Maybe... but there are also countless works of real merit that tread directly on other works that are no longer under copyright protection, such as myriad adaptations of Shakespeare that would likely fail in the courts if ol' Bill's works were still under the copyright protection of Shakespeare's Legacy Conglomo, Inc.
You buy a brand name- and if you’re smart- you’re going to get IP, trade secrets, trade dress, customer & client info, contacts, contracts, and more.
There’s a difference between an adaptation and a new creation based on the original IP.
There’s no such thing as “effectively unending copyright”. Longer than a typical human’s lifespan? Certainly. But every copyright eventually falls into the public domain.
Note: I am not and have never advocated for eternal copyright. Let’s not raise that straw man again, even as a preamble.
Agree completely, which is why I'm glad Funko explicitly took responsibility for issuing the takedown.
So who owns the venue? Who sells the tickets?
So who owns the manufacturing resources? Who runs the art guilds?
But the market is not free, because those at the top have the power to shut down uprisers through means other than fair market competition.
I should have been more accurate in my statement. Still best to have multiple TLDs/registrars and start looking for another domain name now given this uncertain future.
It can be argued that we'll need to fall back on trademarks and design patents as copyright will effectively be rendered obsolete at the rate AI can generate content. That said, it's only a matter of time before courts rule that content generated by AI exclusively fed and trained on the content you own are protected by copyright. In fact they're likely to rule that simply using work your own rather than random noise will suffice, as it's effectively just applying a filter to it.
Well since at least 1980 copyrights have been pretty hostile to the public at large so the pendulum tends to swing both ways if you wait long enough.
I'd say my need for professional musicians is much, much lower than the number who want to be professional musicians which is always going to push the earnings of professional musicians down. And sadly what level of professionalism I personally need is much lower than I think professionals on artistic arenas think it should be. I've fairly routinely had this whole discussion as it relates to photography. I discuss the complaints that professionally trained photographers dont get paid as well as they used to. Large numbers of digital, automated cameras have created "good enough" photographs that the public actually wanted. They had to settle for higher priced professional level photos because that's all there was before. The truth from my perspective is the wages the pro photographers had before were propped up by the skills necessary to use the tool(camera). When that dropped the price dropped both because they couldn't charge for those skills anymore and because the buyers on average never really cared about the amount of skill that it takes to setup good lighting, placement in a photo, etc. They mostly wanted a picture of their friend, kid ,business, etc in the paper as long as it was good enough(in focus, smiling, looking good). I suspect that is a sad truism in most of the arts. People buying the arts on average only care about good enough.
If you have $1m, you average 100k a year in S&P returns. That's pretty sweet assuming you do nothing else. Now some years you get nothing and others you might get 180k but historically 10% is your average.
The general public would be well served by having a serious home economics course in high school. I'm going to worry a lot less about the 5% who get a windfall and fail to manage it vs the much larger number of folks living paycheck to paycheck while still earning a living. You fix that and you probably don't need to worry about the windfall folks.
So I have the counter factual to this in my town, as it relates to IP, where the restaurant(burger joint) changed hands and the owners ,like your example, kept the personnel, general menu but changed the name, interior and style. Business is still solid since functionally nothing changed. Place X still served roughly the same food and setting but nothing close enough you would need to pay extra for the trademarks. At that size and location it's mostly about the people and food than trade dress.
Touring and merch are where the money is. People who are successful enough to actually live off songwriting and recording albums practically don't exist anymore, due to the changing economics of the industry.
Exactly. And that more than cancels out whatever benefits they may have
Touring only makes significant money for top tier artists. Metallica, Swift, etc. They not only command higher ticket prices and longer tours, they take a higher percentage of each ticket sold. Some of the biggest can even ask for a share of income streams normally not available, like a piece of concessions.
