In the world of digital media, copyrights are completely unnatural. See companies desperately coming up with highly complex and inevitably non-functional copy protection schemes. They end up relying on the government arbitrarily allowing or forbidding certain behaviors, usually with little or no possibility of enforcement. The resulting prohibition is about as effective as the alcohol or drug prohibitions, ie. not much.

What's more, it's not a sound policy to prosecute one's own fans and prospective customers. It really sends the wrong kind of signal.

It's incredibly easy to do digital copies. The intelligent person will find a way to take advantage of that. The stupid person will try to stop it. The stupid person will ultimately fail, because although progress can be slowed down, it cannot be stopped.

sorry you find it offensive, but you don't have to register with the government. That's the condition of getting money through the system. That's the same condition that non-profits, including colleges and think tanks, have to meet to get tax exempt status. But no one forces them to get tax exempt status. So, if you are offended, don't do it -- that pretty simple, isn't it.

I don't have a contribution to the main issue, of the fate of copyrightin a digital age. It could be that sharing will add up to grassroots advertising for greater sales, unless you're already a megahit, in which case you should stop trying to control the issue. (That was sure my feeling about the author guild opposition to Googol's book search plans, although those were more like an electronic card catalog than free copies.) Or maybe not. It could prove in the long run no worse than 30 years ago, when people could tape LPs. Or maybe not. But I'm not convinced the copyright law should make the decision for us here.

I'm certainly sure that the described intrusions into someone's home, dorm, or home computer violates the law. And I don't mean copyright law.

Mostly, though, I just was struck, like Reece, that Dean's solution is inane. No, Dean, it's not about being above accepting money or being above those who teach at Harvard. (Last I looked, Harvard wouldn't have hired too many rock stars, and the job would get in the way of making recordings and touring anyhow. And wouldn't it help only the stunning successes that get academic honors?) But if it's idealistic, at best, to assume that musicians and writers can depend on grants. I know lots of artists who are constantly applying for grants and trying to live off them, and as a writer I've tried. Mostly, it's a recipe for discouragement as big as relying on sales: it means a third job in addition to your day job, already a moral, practical, and spiritual killer.

And then again, maybe, Dean, there is an esthetic objection to the teaching route. So may writers live teaching creative writing. If you ask me, it's created a lousy climate for fiction. Too many realistic short stories in small (university?) towns with New Yorker epiphany endings. Anyone notice how unexperimental and small the Times list of best books of the last 25 years was compared to the era of William Gaddis and Gravity's Rainbow? You get a new academic style.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

John,

why don't you try looking at the system (which has nothing to do with teaching or grants) that I proposed? It makes $20 billion a year available to support creative work. I can assure you that's not one-tenth as inane as the copyright system and it doesn't require thugs with guns running around to enforce it.  

Wouldn't you say that historically, the 20th century model of large corporations distributing and charging for artists' work is an aberration rather than the rule?

What the hell. Who needs creative people anyhow?
Good question. Do you have a really good answer? :-)

It's probably worth pointing out that software is in a much better position than music. The reason for that is that corporations, not end users, are a major source of revenue.

I think you're right, but I don't think you can compare software copyrights and entertainment copyrights, because software products and entertainment products have vastly different useful lives. A 5-year-old version of Windows is basically worthless, but people eagerly buy DVDs of 50-year-old movies and CDs of 100-year-old Caruso recordings.

Having written four novels under the most obscene interpretation of copyright law - work for hire - let me chime in here.

I'd like to make money off my writing. It is what I do. It is who I am. 20 years is sufficient protection of my work.

I have to side with Dean on this. Hanging on to the current system is an exercise in futility, both for recording artists and writers. If anything, writers are in worse shape because we can't go out and perform our work for a share of the gate.

We need new models. However, I don't much care for the patronage model, because patronage and control go hand-in-hand. Sooner or later the patron is going to start wanting to control what they're paying for. That's the way it was in the past, and that's the way it will be under any future patronage systems, because that's human nature.

For the literary arts, I foresee a time when the publishing houses and the brick and mortar bookstores disappear, much as the music industry will one day disappear. I foresee a time when literature is vended, and in my mind, this will be a sad day, because readers generally expect to be fed a buffet when they buy prose. It will spell the death of the short story, or at the very least, the death of the paid short story. It could be that the short story will be freebies given away to attract attention to longer works, for which people might me willing to pay. But I also think it's going to be harder and harder for a writer to make any money at all writing fiction.

