I’ve seen some pretty ridiculous patents too, especially software patents. You never know if some of the clever tricks you think up while programming are actually someone’s property. It’d be like if someone patented using a stick as a pretend sword and then went around suing every young boy who one day finds a stick and “steals” this use of it.

That said, you’ve got me wondering. I suspect many artists would be glad to give up some of their IP rights in return for patronage. You know anybody who’d like to pay me to write my novel, whether it sells or not? Because I’d consider giving up the copyright to it for a house for me and my family, dinners at the castle with some regularity, and a personal squire for the rest of my life.

I fundamentally believe that when people are economically motivated to code software, make sculptures, paint portraits, write books, and play guitar, society is better off. That does mean giving artists a temporary monopoly over their works, but I think that should not be a dirty word here since they came up with the thing we’re talking about in the first place. It is theirs, not yours, mine, or your noble farmer’s, just as the potatoes he grew are his, not yours or mine.

And when artists aren’t compensated — when they are told that their work is freely distributable the second they set it down to paper (or tape, or hard drive, or whatever) — society is worse off.

I fundamentally reject the idea that the output of artists is everyone’s, to do with what they will. If you value art, you should too. Relying on the creators to keep doing what they do out of the goodness of their hearts is asinine, and telling them to do it at the point of a gun (which is exactly what you will find at the bottom of Marx’s slippery slope) is evil.

A better argument, I think, is over how long the monopoly we acknowledge artists should have should be. And you’d be surprised where I fall on that — for software, for instance it should be a fraction of what it is (right now, software is so obsolete by the time that it enters the public domain that it has literally no residual value). I don’t even think books, music, and movies should be protected as long as they are. Not by half.

But when you come in saying that based on the fact that it’s easy to copy the book that I am right now spending 10 hours a day writing, everyone should be able to make a free copy, and change whatever they want, and publish it with their own name on the cover, I have to figure we’ve got very little to talk about.