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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts
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you can sell your work without resorting to government enforced Monopoly.
Not when work takes a large amount of time to produce the original, and very little work to produce a copy. An original and a copy of a digital artwork are identical.
if you've never seen someone sell their own creative work without the trappings of a government enforced monopoly, you should look into how any author or artist got paid before the statute of anne.
By the rich?
patronage was common. you can't think that every artist got paid by someone who is rich though.
wrong.
Monopolies are not about exclusively for one specific thing, but about scale and the availability of alternatives. It's not like you can only buy pictures or music from one artist, just that you have to buy art from the artist who made it.
Further reading for anyone interested
In a sense it is a monopoly, just a very narrow one. The first step to identifying a monopoly is identifying the relevant market, and that is quite hard to do, actually.
none of this contradicts what I said. government enforced monopolies are wrong.
The contradiction is that you imply copyright is always a government enforced monopoly. It can be, but it usually isn't, especially with art. So using it as a counter argument here makes no sense.
that's the only thing it is. it's a law that grants exclusive rights to sell. how do you think it's not in relation to art?
Exclusive rights and monopolies are not the same thing. Monopolies are about access to a category of things or services that fulfill a need, not one specific thing. E.g. Samsung has exclusive rights to sell Samsung TVs, but they don't have a monopoly on TVs, and talking about a monopoly on Samsung TVs specifically makes no sense. Similarly no one has a monopoly on landscape drawings, rock music or scifi movies, just exclusive rights to specific pieces of art or literature that they created.
As a side note, patents are a different story imo. Because overly broad patents can actually give you exclusive access to an entire category, and therefore a real monopoly. But you can't patent art.
your Samsung example is trademark. it's not copyright.
Because the example is not about copyright in particular but monopoly vs exclusive access. I wanted one that's not about art to illustrate the point, and the priciple is the same in this regard.
trademark has nothing to do with copyright. they're two sets of laws that developed a two different times for two different reasons.
So, what does that have to do with the exclusive rights vs monopoly discussion? Both give you exclusive rights, doesn't matter that they come from two different sets of laws.
trademark is a consumer protection. copyright is a fucking monopoly.
do you know how I know that you aren't a copyright lawyer?
Can you explain how government enforced monopolies intersects with the discussion here?
that's what copyright and patent are. but you don't need to use the cudgel of the law to sell your work. in fact, most times, it's an irrelevant factor.