Sometimes I feel like a harness-maker at the beginning of the age of automobiles. People will still be strapping mules to plows for another 40 years or so, but if I want to survive, I've got to find a new way to sell harnesses.

Tell that to the legislators. While I think that a 90-year copyright term on music is outrageous, equally long copyright term on software is just plain ridiculous. It's pretty hard to even run 20-year old software, let alone do anything useful with it.

Still, I don't think a 20 or 200 year copyright term makes that much of a difference. If you look at most works of art, you will find that only a tiny minority is still sought after decades past their release, and at any rate the vast majority of copyrighted works brings in nearly all of their revenue within a few years of the original release. Artists like Caruso or the Beatles are an exception, not the rule.

More importantly, the fact that people are interested in 50-year old movies isn't an argument for lengthening copyright terms. On the contrary, if copyrights were shorter, people wouldn't have to wait years until movie studios magnanimously release (or not) old films. In fact shorter copyright terms (around 20 years) would put healthy pressure on copyright holders to do something with their works before the copyright expires. We'd see more old movie releases, not fewer.

And then there are the "orphaned" works, most with limited markets, for which it is impossible to determine and/or locate the current holder of the copyright. There is a bustling market among those interested in genealogy for old local histories, maps, biographies, etc., and a number of genealogical publishing firms that specialize in re-printing orphaned works after the copyright expires. Those firms had the rug pulled out from under them when the copyright period was extended 25 years -- it was like a 25-year moratorium on moving anything more into the expired copyright window. And it's just that much longer before these abandoned works can be reprinted and put in the hands of the small number of people who are clamoring for them.

So we can assume that the writer of this article won't mind if we scan his books and make the pdf available online for free. Right?

I've commented on this indirectly elsewhere where it was linked from another source. I don't remember the particulars in either regard. First your description of copyright as 95 years after death of the individual is wrong. According to Wikipedia (which I checked for confirmation) the term limits are 70 years after death for an individual and 95 years after publication for a corporation (or 120 years after creation, whichever is lower). Not a major point, especially considering the absurdity of the logic of incentive to create decades after death. But then everything .. everything .. about copyright and other recent intellectual property laws have an Alice in Hell-land Kafkaesque (mixed metaphorical allusions?) quality about them.

Regarding copyright and IP (intellectual property) laws, my anger has long ago dropped to a low simmer with only the occasional flame up. The entire core benefit of copyright for the creative has been so greatly overstated as to be much more fantasy than reality. That is, an incentive to create for creative people. I don't remember who it was that said it, but it was an established major "recording artist." The statement was made while Bruce Springsteen was finishing off one of his tours a few years ago. The performer said that Springsteen was making more money on his tour (about a month at that point) than he made in his entire career as a recording artist. This from someone that knew the industry and was famous and established. It wasn't Janis Ian, who has posted eloquently on the web about the recording industry and had a couple of CDs that were famous years ago. She has described her meager income from her recordings. Incidentally Orrin Hatch makes far more money from his Christian song writing than Janis Ian. Do you think that maybe his income along those lines might be related to his political power? Hatch actually claimed to be interested in Napster at the time of the big suit, seemingly befriending Shawn Fanning. But he quickly changed his view to the point of claiming the industry should be allowed to hack into people's computers.

The reality is that recording might make a singer-songwriter famous, but performing brings in the money. Not recording. The fame is the hook. The money is the fantasy.

But the money is very real, just not for the creative people. They're called "recording artists" for a reason. They're paid to be recorded. That itself was a point of contention a few years ago when the recording industry had contracts that described the artists as "work for hire," and thereby without copyright privileges. They could get payment for their songwriting (another group - not the RIAA) but not for the singing. They were paid a fixed fee for that.

This is why I think of the recording industry as similar to pimps. They control people that have qualities that there's a great market for, yet those people with the sought after qualities get very little of the monetary benefit from their talents.

Anyway I could go on, but I'd have to provide references and I don't have the energy to do that anymore. I've tried to find the artist that described the income sources for Springsteen but haven't succeeded. I'm not the only one who has lost the fire. Lawrence Lessig recently dropped his fight against copyright abuses. He has switched to fighting corruption in government. My guess is that his decision might have been based on the case he brought before the Supreme Court against allowing the last extension of the copyright term. Lessig tried to use the logic some of the justices had used in prior cases to point out that extending copyright term (11 times in the last few decades) was a violation of the Constitution's admonition that copyright should be for a "limited" time. The judges ignored Lessig points (based on their own logic) and ruled for the term extension. It wasn't about legal judgment. It was about political judgment, just as it was in the 2000 election. Is it surprising that Lessig has switched to trying to fight corruption in government?

