(09-14-2024, 07:15 PM)Maxmars Wrote: I fully agree that creators need to eat...
But how they divest themselves of the right to decide to allow this 'use through commerce' leads to the situation where authors and artists who might be fully happy to allow some their work to be freely accessed, simply can't.
They can, in recent years there have been many creators making their creations available for free in the Internet, even some famous authors or artists. Stephen King has at least six short stories freely available. They are still copyrighted works, so nobody can use them for anything else.
Quote:I think some authors out there would. Even if only as a marketing opportunity. But some older classic works need to be freed, in my opinion.
Older works that are copyright free (mostly because their authors died more than 75 years ago) are freely available too.
For a couple of years or so I was a voluntary on Project Gutenberg, proofreading scanned books that were converted to plain text and published on the Internet.
Books like, for example, "Dracula", are copyright free, so although you have to pay for a book to read it, you can get it for free on the Internet.
Quote:But they now share what was once their creation (a performance, wisdom, or simple expressions of humanity)… is now suddenly ONLY a "vehicle" of commerce...
It really depends.
My elder sister is a painter and professional photographer. Several years ago she was contracted to make a painting for the label of a wine bottle. The contract (prepared by the lawyers of the Portuguese authors society) stated specifically that it could only be used for that label and nothing more. It could appear, for example, in a photo of the bottle, but it could not appear isolated, with no context.
The company that contracted my sister used it on something else and the authors society warned my sister and activated their legal branch to point to the company that to use it in other things they would need to pay more.
On other occasions my sister has given her works to the models she photographed/painted, as those were not made to make money.
