The Copyright Nazi Sheds Crocodile Tears for the Struggling Artist

It is rare that anyone in this society expresses sympathy for the struggling artist. Quite frankly, with very few exceptions, no one cares about struggling artists but the struggling artists themselves--not even their more successful brethren. (As Balzac put it when writing of the publishing world in Lost Illusions, "the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent, so hard-hearted to a newcomer as" they, for where a "bookseller sees a possible loss of money" in a newcomer's manuscript, a successful author sees--"dreads"--in the newcomer "a possible rival," with the result that "the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you.")

The result is that such expressions of sympathy from people who were not struggling artists have tended to get my attention in the past--until time and again the reference to the troubles of artists proved to be just a hook for another rant about the glories of copyright and attack on anyone not taking a maximalist view of such rights as scum. That said, I will not get into the rights and wrongs of copyright here--but the plain and simple matter of the fact is that sterner enforcement of copyright laws is just not going to do much for the newcomer. Such laws defend the interests of those who possess intellectual property. They do nothing for those who have yet to produce any of commercial value. The standard copyright supporter's position is that a strong copyright regime incentivizes the creation of such property--but those struggling artists need a lot more than that if they are to do so successfully, and those professing concern for them show no interest in that whatsoever.

After all, if we grant what copyright's supporters say, and that a more stringent copyright regime does leave, for example, publishers with fatter profits, what are they likely to do with them? Give newcomers more chances? Only those who have no understanding of publishing, business or the neoliberal age can imagine that they would prefer this to a course of new mergers and acquisitions, or financial engineering, because publishers exist to make money, not produce books (and not even necessarily make money by producing books if they can get more, faster, with greater certainty in some other way)--the monuments that young authors rear with their life's blood, as Balzac put it, to them "simply a good or a bad speculation," and in the view of publishers, generally a bad one, whatever the merits of the work. Alas, a refusal to acknowledge such facts is a requirement in those given platforms from which one can reach an appreciable audience in our time, helping make the reference to the interests of struggling writers the cynical thing that it is.