In the prior comment I made on this I referenced an old commentary by Thomas Babbington Macaulay. He gave some speeches before the British Parliament in the 1840s regarding the, even then, absurdities of copyright law.

Macaulay on Copyright
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

Thomas Babington Macaulay Copyright Speeches
http://www.blackmask.com/books12c/4mwsm.htm#axiv

Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800-1859
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/macaulay.htm

It should be noted that there are aspects to copyright that on the surface would not effect the recording industry. I think it was Lessig that proposed that there be a one dollar charge for retaining copyright after 50 years. One dollar to maintain copyright after 50 years of the privilege! The purpose was to allow orphaned works that no one seemed interested in, and the copyright holder could not be located, to fall into the public domain. You know. The public. The part of the copyright compact that always gets ignored - the public and any benefit it gets from allowing copyright monopoly. The industry refused to consider the fee. I think the key might be that they don't have the documentation to prove copyright ownership in many cases. That was a point raised in the Napster case but the industry was never required to provide documentation proving copyright privilege for all the works they claimed copyright over.

Ironically at about the time of the Napster case the recording industry was found to have been price fixing on a large scale. It would have been fitting if the industry had been fined $25,000 (or more) for every track of every CD that was sold at an illegal price. But then since they control the police they control the punishment. People are pirates or worse, Boston stranglers looking for women alone (the MPAA metaphor presented before Congress in a presentation against the VCR), but the publishing industry just makes poor business decisions.

Recently there was a news item about the recording industry going after some shop where the workers played their radios while they worked. The public could hear the music and the recording industry regarded this as a copyright violation (public performance). I wish I could get $25,000 for every time I had to listen to some jerk's booming boom box playing some song I found revolting. But that's not the case.

I'm not a big music fan. Ironically I became interested when mp3s first began to appear on the Net. This was long before Napster. I would download a song and if I liked it I'd go out and buy the CD. I was buying a CD a week. Then when there was a call for a boycott of the industry during the Napster case when Napster was to be shut down even before the case began, I stopped buying CDs. The ruling was overturned and it took a while longer to shut down Napster but I haven't bought a major label CD since that time.

I haven't missed them.

P.S.

Artists Blast Record Companies Over Lawsuits Against Downloaders
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/11/MN12066.DTL

"Bruce Springsteen probably earned more in 10 nights at Meadowlands last month than in his entire recording career," said rocker Huey Lewis.

P.P.S.

The other IP laws have even more sinister connotations. Patent law, especially with respect to the drug industry, costs lives every day. Many many lives. Every day. Never mind that there's little incentive to find and market cures. Long term treatments, especially multi-drug treatments, are much more profitable.

We also now have software patents, which rather than furthering technological progress, stifle it. I remember decades ago seeing a patent for a simple mechanical switch. The patent belonged to one Dennis Ritchie of Thompson and Ritchie Unix creation fame and the C language it was written in. I think patents then had to be related to an individual (maybe intellect wasn't seen as being a quality of a corporate kit) but the patent belonged to AT&T. The mechanical switch was used as a metaphor for a Unix permission bit.

Business methods are now patentable. I saw some news item about allowing copyright for clothes designs. No matter what the form of intellectual property control it will quickly become dominated by monied interests rather than creative people. It's the power that counts, not the creativity. The thugs on the street corners, except these thugs have the FBI et.al. helping them with their shakedowns.

My only problem with this and Radiohead's approach is that it would be almost unworkable for a no-name artist.

The current system is also almost unworkable for a no-name artist.

I imagine it's even worse.

The only solution I can think of in this scenario would be for a marketing site for independent artists.

There is one. It's called MySpace. 

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

Yes, but the recording industry has artistic scouts, agents, marketing, advertising, distribution, better sound quality, and a host of other "perks" that independents do not have.

It's the recording industry, in all their mass-marketing "wisdom" that makes or breaks a recording artist.  At least, at this particular time. 

The only reason Radiohead's endeavor has been successful is because they are Radiohead. They command the music industry's attention. They have the funds to advertise. They have the funds to set up their own studio and produce their own music. 

How did people find out about Radiohead's endeavor? The media. 

