Who cares what they want? I don't. Culture should belong to us, not them.
Copyright exists to allow them to turn a tidy profit so they're properly incentivized. It's not there to enable their delusions of control nor their perpetual rent seeking. They've already turned their profit, now it's time for the works to enter the public domain. Nobody cares whether they like it or not, it's human culture and it belongs to us all.
I see what you mean now. If creators don't publish their creations, they won't be experienced by anyone. They don't matter to anyone, we don't even know they exist. I suppose it's sad in an existential way that their works could be lost without anyone experiencing them or any preservation efforts being made but what can you do?
I think it's also important to consider that the sharing of creative works is also not so boolean. Works don't always fall into neat categories of "100% publicly published to the world" or "100% completely private and irrelevant to anyone". There's a lot of grey area in the middle.
I didn't suggest that it was. I'm suggesting that this perspective on copyright is very myopic. Regulating copyright as if they are all culturally significant works is like regulating haystacks as if they consist only of needles.
The analogy doesn't hold. Not all copyrighted works are or will be culturally significant, but all have the potential to be culturally significant. We have no way of knowing ahead of time. It's regulating haystacks as if any individual straw may actually be a needle.
A work that isn't publicly shared by the author could be shared by someone else without permission. Copyright law does and should continue to criminalize this.
Literally everything "of value" that was ever published was unpublished for some period of time.
Also, people may keep works private not because they lack value, but for other reasons.
As a very simple example, a someone might take a racy photo for their own private use, not because it would have no commercial value, but because they prefer not to commercialize it. And there are hundreds of other reasons why someone might choose not to share a work with the world.
Culture itself does. I am referring to the fact that most things that people create are not published, do not become popular, and don't become culturally relevant.
As much as I wish that my meeting notes from my standup this morning were good enough to become a cultural icon, I'm pretty sure the entire planet, including me, will forget about them next week. Mundane creations like this consist the vast majority of copyrighted works.
You gotta be kidding me. They literally own our culture. In the most capitalistic sense imaginable. Actual government-granted monopolies on ideas, bits of information. Works you grew up with? You and your children will be long dead before they enter the public domain. If they could delete the copy you have stored in your brain, they would.
> All you'll do with your approach is make creators less like to ever create unique works.
Copyright exists to allow them to turn a tidy profit so they're properly incentivized. It's not there to enable their delusions of control nor their perpetual rent seeking. They've already turned their profit, now it's time for the works to enter the public domain. Nobody cares whether they like it or not, it's human culture and it belongs to us all.