Quote:
Originally Posted by sigmax
my two cents, from a third world country:
As we all know, usually the media creator is on one side (insert here music or book) earning a very small fraction of the cake, then you got the "middle layer" which charges and bites obscene amounts of money, and on the other side of the ecuation you got the consumer, which usually paid for the whole party.
The "middle layer", in other times, could hide behind the "distribution and promotion costs".
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You're absolutely right. You're pointing out the critical problem in the current management of intellectual property.
I know people who work in the publishing industry. I've asked them how much they think an author should gain from the sale of their work, and it always boils down to less than ten percent of the sale price.
That's just not good enough.
We consumers know that authors need to eat. We value their work and we
want to reward them for it. But that becomes pretty hard to justify when you find out that the vast majority of what you pay is actually going into the pockets of middle-men who invested nearly nothing in the creation of the work you're reading.
The real problem that the IP industry faces is its vast inefficiency. It is infested with hangers-on who have no purpose other than to nibble at the cake.
Copyright is fundamentally an issue of respect. If I respect what you do, then I should pay you for it in the hope that you'll do it again in the future. Copyright has become corrupted by the fact that only a tiny fraction of what I pay actually goes to the person whose labours I wish to reward.