16 Nov
2011
16 Nov
'11
11:35 a.m.
On 11/16/2011 10:57 AM, Louigi Verona wrote:
"In a capitalistic society, it should be possible
to earn money by
investing your time and effort in producing things people need/want.
People being paid for their time and effort directly may be preferable.
There's still a need/use for copyright to protect the outcome, to allow
the investment to be made beforehand. This way, payment can depend on
the quality of the outcome."
So basically what you are saying is that in your view copyright is
something that will motivate people to create things and that without
it people are less likely to do things.
That's not what I said, as I did not say anything about motivation, for one.
It is not a bad argument in itself as long as we speak
about work for
hire. Culture is a different phenomena which cannot be limited to a
collection of works for hire. This is why I do not believe this argument
works when we speak about culture.
You cannot separate culture from money in any money-using society.
Does it work when we speak about a caste of
professional creative
people? It does, definitely. But is the caste of professional creative
people so desirable to society? This is another question we can discuss.
As long as people have to earn money for a living, combined with the
tendency to require a huge amount of time at that, the question is then
if people being able to invest a majority of their time, effort and
skill in creative endeavors is desirable.
I'm not a fan of capitalism and even less so of long work-days, but it's
hard to even think of a better system that takes human nature into
account, to not even speak of establishing one.
--
Thorsten Wilms
thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/