Interesting how artists don't make enough money from their creations, so our solution is to make certain information illegal to share, rather than give them a universal basic income.

Post shower toilet thought: Copyright isn't there to protect the author, it's there to create a multi-billion dollar legal industry.

you poop AFTER you shower???
- Heresy of the highest order.
- Poops in the shower.
- Sometimes emergencies happen...
- Some people live places were poop is cleaner than their water 🤷
Expect...no? Like, copyright gets abused a lot, but it's still used for its intended purpose of protecting small time creators and artists all the time.
- There's nothing about abuse in the comment you replied to. In fact, the act of "protecting small time creators and artists" goes through the legal system, funding it like the commenter said...
- Lemmy is full of people that have never created anything of value frothing at the mouth because they aren't entitled other people's creations. I wonder how long it would take them to change their tune if they actually created something worthwhile but got none of the recognition for it if IP laws didn't exist.
More like the multi-billion dollar legal industry sprung up around poorly-written copyright laws.

You can't give UBI to a subset of people. Then it's not universal anymore.

But if you did give artists a basic income, how much art would they need to produce to qualify? What qualifies as art? The law doesn't do well with those kinds of questions.

Better to implement true UBI. Give it to everyone, and afford more security to folks who want to focus on art.

Sorry, I meant UBI for everyone, including artists.
- Ah my bad, then I agree!
- Would you work harder or longer at your current job if you were paid say an unconditional 1000 per month and if not, how would productively increase to pay for it?
  
  I will get down voted but no one will have a good answer for this.
Pretty sure OP meant UBI for everyone, as in its a much better fight than the fight against AI Art
The solution is UBI and then tax incomes. It gives everyone the opportunity to persue goals, and if you make enough extra it is taxes to pay for everyone else to have the same opportunity. Persue art if you wish. If it's successful you'll get to pay it forward. You don't have to struggle to just survive while pursuing those goals.
- So if 5 percent of the workforce pursues other endeavors such as the arts or retirees sooner, and certainly people will retire sooner, where do you find the people to take out your garbage when 5 percent of them quit?
I completely agree on giving UBI to everyone, Imagine a world without artists. Without movies, TV shows, theaters, musicals, museums, books, music, sculpture, paintings, architecture.

Imagine how dull everything would be, without the creativity and imagination of these people out to use. But nowaday people just say Y0u_sH0uLd_sTuDy_SoMeThInG_t0_hAvE_iNc0mE, ignoring the consequences of the absence of arts
My town, in a surprisingly conservative part of Louisiana, has an artist residency. They pay $700/month and supply a studio to 3 artists for 9 months out of the year.

The hours are whenever the artist has the time (so as not to interfere with their jobs), and the stipulation is that they have to be available twice a month to teach evening classes about their individual style. They have to have enough pieces by the end to fill a show, as determined by the board that assigned them for the year. But there's no hard number of art pieces required.

All this to say that it can be done. Even if right now it's just a few artists a year in one town, the concept is there.
im an upcoming starving artist (graphic designer) we def do not need a UBI for artists specifically my peers will take any excuse to not do anything.

but a ubi for all would be fire and likely increase productivity in everyway over time.
- Graphic designers are not part of this. You guys can make a fucking killing designing everything from flyers, billboards, websites and bloody corporate logos.
  
  I know a few British graphic designers. One made a logo for the US government in 1hr. They gave him $10k for it. He lives in a £1M mansion and works from home maybe 4hrs per day.
  
  I don't think I've ever met a poor graphic designer.
Maybe the UBI is the art? I mean, we’re talking about it, aren’t we?

Now that's a cooked thought. How hot was your shower

Based
- Yes we can see that he was based while cooking, we're just wondering what temp for how long?

On SSI right now. My art has exploded recently because I have a lot of time. Every day, at least one complete piece. Still pretty poor, struggling financially. But oil pastels, gesso, baby oil, cotton balls, piece of plastic... because free time, I'm excitedly experimenting, create pieces deeply layered, sculptural. Was never possible when employed.

