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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 7689994" data-attributes="member: 40166">I'm not worried about Siegel and Shuster; they got their credit. I'm worried about artists on the comics of the 50s, or the photographer of that Mussolini photo. They probably took a close look at the business possibilities, and figuring that trying to make their own deal would leave them starving. And in many cases, nobody will ever be able to connect their work to its creators.I'd say it reduces the need for copyrights a lot. Today's newsprint is tomorrow's fishwrap, and most books don't have a second printing. A good Patreon or subscription model means that the work is paid for up front, and that the author is not depending on future returns. In reality, copyright laws are not stopping books from being pirated. Paizo is selling PDFs to people who could pirate the PDFs, but choose to support the publisher. Any RPG publisher small enough that their works aren't piratable, probably would continue to have no one who would buy their products and then upload them. Later sales would depend on customers buying authorized versions, but you aren't depending on later sales, and I think customers would pick authorized versions in many cases.Effective control over the World of Darkness (as opposed to the Chronicles of Darkness) probably would have been lost by White Wolf and successors when they stopped supporting it. WotC would have had more competition with the reprinting of the early rulebooks. Once a company stopped supporting something, the loyalty of customers to buy only authorized editions would drop a lot.Credit? I'm not impressed that copyright makes much difference on that matter. People will credit or not as they will, and if you're out to make money, that's one of the first things that you can be forced to give up. Control would be lost; even if anyone can do Sherlock Holmes, nobody can do him like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did. But anything the author decided not to do could be done without his permission, or at least more publically then it is now.Star Wars: the Force Awakens would probably make vastly less then it would with copyright. Copyright disappearing would distort a lot of things and make it harder for a lot of stuff to get made. But I think it important to point out copyright is not the only option.I don't think I understand. Are you talking about classic patronage? Patreon seems very much unlike work for hire. What's produce seems less under the control of the patrons then it would be under a standard consumer system; I pay for every new world Evil Hat puts out, instead of picking and choosing. It's also nearly opposite on credit, when you're paying for the work of Ewen Cluney instead of buying Raspberry Heaven (which didn't bother to put the author on the cover, because it's work for hire.)</blockquote>

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