How are people going to find out about some new independent band? Certainly not from the media. 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity
Where everybody knows your name...
unless you use a pseudonym

Current and future technologies are going to create a system whereby the people who create the work will see their work distributed without compensation. Trying to hang on to this doomed distribution model isn't going to help. I don't think Baker's proposals are the best solution, but at least they offer a starting point of discussion.

As a personal example of the level of fear current copyright law has created, last year I wrote a story called "Booker." After I had finished writing the story, I heard a song with a couple of lines that worked really well with the story, so I added them as a sort of preface - just the two lines. The first editor who read it liked the story but felt that the two lines from the song were too big of a risk, she didn't want to get sued by the RIAA, and it costs too much to get permission.

You might argue that my use of those lines alters or dimishes the original work of the songwriter. Weird Al Yankovich certainly diminished the value of the original works of Madonna, Michael Jackson, and The Knack at a time when they were sorely in need of diminishing. Either the work is strong enough to withstand alteration, or people end up prefering the altered version, in which case, the altered version is superior and the artist who created the original should learn from it. Their hacking and splicing might make for a better work of art. Certainly that was the case with The Phantom Menace.

But I happen to believe a third alternative - if the original and the altered version are of great merit, they strengthen each other and especially the art as a whole.

For example, Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. I can't imagine that Charlotte Bronte would have been too keen on how her story was rewritten by Jean Rhys, but so what? Literature is made greater by both. Granted that Wide Sargasso Sea could have been written under current law, but how much longer before the law is extended so that another Wide Sargasso Sea couldn't be written? You only need, what, another 36 years added to the law.

Anyone afraid to publish for fear of seeing their artistic vision sullied by hacks and mashers would best serve the world by not foisting their lack of self-confidence upon the rest of us, especially not under the rule of law.

I actually agree with you, but we both know that the studios would see a 20-year copyright as leaving money on the table. Who writes the copyright laws and pays to have them enacted?

Dean,

The AFV is an interesting proposal, despite its somewhat euphemistic name, although I doubt that it can ever play more than a modest supporting role in the broader social challenge of making sure that artists of quality are able to derive sufficient monetary compensation from their efforts to devote a lifetime to the practice and perfection of their art. And I don't see how the AFV proposal gets around the free rider challenge, which is the heart of the problem.

Anyway, I'm glad you posted the AFV report on the web. Are your books available for free download as well?

I too look forward to the brave new world of socialized art. However, that is not the system we have now, and most artists do not have access to special, regulated patronage funds or government sinecures. In the interim we have a problem: we have an insane culture of consumerist entitlement that has given us generations of Americans who think nothing of deriving gratification from the sweat of another individual's labor without doing anything at all to compensate that individual for his labor - whether through a middleman or some other way. We also have a situation where armies of affluent, indulged brats have erected impervious mental walls of rationalization according to which each act of petty theft is an instance of "sticking it to the man."

If my name weren't attached to the altered work, why would anyone think I wrote it? If I produce a Star Wars movie and put my name on it, the only reason you would assume Lucas was associated with it is because you'd assume copyright law wouldn't allow me to make the movie without his approval. Without that kind of copyright protection, there is no assumption of association. The only thing I would argue is someone else putting my name on their work, even if their work was derivitive of mine, but that's not copyright law, that's identity theft, and I would fight that.

Having written and published in shared universes on a work-for-hire basis, rest assured that no one confuses my work with the writing of the authors most famous for novels in that universe, nor is their work confused with mine. We all write in the same corporate owned universe, to which none of us owns copyright, but the stories are nonetheless ours, written entirely by us. We have no rights to the works. Yet no one person could have created the library of stories currently associated with that world. You may argue whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether work-for-hire is an abomination, but you can't argue that the readers and fans of that world haven't benefitted by the combined work of many different writers.

I'm not indifferent to alterations to my work, but neither am I frightened of them. Editors alter work all the time. I'm not always happy with what they do, but sometimes they improve a work. It's no longer true to my original artistic vision, but neither am I so vain as to suppose someone else can't have a better idea about something I wrote.

I expect the chance to make a dime or two off my work at publication, and a fair period of copyright protection would be good were the current structure of publishing not doomed for extinction due to the evolving technology. It's terrible, it's a shame, it's wrong, but there it is. Some horse traders cried about the invention of the automobile and tried to pass laws outlawing them. Others switched to selling cars.