That was my tough, artist's need raw material to work with wich is not free, having a UBI let's artist's buy the thing they need to create art and then mabe make some extra income.
- What I'm realizing more and more is that we don't have to buy materials from stores to make art. There are tons of videos out there showing how to make natural paints, paper, pastels, etc from local resources. I think so many people just can't be bothered.
- I'm struggling with that. My red, orange, blue oil pastels are running out. But have a bunch of brown, grey hues left. So forcing me to adapt. Also, was struggling to figure out how to add layering, depth, large areas of white space. But just one tiny white oil pastel. That forced me to experiment with using gesso as a medium. Initially, just to more cheaply add more white space. But realized gesso is amazing, can be sculpted, if you sculpt patterns, or carve lines into gesso, let it dry... when you lightly run oil pastel over the dried gesso...
  
  Poverty, limited means can be useful. Necessity breeds adaptation.
All of which is your work.

They're suggesting UBI in place of copyright. So all that work your doing right now could be stolen by others and sold for cheaper than you would sell it, without your permission. So companies like Disney can just take it and put it in a movie or something, without paying you.

All you would get would be your UBI, they would get the profit.
- We should just do UBI anyway. Copyright is a whole fucked up world of nonsense, we don't need to go there.
- Stop comparing businesses to people and we can probably get that sorted as well.
- copyright doesn't stop stealing. I creates a tort against copying.
- They are suggesting focussing on UBI instead of getting angry at AI art as a bandaid for capitalism taking artists jobs away, because, spoiler alert, capitalism is going to keep using advances in tech to take all of our well paying jobs away. One solution gives us all a way to live, the other stems the tide for a TINY bit for ONE category of workers

UBI and copyright are not mutually exclusive. Why wouldn't artists want to earn more on top for the work they do and the value they create, like every other profession?!

you can sell your work without resorting to government enforced Monopoly.
- Not when work takes a large amount of time to produce the original, and very little work to produce a copy. An original and a copy of a digital artwork are identical.
- Monopolies are not about exclusively for one specific thing, but about scale and the availability of alternatives. It's not like you can only buy pictures or music from one artist, just that you have to buy art from the artist who made it.
- Can you explain how government enforced monopolies intersects with the discussion here?

The creation can possibly have monetary value, thus the protection. How much is up to society.

This isn't a good argument for UBI.

It's a good argument because artificially constraining the supply to simulate "monetary value" destroys most of the actual value it could have by being available to everyone. The "protection" is a harmful kludge that only has to exist because we insist on making everyone measure their value with the market.
- I don't think that tracks though. If we all lived in universal basic income world I don't think the idea of copyright would be given up. People would still want to be compensated for their work, universal basic income doesn't get rid of capitalism, it just gets rid of the less desirable aspects of it.
  
  We would still have money but it would change in its nature. Instead of needing it in order to survive you would simply need it in order to improve your lot above whatever base level the theoretical society decided on. You would still need copyright to enforce your right to compensation and prevent others from taking credit for your work.
Unfortunately, "society" doesn't control most of the value of anything. The monopolists do.

So the only really valuable kind of art is the art that can be used for speculation and money laundering.

What if their "art" is actually and utterly a pile of steaming shit?

That typically sells better than art that isn't made of literal shit.
You mean like Tracy Emin's bed? It gets featured in the Tate Modern of London.
- Ohhhh man ...

That is too logical and convenient to be allowed under psychopathic capitalism that runs the world

So what you're suggesting is the artists should make a set income, determined by the legislature.

And then create lots of free art that isn't copyrighted.

So that a corporation can come along, take their art, and use it compared with their superior distribution and marketing to make more profit off of it than the artist ever could, without paying them.

Sounds like a flawless system.

If the artist has their needs met then yes, absolutely fantastic. Works better than our current system where most artists make copywrited art for their corporate overlords abd can get laid off whenever new tech roles around that makes them obsolete, and now the corporation owns their art AND they have no house

Give artists a basic universal income, and I guarantee every single person on earth will suddenly discover their "inner Picasso" to qualify.

