• masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    UBI is a separate concern from copyright being a dumb way of rewarding intellectual property.

    1. Everyone should get UBI to reduce poverty and houselessness.

    2. And separately, artists should get paid for their work, when it’s valuable, regardless of whether or not UBI is in place.

    • And sometimes that value is immediately recognized at the time by the masses and can be measured in clicks and streams.

    • Sometimes it’s only recognized by professional contemporaries and critics in how it influences the industry.

    • Sometimes it’s not recognized until long after them and their contemporaries are dead.

    • Given computers and the internet, there is no technical reason that every single individual on the planet couldn’t have access to all digital art at all times.

    All of these things can be true, and their sum total makes copyright look like an asinine system for rewarding artists. It’s literally spending billions of dollars and countless countless useless hours in business deals, legal arguments, and software drm and walled gardens, all just to create a system of artificial scarcity, when all of those billions could instead be paying people to do literally anything else, including producing art.

    Hell, paying all those lawyers 80k a year to produce shitty art and live a comfortable life would be a better use of societal resources then paying them 280k a year to deprive people of access to it.