As a legal matter, no, though copyright terms should be shorter.
As a civil society matter, I think we should agree that making a secret album so that it ends up in the hands of a hedge fund criminal is uncool. It’s appropriate and even good for us to say that while that’s something allowed by the rules, we accord it no honor.
The tech didn’t exist at the time, but honestly wouldn’t it be better for the world if Wu-Tang had issued a single exclusive NFT of the album, and then made the actual music freely available?
I mean maybe not, maybe the songs actually suck, but I would certainly like to hear them.
Who are we to dictate how artists distribute their art? If an artist wants to make their art limited even though technology exists to easily distribute it, we cannot make the choice for the artist.
Often artists like to make a statement with their art, and how an artwork is received is often as much a part of the statement as the artwork it self (think Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain). Wu-Tang Clan wanted to make a statement with their art and they did, quite successfully to be honest.
Who are artists to dictate what we do with information that we posess. If someone wants to make additional copies which takes effectively zero effort, the artis cannot make the choice for us.
Often people incorporate art into their culture, and what the original artist intended with the artwork is only a small part of what it becomes. Society thrives by sharing art and has done so long before copyright existed, quite successfully to be honest.
I don’t think this was this simple. This might be true of folk artists (and it still is), but a lot of artists were sponsored either by the religious institution or by patronage. I personally favor state sponsored artists and I do think that our taxes should go into supporting artists way more then they currently do.
However as it stands our current economy does mandate that artists make a living for them self, and while we still live in a world of 40 hour per week minimum wage where most people have little energy and time to work on art/hobby in spare time, artists selling their art with artificial scarcity follows logically.
All that being said, this is not what we were talking about with the Wu-Tang Clan record. Their piece was a unique piece that works as a commentary on how the rest of musicians distribute their art. I look at this more like a fine art piece (or even performance art piece) then music. A lot of fine artists incorporate music with their art pieces and nobody expects them to distribute it digitally (though many do). This is kind of like the reverse of that.
Finally, by allowing our artists this freedom of distribution, we get nice things, including a diverse and healthy art world.
> However as it stands our current economy does mandate that artists make a living for them self
It does not mandate that they need to make their living from a particular business model. You already mentioned patronage as a method of funding for art - crowdfunding is one natural extension of that. Performance also does not rely on artifical scarcity. Demand for new art does not rely on artificial scarcity. There is also nothing saying that artists need to make their living from their art - and in fact this is not something most artists can do even with society being burdened with artificial scarcity.
> and while we still live in a world of 40 hour per week minimum wage where most people have little energy and time to work on art/hobby in spare time
I don't think the 40 hour work week is something that should be reinforced in any way at all. If society can have people working full-time on art then there is no real need to keep this outdated model where everyone needs to dedicate a majority of their waking time to survival.
> artists selling their art with artificial scarcity follows logically.
An economy built around articial scarcity reinforces a need for artificial scarcity? Maybe, but not an argument for anything.
> All that being said, this is not what we were talking about with the Wu-Tang Clan record. Their piece was a unique piece that works as a commentary on how the rest of musicians distribute their art. I look at this more like a fine art piece (or even performance art piece) then music. A lot of fine artists incorporate music with their art pieces and nobody expects them to distribute it digitally (though many do). This is kind of like the reverse of that.
I have nothing against an artist only distributing their work to a single person if they want to do that for whatever reason - but I don't think that society should then help them in any way in ensuring that that art stays with only that recipient once it leaves their hands.
> Finally, by allowing our artists this freedom of distribution, we get nice things, including a diverse and healthy art world.
Hahaha no. We get art that is optimized for profitability which tends to work against diversity while almost all transformative creative endeavours are prevented - except when copyright is ignored, as it is with most UGC, game mods mods, youtube videos etc. where it is mostly the platforms profiting off that art and not the artists.
I actually agree with you. Liberating people out of our current economic paradigm is probably the best thing we can do for the art world, as it frees people to work on their own stuff (including art) in their free time without any need for compensation.
if Wu-Tang had issued a single exclusive NFT of the album, and then made the actual music freely available?
I think that is probably not what Skreli wanted. The entire point seemed to be that no one else would get to hear the music. Otherwise, there's really not much difference between a single person owning the NFT or the gold master with the mp3 being freely distributed.
