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Subject: From fansubs to capitalist vs communist philosophy...

Author:
Dena

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Date Posted: 21:04:44 06/14/03 Sat
In reply to: D0SBoots 's message, "Wheee! More rant!" on 19:02:35 06/14/03 Sat

>China and Russia in particular are notorious for their
>rampant piracy, to the point where intellectual
>property doesn't really exist there. It will be
>interesting to see how things work out in the future,
>because of this.

And China and Russia are the two biggest communist countries on the planet -- where (if I understand correctly) creators of intellectual property don't have to be paid by the corporations they sell their items to in order to survive, because in a communist society everyone owns everything -- which means both that they have no fundamental right to their own creations AND that it doesn't matter that they don't have that fundamental right because someone will give them the leisure to keep creating by seeing to it that they're fed, housed, and provided medical care.

In a *capitalist*-based society, however, the paradigm fails. Because nobody is going to provide the artist with the money to support himself and therefore continue creating more art unless there is some reliable way of extracting money from the production of said art.

Having been a part-time artist and a full-time job-slave (^^;;;), I can testify that part-time art just doesn't get done to the standards you'd want or at the rate you'd want if you were free to dedicate your whole life to it. (And honestly, the Megatokyo point is a once in a million event -- see also the thousands and thousands of wannabe-musicians and other web artists who *can't* make their living that way.)

Given that not everyone who wants to create worthwhile art can afford to fund it themselves -- and anime costs a LOT more to produce than a webcomic -- someone's going to have to pay for it to be done. Under a communist system, everyone pays for everything and is provided everything. Under a capitalist system, it doesn't work that way.

So I think that unless the IP model stays at least remotely in synch with the economic model distributing it -- that is to say, unless people in capitalist-based economies continue following the rules of capitalism well enough to pay the artist a living wage and the cost of the art production and distribution -- the end result of a model which was out of synch (i.e. capitalist society but people treating IP as though it belongs to the communist model and therefore routinely and as a matter of course not paying the creators) will be the cessation of the production of art, because so many artists get paid so little as it is...

Did that make any sense at all? I know what I was trying to say, but I don't know if I got too lost in trying to run down multiple logical threads in one paragraph or sentence.... @_@

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Replies:

Subject	Author	Date
Dena takes up the torch! Gogogog!	Jake	10:32:09 06/15/03 Sun

Re: capitalist incentives	Adrian	21:31:06 06/15/03 Sun

Re: the concept of property	Adrian	22:00:05 06/15/03 Sun