for selling copies of books.

Yes they do. As a kid our (admittedly not particularly lavish) family summer holiday was paid for each year by the modest royalties my father, an academic, received from a couple of academic textbooks he had authored.

Right, that was worded too universally, but this is what I mean: royalties here are supplementary to a salary, not a wage in themselves. The research was funded before publication.

I'm using "research" broadly. People can privately research and publish under whatever arrangement they wish. Academics too. For those that sell their copyright, that would be valued based on projections of what the copyright buyer expects to sell. For those whose research was funded by the copyright buyer prior to writing because they didn't want to bear the risk or lacked the funds, that's going to be less, but everything stems from how the books are expected to sell.

I think there are better funding models than the precarity of copyright-dependent publishing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com