David Tomlinson wrote:
Steve Jolly wrote:
A year or less strikes me as too little because too many people would
just wait until it was free. 5-10 years seems like a more realistic
minimum in that regard. Mind you, I think that copyright terms would
vary by medium, ideally.
It's free from the start, their are revenue streams, e.g. advertising or
paying for a physical object, be that a CD or a T-Shirt or book.
If you abolish copyright, then there's no way for the author to benefit
from those revenue streams, because the people who make the CDs,
T-Shirts and books have no reason to pay the author.
I have addressed it, while I consider it natural, and people will not
wish to give it up, I don't see it as desirable. It limits the Freedom
of others.
Every law on the books exists to benefit society as a whole by removing
Freedoms from the individual. My right to privacy in my own home
requires that other people give up their freedom to enter it without
permission, for example. So I don't think you can make a case that
copyright is unusual in this regard.
How long would it take for a competitor, to prepare and publish an
alternative to a say a book. More than three months ?
A week or two, perhaps? Longer for a really high-volume product, but
if copyright was abolished then you'd see specialist piracy-houses
springing up, competing to be first-to-market with copied products.
And they could take pre-orders in the interim period, reducing sales
beneficial to the author still further.
For a Dan Brown perhaps, but that is 8 Million sales in the first week,
he can afford the leakage. It is only when products are successful, it
is worth producing the physical copy.
But I imagine the text for book was available in multiple locations
within days. I don't read Dan Brown, for reasons of sanity.
Perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes here. My point was that a
publisher who chose to pay an author for their work would be
out-competed within days or weeks by competitors who have no reason to
pay that author a penny.
S
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