Researcher: Optimal copyright term is 14 years
Pollock’s work is based on the promise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.
You overeducated stupid fuck! Have you never read any biography of any writer?
How fucking dare you equate the means of mass production — a machine function! — with the human energy and creativity and drive and persistence and sheer naked belief it takes to persevere during the act of creation?
I read somewhere that someone once said that in order to make one’s living in any field of creative endeavor one had to be almost psychotic. You have to believe in yourself so strongly, to sit there day after day with your computer or your pen or your piece of paper or guitar, and think “I can do this. 999 billion people before me have failed, but I can do this.” It’s quite a psychotic state of mind to have to hang onto year after year. It takes years. Nobody does it overnight.
— Nicole Griffith; interview printed in the eBook, The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0 by Dave Slusher
And you, you fawning little shit sucking up to the Overgarchy so you can aid and abet in their looting of the rest of us, you want to dismiss the blood, the sweat, the tears, and the terrors true artists go through as they struggle to develop their style, as they seek out their audience that is scattered among nations and even across years and generations, as they wait wait wait for some fucking collection of tasteless and brainless Suits called a Publisher to mistakenly hire that one person who has the ability and taste and brains to recognize the artist’s talent and who is passionate and eager to share it with a busy and otherwise distracted world?
You would equate the seconds it takes to rip a song from a CD into an MP3 file with all the creative work it took to bring that song into existence?
You stupid, stupid, stupid fuck!
It took Ayn Rand — the Bitch Goddess of the Overgarchy — seven years to write The Fountainhead. It took her over ten years to write Atlas Shrugged. And yet you would have had her works go into the public domain during her lifetime?
John Fante — a writer you’ve probably never ever heard of — went out of print during his lifetime. It took the fame of Charles Bukowski — a fellow writer who had been inspired by Fante! — to get Fante’s prior works back in print. But according to you, you talentless motherfucker with a mechanical calculator in place of a human soul, whatever had once been under Copyright after fourteen years would have been fair game for the looters of the Overgarchy to confiscate and to freely use to pay their rent and to fill their bellies while the creator starved on the street! Further, you would have denied Fante’s wife — and eventual widow — her share of the royalties from her husband’s works! She stuck by him through all the hell, believing him to be the great writer it took decades for other people to finally discover (mainly because other fuckheads like you put him out of print for decades — why don’t you conjure an algorithm for what that cost Fante?). To you, such human devotion has no monetary value — which is apparently the only value that matters to your disgusting breed. You bastard.
Philip K. Dick — a writer you might have dimly heard of due to the atrocious movie bastardizations of his works — had to eat horsemeat bought from a pet store to survive early in his career. And once his career began, he had to overclock his brain with drugs to produce enough words to stay off the street. And just before his Hollywood adaptations came out, shortly before his overheated mind finally burned out in a fatal stroke, he had to apply for Food Stamps to feed himself! Yet you, you goddammed son of a slut bitch who should have used a coathanger in her cunt to spare us your birth!, you would have turned Dick’s life into an endless treadmill of poverty as he watched his early works turned over to any tasteless bastard who had the capital to buy a printing press and reprint them without Dick gaining any profit!
Recently an unfortunate man was brought before our courts whose forehead was marked by a rare and strange tattoo: No luck! He bore thus above his eyes the label of his life, like a book its title, and the cross-examination proved that this bizarre inscription was cruelly true. In literary history there are analogous destinies, real damnations — men who bear the words bad luck written in mysterious characters in the sinuous folds of their foreheads. The blind angel of expiation has seized them and whips them with all its might for the edification of others. In vain their lives show talents, virtues, grace; society has a special curse for them, and accuses them of weaknesses that its persecution has engendered. –What did not Hoffmann do to disarm destiny, and what did not Balzac undertake to conjure fortune? –Does there then exist a diabolical Providence which prepares misfortune from the cradle — who, with premeditation throws spiritual and angelic natures into hostile surroundings like martyrs into the circus? Are there then consecrated souls, destined for the altar, condemned to march to death and glory through their own ruins? Will the nightmare of Darkness besiege these rare souls eternally? In vain they struggle, in vain they adapt themselves to the world, to its calculations and tricks; they may perfect prudence, block all exits, pad the windows against the missiles of chance; but the Devil will enter through a key-hole; perfection will be the flaw in their armor, and superlative excellence the germ of their damnation.
The eagle, in order to shatter [their hope],
from the sky’s heights,
On their bare heads, will drop a tortoise,
For they are inevitably destined to perish.
[Theophile Gautier — Tenebres.]
Their destiny is written in their whole being, it shines with a sinister luster in their eyes and in their gestures, it circulates in their arteries with each drop of blood.
— Fatal Destinies: The Edgar Poe Essays by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Joan Fiedler Mele, © Copyright 1981. Cross Country Press, pgs. 44-45
And what about Lafcadio Hearn? Ever heard of him, egghead?
[…] If father had lived until I had become a man, I might have been able to look after my parents. In order to accomplish his aim, father had always said that it was not good to bring up children in Japan. But to send three sons abroad and to leave a property for his wife and daughter was a great problem to a man who had no other source of income than a teacher’s salary, royalties from books, and payments for his writings. I have repeatedly heard father’s cry, “Money!” “Money!” “Money!”—which seemed pitiable. “I don’t want money for myself,” he would say. “I only want it for my wife and children.” He always said these things in a touching voice. I can even recall that voice now; it has been stamped upon my ear. Whenever I used to hear father utter these words, in my childish heart I had a premonition that he had not long to live and it used to make me feel sad.
— Father and I: Memories of Lafcadio Hearn by Kazuo Koizumi, © Copyright 1935; pgs. 11-12
How about Nerval?
Unfortunately the money he was expecting to receive at Naples did not arrive and with empty pockets he had no choice but to return to Marseilles, where he settled himself in a hotel to live on credit until the money should come through. But on 4 November [1834] he was still waiting and he wrote to his friend, ‘If all else fails … if Paris has been burned in an earthquake or the Bank has been blown up, or Mignotte has committed suicide; you yourself Jehan Duseigneur [his friend] crushed like Don Juan by your own statues, if there is no more money in the world, if there are no more notaries, no more stock-brokers, no more bankers (which I should like but can scarcely hope for), let me know in a letter addressed to Marseilles.’ A week later he wrote to his friends, ‘I hardly dare walk because my boots are splitting … But I have dined well all the time: imagine, I have eaten nothing but macaroni and fruit for a fortnight.’ Eventually the money arrived, and he was able to move on to Agen […]
— The Disinherited: The Life of Gerard de Nerval by Benn Sowerby, © Copyright New York University 1974, NYU Press; pg. 35
How many times have you had split boots? How many times have you missed a meal? How many times have you had to live in fear of a landlord’s knock on your door? How much humiliation have you had to suffer from other people as you stood alone backed solely by your own judgment and belief in your own talent?
Bastards like you should have absolutely no say in Copyright law. None! Copyright is meant to protect the rights of creators. Only we have the right to speak about it. Only we can speak about it.
It’s time you fucks started to listen, too!