Lifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.
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https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html
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If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software).
> If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree.
> Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time.
> Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
Is anyone arguing otherwise?
Maybe selling books? Maybe other jobs? The same way that they made money for thousands of years before copyright, really. Books and other arts did exist before copyright!
> and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
I don't think it's really a matter of if people will pay them. If their art is good, of course people will pay them. People feel good about paying for an original piece of art.
The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
We didn't have modern novelists a thousand years ago. We didn't have mass production until ~500 years ago, and copyright came in in the 1700's. We didn't have mass produced pulp fiction like we do today until the 20th century. There is little copyright-less historical precedent to refer to here, even if we carve out the few hundred years between the printing press and copyright, it's not as though everyone was mass consuming novels, the literacy rate was abysmal. I wonder what artist yearns for the 1650s.
> If their art is good, of course people will pay them.
You say this as if it were a fact, but that's not axiomatic. Once the first copy is in the wild it's fair game for anyone to copy it as they will. Who is paying them? Should the artists return to the days of needing a wealthy patron? Is patreon the answer to all of our problems?
> Maybe selling books?
But how? To who? A publishing house isn't going to pick them up, knowing that any other publishing house can start selling the same book the minute it shows to be popular, and if you're self publishing and you're starting to make good numbers then the publishing houses can eat you alive.
> The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
No, the question is if ordinary people could make a living off their novels without copyright. It's very hard today, but not impossible. Without copyright it wouldn't be.