Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I wonder why people pursue a profession that is so poorly renumerated. Nothing stops them from pursuing some other profession that is more renumerative. After all, if money is what counts....
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Good lord, man. That is what this entire conversation has been about
: money. Money, apparently, IS all that counts, because this whole discussion has been about nothing more than the idea that folks who want copyright ended sooner want to get their hands on someone's original work for NOTHING. Whether to read it for NOTHING, own it for NOTHING, or use it, for NOTHING, upon which to build their own "artistic" endeavors (which they in turn will copyright and sell)...
what else is this whole discussion about?
All the rest of the diversions, u-turns, prestidigitation, bloviating about how big evil corporations are ripping off poor starving artists and enriching themselves, lost works, blah-blah-blah--it's all distraction. You can dress it up however you want, but: this is
ALL ABOUT MONEY, and proponents of reducing terms of copyright want the work "to fall into the public domain" which means nothing more than "we get it for free, and the creator no longer has any rights to it." Look at the whole lost works discussion in the sector--everyone claimed that they were "really" concerned that all these books not be lost (which is why they should all go into the PD), but now they bitch that Google digitized them and saved them. Because now they have to pay a small fee to access them. The books were indeed saved. But I guess that's not what they REALLY wanted--they wanted those books scanned, OCR'ed, digitized,and made FREELY available...so that somebody else would do all the heavy lifting, for NOTHING.
Period, end statement. All the rest of it--citing Macauley's speech of 1841, when 56 years meant a significantly longer portion of a person's lifetime than it does now, corporations, rights, kines--it's all window dressing. It all comes down to a single thing: money. There's no getting around it. Anyone--anyone at all--could approach any author out there and ask for a license to use their creations in their own book, to create more, uh, "homages" to someone's work, or "reboots." They don't need to wait for PD. Why don't they? MONEY. Why do people want to obtain books that are in the PD, instead of just buying them? MONEY.
Can we all please just stop jelld***ing around, and just get to the core of the discussion? It IS about money. It's about money from the artist's side, and it's about money from the acquirer's side, or user's side. It's not about anything else. Nobody really wants to talk about THAT end of it, do they?
The acquirer's side, and money. Or the "none" thereof. They just want to talk about taking rights away from the creators, stopping evil corporations who are enriching themselves unjustly, whether or not authors should write for nothing, etc. It's all well and good to talk about somebody ELSE'S money, and how they've "made enough," or how their great works will be lost, or how their crappy grandaughter doesn't deserve it.
Why don't we talk about the motivations of all the people who want works in the PD sooner?
Why don't we talk about why somebody can't buy a used book from 1960 for a few bucks, instead of arguing why it should drop into the PD? Or how evil
cheap people can't spend a few dollars to buy a copy of a work they want, thereby
unjustly enriching their brains with the entertainment that they claim no longer has any "value," but apparently, had enough value to them that they wanted a copy of it?
Piffle.
Hitch