The thing here is that the vast majority of copyright infringement has nothing to do with altering someone else's work or trying to pass it off as your own. In most cases, it's about piracy and about protecting corporate profits. Nobody's whipping out altered versions of Dan Brown's novels, or pasting Dan Brown's name to their novels, but some people are certainly claiming that Dan Brown violated their copyright. And one of the largest problems with current copyright law is that older works are kept out of the public domain too long, either because of greed or because the heirs don't want writers building, expanding, or "retelling" the writer's original vision.

And I don't buy the parody justification because parody is just a form of humor, so why does it deserve special legal protection? A parody is a work of art that depends entirely on the original work for its humor, especially popular familiarity with that work, otherwise the jokes make no sense. How is that any different, on a technical, creative level, than someone publishing their own Star Wars stories, for example? Their stories cannot exist without the larger Star Wars universe, especially popular familiarity with that universe. Because one is funny and one is serious - how is this a logical interpretation of the law?

Art benefits by participation, not exclusion. The copyright law, as originally intended, was to protect the artist from unlicensed distribution of their work - in other words, to protect the individual from the corporate. Back in the days of Mark Twain, a shady publisher would crank out illegal copies of Mark Twain's novels and sell them, banking on Mark Twain's name, and he wouldn't get a dime. In general, that's not what's happening today and that's not how copyright law is being applied, especially when it comes to file-sharing. If that single-mom who got popped for $222,000 were making money off that music, that's one thing. But she didn't profit by her file sharing. All that was lost is some corporation's and recording artists' potential profits. Who is to say the people who downloaded those files would ever have paid a dime for them? I'd like to know if the court asked them, otherwise how can they prove that any harm was done?

Obviously, logic does not always prevail in courts of law.

We should distinguish between fraud and copyright infringement. If someone claims a work that they didn't author as their own, whether it is copyrighted or not, that's fraud. If they alter an existing work, and fully acknowledge the authorship of the original work, and that it has been altered, this is not fraud or plagiarism, although it can be a copyright violation under current law. While the original author may not like the new work, it should be apparent that he/she did not author the derivative work. 

Q: Who writes the copyright laws and pays to have them enacted?

A: Corporations endowed with the rights of individuals while unconstrained by mortality

and yes, the industry would see things that way because their terribly inefficient business model is dependent on the homeruns (the exceptions like caruso and the beatles) instead of the base hits. any change to copyright laws means forcing the industry to change their business model. by not allowing copyright laws to change in response to advances in technology, government(s) subsidize outdated business models.

actually, nothing in his post would make that a reasonable thing to assume.

Mike, if I were to change the title of Milton's "Paradise Lost" and call it "I Won Paradise in a Lottery" do you suppose Milton might think that the concept of copyright enforcement is about more than money?

"Let us go then, you and I,
While the evening is spread out
Against the sky, like a big ass
Broad who ate too many french
Fries."

There, I altered it a little bit, and in my opinion, improved it - Elliot wouldn't mind, I'm sure.

Small addition/correction. The Supreme Court rejected Lessig's case on both legalistic and constitutional grounds. They argued that the Constitution gives Congress to set copyright protection for a limited time. Clearly 90 years is a limited period (so is 90,000 years) and the Congress did set it. Therefore, nothing unconstitutional happened.

Basically I think the Supreme Court didn't want to get into this tangle. They would have to say that X is too long but Y is not, and that would not be easy. Hence anyone wishing to change copyright law should be pressuring Congress (hey, the record industry does that and look how well it's worked out for them!). I can understand Supreme Court's reasoning but I'm not happy with their decision.

The middlemen deserve little or no profit, but people should be able to make a living selling what they create.

That may not be a parody of a tree-hugging hippie but it's communism. No, people have no inherent right to make a living selling what they create. They have to create something sufficiently in demand to make a living. Sad but true.

The problem here is that we got all the principles wrong from the start.

Nobody should be able to tell me how I use my computer. What Web sites I visit and what I choose to download is my business and I shouldn't have to answer to anyone.

That doesn't mean that pirated music should be everywhere. It means that if it's out there, I should be able to legally get it. The recording industry should police itself, and make sure that its property is protected.

If I went around handing out every book in my apartment, and left some on the street, no court in the land would go go great lengths to see that I got all of my property back. The music industry has been irresponsible here. Put the onus on them.

If it's out there, I should be allowed to download it. If that bothers the RIAA, then the RIAA should keep it's stuff from getting out there.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

But the problem is how the RIAA keeps its stuff from getting out there in the internet age isn't it? That's what the law suite was about.

