Yes, we know who the painters were, however most made little money until after they died. For example...Van Gogh wasn’t even famous until after he died, and his brother THEO s wife held a showing of his work, and now his paintings sell for millions.
Van Gogh was a starving artist, who had mental issues and could have used some money. Did he really commit suicide in that field? Well now they don’t know for sure....
This is not the era of Impressionists, who had the benefit of the Paris Salon, and some like the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt (not always included in their ranks 1844-1926) was from a well to do family in Pittsburg. The Artists had the Paris Salon, which was a major factor in exposure and their later success. Many came from wealthy families and benefactors.
No, there wasn’t chaos in colonial times because people were more sophisticated, civil, and decent. And you could make a contract with a handshake....now they all lie, steal, and plagiarize just to get in politics or make money off someone else’s creation or ingenuity.
The new conglomerates steal royalties of authors like on Amazon. And then put their headquarters in Luxenburg and don’t pay their taxes, so suing them is an international issue and too expensive. I don’t know her, but Vaughn has proof of her losses on her website, as do many others.
Royalties and pricing was what the Hatchett vs Amazon dispute was really about. Artists are interested in creating and not having to defend their work from the lazy people, who have no real ideas.
There are plenty of multiple manufacturing companies of what were once magnificent pieces of art, pottery, or writings...no longer of any real value after being changed several times. Oh the original is of value, but the interest wanes the more you see it....or read it in other forms.
Copyright keeps the majority of people honest, there will always be the copycats in a lesser form. Distortion ruins creation.
Once a new piece has flooded the market and becomes ‘mundane multiples’ with no character left.... it is no longer ‘unique’. I like originals in art, clothes, furniture, and books.
The only reason people want ‘no copyright law’ is because free stuff is their due...it’s the entitlement mentality of our age. Those people ruin everything they get their hands on because creativity cannot live in minds that are filthy, greedy and lazy.
More important to some are increases in perversity and immorality. We create something innocent and the disgusting change it into something we no longer want our name attached to, so if there is no recourse like copyright law to sue, and get it removed from the market...the artist is forever associated with its creation over the distortion. For Christian works that expressed a God ordained purpose, this distorting is blasphemy.
Patents/copyrights that are technology or social have been under attack as everyone wants a place to start...however the original idea has the right to exist in it’s own inspired form. Altered ideas that were copyrighted and stolen....
Facebook is a good example, because Zuckerburg was not the one with the idea, he stole it, while working for those guys and cut them out of it. Those twins were busy with sports and commitments. He has made not millions but billions on someone else’s project in college. I can’t think of a better reason to copyright, or patent an idea, product, or creation than that one.
GREED is a national past time in America now. I believe the loss of real creation talent would be the consequence of ending copyright or patent laws.
You’re still arguing with some absent or hypothetical advocate of abolishing copyright. Does anything you wrote in any way argue for the current regime against the alternative I propose of returning to the terms of copyright which prevailed during the colonial and Federal eras?
Van Gogh? He was a starving artist not for lack of copyright laws, but because not enough people were willing to buy his paintings. Both the Netherlands and France (where he lived from 1886 until his death) were party to the 1886 Berne Convention that inflicted life-of-the-artist-plus-50-years copyright on the world.
John Dowland, in copyright-free Elizabethan England made a living as a singer-songwriter. Albrecht Durer made a living selling prints in the copyright-free and legally chaotic Germany of the “Holy Roman Empire”, and as I noted successfully defended his brand against copyists fraudulently selling “Durer prints”.
A lot of what you write about publishers appropriating royalties from actual authors and artists, actually supports my position that copyright extension should be a right of the original artist or author, not a second-party “rightsholder”. Most of the distortions of copyright law have been created because we have allowed the exclusive rights to works which the Constitution specifies Congress may grant to authors and inventors to themselves become “property”, a commodity which the author or inventor can sell. Outside this thread, in the real world, the most forceful advocates of lengthened copyright terms, suppression of derivative works and everything I’m actually arguing against are not artists, but the very sort of conglomerates you are suggesting copyright protects artist from — the RIAA puts a lot of effort into making sure music publishers get paid, but not very much making sure actual musicians and composers get paid, so that actual musicians and composers often have to sue their RIAA-corporate-member publishers to get their money.
Again, stop arguing against a position no one is taking, or if I’ve been inattentive and there is someone on the thread, unknown to me, advocating the abolition of copyright, post your replies to him, not to me.