6 ms·
How do you propose that the authors of creative works be paid for their efforts, outside of copyright?
by jawns 6y ago
How do you propose that the authors of creative works be paid for their efforts, outside of copyright?
- hopfscotch7 6y agoThey aren’t?
- karaterobot 6y agoYour position is unusual enough that I don't really understand it. If you laid out an argument, I'd be happy to read it and have my mind changed. Terse responses are not persuasive, though.
- hopfscotch7 6y agoI hold that you cannot own information. I can have a copy of some information which you have, without depriving you of it. Property rights don't apply. One needs only look at the way Disney has gotten copyright terms extended to see that it exists purely to serve entrenched publishing interests, and nothing more.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoBetter yet, nobody should be paid for any work whatsoever. We should all love what we do, and if we won't do what we do for free, we clearly don't love it enough. We should all put our lack of money where our mouths are.
- hopfscotch7 6y agoIf you just dropped the sarcastic tone, that's exactly right.
- mlyle 6y agoIf we could only find enough people who love cleaning toilets...
- thr0waw4y5555 6y agoWe are, very poorly. With rampant piracy of books (e.g., ruslib), royalties have become quite reduced that would traditionally compensate for low up front payment from publishers. I’d blame publishers for paying so poorly, but the bulk of my irritation goes to entitled consumers who have decided that regardless of the time and effort required to create something, they deserve it for free.
- Aeolun 6y agoWhat I think I deserve for free is the ability to decide whether a book is worth the price or not. This is simple in a bookstore, but when I’m online the default seems to be that I have to shell out to even take a look.
- thr0waw4y5555 6y ago100% agree. The death of in-person bookstores has killed that mode of browsing, and I have yet to see a viable replacement when buying online.
- ghaff 6y agoMany ebooks have some degree of preview. In some cases, it's imperfect, but it seems overall at least roughly equivalent to a bookstore.
- sjy 6y agoIt’s not roughly equivalent. I often look at the free previews on Amazon and Google Books to check print citations or read a few pages from a chapter of interest, but usually the pages I want to read are unavailable. An online equivalent to bookstores is not possible because there’s no way to glare at a customer for treating the store as a library.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> I’d blame publishers for paying so poorly That's exactly what you should do. You should have been adequately compensated for the time and effort required to write your book. Instead, your publisher decided to require you to put the work in first and then offer you the chance to get compensated afterwards based on how well your book sold. The expected results didn't materialize because the market conditions that enabled those sales no longer exist. The world has changed. We're living in the 21st century. It costs $0 to make and distribute copies of information. Only the costs associated with creating the first copy must be paid for. Blaming consumers for this reality isn't going to make it go away. Insisting on copyright doesn't seem to be working either. The sooner people accept this, the sooner we can start working towards alternative business models that don't depend on creating artificial scarcity in the age of free information. Creators are scarce. Intellectual works, once created, are not. Therefore we must somehow compensate creators for the act of creating and not for the sale of the resulting work.
- different-guy 6y agoI propose that they do it out of love, and not for money. There will be less trash on the market and more high quality work.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> There will be less trash on the market and more high quality work Actually, only those with lots of disposable time, or who can purchase others’ time, will produce content.
- geofft 6y agoIncidentally, this is the reason why you should always pay your politicians a salary and why you shouldn't find "this politician refused their salary" to be meritorious - you don't want to artificially restrict your pool of politicians to the independently wealthy.
- ketzu 6y agoA lot of trash is created by people who do it out of love. Cases include fanfics, youtube videos and videogames. (I am personally guilty of producing trash in all of these categories.) Also, a lot of people love trash.
- WalterBright 6y agoOne way (an old way) is for, say a newspaper or magazine, to publish a novel as a serial. The newspaper pays the author for a few pages at a time, and the newspaper gets subscription fees and ad revenue.
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoSerialized novels have perverse incentives in the form of puffing up word count and frequent cliffhangers to keep readers coming back. I cannot find it at the moment but there was a fascinating article comparing excerpts from a serialized novel versus a standalone novel to illustrate these effects.
- 6AA4FD 6y agoThat may be, however you may be interested to learn that Ulysses was first serialised.
- cxr 6y agoAside from that, it also hampers authors creatively. The difference between a great film and bad film can hinge on what happens in the editing room. It has to be the same for books. Consider how hard it would be for a programmer to do their job if they could only write programs concatenatively (e.g. if the code you committed last week were a real commitment—set in stone and you were never able to refactor it or clean up the architecture, etc.)
- WalterBright 6y agoAnother way is to simply limit copyright terms to 20 years. Or charge a fee to enable copyright, and copyrights must be registered.