> I dare you to take the same position about not paying workers for any other career.
Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. Once.
Past that requires a bargain with the public.
The bargain was that the public would yield their rights for 14 years, for works that promoted the progress of science and the useful arts. The public could gift another 14 years to the creator.
The bargain has been altered. Prayers to not alter it further are never answered.
More and more years have been taken from public - almost entirely without the public's consent, typically as quietly as possible and always in response to piles of campaign cash from massive IP interests.
And if it were creators that were the ~sole (or even primary) beneficiaries of purchased and ever-ratcheting copyright extensions, maybe the public would be willing to forgive the immoral methods used to arrive here.
But creators didn't buy modern IP laws and most of that wealth is not flowing into creator's pockets. If we're looking for bad behavior to be angry at, there are a lot of deserving recipients.
I'd even argue that some blame should go to creators that remained silent while corrupt copyright laws were purchased in their names.
>> Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. Once.
> Interesting way to look at it. If you write a piece of software should you only get a single sale and then it be free for use by the entire world?
I'll restore the context you omitted.
>> Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. Once.
>> Past that requires a bargain with the public.
After I write code, my client pays me as agreed and I have received 100% of what I am entitled to. That's how labor and wages work.
Someone else can write the same code and sell that labor to their clients and get the same result. This is good and holy and what is right with the world.
If I want to write code and deny every other person possible their right to develop and deploy that tool - Ok, well, there's a good chance I can't.
The plain and obvious nature of computer instructions puts a lot of healthy limits on whether code can be copyrighted. Not enough and like everything tied to copyright it's a convoluted mess of industry-built pitfalls.
But say I work all that out. If I want to force the public to gift me the protection I get - by denying the public their natural right - I have to enter into a bargain with the public.
As far as it relies on purchased copyright law, it will be a corrupt bargain. But the bargain does have to exist.
Proponents of free software would agree. In addition, from the programmer's point of view this is usually how things work (unless they own the startup, the equivalent of self-publishing). And for most products that actively gain new users, there is continuous work being put into adding new features and maintenance. So in my mind, this is not a perfect analogy.
What does "once" mean here? Book sellers use a business model where the cost of creation is split between all of the purchasers. If "once" means that piracy can begin after the first sale, well, that first sale is going to cost a fortune or the book won't be created.
> I dare you to take the same position about not paying workers for any other career.
You asked about not paying workers for any other career. They work once, they get paid once. That's the nature of labor.
If you're now asking about onerous agreements within some purposefully convoluted industry then you are remolding the question into a wholly different scope and at that point we have moved on.
Having moved on, we can consider the question about paying workers closed. It's been a pleasure.
Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. Once.
Past that requires a bargain with the public.
The bargain was that the public would yield their rights for 14 years, for works that promoted the progress of science and the useful arts. The public could gift another 14 years to the creator.
The bargain has been altered. Prayers to not alter it further are never answered.
More and more years have been taken from public - almost entirely without the public's consent, typically as quietly as possible and always in response to piles of campaign cash from massive IP interests.
And if it were creators that were the ~sole (or even primary) beneficiaries of purchased and ever-ratcheting copyright extensions, maybe the public would be willing to forgive the immoral methods used to arrive here.
But creators didn't buy modern IP laws and most of that wealth is not flowing into creator's pockets. If we're looking for bad behavior to be angry at, there are a lot of deserving recipients.
I'd even argue that some blame should go to creators that remained silent while corrupt copyright laws were purchased in their names.