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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.
My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.
One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.
Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.
I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.
Porn is probably the most pirated visual work that I'm aware of and I've noticed that one of the responses by the people who make it is to move their business model away from restricting access indefinitely to producing custom/bespoke pieces at a relatively high one-off price to compensate for cases where it immediately gets proliferated without further gain for themselves. If someone pays them to make the clip and then shares it with others it's OK because the producer has been rewarded in full at the point of sale. This is roughly equivalent to a piece of art being bought or commissioned and paid for in full by a museum or gallery, who put it on public display and make digital copies available for people to make their own prints from.
From an artist's POV this is much simpler and more economical than trying to gather royalties on an ongoing basis and enforce copyright to create false scarcity.
In my solarpunk future though, I will be an artist whose basic needs are met by machines and nature and who receives a universal basic income which I can give away to other artisans as a way to say thanks and to encourage them.
@Churbleyimyam
Cory Doctorow calls it "The Bitchin' Society" and Ian M Banks calls it "The Culture". Maybe someday.
@Tiresia @solarpunk
I don't remember where I first heard this, but "works of art are never finished, merely abandoned."
Every creator always has things that they would continue to tweak or adjust about their works, stopping only when they get distracted or are faced with a hard deadline.
I know some artists and it's quite rare to see them finish stuff on time. Many just don't finish stuff at all.
Fact is that clients feel entitled to results, so they create pressure, which is the most counter productive thing you can do for creativity, since it needs to be free and open. Add to that a splash of mental health issues and perfectionism and there you go.
Artists also tend to be good at a lot of stuff so they are constantly asked by people to do stuff. They're constantly busy solving other people's problems. They're valuable people in society but often are quite miserable from stress and poor.
There's more to it than that but it gives you an idea why artists hate clients.
https://search.creativecommons.org/