People don't respect intellectual property rights in general and will justify sharing copyrighted music with others for free. Taking draconian measures to stop them from doing so just drives legitimate customers away.

I don't share Bev's outrage that the integrity of a work could be lost. If the twist is interesting, it's art and not piracy; if not, people will lose interest once they discover it's plagiarism. I also agree with Destor's and Robert B.'s feeling that the enforcement of rights can't legitimately extend to what's out there and, as the latter puts it, just drives real customer's away. But I also still don't share the belief in a happy future without royalties. 

First, maybe it applies to pop music, because touring will provide revenue, but then there won't be need for Dean's proposal.  And then there's less incentive anyhow for studio productions, which are creative acts in their own right, Perhaps that isn't important now that software makes home production and distribution easier. But that's not a useful model for classical music beyond electronic music and chamber music or for arts other than music. 

Second, aMike's reference to Bach and others is irrelevant. They didn't work for love. They worked for patronage. Capitalism changed the nature of audiences and support, but abolishing capitalism wouldn't restore the aristocracy.

Third, Jeff's idea that book publishing is irrelevant is a pipe dream. We keep hearing of the eBook future, and it doesn't happen. And is it desirable? Not every book thrives without a publisher investment or author interest in royalties. There wouldn't be new textbooks (my business) that way, and I can't imagine scholarly nonfiction or most new fiction getting out there just by word of mouth. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Excellent post--regarding software IP issues, you and others here may or may not be aware of the long-running legal battle of SCO vs. IBM and SCO vs. Red Hat, where, SCO, seeming to act as proxy for Microsoft, has challenged the legality of Linux, the Free as in Beer and Speech Operating System.

Also, software patents have been under fire for years, and are showing signs of failure--recently, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft has issued veiled threats of using The MS patent portfolio to sue somebody in the Linux community, but the backlash has had the opposite effect of the Linux community telling MS to put up or shut up. Since MS refuses to share any specifics, they are being rightfully accused of attempted extortion.

There is a fantastic website, Groklaw, that has been tracking the legal issues around these cases, and others in the same arena, for years--I'd highly recommend a visit there to anybody who is interested in this aspect of copyright.

Every published work will eventually enter into the public domain. Once there, anyone is free to use the work in any way they want. Copyright is a two-way street -- in exchange a time-limited monopoly, the work will eventually become free.

Now, if artists cannot live with the thought of their work being butchered, improved, or otherwise altered, they have a simple recourse: don't publish the work. Then copyright doesn't apply and they retain full control over the work. They may not make any money either, but artistic control's gotta be worth something, right?

I should add that this is actually the same concept as patents. Inventors are granted temporary monopoly on their inventions, but in return the invention becomes free for anyone after the patent expires. By now it should be clear why The Coca-Cola Company will never patent the eponymous drink, even though that means anyone can sell 'clone' drinks.

(Let's not go into how the patent system is broken :-) )

Speaking as a copyright-holder I agree there should be some wiggle room, and there is. Fair Use is allowable reference or comment, or satire, IIRC. Self-consciously quoting a phrase is legit, basing a song on that phrase is not, as George Harrison discovered after "My Sweet Lord".

Might have been Stravinsky, who said "Amateurs borrow; artists steal."

If my AFV proposal compensates all artists at the same rate, it is a mystery to me how. 

This seems like a troll, but to answer your questions:

a.) Milton won't mind, because he's dead.

b.) Paradise Lost is in the Public Domain, so you are free to make all the alterations you want.

Perhaps it is because your background appears to be literary, however, in many arts, especially music, there is a rich tradition of, well, Traditional songs that artists are (or were) free to borrow from, embellish upon, and change at their whim. Were your assertions correct, Bob Dylan, for one, would certainly not have a career!

In painting, you may want to examine the works of Arshile Gorky, amongst others, who has many works in his oevre that were 'copied' from artists like Picasso. Another example would be Roy Lichtenstein, who painted many derivative works, such as Still Life With Picasso. Without derivation, much Modern and Contemporary Art would not exist.

Sorry, but your absolutist position seems to rely more on what you think is 'common sense' than the historical traditions of music and fine arts. (I forgot to add sculpture--I just saw several Matisse sculptures that were copied from Rodin)

I think this a little exaggerated reaction. A lot of artists are starting to share their albums on the Internet and let the fans have the liberty to decide whether they're going to pay or not. Even if in my Winnebago Era I liked to hear music on the bought Cd's, I still believe that's a too drastic response.