Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author
from the copyright-is-not-the-business-model dept
Copyright is built on a lie that most people seem to accept: artists can make a decent living from the current system of rewards that copyright provides. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) explores, all the data about artist remuneration shows that isn’t true. Alongside such dry statistics, it’s good to hear about the personal experiences of creators, and I recently came across a fascinating post by the writer Monica Byrne, published in May this year. Its title is self-explanatory: “Can an author make a living from royalties?”. The post is particularly valuable because Byrne generously gives all the details of her earnings arising from her second novel, making it possible to see the reality of copyright for a modern creator who seems to be thriving:
First things first: by most measures in traditional publishing, my second novel The Actual Star was a success. It earned out its higher-than-average advance, which was $40,000*, less agent fee.
“Earned out” refers to the system of paying authors an advance against possible future earnings from royalties. It is only after that advance has been “earned out” by actual royalties that additional money is paid to an author. Byrne says that The Actual Star is in the top 20% of all books published in terms of earning out. But the additional royalties she has received after earning out are rather small: for the past calendar year they amounted to just $4,370.67, and to $6,936.14 in total. Looking at the overall income, she writes:
“But Monica, you were paid $34,000 up front.” (That’s $40,000 less the 15% agent fee.)
Yes, this is true! So that brings my total earnings for the book to $40,936 [$34,000+$6,936].
If we average that over the time since we sold the book (October 2019), that’s $8,187/year.
If we average that over the time since I actually began to research and write the book (January 2012) to today, that’s $3,411/year.
Clearly, it’s not possible to live on such a meager income. Byrne explains how she manages:
The reason I can survive is because I have the incredible support of a direct patronage community. The amount of support fluctuates from month to month, and the changes Musk made to Twitter have severely damaged my ability to advertise. As of now, I can still pay for basics—housing, food, healthcare, transportation—especially now that I’ve left the U.S. to save money. But my situation is very rare. And maintaining it is its own full-time job.
She says that she earns about $43,200 from such direct patronage – a decent sum, but one that requires a lot of work in terms of encouraging fans to contribute, an activity that takes away time from her creative writing. For what it’s worth, it precisely the model that I advocate in Walled Culture, and it’s interesting to see it working here. But the fact that a successful author like Byrne depends on patronage underlines the point that copyright simply does not do what most people think it does: provide a decent income for a good writer. Commenting on the reasons why today’s copyright model is not working for her or others, Byrne writes:
“But Publishing Is A Business, Monica.” I’ve heard this many times from many quarters. Yes! I agree! But it’s a business built on the unpaid and underpaid labor of the very workers who generate its product. Art is labor, no different from any other kind of labor; just as artists are human, no different from any other kind of human. To take it a step further, humans deserve the basic means of life independent of their ability or desire to perform labor, and that’s a whole other conversation; for now, while we advocate for Universal Basic Income, I welcome alternative compensation models for authors. And I appreciate whenever publishing professionals welcome them, too.
The suggestion that a Universal Basic Income should be introduced is a good one. There are lots of advantages for society as a whole, especially for those at the bottom of the financial hierarchy. For artists, it would amount to state patronage of precisely the kind that produced most of the great works of art created in past millennia, but extended to everyone. It would not replace direct patronage from fans, but it would provide a solid foundation for artists to build on as they sought to build this kind of support, as Byrne has done. Even the smallest Universal Basic Income would be better than nothing, and almost certainly better than the few crumbs that today’s creators are granted from the rich banquet enjoyed by the copyright industry.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: advance, authors, basic income, business models, copyright, earn out, monica byrne, patronage, publishing, royalties
Comments on “Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Works(research and writing) for 7 yrs, then expects to retire forever after? Says more about unrealistic expectations than about copyright.
Re:
There is nothing about retiring, just that won about $3.5k a year during seven years of work.
McDonald’s Managers earn this amount monthly.
Re: Re:
7 years is way too long to take to write one book, though. The book is about 624 pages long. Assuming you take about 4 weeks off per year for holidays/vacation/sick, that means you’re only writing about 1.86 pages per week. At ~250 words per page (I’m not sure how accurate that is for her book, but a search suggested it was typical) and assuming a 40 hour workweek with zero overtime, that’s an average of about 11.6 words per hour. Is it reasonable to expect to be able to make a living at that rate?
