David McNab wrote: > Yes - artists do profit from copyright - about 0.1% of them, that is. The > rest survive on low incomes, even welfare, or day jobs. Most of those who do > hit the charts find most of their earnings gobbled up by the machine - a
Yeah, some found they make as much from getting the full 10$ for selling their own CD-Rs or even downloads from their website to 10'000 people, as they'd make getting pennies per CD from big industry selling to millions of people. It'll grow, and RIAA will hate the loss of influence. The movie industry is close behind for the same future, as every hobby theater group can now make net or CD-R distributable movies on cheap hardware. > fairs, only the books' covers are on display - purchasers for retail > companies choose purely on that basis. Yes, a lot of shit gets written, but I'll explore cover art for my next job then, if and when I need one. Thanks! :)) > The masses are largely > uninterested in independent creation, since they've been conditioned to > blindly subscribe to the mainstream product. A music teacher of mine, very long ago, said that "pop" music is successful because it uses a heartbeat rate rythm, making us feel as if we were in mom's womb again, safe and secure and fed and cared for. ;) > IMO, the entire system of copyright needs to be replaced by a system of > voluntary micropayments. That way, artists and other content-creators will, > on average, earn *much* more than they earn now. Ok, but stuff a person can produce in a single-handed run-down, like music recordings or writings or photography or even paintings, isn't all that copyright is on. What I'm particularly interested in, is computer software. Making any larger program needs a lot of things: learning to code (all the theoretical stuff like objects and complexity handling, that makes software work efficiently and nice to use), learning the programming interfaces of the operating systems and other stuff you work between, and then doing the research for your project (aerodynamics, military history for a flight sim game, business law for a useful production wordprocessor and database and spreadsheet, physics for a raytracer, biology and medicine for a movie animator or anything else with bearable living beings in it), and then again a long time actually coding your stuff and testing it. Lots of work, extending over a year or even several. Linus took years for just a kernel, when lots of other stuff was already available in the GNU archives. And he had almost full time available as a student, living cheap on government support (Finland cares more for its people than you'd expect in the US), or on his parents' budget. Most people have real bills to pay all the time, a family to feed and house. And you can't finance it by giving "coding gigs", where you let fans watch over your shoulder while you type - just too damn boring, and much less understandable and consumable than even "difficult" music. Banks won't give you loans on such a project, your coding skills and the software market are just too hard to understand for them, so they can't figure out whether they'll ever get their money back from you, and so won't take the risk for you either. I'm not sure how well the shareware model works - I do have test versions of some things, but N$ is free (and I like it, uh), so I don't use Opera, and PowerArchiver is free, so why shell out 70$ for WinRAR (15$ I might, but they don't offer that) or WinZIP, IrfanView is free, so I don't use ACDSee any more (and there's again several other media viewers I can get for 15$ instead of 70$), and so on. I know there are people living from shareware, but I haven't seen any of them publish their income figures so far, so I remain unsure whether that could be an alternative to buying at people like M$, to M$'s conditions. _______________________________________________ Chat mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/chat
