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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bunch" data-source="post: 9535760" data-attributes="member: 6696094">Well since at least 1980 copyrights have been pretty hostile to the public at large so the pendulum tends to swing both ways if you wait long enough.I'd say my need for professional musicians is much, much lower than the number who want to be professional musicians which is always going to push the earnings of professional musicians down.  And sadly what level of professionalism I personally need is much lower than I think professionals on artistic arenas think it should be.   I've fairly routinely had this whole discussion as it relates to photography.  I discuss the complaints that professionally trained  photographers dont get paid as well as they used to.  Large numbers of digital, automated cameras have created "good enough" photographs that the public actually wanted.  They had to settle for higher priced professional level photos because that's all there was before.   The truth from my perspective is the wages the pro photographers had before were propped up by the skills necessary to use the tool(camera).  When that dropped the price dropped both because they couldn't charge for those skills anymore and because the buyers on average never really cared about the amount of skill that it takes to setup good lighting, placement in a photo, etc.  They mostly wanted a picture of their friend, kid ,business, etc in the paper as long as it was good enough(in focus, smiling, looking good).  I suspect that is a sad truism in most of the arts.  People buying the arts on average only care about good enough.  Making a living your entire life just on the arts is not realistic for 90% of the participants.  People don't value it enough and the quantity of people who want to do it is so large that earnings from it will always be low.  If you have $1m, you average 100k a year in S&P returns.  That's pretty sweet assuming you do nothing else.  Now some years you get nothing and others you might get 180k but historically 10% is your average.   The general public would be well served by having a serious home economics course in high school.  I'm going to worry a lot less about the 5% who get a windfall and fail to manage it vs the much larger number of folks living paycheck to paycheck while still earning a living.  You fix that and you probably don't need to worry about the windfall folks.  So I have the counter factual to this in my town, as it relates to IP,  where the restaurant(burger joint) changed hands and the owners ,like your example, kept the personnel, general menu but changed the name, interior and style.  Business is still solid since functionally nothing changed.  Place X still served roughly the same food and setting but nothing close enough you would need to pay extra for the trademarks.   At that size and location it's mostly about the people and food than trade dress.</blockquote>

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