this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Well, yeah. Speaking as an author, we kinda like to eat. Without copyright, we're being paid in exposure; if our shit gets popular, nobody's going to buy the official hardback for $30 (of which I'll see a few pennies) when they can buy the perfectly legal knockoff hardback for $1.
I don't have time to write for the love of the art. It takes me about 2-3 months to crank out 100k words of a first draft, then god help me amounts of time to revise it to be fit for human eyes. If I had to hold down a regular 9-5 to pay my rent at the same time, I'd produce a book about every five years or so (that's how long the first one took).
Fuck all of that. I deserve to be paid fairly for producing something of value just like people in every other profession. Get rid of copyright and you're basically ensuring that the fiction market is 95% AI, 4% independently wealthy people, and 1% people who just love to write so much that they'll do it even after coming home from a 12-hour shift, and just like the attention they get. Which, I mean, I get it; we're worthless, and don't deserve to make a living producing works of art that make other people happy, right?
My few published pieces were done because I wanted to try my hand at writing, but those weren't my day job. But if I were writing for money, I'd want enough time to profit off of my work because creating stuff people want is absolutely hard work. What that term is, I don't know. That's a huge discussion with no easy answers. But whatever the term is, I'd like to see creators paid for their efforts.