That average isn’t for just the time spend on the book; it also includes the time after she sold the book. She’s earned $40,936 and claims 8 years of working on the book. That comes to exactly $5,117 per year (or exactly $5,848 per year if we use your 7 years. Which is still nowhere near enough to live on – but, again, you can’t expect to make a living on one book every 7 (or 8) years.
Also, it’s important to note that she’s not done earning. Every year, sales of that book will likely drop, but it’s unlikely she won’t earn any money from it in the future.
Re: Re: Re:
Just because she didn’t finish the book for 7 or 8 years doesn’t mean she spent every moment of those years writing it. A significant part of writing a book is thinking about it, developing ideas, fleshing them out, writing a draft of a chapter and then deleting it and starting over. Some ideas are more complicated than others to write about. And she doesn’t appear to have done nothing else during those years.
Neil Gaiman once said notably that he wrote Coraline at 50 words a night. Writing isn’t a straight-forward task like assembling a chotchke. Unless you’re Stephen King on cocaine, you don’t just sit down, write for 8 hours straight a day and every word you wrote makes it into the final work.
Re: Re: Re:2
King came out with like 12 novels in that time period, plus some other things. That’s crazy; I would not suggest trying to imitate him. And of course you can’t just sit there and type. But come on. If you’re averaging less than half a page a day on your primary work, you’re doing something wrong.
Agreed. But then she also, presumably, made some income from those other things. It doesn’t paint a fair picture if we’re saying she only made $X from the novel she worked for 7-8 years on, if she spent a lot of work time on other things.
Sure, but he wrote other things while he was writing that – and not just small stuff. Multiple novels. Seems like Coraline was a side project, not his focus. He had a notebook by his bed and wrote 50 words a night after he was done with his other work. I am going to presume it did not take him an average of 4.3 hours a night to write those 50 words.
Re: Re: Re:3
Realistically, we’d never get to know just how artists, authors and content creators make their money during downtime. It’s not like their work functions like delivery gigs where you don’t eat if you don’t hustle. They could be making money from derivatives on their main work, other projects and existing income streams. We just wouldn’t know. And it’s a lot easier to sell the idea that someone didn’t eat at all during the 7-8 years of writing a book.
This is why the copyright debate applied to these cases usually gets so poisoned. There is almost no straightforward way one can determine how many man-hours was spent on a work – hell, even with time sheets and measurable metrics, we sure as heck struggle to compensate trades and desk workers. Copyright then gets sold as this miracle tool to make sure content creators get paid during downtime, but that’s simply not how it works. The fact that something gets copyrighted does not suddenly spawn an income stream for an otherwise unmonetized work or downtime where an author isn’t getting anything published.
Now intersecting UBI makes it interesting. Critics are free to argue that it won’t actually be enough to help people live the life they want to live in a career of their choice that is also constructive to society – but what we currently have, where we are in desperate need of people in healthcare, education and other industries, simply isn’t working out either. Because roles like nurses, caretakers and teachers are far from being adequately compensated anyway.
Re: Posting Stupid?
Post Anonymous.
Re:
I don’t think she expects to be able to retire forever on one book. However, the author of the article seems to think people should be able to retire forever after writing zero books, via UBI.
Re:
And what enabled those expectations, if not copyright?
Re:
Where did you even find that much straw?
Re: Expectations
Let’s take a step back. In terms of s writing career, hitting the top 20 is basically like making it, right? You “got there”. You’re “a big deal”.
You would think (because that’s the perception) that you can at least live off of that for a time. Not retire to a yacht made of rare caviars , live a comfortable life where you aren’t sweating all day about where the money’s gonna come from and you can also work on the next book.
So it is a little strange that you can be one if the top selling authors and still your main support to be patreons. Because if one of the top 20 selling authors can’t even live off of their book, that means the under 20 are making even less, and there’s a whole lot of them.
But copyright lovers out there will swear up and down that you need copyright and lots of it so creatives will create. But turns out even when you do make it you just make a little bit if money and then under a decade you’re not even making ANY money from the work.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Copyright to protected your idea, nothing to do with making you money. I could copyright a any random idea that does nothing. Just because you think your idea is good, doesn’t mean it is too everyone else. No one else can use your idea when it’s copyrighted but that doesn’t make it a money making idea. Noting about copywriting says anything about making a living.
Re:
Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, it protects expressions. Or at least in theory.
Re:
Definitely heeding the perspective of a person who spells it copywriting.
Re:
But copywriters make fantastic livings much more frequently than authors.
Re: Re:
I agreee. Advertising budgets are huge.
