Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Quite a few, if you look at all the editions of authors like Dickens and Shakespeare in the typical book shop.
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I was thinking of something... a bit more recent. After all, I doubt Dickens or Shakespeare are benefitting from their current sales, one way or the other.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
I think you totally missed my point.
You are formulating your view so it seems that you prefer to earn 1000 money units and having no person reading your books without paying for it to earning 1000000 money units and having 10% of the people reading your books not paying for it.
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That's more of a DRM issue than a copyright issue, and I'm not addressing DRM here. I have no reason to believe that the removal of copyright will result in a 1000x increase in the number of sales of my books, as you suggest in your example. Without copyright to protect my interests, I'd have more reason to expect a comparable
loss in income, quite possibly down to zero, as people freely swap my books on the darknet, with no one worried about paying me for any of them... or more significantly, someone else selling
my books in
their name, with better marketing and publicity, making money from them instead of me.
Can you see how that might concern me as an author?
Copyright is a tool, like a cashier in front of the store exit, that provides a way to make sure the product gets paid for. (Well, actually, I suppose DRM is the cashier, and copyright is the societal agreement that you are supposed to stop there and pay on the way out.) It is not 100% secure and foolproof, but it works well enough to provide a maximum of sales with a minimum of loss. Removing copyright would be akin to putting the cashier in the parking lot, farthest from the door, and seeing how many people bother to go over and pay (instead of making a left turn and walking away). As the net (and the world) has already demonstrated, giving people the choice to pay for content out of the goodness of their hearts generally results in pitifully low payments and overall loss.
But even copyright won't work when everyone decides to just rush for the doors, past the cashiers. That's the issue here: How do we make people act fairly and honestly, when they perceive that it's too easy to just rush the doors?