Copyright and intellectual property exist because we've decided as a society that we want people to spend serious time and energy making these worthwhile things. Absent protections, the upfront investment of time and effort aren't worth it. If one cannot control the use of one's original works, only the wealthy can afford to chase that sense of accomplishment.
I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).
On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. And congrats! I've written several novels, mostly for fun, but even if I wanted to publish them now that self-publishing is such a thing: two are lost on a DOS floppy, one is lost on a Zip drive, and one is lost on a MacBook hard drive. And one is still around in hardcopy form, but I'd never be able to re-type it without getting sucked into editing it.
If you're willing to share, do you have a sense of how your income balances between newer and older works?
Plagiarism done for profiting from book sales is a symptom of copyright in this form (punishment over monetary loss, not lack of attribution).
Having consumers of the artworks (if they aren't commissioned) donate to the author along with severe enforcement of attribution requirements (especially bans on claiming other's work as one's own, so the donations wouldn't go to the plagiarizer), doesn't require bans on copying/reproduction.
Yes, it would change what art gets the funding: e.g. less Marvel Avengers (dominated by casual consumers), more art house cinema (say, something like "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri").
Less autotune'd popstars, more "Nirvana"/"Taylor Swift"/"Marina and the Diamonds".
But in the realm of the "useful arts ", we're talking more about commissioned works, be it the way an architect is commissioned by a bank that needs a new HQ, or be it the way a fan base causes so many sales of the new Final Fantasy that the creators make a sequel (the commissioning tactic would be one exhibited by, for example, "Dropkick on My Devil! X" (the third season of a splatter (in the way Doom is) comedy anime, which reached its crowdfunding goal in 33 hours)).
I strongly believe that for useful arts, like, say, engineering reference books and ISO standard documents, crowdfunding could sufficiently cover cost of creation, using for example selling of voting power in the ISO standard creation process for individual standards as the incentive to coax industry into paying up-front instead of afterwards for their paper/digital copies.
Or have that industry's guild/association sponsor the standard writing.
After all, IETF RFCs prove that standards don't need to be paywalled to continuously be created.
I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).
On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.