Re: Re:
Copywriters ARE authors. They write copy.
I don’t think copyrighters is a real word, but I’ll take it to mean someone who holds a copyright.
Re: Re: Re:
That assumes AC misspelled “copywriters”, but I don’t think they did.
It would be interesting to see how much have been gathered for the sales. Of course, there is the printing, publishing, distribution, so on, so I won’t be surprise if she only gets 2% of the total sales.
It’s pretty much like in music, when an artist only gets about 2c for a $0.99 song bought in iTunes.
Re:
Not if you own your masters, then you get 69¢ out of every 99¢ song sale from iTunes.
Re: Re:
And when do artists ever own the masters on their songs even when they write them? That’s what makes Taylor Swift so unique among famous singer/songwriters, and even then she had to sue to become so.
Re: Re: Re:
Um, there are shitloads of indies out there? Many of whom are the labels themselves of their own masters? Not everyone is on a label, you know.
Re: Re: Re:2
Which are heard in the pop charts almost never. Your point?
Re:
A random Internet site says 10-15% is typical, another says 5-20%.
Re: Re:
Less, from Spotify, as they create works-for-hire to flood playlists with.
Reducing artist royalties, one fake artist profile and slop tune at a time. … except that they have the same tune under half a dozen different titles and fake authors…
Re: Re: Re:
I was referring to novels with my figures, not music. I don’t think I was clear on that.
Re: Re: Re:
It’s an interesting example, since it both shows the limits of copyright, and what it does well. Without copyright, Spotify could just reproduce the song exactly. Instead of just going after playlists where people don’t pay enough attention to notice slop being slipped in.
Copyright is far from perfect, especially without other protections, but how Spotify acts shows exactly why artists like it.
Re: Re: Re:2
I’m an artist and I hate Spotify because they I don’t earn enough to get 1000 plays on a track and whereas spotify used to pay me, they don’t anymore.
Their new “you must have 1,000 plays to get paid” policy is the voter ID of ripping off musicians.
Re: Re:
10-15% is typical for bandcamp (except Bandcamp Fridays), 30% is when you download a song from iTunes or AmazonMP3.
(I make music and sell it on these services, so I know what I’m talking about)
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Abolish Copyright
The solution is that simple. Yes, any individual author (Byrne in this case) would lose “copyright” on their respective works, but would gain an ability to use Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, [insert any other big franchise that’s currently blocked by copyright], etc. Any author should lobby to abolish copyright as it is in their best self-interest.
Re:
That would be awful for authors. The author would get no advance and zero royalties, because the publishers could just legally rip everything off the second they could get their hands on a copy. Current copyright is way too long, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
Re: Re:
What current copyright needs is some tweaking, but you’re simply not going to get a favorable or honest response from the copyright camp. Never mind that they still can’t explain away why a term of “life + 50” would inherently make them create less than a term of “life + 70”.
Re: Re: Re:
Unless we’re delving into necromancy, life + anything doesn’t make sense. There’s no incentivizing a corpse to do more work.
Re: Re: Re:2
It’s not meant as an incentive to do more work, but I agree that it doesn’t make much sense. 70 years is already probably too much even without the “life plus”.
Re: Re: Re:3
It’s literally been argued by copyright maximalists that authors wouldn’t write more works if their heirs couldn’t profit from their works after their deaths.
Re: Re: Re:4
Yeah, I remember John Smith making that argument. He also claimed unironically that it would incentivize publishers murdering authors so authors would lose the copyright to their works.
Copyright apologists genuinely are some of the most brain damaged people on the planet.
Re: Re: Re:5
Ah, but a publisher who has bought the exclusive rights to publish the work would be incentivized to protect the author, so all the other publishers can’t horn in on it.
Of course, either scenario posits a corporation caring about things 70 years in the future rather than the next quarterly report…
Re: Re: Re:2
But how do you incentivize someone who has only a short life span left? And who is going to pay them a cent for their rights if they are about to die any day? Even if they don’t have dependents they have to think about, like because of living in a single-income household.
There’s also the problem that authors, particularly those writing disruptive and game-changing works, may not be able to retain quality of writing up into old age, so there is some point to letting them retain remuneration from early works.
However, some of that seems to break more things than it fixes, so I think one of the previous rules, namely 25 years and another 25 years that can only be requested by the author themselves (so that when they got ripped off on an important work, they’ll get a second chance to market it) are a reasonable compromise. If expectation of life does not play into the negotiations, I consider that a positive thing.
