> If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.
This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.
You're missing my point: copyright is not an effective solution to the problem. We all wish it were, because it has so many terrible side effects, but it's just not very good at getting artists paid, whether that be art, music, or literature.
What a great question! There is no complete answer, but I've been studying this for years. My position often comes off as anti-artist, because folks combine "I want artists to get paid" with "Copyright should be respected": this is a cognitive error: wanting to solve a problem is different than advocating for a particular solution. I'm particularly prone to criticizing solutions that have proven ineffective.
But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air".
In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that.
William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as:
> Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work.
Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as:
> The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future.
This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.