I think that it's very important to make a distinction in this discussion between art that can easily be copied and art that can not.
Art that can not easily be copied has no problem at all. If no-one wants to pay for your paintings, no amount of copyright protection is going to help you. The only area where there is a possible problem is with products that can easily be copied.
The question society has to ask itself: will that type of art (the easily copyable one) still be created in the absence of copyright? If the answer to that question is yes, then society has no reason to maintain copyright law.
Personally, I think the answer is yes. One look at the open-source community shows this quite well.
But even if the answer would be no, what's the benefit for society of protecting works of artists that have been dead for 70 years?
Are you familiar with this book?
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/i ... tfinal.htm
Evnissyen wrote:
If we're going the patronage system: we'd have to go back to talking about Communism... or at least to establish an enormous system where the government pays artists to be artists... which would -- let's face it -- cost a brutally excessive amount of money, and probably face abuse.
You must be American. That's the only people that think that anything that is not 100% pure capitalist has to be evil communism...
Here in the Netherlands (not a communist country by any measure) there are plenty of grants for artists. Building code even specifies that at least a certain percentage of the cost of any significant building has to be spent on art.
I don't see how that setup is a problem. It does not generate abuse. It does not generate brutally excessive costs. It does generate art. And since that art is publicly funded, I think it should be freely available to everyone.
Evnissyen wrote:
(I'm an artist myself (trained painter (and, yes, I can draw, ahem) as well as a writer, so I, like every other artist on these forums, can attest to the fact that our human nature is no different from anyone else's human nature. We take what we can get. When we see an advantage we take it. We all need to survive, and if we're surviving and making a little extra: we want things. It's only natural.)
And once the basic needs are met, we want to spend time doing things we like. And there are lots of people who like creating things. It's fun. No special protection needed.
Evnissyen wrote:
The Arts enrich the mind and senses; they do not make a person healthier or safer.
Citation needed. A healthy mind in a healthy body. Have you ever visited an average iron-curtain industrial city? They're
depressing. The total absence of beauty
is bad for your (mental) health. And a problematic mental health does have a very real effect on ones physical health.
So it is the job of the government to supply a (mentally) healthy public space. That includes art. And I think that locking away art with lots of laws is not the way to get art to the people.