Re: Re: Re:3
Funny how this is the sort of hyper-specific theoretical that you have to come up with just to explain away why copyright protection beyond the natural lifespan is necessary. If a prospective author is about to shuffle off the mortal coil, they’re going to have much bigger problems to think over than copyright protection. And let’s say they do have an idea worth writing about, you think a publisher is going to take a chance on an author who’s about to pass away?
Mate, didn’t you just suggest a hypothetical of an old person suddenly starting to write on their deathbed? Now you’re saying that they probably can’t retain quality of writing? Make up your mind! Not everything has to have copyright slapped onto it, especially after a person has become worm food. You can’t take any of it with you!
Re: Re: Re:3
First, copyright doesn’t incentivize creating works at all—at least not of good quality. It incentivizing creating works for profit. People wrote great works before copyright existed. Many people currently create mediocre shit for profit with the knowledge that copyright protects their efforts and they can get a first sale before people realize their slop is slop. Second, a person with a short while to live will be incentivized by the urge to express their thoughts before they die, regardless of whether they profit from it or not.
Hence the idea that they retain copyright protection throughout their lives. Preferably non-transferable so they aren’t pressured to sell it for pennies on the dollar to a publisher. If the publisher thinks it’s valuable and profitable, they should have to license it from the author and the author should get the bulk of the profit since they put the bulk of the effort into its creation.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m in the copyright camp, and I would be fine with life+50. Hell, I’d be fine with just life if that deal came with the promise that publishers couldn’t earn more from the work than I do. I think the term you were looking for is ‘copyright maximalist camp’.
Re: Re: Re:2
As it stands, you have life plus 70 – and publishers will still earn more from your work than you do. That’s not really a case for copyright being the good guy here. If anything it’s what gives publishers leverage.
Everyone’s a copyright fan until it becomes socially inconvenient.
If it wasn’t for the likes of Evan Stone, Andrew Crossley and Malibu Media saying the quiet parts out loud, no copyright camper would be admitting to the abuse that happens in their name.
Re: Re: Re:3
*whooooooooooooosh!*
Re: Re: Re:2
I’m in the Life+25 camp, or at least opt-in 28 years+28 years more if you please. You know, like it once was.
Re: Re:
Why would people deal with the publishers if they could get stuff from the authors?
Re: Re: Re:
My question for your question is: Why do they deal with publishers now, and why would that change in this hypothetical?
Re: Re: Re:
Cheaper, better marketing/distribution, etc. I think you have to make a distinction if you’re talking about a hardcore fan, or just the average consumer. A Swiftie is going to go buy Taylor’s Version. Your average Spotify listener is just going to click the Pop playlist.
There’s a reason artists put up with things like advances etc in the first places, now, despite the terms sucking. They don’t have to go that route. But publishers offer them things they can’t do on their own (at least not until they’re well established), and those functions are needed to reach an audience. Once you build an audience you can go the patronage route, but trying to break out from scratch as a self publisher is even more difficult than publishing already is. Look through your books/music next time, and see how many are from people who weren’t signed to large labels at some point.
What were the book sales?
How many copies of the book were sold? Was it 40,000, 400,000 or 4,000? You really can’t understand the economics of the situation without knowing this. Is the problem that authors get too little of the book sale price? Is the problem that there are only so many readers buying books?
Re:
More than a million, going by all the hype. How do I know? Quick search you clearly couldn’t be bothered to do.
Re: Re:
my searchfu has failed me. what search did you use to find this?
And when I think of how stealing something copyrighted is punished so severely, it really drives home how crime doesn’t pay.
Crime doesn’t pay for the perpetrator, but for their severe individual punishment, the benefits to society far outweigh the imprisonment or hefty fines they face. Sure, people who infringe are viewed as selfish thieves, but they could be historians and preservationists who are so devoted that they’d be willing to risk going to jail to save something. And if someone was willing to be sent to jail for what they created, it must be worth reading/watching.
Re:
Really? I stole a copy of The Official Agatha Christie Puzzle Book last month, and all that happened to me is Waterstones’ security team banned me from the store for a year.
Re: Re:
I think the real consiquences are coming when you try to enter the gate of heavens and when they lock the door for your stealing, your only alternative is to suffer in hell for all eternity.
Re: Re: Re:
*whooooooooooooosh!*
Re: Re: Re:2
mind blown?
Re: Re: Re:3
Yours? I guess so.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
If the content creator were any good, they could make a living from their work. That they can’t says more about them than the current system.
