Copyright seems to be a less than ideal solution to a real problem.

Most of us would probably agree that if someone provides something of value to someone else then the beneficiary providing something of value in return is “fair” on some basic level.

If there’s a physical item involved then it’s obvious how “providing” it works. We can exchange a certain amount of money for a certain item and everyone understands the trade.

If there’s some kind of personal service involved then again it’s obvious what “providing” it means. Again, we can exchange a certain amount of money for a certain service rendered and everyone understands the trade.

There are at least two other things that we value greatly as a society but which can’t be supported in the same direct ways. One is public services, which is essentially work that is done for the common good that would probably not be arranged by any given individual beneficiary. For this we have established governments and we typically fund them through taxation. Naturally this is controversial because it represents (usually) the only lawful way in which someone else can come along and take your money from you, ultimately backed by a threat of force if you don’t hand it over, and there will never be universal agreement about what should or should not be provided and funded in this way.

Another tricky thing to support is creative work. There is no reasonable doubt that this provides enormous value to our society, nor that many people contribute to creative endeavours and if we want them to continue providing their contributions then most of them must be compensated sufficiently by those who benefit from them to make their ongoing work possible. But unlike everything else mentioned above, most of the work that goes into the creative process naturally happens before the end result is ready — before there is anything of substantial value that will benefit others who might provide something of value in return. So how to incentivise this kind of creative work?

The way I see it, that is the problem that copyright tries to solve, or at least tried to solve originally. It’s an attempt to apply the more familiar economics of selling physical products to creative work, to provide a system where it’s worth creators investing their time and resources into making something that others might want, in the knowledge that if they succeed then they will receive compensation accordingly. Like any uncertain investment, it can still result in better or worse returns, in this case depending on how much benefit they do create and for how many people, but that is essentially the kind of market that copyright creates and how it functions as an incentive for creative workers.

Looking at the evidence so far, it appears that the basic principle of copyright has been highly effective in motivating creative work compared to other funding models or volunteer efforts. It also appears that the original link between the creators doing the work and the beneficiaries of that work who pay to support it has been subverted by numerous intermediaries and changes in the legal/regulatory framework. This often results in the creative workers usually receiving only a small fraction of the money paid by the recipients of the work, and the recipients paying a lot more for the benefit of the work than the creators who made it will ever receive. IMHO, this is the fundamental problem with modern copyright and where any attempts to “fix the system” should first be targeted.