A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation.
Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?
Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly.
The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain?
That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright...
[Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]
That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
That's pretty easy - the return for the creator is higher with copyright than without. Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop (outside of some niches --- software is maybe a limited counterexample, with licences like the GPL demonstrating what might happen if copyright did not exist). Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent.
Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation-giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading.
Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent.
There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter.
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation-giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading.
Indeed, and plenty of artists nowadays (both big and small) have experimented to a certain degree with this model. It has its benefits and downsides but largely your argument is not particularly relevant to the topic of the article: the question is not 'Would content creators be better off without copyright?', it is 'Would society be better off without copyright?' The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else; there is little incentive for them to support changing the current system which gives them an essentially unlimited monopoly on their work. The article is merely meant to outline some ways in which creators could get their fixed costs covered without copyright.
There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter.
Why is this a problem? Modern popular culture demonstrates pretty conclusively that most people have no problem with works that are essentially derivative..
The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else
I don't think economics works the way you think it does. You just removed not only the incentive to make a better (but more expensive to produce) work but also the financial incentive to create any work at all.
Why is this a problem?
Why is it a problem to replace a system that supports the creation of original, innovative works with a system that pushes heavily toward creating endless derivative works and minor variations of the same tired ideas? Are you really asking that question seriously?
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
From the Mark Lemley paper quoted elsewhere on this page:
Economic theory offers no justification for
awarding creators anything beyond what is necessary to recover their average fixed costs.
I think I'm fairly happy putting my faith in him knowing how economics works.
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
Do you think Notch would have problems raising funding on Kickstarter? How about Quentin Tarantino? How about Amanda Palmer, of the Dresden Dolls? How about the XX? Stuff which has a cult following seems to fare well under the patronage model.
Most of the really high budget stuff turns out to be fairly derivative. There are exceptions, but they're rare.
>You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?
I'll grant you that the phrasing of the 'myths' on the site is more absolute than is generally used by copyright proponents, but the arguments are extremely common with minor qualifiers, e.g. that free sharing causes an extraordinarily large (albeit not 100%) reduction in the amount that people spend on entertainment (see generally http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...), and (most importantly) the counterarguments still apply to the less absolute versions of the argument more commonly encountered in the wild.
>If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
There is an extent to which we are. See: YouTube, github, etc.
But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.
More than that, a large part of the benefit of not having copyright accrues to content consumers rather than producers. The argument is that the benefit consumers gain exceeds the benefit producers lose, i.e. that no copyright is only slightly worse for producers and vastly better for consumers, and the benefit producers lose is insufficient to significantly impact the number and quality of works produced.
That content producers can't actually be better off without copyright is of course necessarily the case for the reason you point out. If a situation arises where not having the rights granted under the copyright act is better for the content producer, the content producer can just license the rights to whoever he likes and be in the identical position as there would be with no copyright. So eliminating copyright wouldn't create any benefit for the content producer that they can't already obtain (ignoring for a moment that content producers are often simultaneously content consumers, e.g. when they produce derivative works). But that explains the lack of examples of content producers adopting non-copyright business models: They're the ones under copyright who decide whether to authorize alternative business models, but they aren't the ones who derive the bulk of the benefit from them. The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
> But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.
In addition to that, there's the fact that a lot of the benefit to creators of a lack of copyright monopolies is the increased richness of source material to draw on for inspiration of new works. Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm talking about "ripping off" existing material to make a fast buck, either. I'm talking about the fact that every creator is inspired to some extent by the works he or she consumes, but many works are not as easily accessible to the potential creators of the future, so that the inspirations that might arise after a creative person experiences a given existing work that is, unfortunately, never actually experienced by that person due to lack of legal distribution, simply never come to pass.
Then, of course, there's the fact that people have been so heavily indoctrinated by the propaganda of the copyright economy that people who have not yet made a name for themselves as creators of marketable works are convinced without any evidence apart from that indoctrination that their major problem in life is figuring out how to make money off of copyright, which to them by default involves appealing to a major distributor to publish their work. The truth of the matter, of course, is quite the opposite: the major problem in life for such a creator of marketable works is getting it into as many hands as possible. The biggest enemy of the common creative person is obscurity, not "free riders", "pirates", or whatever else people imagine would destroy their lives if not for the protectionist monopoly power of copyrights.
My experience, as a writer and programmer of mixed success, is that when people notice my work I have a difficult time stopping them from giving me money or otherwise offering me incentives to continue; when they don't notice my work, I can't get people to accept it for free. There is no hyperbole in hits. I have literally put together websites where I attempt to distribute materials for free, just because I think it's good and should be seen by more people. The result is that nobody notices for long periods of time, but then eventually people might start taking notice -- and when that happens, well, to use one recent example, someone actually tracked down one of my email addresses via intensive web searching then used PayPal to contribute money to me because they couldn't find any other way to pay me for work I had already given away to the world for free, using a license that generally mimics the conditions of a world without copyright, on a site where I specifically stated that circumstances made it legally inadvisable for me at that time to solicit any contributions for my work.
Honestly, I think the concession that people might make a little more money with copyright than without it is not only negligible, not only overcome by the unrelated benefits of a lack of restrictive copyright monopoly, but actually the opposite of how it would work in general.
In short . . .
> The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
I think -- based not only on a more comprehensive overview of the economic effects of copyright than most people ever imagine, and not only on observation of what happens when people start working with business models that do not strictly rely on copyright (e.g. Radiohead, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Google, EnterpriseDB, and so on), but also on personal experience many times over -- that even just considering the direct effects on published, financially successful creators themselves the benefits outweigh the detriments, and when you add in those who are not yet so successful those benefits only increase.
Then, as you say, there's the matter of people other than the creators themselves. Except for push-marketing middlemen and lawyers, everyone gains. The real reason we don't see as many examples of this in action as we'd like is because the people whose propaganda makes up the majority of the argument are the push-marketing middlemen.
Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?
Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly.
The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain?
That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright...
[Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]