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Artistic Freedom Vouchers Proposed
Corvus writes "Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written a paper proposing a system giving everyone a voucher which they could use to support the creative artist/writer/etc of their choice, as a way of avoiding the intrusiveness and inefficiency of the current copyright system." I'm sure I'd use mine on MC Chris.
Can be found here.
If he continues to blow things up in his movies.
Can I use my voucher to support myself?
I say M.C. Hawking
"E" stands for energy, yo that's me,
I'm a brilliant scientist and a dope MC.
Before you step to me I'd think twice G,
I'm the Lord of Chaos, King of Entropy.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Under this system or any other in which copyright were abolished, indeed the GPL would lose it's might. But that is a moot point since the GPL would lose it's purpose as well. In a world where everything is in the Public domain there is no longer any risk of a corporation closing it up since their derivative would also be in the public domain.
In essence this is the ultimate GPL.
...is to just monitor consumption of copyrighted works. Everyone pools 200$, and each song just gets a percentage based on its "mindshare." If, say, Madonna's music constitutes 1% of all music downloads, she gets 1% of the pool. Of course, this requires huge amounts of monitoring of popular media, but it is the only way to allow art to embrace technology.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Count me in, but here's an interesting question. I have a degree in Fine Art and a number of other experiences that I believe would qualify me for the program. What should really be the criteria for being accepted to the program?
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I really like the general idea. Capitalism works great for material goods, but it has a lot of problems for digital goods, in the face of unstoppable copying. It would be interesting to try a whole new system and see how it works. I think you could add software to this system as well as music and movies and such.
That said, I see a few problems:
- It depends on each taxpayer to be (slightly) altruistic. You have to take the trouble to remember and then designate a recipient on your tax form, but you get no direct benefit from this. What if you don't put anyone down, is the money lost? What if 75% of the people are too lazy to write down a recipient? Maybe the unassigned money goes proportially to all the artists that people did put down.
- How do you remember which artist(s) to give it to throughout the year? I predict that every album and every movie will come out in March under this system.
- How do you define a "fraudulent" registration? What if me and my buddy both register, then we each make a finger painting and give it to each other, and then we put each other down on the tax form? Who's to say that that art wasn't good enough to qualify as a "registered" artist? I think you'd have to make people pay $100 to register, to prevent this from happening.
- Do people in other countries get to copy these works? If so, then the country that implemented this system would essentially be subsidizing
listeners in other countries.
Can I give mine to Linus?
I find Schroeder to be much more worthy of an artistic voucher. Man, that kid can wail on the piano.