Posts by Matthew Poole
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Yes, Matthew, the right to inherit is unique to artists.
Oh, very good.
To summarise the points presented thus far: The families of artists who earn very little from their work are more important than the families of other low-income earners, and this justifies the imposition of a statutory monopoly on an expression, far in excess of a human lifetime. That about right?
Consider that the House of Lords decided a couple of centuries ago that copyright isn't a natural right.
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If I run a business and die, my next-of-kin inherit my business, which might be worth quite a bit of money.
And if you're a wage slave your family gets nothing. The business is also only worth something if it's kept running. It's either a once-off gain (possibly with a short-to-medium term income stream if there's goodwill) from its sale, or there's an ongoing commitment by the family to keep it running. They don't get something for nothing for decades to come.
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Accident and emergency doctors today call for the banning of long, sharp kitchen knives, arguing they account for at least half of all stabbings...
Knives "of less than 5cm [2ins] in length" or with blunt, round ends would meet culinary needs and be far less likely to result in fatalities.So we'd see a rise in slashings, rather than stabbings? Coz you simply cannot prepare food with a blunt knife. Fine, points may or may not be necessary (I'm insufficiently culinarily-inclined to really comment for certain on that point *har har*), but I do know that you can't slice tomatoes or dice onions worth a damn if the knife's edge more-closely resembles a spoon.
People will make weapons of whatever's at hand, and it's also a totally trivial exercise to put a point onto a blunt-tipped knife, by way of five minutes with a bench grinder, or a bit more application of a piece of concrete or a sharpening stone.
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If you were the partner of a writer/artist etc, and that person died, you sure have the rights to collect income from their work, in much the same way that you might inherit their superannuation asset etc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the right to a person's national superannuation die with them in this country? I'm pretty sure it's not a transferable income stream.
Artists die with young children and partners left behind like anyone else.
Yes, but we no longer live in a world where every job comes with a super scheme. KiwiSaver isn't exactly within reach for low-income earners, especially if they have families, since every cent they earn is going on just keeping up with basic cost-of-living issues.
So you're saying that artists' families should be somehow afforded a right that is available to nobody else? -
And, uh, 20 years? That's widows and orphans territory, to be honest. It's the 50 years copyright that's a stretch, not the life + 20.
Once upon a time, copyright was for 14 years, plus a further 14. Like him or loathe him, Dickens wrote under those terms. Twain wrote with a term of just over 40 years. Two of the most-recognised writers in the Western world did it with the knowledge that they may well live to see their works pass into the public domain.
Pardon me if I cry "boo fucking hoo" to your "widows and orphans". If I'm working a minimum wage job and raising a family, and I die tomorrow, they're out on their own. They'll get the same state support as anyone else, but they've no entitlement to an income stream from my employer. Yet again, I'm left to ask why are artists so much more special than anyone else?
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You might want to justify why copyright is supposed to be an incentive scheme, as opposed to a recognition of an artist's inherent right to control their work.
If it's about artists' control, why is it a "lifetime-plus" term? Generally, once a person dies they cease caring about what's happening to things they did or created while they were alive.
The only way you can justify terms that extend beyond life is if it's about money, because ego and dignity die with the creator. So we're back to the titular economic justification.
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Rich, the argument espoused to justify copyright is that if there's no money in it people won't create. I'm calling bullshit. You'll point to a Mozart, who had a rich patron (but still got shafted in the end). I'll point to a Van Gough, who survived on his brother's charity, and it's only now, long after his death, that his works change hands for sums that could pay off the national debt of a small African nation.
I'll also point to Linux, and the BSDs, industrial-quality software that's primarily produced by people who do it for love, not money. For the money-is-required-to-encourage-creation argument to hold water, that software wouldn't exist. But it does, and even though there are not-insignificant numbers of contributors to those projects who do it for their employment (Linus, Theo, the primary driver of FreeBSD's security framework, to name three) there are many more who contribute code for which they've never been paid a cent. They write it because they enjoy writing code.
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It's actually the very, very successful that gain the most from touring -- hence Madonna signing a record deal with a concert promoter when her Warner contract expired.
Oh, of course. The bigger you are, the greater the base of fans willing to pay to see you perform and the higher the ticket price that can be commanded. But that doesn't change the fact that minor artists get utterly shat upon with albums and make their money from touring. I assume you're familiar with Steve Albini's exploration of record company accounting?
Copyright is very important to smaller artists, if they write songs. Rights fees and other publishing receipts are what keep many NZ artists going. Retail sales, not so much.
Sure, but that doesn't justify locking up their works for 100 years or more. Again, I'm not against copyright, or against creators getting paid. What I am against is society being deprived of access to make free derived works from something that was produced by a person who's been dead for 20 years, or from, say, a book that hasn't been through a printing run for three decades. The author ain't making a damn cent from those things, but nobody else is allowed to take those works and derive from them. That's a really fucking perverse take on the ostensible incentive to create that justifies copyright's existence.
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You could equally argue that taking police of criminal investigative duties and putting them on street beats (something a lot of crime nuts would be in favour of) reduces dedicated criminal investigation, in favour of general policing.
Only if you actually take CIB staff and stick them back on general duties. If you take GD staff out of cars and put them back on foot, the increased visibility has an effect on crime. Auckland City noticed this when foot patrols were brought back in the CBD at night, and when Newmarket got back NMB (Newmarket beat patrol) as well as the vehicle-based patrols. Plods on foot are seen, and can readily interact with people passing by. Vehicles are impersonal, reduce visibility, and lower interaction. There's a place for both forms of patrolling, it's not an either/or equation.
I'm also not so sure that crime nuts would agree that taking CIB off investigation would be a good thing. Possibly the thoroughly stupid would think so, but anyone with half a brain and an ounce of reasoning ability would realise that unless you catch people in the act (and even if there was a police car on every street there would still be crimes that went undiscovered until the offenders were long gone) you need someone to do the work in tracking them down.
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Keir, how many had that lifestyle from their work, and how many because they came from families with lots of money?
The Statute of Anne, which is generally regarded as the advent of modern copyright law, didn't come into being until 1709. It also only covered printed works, so "the artists whose names we know" weren't even covered by copyright at that point. Mozart and Beethoven both composed without any significant copyright protection. The great Italian painters and sculptors all did their thing without any legal protection against having their work copied. They created for the creation, not for some notional belief that their work would afford them an income for life. Once they stopped creating, the money stopped flowing. They couldn't produce one good work and be done with it. Even authors, who were the original protectees of the SoA, had to keep writing if they wanted the money to keep coming in in their later years.
Even then, as (effectively) a solo mother raising two children, she was never making enough from her writing to give up work.
She's hardly alone. Janis Ian, of whom I'd never heard before I first read that article several years ago, has been a musician for decades. "[I]n 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money." For musicians, except the very, very successful, the money doesn't come from albums, or lyrics, or music. It comes from touring. Getting out there in front of the fans. Ridiculous term durations don't help that situation.