Re:
“If the slave were any good, they could earn their freedom by their work. That they can’t says more about them than the system of slavery and exploitation.”
Re:
But there are some things more important than money. Take Manos: The Hands of Fate. Hal Warren directed one of the worst movies of all time on a dare. When his son wasn’t invited to a premier party of the sequel, he attempted to trademark the original movie
which is in the public domain. But you know who’s been fighting it? Jackie Neyman Jones, the on-screen daughter of Hal Warren’s character and the IRL daughter of Tom Neyman, who played the master. She wants it to be public domain. Why? Because she saw people remixing it and celebrating something of which she was a part and it allowed her to reconnect with her father with whom she had an estranged relationship, and if Manos were copyrighted none of all the culture surrounding the film would’ve happened. Besides, she got paid in the form of receiving a bike.
So like I said, sometimes a lack of copyright can bring more value to a product than a copyright can! This is why I license all my original works with a creative commons license!
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
If you recoil at the idea that rich people have too much power today, wait until their tax dollars required to fund a multi-trillion dollar UBI scheme.
Re:
“Rich people would only be more powerful if we decreased wealth inequality” sure is a take, all right.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
For a UBI of about $30K per year per person while keeping all current government programs, all we need to do is triple the tax on everything the federal government currently taxes. So, among other things, we’d need to set the max tax bracket, currently 37%, to 111%. What could go wrong?
Re:
Or you put a 20% tax on any wealth over 200 million dollar and still have money left over after UBI.
Re: Re:
That would not generate nearly enough money even if it were sustainable. Not even if we lowered the threshold significantly to from $200,000,000 to $46,273,732.
There were 258.3 million adults in the US according to the 2020 census (I’ll assume this UBI plan doesn’t give money to children.) Multiply that by $30,000 per person, and you get a cost of $7.749 trillion per year.
According to the St Louis Fed, the top 0.1% of households had $22.133325 trillion in assets in Q3 2022, and getting to the top 0.1% required $46,273,732 or more in assets. 133,757 households had that much wealth, and each of them gets an exemption for that first $46,273,732, so that leaves $15,943,889,428,876 taxable. At a rate of 20%, this would generate $3,188,777,885,775.20. Less than $3.2 trillion.
Well, maybe it’s not really “universal” and you don’t give UBI to anyone who is too rich, defining “too rich” as … um, anyone with a full-time job. (You can change the definition, but you still have to exclude about that many people.) Restricting it that severely, this would almost be enough to pay for it. Assuming a bunch of wealthy people don’t just leave for the Bahamas the second this plan is implemented. And assuming that after taking 20% per year for multiple years, that wealth will somehow still be intact to take from in future years. And assuming that a lot of people won’t just quit their job to go on UBI instead.
Re: Re: Re: AC's calculations...
…are generally correct, but they beg the question people often beg when discussing income — where will this come from.
It doesn’t matter if it’s almost $3.2T or even $3.2B or whatever. It doesn’t matter if you’re discussing income from copyright, patents, trademark agreements, cryptocurrencies (lol), NFTs, etc.
What matters is WHERE WILL THE MONEY COME FROM. And because this is TD we probably understand trade tariffs better than Señor entrado naraña, that’s a really big question because just moving stuff around (like fee shifting but without a court) won’t create new money. Only the government can do that.*
E
Re: Re: Re:2
I don’t think that question was begged. I used the other guy’s idea and took it from the wealthy. It’s a bad idea and I heavily implied it’s not sustainable for multiple reasons, but it’s not coming from nowhere.
The government can create new money in a sense (by literally printing it, by running deficits, or by fiddling with interest rates), but all that really does is cause inflation. If something like Bitcoin becomes generally accepted instead of a get-rich-quick scheme, you can also consider that as creating money, but that also doesn’t really make people better off. If you want every person to get a bicycle, someone has to make 333 million bicycles. Otherwise no amount of printing money or mining Bitcoin or redistributing wealth is going to allow everyone to get one.
“Copyright Doesn’t Provide A ‘Living’ For A Successful Author ”
Won’t someone please think of the lawyers? Don’t they deserve to get rich on copyright law?
Re:
We think of ways to defeat them.
Copyright law:Internet = the law of gravity: NASA
Re: Re: The Internet didn't start in 2000.
Imagine if that was a real analogy.
[Isaac] Newton’s “law” of universal gravitation, first published in 1687 is based in science (you know that whole hypothesis, testing, repeatability thing) and is real.
