Zander Cannon

Everyone who thinks that taking individual author's copyrights away after a time is going to benefit the little guy is living in a dreamworld. /end

It will be Target stealing artists' work off of their tiny sites for their spring line and not even having to worry about that little lawsuit.

The most profitable music, art, film, etc. is going to be barely-altered mashups of popular stuff blasted out as fast as humanly possible. It will be huge corporations making new versions of that stuff, and enriching CEOs.

Something of that scope is now out of the reach of a small band. That's too bad, I agree. However, you take away legacy artists' ability to enforce their copyright and this is what happens:

Yes, I loved Paul's Boutique too. Yes, I'm sad that you (supposedly) can't make music like that anymore because the samples are too expensive. But are we really saying that the creators of those samples don't deserve a chunk of that money?

Why would anyone want to deprive their favorite authors and artists and filmmakers and cartoonists and musicians a living just so they could get something for free instead of $16.95?

Nothing I make is a huge hit. But all of them taken together, on a long enough timeline, there's honest money to be made for someone who wants to tell stories and draw pictures and make people happy.

I don't have a retirement. I have work that I've done that generates money for me, and for the publishers that took a chance on me.

I've been a freelance illustrator and author for 28 years, my entire adult life. What kind of 401K do you think I have?

But authors deserve to make money on their work their whole life. Maybe their heirs too. No one benefits from this kind of crap take except bottom-of-the-barrel publishers and Google.

I know there are archival reasons and cases to be made for letting things be freely available so that they can be curated by professionals, but the takes I generally see are just that people want shit for free.

And why are people so hot to get things into the public domain? You want to publish something popular? Pay the artist. You want to write derivative works? License it or scratch off the serial numbers and do your own.

Individual authors are never the ones abusing the copyright system. Take shots at Disney or Warner Brothers extending their stranglehold over a century before you decide some poor son of a bitch can't make a nickel in their retirement.

Every creator owned work is a gamble that it's going to bear fruit sometime, sometimes right away, usually when there's renewed interest due to nostalgia. If you think that happens and pays off within 30 years, you're dreaming.

I'm not even fifty and my first creator owned work is almost thirty. Do you think that I've earned enough money that I would just shrug at someone republishing my work or turning it into a movie and not paying me? (I have not).

You could make a case for lifetime of the author (though I think that has sinister implications for people who want to get at famous authors' works) but thirty? Jesus Christ, get serious.

This is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever readhttps://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1367091002561998848 …