I'm tempted to say your conclusions are too confident. For one thing, it occurs to me that Disney is responsible for the most successful media franchises in history, in part by developing such beguiling storylines and characters over decades, with an attention to quality. In a literal sense, it's difficult to imagine Disney's productions, spinoffs, and influence without strong creative protections. I wonder if you're overemphasizing the nature of outliers in movie production, like Tangerine (although I agree with you 100% on music, as proven by SoundCloud).
Furthermore, I think you overrate alternative compensation structures; Patreon is one of those things where you have to continually pump out content to build an active fanbase, in the hopes that a small percentage will pay up. What if an creator just wants to make something once or twice? And NFTs also have unusual properties: the examples you cite, and just my intuition about their model, leads me to believe that you have to really get lucky and have a high-income, unusually profligate fan willing to pay for an "original" version of something everyone else can obtain free copies of. It's unrealistic to expect *most* small-time creators to profit off this. My Minecraft YouTuber friend (1.2k subs) doesn't earn too much, but at least gets some cents off every hundred views or so (note there's an explicit assurance by YouTube that reproductions of his work, say a clone channel, will be taken down). I doubt he'd get a single Patreon or NFT sale!
On the other hand, as someone who grew up an hobbyist web tinkerer and developer (my self-built website as a kid consisted of Flash games, movies, and music ripped from other sites) I have a strong anti-copyright streak, and hope we can do away with it.
I definitely agree its hard to imagine Disney as it is today without strong copyright protections, they have in many ways built their business around them. I think that even in a world where other creators could use Disney IP, people would still want to see the real thing. One thing that NFTs prove is that people are willing to pay a lot for authenticity. The Mona Lisa at the Lourve is a tiny painting behind walls of glass and its always crowded to the gills, but people still fly to France to see it even though a thousand photos, parodies, and recreations of the painting exist for free. I don't think Disney's content creation model could be exactly the same without copyright but maybe that's a good thing. They would be incentivized to create more new and original material rather than pumping out sequels, remakes, and re-releasing content from the Disney Vault.
In terms of alternate compensation structures, you may be right that some artists would be unable to monetize their work but I don't see how copyright helps these artists. If no one is willing to pay for an 'original' version of their art then they will struggle to sell anything; NFT or otherwise.
I think that NFTs have wider use cases than I made clear in my post. There are flashy huge price tags that work well as blog post examples, but I think that NFTs generalize as a way to sell art at any level. I linked to this digital marketplace in the post https://zora.co/
There are artists of all styles and sizes selling their art for a range of prices on this site and there are several others like it.
I guess it is unrealistic to expect most small time creators to profit off of Patreon and NFTs but it's also unrealistic to expect small time creators to profit of anything they make even if they do have copyright protections so I don't think that copyright is providing much of an incentive for creation there.
I'm tempted to say your conclusions are too confident. For one thing, it occurs to me that Disney is responsible for the most successful media franchises in history, in part by developing such beguiling storylines and characters over decades, with an attention to quality. In a literal sense, it's difficult to imagine Disney's productions, spinoffs, and influence without strong creative protections. I wonder if you're overemphasizing the nature of outliers in movie production, like Tangerine (although I agree with you 100% on music, as proven by SoundCloud).
Furthermore, I think you overrate alternative compensation structures; Patreon is one of those things where you have to continually pump out content to build an active fanbase, in the hopes that a small percentage will pay up. What if an creator just wants to make something once or twice? And NFTs also have unusual properties: the examples you cite, and just my intuition about their model, leads me to believe that you have to really get lucky and have a high-income, unusually profligate fan willing to pay for an "original" version of something everyone else can obtain free copies of. It's unrealistic to expect *most* small-time creators to profit off this. My Minecraft YouTuber friend (1.2k subs) doesn't earn too much, but at least gets some cents off every hundred views or so (note there's an explicit assurance by YouTube that reproductions of his work, say a clone channel, will be taken down). I doubt he'd get a single Patreon or NFT sale!
On the other hand, as someone who grew up an hobbyist web tinkerer and developer (my self-built website as a kid consisted of Flash games, movies, and music ripped from other sites) I have a strong anti-copyright streak, and hope we can do away with it.
Thank you for the in depth comment!
I definitely agree its hard to imagine Disney as it is today without strong copyright protections, they have in many ways built their business around them. I think that even in a world where other creators could use Disney IP, people would still want to see the real thing. One thing that NFTs prove is that people are willing to pay a lot for authenticity. The Mona Lisa at the Lourve is a tiny painting behind walls of glass and its always crowded to the gills, but people still fly to France to see it even though a thousand photos, parodies, and recreations of the painting exist for free. I don't think Disney's content creation model could be exactly the same without copyright but maybe that's a good thing. They would be incentivized to create more new and original material rather than pumping out sequels, remakes, and re-releasing content from the Disney Vault.
In terms of alternate compensation structures, you may be right that some artists would be unable to monetize their work but I don't see how copyright helps these artists. If no one is willing to pay for an 'original' version of their art then they will struggle to sell anything; NFT or otherwise.
I think that NFTs have wider use cases than I made clear in my post. There are flashy huge price tags that work well as blog post examples, but I think that NFTs generalize as a way to sell art at any level. I linked to this digital marketplace in the post https://zora.co/
There are artists of all styles and sizes selling their art for a range of prices on this site and there are several others like it.
I guess it is unrealistic to expect most small time creators to profit off of Patreon and NFTs but it's also unrealistic to expect small time creators to profit of anything they make even if they do have copyright protections so I don't think that copyright is providing much of an incentive for creation there.
I counter again with YouTube's model, which entails
1) viewers paying with their time spent watching ads
2) advertisement companies paying YouTube for showing said ads
3) YouTube distributing partial revenues to content creators
Copyright appears to allow freemium models to take hold
Max: We should do shorter blog posts
Also Max: