I agree that copyright and especially patent law is ridiculous these days and that the government propping up the music industry is wrong.
But my wider point was that the reason they capture so much value is because they're businessmen, that's what they do. It's not that society chose to pay them 80% or whatever, it's that they figured out how to make that money. If we kick out the foundations, the major labels, dinosaurs that they are, will crash and burn, but this won't lead to artists reaping the rewards, it will lead to new businessmen who spring up to figure out how to extract value from the new status quo.
All of this is to say that I don't think it's effective to measure what percentage artists end up as a proxy for the quality of the law. There are just too many ways to game that, and you know who's going to come out on top. Rather I think the original principles of copyrights need to be revisitied, and we consider only the maximum benefit to society, with the simple goal of having a richer culture. The question of "incentive" to create is especially slippery since it can never be tested, and the full-time lobbyists are all on the big content side. But the real problem is that the law is woefully out of date with regard to the ease of copying bits, and the value of a remix culture.
But my wider point was that the reason they capture so much value is because they're businessmen, that's what they do. It's not that society chose to pay them 80% or whatever, it's that they figured out how to make that money. If we kick out the foundations, the major labels, dinosaurs that they are, will crash and burn, but this won't lead to artists reaping the rewards, it will lead to new businessmen who spring up to figure out how to extract value from the new status quo.
All of this is to say that I don't think it's effective to measure what percentage artists end up as a proxy for the quality of the law. There are just too many ways to game that, and you know who's going to come out on top. Rather I think the original principles of copyrights need to be revisitied, and we consider only the maximum benefit to society, with the simple goal of having a richer culture. The question of "incentive" to create is especially slippery since it can never be tested, and the full-time lobbyists are all on the big content side. But the real problem is that the law is woefully out of date with regard to the ease of copying bits, and the value of a remix culture.