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.

Comments

Re:copyright != feudalism

[SkArcher]

Socialism is not much different than feudalism. A small minority (the rulling class or govt.) comtrols all the wealth, and doles out enough for the proletariat to keep them alive.

I don't know what world you come from, but on my planet, Socialism is a community supporting essential services (health care, public parks, transportation) by taxation. What you describe is Total state ownership, which is a society that is basically a C+C game from the central command. And Feudalism is again different, as it relies on a small competing group (the aristocrats) negotiating amongst themselves for power.

All of that is very simplified, but it does explain where you are wrong.

Re:I love it, but...let's be realistic

[rollingcalf]

"Without copyright I, as a painter, could post images on a message board and some 15 year old could rip it off and win some art contest with it (ok, so this has happened anyways.)"

That is plagiarism, and copyright isn't needed to protect against that. If that 15 year old copied a 200-year-old painting (i.e. copyright no longer applies), pretending it was original, he would be kicked out of the contest if the organizers were told the truth. Anybody is free to copy art, music or novels that are no longer copyrighted, but they still can't legitimately claim to be the creator.

Re:Just Wondering

[monkeyfamily]

No, the GPL would still be needed and still need copyright to back it up. Source in the public domain can be used as the basis for a closed source project with intentional incompatibilities. Imagine if MS could take the linux source, add a MS compatibility layer that breaks interoperability with regular linux apps, and then market it as Windows LX. Their fork now has a corp with billions to develop it, but the public no longer gets the advantages source access gives. Without copyright, MS can still just keep their source secret. The point of the GPL is no binaries without source available to those who want it.

Artists become 501c3s?

[WillWare]

AFAICT, this proposal is equivalent to the idea that an artist becomes a tax-exempt charity (a 501c3) provided they release their work into the public domain. The vouchers themselves don't seem pivotal to the proposal (other than to limit the amount of money that gets moved around to $100 per adult). As a taxpayer, I wouldn't feel too bad about giving artists tax-exempt status in exchange for putting their work in the public domain.

If we dispense with the vouchers and think of it as a change in the laws about what's allowed to call itself a charity. The IRS publishes some guidelines, the official rules aren't so easy to find. Currently you need to be an "organization" (so maybe artists would need to group together) and one of the allowed types is "literary", so this isn't entirely without precedent.

Would people collude with their friends, and declare themselves artists, cheating the system with 5-minute finger-painting exercises done in macaroni and cheese? This kind of thing doesn't happen very much now with ordinary charities. That might mean that the government would insist on some criterion of artistic quality before giving out tax-exempt status. In any event it's an interesting idea.