Comment by Pet_Ant
5 hours ago
> - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,
That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.
The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
All are workable, but with their own tradeoffs.
You could have a system that limits sale of IP to clearly defined capitalization, I.E. instead of "You own this IP for 20 years and get x% of profits in return for funding/publishing and giving my y% of profits" it could be "In return for funding/publishing in the next 5 years, you get x% of profits and I get y% of profits, but I still own my IP and your rights expire after a short period of not publishing.
AFAIK that's actually standard for writers: publishers usually license the IP for a period for a prescribed royalty blend and for publishing, and after a certain amount of time or if they don't publish the rights revert, and international/audio/digital rights are negotiated separately.
There's an argument for "What if I don't want to deal with capitalizing on this whatsoever and just want to sell it for a cash payment now because I literally don't want that to be my job," but even then there should probably be a minimum royalty along with the lump sum to protect against exploitation.
>That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.
It should.
>Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made.
So be it.
>The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
Sounds amazing.
We don't need to go with the default vanilla options that are passed as inevitable...
>> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.
> It should.
Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income.
Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.
Why shouldn’t a band be permitted to do something similar, getting money now in exchange for future income and, at the same time, transferring the risk of their future product being a flop to a third party?
The other replies are good.
The general principle is inverting who has power. It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money whose primary business of redistributing money and taking a cut.
If they are allowed to ask for something, they will and because they have more power, they are able to pressure people into unfavorable deals. They don't need your band, there's plenty of others who will take the deal. But you need their money or someone else's but that somebody else will offer similar terms, unless those exploitative terms are illegal because people united against parasitism.