Quote:
Originally Posted by HamsterRage
For the past 30 or so years, there have been lots of people who spent countless hours writing software simply to set it free into the world for people to use and enjoy, sometimes asking for people to donate, sometimes not. Chances are that the website the this forum runs on is driven by a web server that nobody paid a penny to use.
My point being that creativity can flourish - and really, really good stuff can come out of it - in an environment where the author doesn't get paid in money. And there are lots of people who live just to see their work get passed around a million times.
OK, so I know that's not the same situation you described. But I'd say that if you were an author today, you'd have to be blind to not realize that anything that you publish is going to available via file sharing a few minutes after you sell the first copy. So there has to be a limit to how pissed off you can be.
Now if you did all that work 5 years ago, and were hoping to fund your retirement for the next 30 years off of ongoing royalties...well then I think you'd have a strong reason for being really angry.
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I know a bit about freeware, public domain and open source and I agree 100% that it not only can work to bring about creativity but it does work and works very well, but as you pointed out thats not what we are discussing. We're talking copyright.
I don't think there are any authors that really believe they will live off the royalties of a book for 30 years, I'm not a writer so I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine they would be happy about it.
I have a lot of personal knowledge about the music industry and how much a well known artist earns on royalties for 11 albums and if thats what an author is earning then, I hope they have a day job. Copyright is intended to protect the value of intellectual property, not to keep people from making copies of it, that should be handled by peoples personal morality and their understanding that they are stealing something. Just like it they walked into your house and walked out with you TV, copyright is like the deadbolt on your front door, it won't keep a determined thief out, but it will keep the more honest ones out.
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