You say that like that would be bad.

Who fights for having people in braindead jobs, working unsafe conditions, Christ almighty. Check please.
- You can debate the merits of some work, you can debate the amount people are compensated for that work. But what is absolutely not debatable is that we actually need people to do work for us to contribute to function as a society. Some of that work that's absolutely necessary is both dangerous and nigh impossible to automate. Do we need another Starbucks? No, absolutely not. But we will still need places to be built, and infrastructure maintained. There's really no escaping that.
- So your ok if your garbage does not get taken out or if that many less people want to be doctors and nurses?
- Probably someone who sees a causal connection between unpleasant work and pleasant outcomes later.
  
  I mean if work was an end unto itself it doesn’t make much sense to go do things you don’t feel like doing. But once you connect the present moment of facing unpleasantness to the future payoff of the work, it makes more sense.
The reason it's called universal is because everyone gets it.
Oh nooooo, people won't be as strongly bound to corporations anymore! Whatever will we do?
- Starve?
Not really. Basic income is - just that. Basic. It'll cover your necessities and put a roof over your head, but not much else

Id much rather continue working so that I can afford luxury items (my hobbies are as expensive as they are time consuming). I'd imagine most would feel the same.

Opponents of UBI all seem to have this bizarre notion that most people would be willing to take a big step down lifestyle wise to not have to work, but that doesn't mesh with how most people treat money.

How many people deliberately underemploy themselves just to have more free time, even if they could easily be making more money? Very few. And I'd wager that most in that category have lucrative enough careers that their "underemployed" is still making most people's normal income
- Are you unaware that many people don't get much for their work beyond a roof over their head?
You say that like it's a bad thing. We could use more people who can afford to make art in the world, even if a lot of it would be shitty art.
- Do we really need them more than doctors, plumbers, teachers, etc. though? While I'm for a UBI, I'm against it being enough to fully live off of for exactly this reason. The world doesn't need a bunch more popsicle stick art.
- Eeh deviant art had that perspective and then got flooded with mspaint fetish porn and became unusable.
  
  Art station on the other hand always blows me away every time I visit the front page. So there's a limit.
UBI is a separate concern from copyright being a dumb way of rewarding intellectual property.

Everyone should get UBI to reduce poverty and houselessness.

And separately, artists should get paid for their work, when it's valuable, regardless of whether or not UBI is in place.

And sometimes that value is immediately recognized at the time by the masses and can be measured in clicks and streams.

Sometimes it's only recognized by professional contemporaries and critics in how it influences the industry.

Sometimes it's not recognized until long after them and their contemporaries are dead.

Given computers and the internet, there is no technical reason that every single individual on the planet couldn't have access to all digital art at all times.

All of these things can be true, and their sum total makes copyright look like an asinine system for rewarding artists. It's literally spending billions of dollars and countless countless useless hours in business deals, legal arguments, and software drm and walled gardens, all just to create a system of artificial scarcity, when all of those billions could instead be paying people to do literally anything else, including producing art.

Hell, paying all those lawyers 80k a year to produce shitty art and live a comfortable life would be a better use of societal resources then paying them 280k a year to deprive people of access to it.
You do realise U in UBI means Universal, they arent suggesting only artists get it
So you just have to give everyone universal income
- It's not really universal unless you do.
The biggest issue with UBI is that it will never work, the math just doesn't add up.

Where does the money come from? The government only really has one source of money and that is taxes, so to pay UBI it would either need to raise taxes or massive cut on other expanses.

Should a solution be found for 1) and everyone (universal means that everyone will automatically qualify for it, no questions asked) will be paid UBI then the prices for housing, food and all the other basic things will skyrocket because a) of the higher demand and b) because of the higher amount of money in circulation creating inflation.

The higher prices will mean that the amount of UBI money must be raised, which means we are back at 1)
- Where does the money come from? The government only really has one source of money and that is taxes, so to pay UBI it would either need to raise taxes or massive cut on other expanses.
  
