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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnRTroy" data-source="post: 4685022" data-attributes="member: 2732">You completely miss the quote he makes about sales people, lawyers, etc.  And I don't think you have a lot of knowledge on the way Hollywood and other writing endeavors work.  I'm sure as an IT person you get paid a solid wage for what you do.  A lot of writing is fronted by whether or not its a hit.And I think you seem to think writers are overpaid spoiled brats, they aren't.  The people who make it rich screenwriting are very few.  And some software does get royalties--there are people using other people's libraries of code, etc.This analogy is flawed because software is not like prose writing.  Software usually needs maintenance over time.  Plus, in the world of software, hardware changes, OS changes, etc.  By rights, they need constant maintenance over time.It doesn't work like that because for every success there are 10 failures.  Only with success does the money always come in, I thought he made that pretty clear.  You're being pretty ignorant here.  First of all, Steven Grant is by no means a rich man.  Secondly, you seem to be thinking all writers are rich, they are not.  The whole royalty thing is a way of compensating for the fact that a lot of writers aren't paid much for their efforts, especially in Hollywood where they can be easilly exploited if they didn't have their own union.  In fact, in some ways writers are suffering because the people with the money are starting to take the same attitudes you have and make it seem like the writers are the ones being greedy.You don't really know that for a fact.  I'm a little disturbed by the "techno-worship" I see, that technology changes everything.  Yes, well laws do catch up with that.  Modern society is filled will laws.  We can drive twice the speed limit, for instance, but we don't.Yes, but you can also be tracked, your data recorded, etc, and there aren't that many ISPs out there you can use in a single geographical area.  Encryption works both ways.  I suspect there will be tools to help combat piracy--especially if criminal hackers, the kind who want to steal money from banks, make major successes.  I find it interesting that the technophiles always say "there's no way to stop piracy", when people are working on the solution.Well, you could say that about laws on the books.  What I personally thing should happen is that ISPs work with the government to punish infrignement by setting up something similar to speeding tickets.  There's a cap on punishment unless you are a blantant violated.  Say if they discover you illegally downloaded a book and were caught by the logs and CRC checks.  You get charged a $100 to a $500 fine.  It's added to your ISP bill--don't pay, get cut off.  You can argue against this like a traffic ticket.  But just like most traffic tickets, people would pay the tickets and avoid the behavior.  If we did this, I think it would stop most piracy since the younger set would get in trouble with their parents, and it wouldn't be see by the masses the same way as a 250,000 suit against an individual world.Oh, c'mon.  I am getting a bit sick of the "people should do it for the ART, not the MONEY" meme that keeps coming back.   Art from ancient times only lasted because it was popular and respected enough to be preserved.This seems to be a class warfare thing--it's like the people look at the richest ones, the ones that are the most successful, and think everybody is like that, and that they have it too good.  Wrong.  Only the top of the class gets that way.  J.K. Rowling made her money the old fashioned way.  I don't begrudge people who get rewarded for there skills.  Economic realities are a fact of life.  If you cut out paying for artists, you just have people who will do it part-time, or do a quick burn then fadeout as they get less free time, or a few poor suckers who do it "for their art" and not getting anywhere in life.  In fact, a lot of businessmen have conned many writers into working on stuff for free.  That's the easy answer all the opponents to copyright say.  Note that the people judging are not usually in the industry and don't usually know enough about it, just make judgments from the outside based on their own perspectives.Personally I think this cartoon says it best.<a href="http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/50538" target="_blank">AAEC - Political Cartoon by Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate - 03/24/2008</a>But then, assuming they feel that way, then there are free alternatives, aren't there?  Entertainment on traditional channels is free, with advertisements being the price you'd pay.Part of the problem is lack of empathy.  I know what it's like to create, and I'm sympathetic to people who lost their jobs.  I can understand questioning the benefits of copyright.  But I think a lot of the people who are actually pirating music, movies, and games are young people without money, who pay a bit of lip service to the copyleft movement as well as think they are "screwing the rich", but they are motivated to get everything they can get without paying for it because they can.  Then they use these arguments to justify their actions, without ever understanding the other side.(And I'm not saying everybody feels this way, but I think the idealists out there are outnumbered by the self-justifiers.  The complaints about SPORE on Amazon proved this to me.  When people started the protests about the Spore DRM, I noticed that anybody with a contrary opinion on Amazon's message forums were "voted down", so you couldn't read the opposing posts, even if the person started a thread.).When I mentioned "hundreds of years of precedent", I mentioned stealing, etc.  Everything those moral laws taught me tells me it's wrong because it hurts the other person--the owner of the good, the shopkeeper, etc.  Apply that to non-tangible goods and I can see taking a copy of something that's taken a lot of time to develop and where there's a lawfully setup way for that person to get compensated, whether it's the writer, artist, programmer (for games), and I can see that its not right to copy that.  Saying "it's not theft" just doesn't seem right to me, and I don't think this semantic argument makes much sense.I believe your wrong.  Let's say most content is commoditized.  What I see ending up happening is there will only be a few places to get content, and those that hold the content.  So, instead of companies like Sony, etc, getting rich, it might be Google.  At the same time, since you've scrapped the system that pays the actual creative types, all of the lower-paid creative types suffer the most.Agreed, but Forward thinking also has to take into account all factors of the business and its economic impact.  You need to see all sides, and not just say "out with the old, in with the new", "sucks to be part of old media", etc.  I am not advocating charity, in fact in some cases I think the media should change, and I think certain choices they made regarding technology, such as the newspaper industry, hurt them.  (Too many big companies just put their content on-line for free in an effort to get eyeballs instead of profit, creating a free expectation).But I think a lot of people need to study all sides--study why copyright was made, study economic models and theories, study how the payment systems work in the media, study past historical changes, understand why minority interest groups get power and why sometimes that's okay (somebody up-thread mentioned the US is a Republic--a Republic prevents a tyranny of the majority, which is why we have laws for instance protecting certain unions, laws for the handicapped, laws to protect certain business interests, etc ).  Don't be attached to your own opinion without studying all sides, as well as history.  One of the problems is there's no compromise between the camps and something will have to give to make a better future for us.</blockquote>

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