Copyright law is manmade shit to provide an incentive to creators. It is not science, nor is it fact. It’s a man-made order to move money.
The Internet has been around since the 1970s. The national US Internet has been around since the 1980s. The commercial US Internet has been around since 1993. The World-Wide-Web was around since 1993/1994. None of those evolutions have done anything to or for copyrights or copyright law.
In 1998 the US passed the DMCA, notably two years prior to 2000. It didn’t change the Internet. It didn’t change copyrights. It expanded on some right and reduced some others.
So no, Internet:Copyright is nothing to science:NASA.
E
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Living? You gotta be kidding. I’ve been doing these 3d model rendering code for 10 years now, and got $6 directly attributed to the copyrights of the work from itch.io. And $46 from fiverr related to teching babylon.js folks how to use emscripten.
But government has promised that copyrights are the main income stream for authors, so even if it doesn’t make much sense, that’s the best that our government is able to promise.
Re:
To be fair, you produce stuff nobody wants.
Re: Re:
And he’s never actually made any attempt to prove what he’s been doing those 10 years, either. “I made $6 in 10 years from my work that nobody uses” is good when you’re trying to shill a scam project but it’s not meaningful or practical in today’s world by any stretch of the imagination. He’s either living off Finland’s welfare system or begging in the streets, neither of which justifies him harvesting the organs of grandmothers in the name of copyright enforcement.
Also it’s funny as fuck that he’s still this much of a sad shill for copyright, when itch.io – one of the few places where Meshpage is actually available – got taken down because of DMCA abuse. Tero Pulkinnen shilling for the RIAA is the same level of sad where gays and Muslims ended up voting for Trump because fuck-knows-why levels of self-own.
Re: Re: Re:
Internet seems to have this reliability of services quite bad status currently. Russia is cutting cables between finland and europe with their shadow fleet, so we’re going to be in war soon enough to restore our internet connnections.
This is why the activity is encoded to a digital work called “game”. Harvest of the Corn Children is our game, which displays our belief that harvesting organs no longer happens in finland. We did similar kind of game when newspapers declared that bees are going to disappear, so bees also got our special treatment.
But fear not, USA is highly represented by their Elon Musk rocket launch. We made a game of that too.
It seems nobody is using “games” and “demonstrations” of disappearing practices.
Re: Re: Re:2
Internet reliability is an issue with ISP and infrastructure, separate from your obsession with DMCA takedowns. Removing one of them will not suddenly make the other less of a problem. It’s also funny as fuck you think Finland’s going to war with Russia about this, especially when you claimed that Russia went to war as a protest against copyright infringement.
You can’t even get kindergarteners to use your software instead of Roblox.
If Meshpage achieved anything at even a hundredth of the impact you claim it’s accomplished, you wouldn’t be constantly bandying about the claim of “Meshpage made $6 in 10 years” as some martyrdom story.
The fact of the matter is that the RIAA and other copyright-shilling organizations around the world don’t even know who you are, and in the event that Meshpage went down, none of those organizations would miss you.
Re: Re: Re:3
I expect that someone called Anonymous Coward didn’t beat roblox in the marketplace either. So guess I belong to the same group of people who cannot beat roblox…
Re: Re: Re:3
https://www.inta.org/resources/the-status-of-intellectual-property-in-russia-and-ukraine/
“””unless the foreign IP rights holder has formally consented to the opening of an O-type bank account in its name, Russian persons (licensees) have the right not to make any royalty payments to such foreign person (although retaining the legal right to continue using the relevant IP) until such consent is obtained.”””
This pretty much means that copyright is not respected in russia.
Re: Re:
You would be mistaken. My most recent work is christmas greeting at https://meshpage.org/450 and there wouldn’t be millions of christmas greetings shared every year if nobody wants it.
Furthermore, my work works in all 3 major platforms used by computers in today’s world: web, windows, linux. There’s even nice cmdline tool to play the developed projects in your computers.
Then the project can be edited with gameapi builder tool, which makes developing these products easier than ever.
Also, noone wants google’s ads, and still they’re everywhere. Why is my work any different from google’s?
Re: Re: Re:
Mostly because Google has the money, but realistically both your malicious bloatware and Google’s ads get blocked by any user with common sense and cybersecurity.
Re: Re: Re:2
I has the money too. All 6e of it.
so you don’t want to pay for the luxury of using groundbreaking technologies? No wonder you need to reject my gameapi, if google has put you to some blacklist of people who didn’t share their hard earned cash to support technology development.
