>>>If people could reproduce my work and by law were required to give me a cut, I would try to find the best salesman out there and let her take care of it.<<<
So now they are paying you and a distributor. Doesn't sound too different. Maybe you need manufacturing too, and some PR, Huh?
>>>My central point remains that those little CDs with music or computer programs are not worth what people are being charged... especially computer software.<<<<
Based on what? Intuition?
Most records, most books, and most software titles, lose money at the current prices. If you lose on 9 items you fund, promote, manufacture, and distribute, are you entitled to recoup your losses on the tenth item? Most software companies go broke and the investors in them lose their money (at least, some investors do, though often not the scammers that do the IPOs, I'll admit. But little of that IPO money goes to the folks who actually do the creative work.)
You focus on the cost of the plastic CD knowing full well that millions go into a typical software title. This is just sophistry.
I think a better model would be laws like californias fine art resales law, that says you have to pay the original artist 5% on resale of one of their works no matter what happened in between. Also, you own the painting, but the artist owns the image.
Put something like that into the patent law to protect engineers and geneticists, and something similar in copyright law to protect programmers, writers, and so forth, and you have my vote. Only please don't sell my stuff for a buck a copy so that if a hundred thousand copies get sold my reward for a year's work is a big $5000. I don't think that would work out.
Another issue is whether you have the right to control your own work. If I write a song or paint a painting, can you coopt that in a cigarette ad without my permission? Can you use it intentionally in a way to damage my reputation? I don't think I like that either.
These rules have been worked out over centuries of solving conflicts. The result has been an explosion of innovation and creativity, and a much better lifestyle for the average person. They are not perfect, but now that the US has signed on to the international copyright convention, and the two largest states are making some moves to protect artists, things are once again moving in the right direction.
What we need is better copyright and patent protection for originators of the works, not no protection for anyone.
You don't wanna pay Microsoft. I don't care, really, though I personally pay them off. I hope you won't use that cheesy 'cost of that little CD' excuse to rip off some individual's life work, though. You want free, program it yourself, play that guitar, make up that story and tell it to somebody. |
