One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …
As… Opposed to now?
If Disney does plagiarize small artists’ work, and becomes known for it, they take a reputation hit, and the artist gets an explosion of exposure, as long as it is provable he made the original story. (Disney making million-dollar budget movies of your OC, isn’t even that bad for you, to be honest, but let’s assume that it doesn’t market the fuck out of your small artist story. In real life, stories are not in competition.)
If Disney doesn’t, then it’s an undeniable positive for worldwide creativity.
The only thing copyright protects, is big companies’ exclusive right to public-consciousness characters.
As opposed to now where the original artist/author at least has some recourse against the big corporation. Versus none.
Why would the artist get an explosion of exposure when Disney’s edition of the book was significantly more widely publicised, so everybody who might be interested in it already bought it from Disney.
The literal best case scenario here is that you have equal marketing, in which case Disney gets 50% of the sales and you get 50% of the sales. In what world is cutting your potential revenue in half a win for creators?
A “truly small” creator, would get , I dunno, let’s say 5% of Disney’s marketed sales, after being stolen from, from being known as the guy Disney stole from. Which would be enormously more than if he only had his “truly small” marketing.
A more successful and known creator, who would market himself more broadly on his own, would not be easy to steal from, since it would be quick enough for the stealing to be found out, to dampen Disney sales.
And all this, ignores the paradigm shift in monetisation (Uniquenameosaurus YouTube video), that could enhance this process immensely, and allow artist creativity to flourish even more, without even leaving the diseased economical rules of capitalism.
and irrelevant little aside
Also about this,
Guns give some recourse to poor people, against the rich, because anyone could use a gun.
Guns allow the rich to equip their personal security teams, with guns.
Guns are not helping the poor, and neither does copyright.
you’re now sitting here justifying paying artists in exposure?
disney doesn’t avoid breaching copyright in our world because of the threat of being found out. they avoid breaching copyright because they’d be sued.