Re: Re: Re:
I just noticed that the windows release of cmdline tool was missing sdl2 libraries. So my work didn’t actually work in all 3 platforms. But happily noone in techdirt noticed about the problem…
Re: Re: Re:
Funny, I’m pretty sure I can say “Merry Christmas” to someone else online or IRL without using Meshpage to do it.
Re: Re: Re:2
You’re right on the money opportunity. It was recognized early in 1980s that the strength of the messages in internet is going to increase over time. This was already detected from the star wars death star destroying a planet -shockwave. Meshpage is just continuation of this form of thinking. When messages are getting stronger, our position is that the effort to create a message should get larger and more burdensome. To combat this, meshpage makes it very easy to build messages easily that look and feel more fine-tuned and stronger than what our competition can do. We’re riding the bleeding edge of message strength evolution of the internet.
This is why money should flow to meshpage soon enough.
I’ve heard people argue against reducing the copyright term to a period less than the life of the creator, on the grounds that if people’s copyrights expire before they die, then they won’t be able to use them to generate income.
And I think of Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, who created them as work-for-hire and never earned a single thin dime in royalties.
And how late in life, he wasn’t able to make any money off them, his two most successful creations, but he was able to sell reprints of the comics he’d drawn that had fallen into the public domain.
Now, granted, Ditko also had creator-owned work that he owned the copyrights to, and some of his older creator-owned works like Mr. A did continue to earn him an income, albeit a modest one. But a 56-year copyright term would have been more than enough to cover the entire period from Mr. A’s creation to Ditko’s passing.
Course, it’s only fair to acknowledge that Ditko was an Ayn Rand devotee and would have spit nails at the very suggestion of UBI. But I’m not him and I think it’s the only rational solution to the problem of people who work their whole lives just to be broke.
Re: Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.
Well, as you said, Steve created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange as work-for-hire. He got paid in full for his work and presumably it was acceptable for him at time.
Most writere write more than one book also earnings vary depend on how many copy’s you sell. Is it optioned for a TV show every c
This is because it has become normal for authors to assign their copyrights to publishers via contracts. I’m willing to bet if publishers had a pay-per-service (printing, cover design, advertising, etc.) set-up in place of copyright assignments and royalty payouts, authors would make so much more money. Of course, no publisher would ever do this because it means cutting quite sharply into their bottom line, and they daren’t piss off their shareholders by doing that.
Re:
You can absolutely do that. You can hire a publisher to print as many copies of your book as you want. I don’t know if they’d do the advertising and cover art, but even if they didn’t, there are lots of artists and advertising agencies who you can pay to do those things.
The problem is that, instead of getting an advance, you instead have a bunch of up-front costs which you may or may not eventually recoup. You’ll make more – eventually – if the book sells well. If it sells poorly, you’re eating the loss yourself. And you have to figure out a way to front all those costs while putting food on your table in the meantime.
Re: Re:
Because publishing companies aren’t big enough to initially cover the costs. Of course.
The purpose
No, it’s not. That’s just the lie being fed to the media.
Copyright (concept and law) is built on providing an INCENTIVE to create. Feel free to disagree and show any corpus of law that say anything about a “living wage” or whatever.
Copyright is about an incentive to the creator of the work. No more. No less. How long should it last? I think everyone who’s already HERE, who’s read THIS FAR can likely agree “not this much.” The rest is opinion, and since the “cancel copyright culture” has no hired lobbyists, likely that’s the end of that tale.
Re:
It doesn’t even do that! The period where the most impactful works of culture just so happens to fall way outside the copyright madness. Say, did Plato enjoy copyright protection? How about Da Vinci, Michaelangelo or Mozart?
Re:
Copyright (and patents, for that matter) are not about that either, at least according to the US constitution. It’s for “promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts”. That’s why Congress has that power. And they can take it away (though it would conflict with our treaties).
Re:
What, specifically, do you believe is the implied incentive that copyright is supposed to provide?
UBI
I’m not quite clear on how failure to negotiate better terms for writing a book requires more productive members of society to support the activity through forced contributions (taxes). Perhaps she should self-publish?
Also anyone who supports UBI really should read Phillip Jose Farmer’s story “Riders of the Purple Wage” and explain why that won’t happen.
