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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.
"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.