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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
The second, although i wouldn't phrase it the way you do.
I hear both you and Hitch how poorly paid writing is, on average. I agree. It's basically buying a lottery ticket with a lot of hard labor.
If that is what a person wants to do with their time, that's their business. But I'm rather fed up with the expectation that all that labor <entitles> an author to special priviledges, that no one else in God's green Earth gets.And onward unto the Nth generation's descendants. And to make it even more annoying, I get their justification of how <hard> they worked. They <deserve> these extra priviledges, because writing does't get paid enough.[...]
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Lots of others get similar privileges. Interest and dividends earned on investments offer income for work the investor doesn't perform - and many play the markets in the hope of striking it big (and these are things you can pass on to your "Nth generation's descendants", they don't automatically revert to the public domain at some arbitrary point for the public good). Patents, though different things to copyright, offer similar privileges. These are not about expectation so much as possibility (the carrot on the end of the stick to keep the donkey moving), these are incentives to encourage people to contribute - to invest.
The arguments offered in relation to the amount of work involved are there show that the incentives offered are in return for real effort. This is not a something for nothing deal (which is the way many seem to see it).
And, since you admit that authors are paid poorly on average, it seems like a pretty good deal. Society is obviously not paying full price for the labour involved in generating that contribution. And since it is a user-pays system it is difficult to claim it is unfair.
A person can sell their labour directly - as an employee or an independent contractor - but it can be sold that way only once, however the money earned this way can be invested to earn income indirectly. Or a person can invest some of their labour in creating/inventing a product, and possibly sell the result of that labour many times - but that's a big risk, and without some level of incentive fewer people will take it.
So it's not just copyright, it's the whole economic shebang, that is about offering incentives to encourage investment - all, in theory, for the public good. Other structures are possible, and some have been tried in the past, but unless you have some alternative to present then the question remains one of choosing the ideal length of copyright (if such a thing can be said to exist) to achieve the desired level of incentive.