Re:
Because it’s a fictitious story? You know, made-up? Lord of the Flies was supposed to be what happened if kids got in control of a desert island to themselves, but in a real life example, democracy, not fascism, happened instead.
Temporarily Embarrassed J.K. Rowlings
Alright alright.
Copyright was never made for authors.Just get that out if your heads. Copyright was made for Publishing Presses first and formost. Because you needed to pay the government to have an official printing press, and unlicensed printing presses where just printing anything and selling it for cheaper, thus cutting in in their sales.
The idea that a strong system if copyrights is for authors is and has always been a fig leaf to keep the people fighting for something that’s only incidentially beneficial to them at best.
Because as creatives you see the Walt Disneys, J.K Rowlings, the Marvels Comics of the world and you think, sure between that scale of success and me everyone is a graveyard of talented creators who made a million dollars alright but for some company instead of themselves and think “but if I made The Next Harry Potter , I would want royalties for 95 years, for my grandchildren who would live in my castle I left them.”
But most authors aren’t JK Rowling living in a castle and most aren’t gonna be, and it makes no sense to make our copyright laws based on the most extreme cases of success you can have. Most works aren’t producing licensing fees A CENTURY later. Most works aren’t producing licensing fees a DECADE later.
So the main thing I try to do, because I know even if there was appetite to change copyright laws for the better, international agreements limit how much we could even scale it back, is try to make people concious that most if them are not in fact temporarily Embarrassed J.K. Rowlings and even if, your Super Author ass is keeping itself out of more creativity than it is protecting.
I’m also for UBI but like… nothing else to add it would be good.
Re:
Incorrect. Publishing monopolies were made for publishers, the copyright that replaced them was made for authors. Why do you think they are specifically mentioned in the US Constitution and the Statute of Anne?
The Internet didn't start in 2000.
Imagine if that was a real analogy.
[Isaac] Newton’s “law” of universal gravitation, first published in 1687 is based in science (you know that whole hypothesis, testing, repeatability thing) and is real.
Copyright law is manmade shit to provide an incentive to creators. It is not science, nor is it fact. It’s a man-made order to move money.
The Internet has been around since the 1970s. The national US Internet has been around since the 1980s. The commercial US Internet has been around since 1993. The World-Wide-Web was around since 1993/1994. None of those evolutions have done anything to or for copyrights or copyright law.
In 1998 the US passed the DMCA, notably two years prior to 2000. It didn’t change the Internet. It didn’t change copyrights. It expanded on some right and reduced some others.
So no, Internet:Copyright is nothing to science:NASA.
E
Re:
The point is: Internet culture sees copyright law as something to be overcome through ingenuity, sacrifice, and cooperation, just as NASA- its scientists, mission control, and the astronauts themselves- see the law of gravity as something they would overcome. One builds upon the works of others to allow others to explore remixed and reconstructed ideas to better humanity, one builds rockets and space stations to allow others to explore the universe to better humanity.
Re: Re:
When they ask why did you spend your life creating software, even though it never was rewarded properly, the answer is obvious:
1) because we can
2) and other people have more pressing needs to tend to
3) if I didn’t do it, who would? Would I let president of the fucking country to deal with my dirty laundry?
Dear glyn
Would you like a strange story, to interpret your own?
Re:
Everything coming out of your keyboard is strange, but not interesting, just incoherent. Ain’t nobody got the time for that.
” your keyboard is strange, but not interesting, just incoherent. Ain’t nobody got the time for that.”
ALWAYS a good start…
Why does UBI bring out numb US citizens
It is amazing just how few people understand what UBI is and decry it as something evil.
Yet call something a Tax Allowance and all of a sudden it’s OK.
The simple fact is the greatest experiment in what is another name for UBI “Unemployment Benifit” back in the Thatcher Era produced in the UK some of the greatest spurts in cultural growth that has happened in living memory.
Oh and go look up the effect of the California rise in basic wages, the same numb brains who decry UBI are very incorrectly calling it a failure, where as the reality is it’s been a success.
Those numb brains from think tanks and the like have tried just about every underhanded trick they can to incorrectly portray it as a failure, but they’ve been caught out…
Oh and who are these numb brains of whom I speak?
Every one who believes in “The American Dream” which if you can be bothered to analyse it you will find it is a charter for the worst of criminal and antisocial behaviour.
In short those numb brains are veing created and lead astray by a few who are trying every which way they can to destroy anything approaching any thing that would be a progressive socially cohesive society. A society by which all can profit, not just a venal few who are so self entitled they think they are some how important.