  How's that National Debt looking?
- I like the idea of a "Citizen's Dividend" funded from taxes on pollution, carbon Emmissions, etc. We can throw a wealth tax for billionaires in there too.
- Tax doesn't finance spending. That national debt is owed to no one. Money is created out of thin air, my friend, and always has been since fiat money was introduced. When the government spends, they just adjust the number on their account; they've come right out and admitted this.
  
  "We can't afford that" is a lie. They can afford absolutely anything, because they own the money, and they own the debt in that money - it's a constructed fiction.

If their art doesn't make enough money then it's clearly not in enough demand. It sucks but thats how things work. Only a small number of artists can ever coexist at the same time.

If their art doesn’t make enough money then it’s clearly not in enough demand.

Unless you burden the word 'enough' with far too much work in that sentence, then that implication doesn't necessarily follow. It is possible for something to be in great demand by those without money to spend. Furthermore, it is possible for there to be issues with the logistics between the source and the demand (e.g. demand is very physically distributed, or temporally limited and/or sporadic).

Money is a very particular way of empowering and aggregating only some demand. It ties the power of demand to history and not moral or egalitarian considerations for one.
Interested to know - what political party do you support?
- I have absolutely no idea what that means.
  
  But to answer the actual question, I don't disagree that universal basic income would be great I just don't think that the above arguement is a particularly great one for it. There are many better arguments that could be made and I don't appreciate the false dichotomy that OP is putting out that because it just makes the whole idea seem hippie and stupid.
  
  Also been aggressive with people who even marginally disagree with your opinion isn't productive.

Not all Art has the same value.

You think someone who delicates their life to musical excellence should get the same as someone who sticks seashells onto things?

What t about if they only produce one seashell covered mug per week? Per month?

If only there was some mechanism to objectively measure the value of what we produce.

Do... Do you think that mechanism is market? Like, you seriously think that?
Recent times have shown two important things to me.

One: People want to create regardless of any reward related to it. The excuse that people need to be rewarded in order to do anything valuable is completely wrong. People, in general, want to do things that other people find valuable and beneficial and bring joy to other people. We are very social, and that desire is nearly universal. If one has no concerns over their continued comfortable existence, then the vast majority of people would dedicate themselves to something they enjoy which is also useful and helpful to others.

Two: People will very happily give rewards to those who create things that they want and enjoy. Even people who themselves have little, will give some to those who have brought them happiness and joy with their work and effort. We see this in all the people donating even when they receive nothing in return for it.

Point two suggests that universal income is theoretically unnecessary, but point two is unreliable. Yes, people will give, but they won't give in a steady, reliable way that can be counted on to meet another's needs regularly. And just as importantly, they don't really give if the quality of the creations are low, which...fair enough, however, this limits the potential creator's ability to practice and get better, since they cannot devote their efforts to the thing they enjoy that would, if they got good at it, be enjoyed by many; instead they are forced to devote their efforts to continued survival and comfortable existence.
People should just be paid to exist at this point regardless of what they contribute.

Most people are wholly incapable of doing for themselves so just give them subsistence money so they can sit in their house and not bother anybody else.
- I think that anyone who wants to contribute somehow in a positive way to their society, environment or country, should get enough money to have their basic needs fulfilled. Being it full-time or part-time work, volunteering or just helping out random people from time to time (pick trash alone somewhere and stuff).
  
  I don't approve ending people's lives because they create harm to others. Of course it's a whole different thing when you compare a feared dictator who hates humankind versus someone who spends all their time trolling people out of their minds in the Internet just because of the lulz. But I don't know, what would be a good solution in these or any other cases.

Lmao as if artists would manage to produce anything if they could just slack off and hit a blunt instead of producing anything

Yep, totally correct. History is totally not full of artists creating despite their genius not being recognised socially and economically and dying poor and isolated. Clearly, the only way to stimulate artists is monetary compensation.