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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.
Interesting idea. I wonder how long it will take before a secondary market forms to buy/sell these vouchers. Since the cost of vouncher to the owner is less than voucher's benefit to the artist, there is opportunity for the sale of voucher rights. For example, an artist might pay $10 (up to $99 if the artist is in a 0% tax bracket) to people to sign their $100 voucher over them. The voucher owner gets cash and a tax break, the "artist" gets $100 minus what they paid to buy the vouncher.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"In exchange for receiving AFV support, creative workers would be ineligible for copyright protection for a significant period of time (e.g. five years)"
Though I am a strong advoate of copyright/patent reform myself, that does not mean copyright is useless. Without copyright Microsoft could take GPL'ed code, slap it in their software and sell it. 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.) The point is, abolishing copyright altogether is going to solve very few problems. Copyright needs to be a tool for society as a whole.
Vouchers? I'm not sure if I can use any adjectives to describe this without a lot of %&#@! To put it bluntly this idea is just dumb. If I want to be a n artist I shouldn't have to register with the government to get re-imbersed. "Sorry Mr. John Doe, but your song 'Fuck Bush' disqualify's you from recieving vouchers." Hell, forget censorship, perhaps the makers of GTA3 will just be ineligable for vouchers.
$40k a year? Music, ok, but movies? With budgets in the hundreds of millions whose going to be getting all that capital? What a mess.
Lets take a step away rather than a step toward becoming more dependant on government.
Agreed!
This really would just create a "buddy system" where everyone registered with the feds and everyone exchanges with their friend.
We live in a demand-based economy. Demand is measured with money. It's really hard to determine the demand for something creative with money, because it's not exclusive property. It's not worth $1M to me to develop some some software to use, but it's worth $1 to 1M people to have the software available.
The solution to me seems to be large groups supporting the system by agreement and pledges. Some people equate this like a government with taxes, but I don't think that's the right approach. The problem with that approach is that the powers we've conceded to the government were designed to protect us against more substantial harm, like someone stealing from us or hurting us physically.
Maybe the copyright idea will work, but we need to organize into large groups. Maybe the techies organize a software group that develops software, and anyone inside the group has copyright, but has to apy a yearly fee. No legislative changes, just citizens acting in an organized way.
We don't want to get the government involved with laws an so forth... they will skew demand, and they have powers entirely unnecessary for this type of situation (i.e. jail time and guns aren't really appropriate for this type of situation). The government will still have to enforce the copyrights to encourage people to join these groups (and pay the fees that support, e.g. software), but it's going to be an entirely different scene, I can promise that.
U.S. citizens need to stop relying on the federal government to perform every citizen organizational function. We're free, and we need to excercize our freedom to associate. If we let the government in on this one any more, they're just going to screw it up even more.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.