You could say the same thing about software.
No. The scheduling program harms the haircutting business if it has bugs,
missing features, malware, etc. With free software, the hairdresser can make
changes (by herself or contracting a developer) that she deems useful to her
business. But it is not only an hypothetical possibility: it happens for
real! On the contrary, I still defy you to find one hairdresser who affirms
that her business is harmed because she cannot modify the music she plays in
her salon or who modifies free music to specifically please her clients.
Then you're not talking about anything, because everything is already
derivative.
You must at least accept that an exact copy is not an original derivative
work.
But ignoring that, selling copies doesn't work anymore. *Especially* for
digital things.
What about Netflix, Spotify, iTunes, the Kindle store, etc.? Don't they
"work"? Aren't they selling exact copies? The public pays despite (not
because of) the DRMs preventing them from owning the copies. Physical copies
are not dead either. People buy physical books for instance.
Hairdressing salons, bars, and other shops pay to play music/videos, which
they do not modify (nor they need/want to). TV channels and movie theaters
too.
With the current system, artists get revenues from all those exact copies (a
far too little portion of the pie, but this is a separate issue). Since most
artistic works have an audience for only a few years after their
redistribution, a five or ten-year term would not decrease those revenues in
any significant way. A 0-year term would.
restrict the public's rights in today's world.
The public should be allowed to *non-commercially* redistribute copies. I do
not recognize companies (Netflix, Spotify, iTunes, the Kindle store, the
hairdressing salons, the bars, the book stores, the TV channel, the movie
theater, etc.) any right to redistribute recent artistic works without giving
a cent back to artists.
And, as I explained on your hairdresser example, the public does not
need/want the right to modify artistic works. Only artists do. You do not
"restrict the public's rights" by preventing it from doing something it
neither needs nor wants to do.
I am reminded of something Stallman wrote in the GNU Manifesto
I do not know what you read in the quote but Stallman would certainly
disagree with your interpretation of his words: he considers functional works
and artistic works belong to distinct categories and only insists on the
freedom to non-commercially redistribute artistic works.
When the public has already paid for it in advance, say via a modern system
like crowdfunding just for an example, what's the argument to be made to
continue keeping it under restriction after that?
If it was paid in advance, there is indeed no argument. Regardless, I see no
reason why artists should be forbidden to ask for revenues to companies
making commercial uses of their recent works. Those companies are not "the
public".
