zippthorne's Journal: Putting your money where your keyboard is.

From my comment here:

Clearly, there are a number of people here and elsewhere that desire for easily duplicatable artistic works to be available for as large a number of people to enjoy as the ease of duplication makes feasable. At the moment, the regular market is not providing this, leading some to resort to black market solutions.

But the problem with the black market solution, and also the "get rid of copyright entirely" solution is that the pendulum swings too far the other way. Removing the ability for people to become professional artists would reduce the amount and quality of such works.

Creative Commons addresses part of this issue by providing a means for artists to donate all or part of their work to the public domain, but their scope and means are not adequate to the problem at hand.

What we really need is an organization (or many) charged with the task of buying works into the public domain. It should not be too difficult to estimate the total monetary value of the various works and thus the total remaining monetary value. If a rights-buying organization offered the remaining monetary value, a rights-holder would be irrational not to sell and realize the remaining value *now* rather than letting it trickle in.

Since there is little profit in this area, such organizations would probably have to be funded mostly by donation, and with limited budgets, would have to carefully choose the works purchased. I propose that one method would be to maximize the total lifetime monetary value of works purchased. Such an organization would eventually snap up the more popular works, but mostly quite a ways into the tail due to limited budgets. Another organization could buy "good" works, for whatever value of good that they choose, etc.

Such organizations could be established right now under the current copyright framework, and if people are as opposed to perpetual copyright as they claim to be, donations should be available in spades. So, where are they?