[moz]

Steve,

I'd like to move to some extent into the philosophical question more than the practical one. Rather than argue about whether we're obliged to feed lawyers, why not work out what we want, then how we can get it? I assume you'd like to be paid for your writing? And I'd like to pay you for it. So, generalising, you'd like to see authors paid, and I'd like to see readers pay authors. I suspect both of us are willing to give a cut to some kind of distribution and rating people. Is that right?

What I see now is that the service layer gets almost all the money, especially from people like me. For new material, I buy from bookshops for the most part, which means most of the money goes to the bookshop. For material that's not sold new, I either buy second hand books (I just paid $US25 for ~15 hardcover SF) in which case the second hand dealer gets the money, or I use the darknet and my ISP gets the money.

So, from the point of view of rewarding the authors, how do the two mechanisms above differ? As far as I can tell neither will reward the author at all. Well, except for the warm glow of knowing that someone loves them. Which doesn't pay the rent.

There's an opportunity there for the copyright holder to make a profit by selling the electronic editions for next to nothing (even $1/book) instead of actually nothing (what they get now). Amusingly, the author could probably in many cases simply resell the darknet edition with a comment from the author.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Actually, the industries could have controlled "the game" if they'd wanted to, simply by forcing the middleman--the ISP--to pay a "tax" for transmitted music

They actually succeeded in doing that with radio, but as I'm sure you're aware it does not work very well. Even the US government was forced to admit that eventually. The major problem from a content producer point of view is that without very strong centralised monitoring (which requires command and control), the tax is distributed unfairly. Either way, most of the money goes to the middlemen. The chances of you personally getting any money at all are vanishingly remote, and the chances of someone like me (a small, semi-amateur in a far-away country) getting anything are zero. My choice is between having my work used free by anyone and used with the payment going to support people in the USA who I strongly disagree with. Small wonder that I choose free (well, strictly, it's begware).

As far as the "long, losing battle" is concerned, think about the fact that the longer illegal file sharing continues, the longer that battle will last.

Actually, the longer people like you keep paying them to do it, and resisting every alternative, the longer the battle will go on. You'll note the absence of software makers from that fight, for instance, as well as copyright holders from outside the USA. My personal efforts go in two directions - asking people for money, and being a member of a professional association who can influence the major violators in the direction of paying me (with photos that's the AIPP and the bought media respectively.