Screw Metallica

You may or may not have realized it but the world is full of musicians, writers, photographers, filmers, actors and any other imaginable creative crowd. Most are hobbyists but even the vast majority of the professionals (with the possible exception of writers) is not affected by this whole discussion. Professional musicians teach music and make some small money with live gigs. Actors work at theaters and so on. Only a very small minority of the professionals earn significant money through copyright. Everybody's right to publicly perform cover songs is supposed to have a lower value than the morally questionable right of an infinitesimal minority to make Money for Nothing. I don't agree.

In the light of the contemporary creative onslaught, the copyright laws and public discussion smell a lot like hysteria. When those laws were devised, life was pretty tough and few could afford to act upon their creative inclinations. If our culture wanted to afford some culture it had to grant creative people an income from their creativity. That is not true anymore.

So you aren't going to make any money from your books, your songs, your movies or any other creative informational product, right? Well mostly right, see above, but putting the nitpicking aside: yes right enough.

So nobody's gonna write any books, make any music, movies or other creative stuff? Quite to the contrary. Indeed, nobody will make any ``art'' for money and that implies that we will be spared a lot of trash. I would really like to make excessive use of this argument that nonexistent copyright laws are supreme trash filters. I believe it's true, too. But I think the effect will be more than made up for by marauding creative masses that - robbed of classical television and most of the other cheap commercial entertainment - will start creating like crazy and make it even harder to locate quality in that vast sea of posh poo.

Not only will these frighteningly creative masses be robbed of cheap entertainment, they will also have more time on their hands, because there is much less work (marketing gone, administration much simplified, law simplified, reinventing the wheel the zillionth time over to find it patented: obsolete, letting loose the hounds - aka lawyers - zilch). One will not find much work designed to catch and hold attention, though. This is currently the main purpose of the mainstream, since it's the only way to sell enough commercials. People will only create what they find worth creating for it's own sake. I assume that is indeed an effective trash filter, but it's not nearly enough to cope with a swelling flood of creative products. But computer programs that solve this problem already exist and will likely improve considerably in the future.