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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4698993" data-attributes="member: 5143">I completely agree that everything around the industry needs to change for this to take place.  But it's a self defeating cycle.  No one in the industry wants to increase the amount of upfront money they are paying out to authors because "that's not the way it is done".  And there's no incentive to change.Either way, I don't know what the new deals authors would receive would be.  If the publisher and author only had the rights to sell the book for 5 or 10 or 20 years, maybe nothing would change and authors would simply get paid for 5 or 10 or 20 years then stop receiving residuals.  But I think the laws need to change to say something like "The author is the only one able to sell the work in question".  Other people are allowed to give it away for free, share it with their friends, do whatever they want with it as long as they make no money off of it.Because that's the way the world currently works.  People already distribute these things for free all over the place.  Another podcast I was listening to recently said that Microsoft announced that the second most popular OS installed on computers wasn't the Mac OS OR Linux.  It was instead pirated copies of Windows which had more installed copies than the Mac OS and Linux combined.  I believe Steve Balmer made a joke about it, saying that "It's hard to compete with them, they have just as many features as we do, but they don't charge anything for it."But it just proves my point.  Pirating is here to stay.  There are a HUGE number of people doing it.  The fact that it is against the law doesn't deter anyone(or very few people).    There needs to be a solution that doesn't involve locking up or suing everyone who does it.  Because our society wouldn't function missing 70% of its population.It's been this way for a while, and people continue to make money.  I think nearly nothing would change if it was suddenly made legal to distribute this stuff.  But, for that to happen, a change of attitude needs to come first.  Content creators have to be willing to accept that they don't own every copy of their book that exists anywhere.</blockquote>

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