Recently the US and Europe have been extending their copyrights in order to “harmonize” with each other… I think that the US government will use that excuse when copyright owners start pressuring them to extend copyrights again. (like with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) And I don’t think that the companies (Disney, etc) will be satisfied with that copyright extension either. (“Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever”)
BTW, one of the problems with the copyright extensions is they extend the copyright on existing works - normally they would have gone into the public domain. (Where Disney got a lot of its material from) And when people originally made their things, they had expected to only have copyright on it for a few decades - if copyright hadn’t have been extended on past works it wouldn’t have suddenly caused old works to cease to exist, since they’ve already been created.
Of course not. If you steal an object, it still belongs to its original owner; if you send it to me, that doesn’t change the fact that the real owner is still out there. (OTOH, if the thing you’re sending had no owner in the first place, then you’re fine.)
As for whether it’d be legal under 39 USC 3009 (the statute dealing with unsolicited merchandise), I’m not sure. I doubt the definition of “merchandise” would extend to things you have no legal authority to sell, but I’m not a lawyer, and the few legal definitions I could find were unhelpful.
All right, but how does that disprove my point? A world class performer’s labor is more valuable than a second rate performer’s labor.
Sure. The owner of a theater would be justified in keeping people out who attempt to record the performance, though, since he decides who can be on his property.
Yup. Isn’t that the logical conclusion of getting rid of copyrights - that authors would have no right to dictate who can make a copy? You don’t have to go out of your way to make it any easier for people to enjoy your work or copy it, but if they manage to do so anyway, you can’t stop them.
If so few people are willing to pay for your services that you can’t make a living at it, you should find another line of work. Just like any other service. You can’t blame it on pirates and leeches if you ask for the money up front and no one wants to pay.
I see you’ve never listened to satellite radio, or the music channels on digital cable, or internet radio, or a regular radio station during a “less talk, more rock” commercial free extravaganza…
Yup. People will try to get the most benefit for the least cost. That’s human nature and the foundation of economics; ignore it at your own risk.
Well, at least one person is doing it - that’s where the idea came from. That’s hardly proof that it isn’t viable, though, merely that it’s less convenient (in this current legal situation) than working for free and expecting payment later. After all, the artists themselves don’t have to hunt down and sue pirates, develop copy protection schemes that’ll be defeated within 48 hours, bribe politicians to support copyright term extensions, etc… the record labels take care of that for them.
Just like theatre owners do now, in order to prevent bootlegging. But bootleggers are still able to create bootlegged movies and release them anyway. What you seem to want is for the spread of these bootlegged performances to be completely legal, mainstreamed, and available everywhere with no restrictions. If that were the case, imagine what sort of restrictions the theatre owner will have to go through to ensure that nobody sneaks in a recording device, and imagine how pleasant that will be for theatre-goers.
Which will force all of us to be more paranoid and “close to the vest” with everything we create, and far more reluctant to show it to anyone.
There are different kinds of projects and not all of them will work by asking for the money up front. Many may find themselves changing the format of the product they want to sell, in order to glean money ahead of time. Others will say, “Screw it” and study dental hygene instead, and keep all their creative works locked in a drawer.
Another thing I’m curious about, and have probably asked before: Why would a business hire an artist to design a logo anymore? Say the company wants a special illustration (of two cooks splitting a pea with a hammer and mallet, a la Andersen’s Split Pea Soup). They hire an artist to design the logo, but they know that once the illustration is published, all their competitors in the Split Pea Soup market can use the same illustration and copy their company’s identity. Why pay anything for an illustration that can never truly be associated with their product, since it never can “belong” to them? Why bother having any visual “identity” for their company at all?
I get music channels through the satellite dish, but I don’t get a schedule as to when what piece of music is going to play. I can’t order up a particular piece at a particular time. Most inconvenient if I want to get a pristine copy of Sibelius’s The Origin of Fire, for instance. (Where do I find a radio station that will play a pristine version of that, and let me know beforehand so I can get the tape player ready to tape it?) And even if some radio services do list a schedule of what they are going to play, I do pay for the satellite dish service, and the radio stations come with the package that I pay for. It isn’t free.
Oh, I am sure that a lot of people are aware of it, and are aware that some forms of media are easier to “steal.”
Make it even easier to “steal”—or make it essentially “free,” and make the people who want (and need) to earn some money doing it (in order to afford to keep doing it) have to jump through cumbersome and convoluted hoops in order to make any money, and watch that form of media wither up and die. The people who create the work that you want to enjoy have a bullshit threshold, after all. Make the creative process too much of a pain in the ass, or tell them that they have no right to their work, and watch them tell you where to stick it.
If what you want were to come about, I don’t want to hear people bitch and whine about how strict those mean theatre owners are, doing a pat-down nigh-onto strip-search to theatre patrons. I don’t want to hear any whining because so-and-so author won’t show any advance chapters of his book to anyone anymore. I don’t want to hear any whining because those who create these works are making things harder to acquire and access, or perhaps are just getting out of the business completely.
That’s the nature of things too. Make the product you desire easier to take, and the people who create the product will make it harder to get.
Not necessarily. Trademark law is entirely separate from copyright law (as is patent law, which is why referring to “intellectual property” as a single concept is misleading), and I have no problem with trademarks. You’d still be able to copy that illustration, but you couldn’t use it to represent your business - just like we can talk about Apple computers all we want, as long as we aren’t selling our own computers and calling them Apples.
Actually, you can receive music channels from one of the satellite services (DirecTV?) for free, legally, if you have the right equipment. Internet radio and FM radio are also free, and often play songs without DJs yapping over the beginning or end. And the fact that they don’t publish schedules only supports my point further: if I turn on the radio, I’m not soliciting a particular song, because I have no idea what they’re going to play.
Cumbersome and convoluted? Please. It’s the same hoop that everyone else who provides a service needs to jump through - make sure someone will pay you for your labor before you perform it. Why should artists get special treatment?
Sure, sure. And no one’s going to bitch about how there’s less stuff out there to enjoy, and those who make the stuff are more careful with it. Nobody will whine or bitch when theatre owners do strip searches to patrons, to make sure no one’s bringing in a camcorder. No one’s going to bitch about having to be ultra-protective of anything they create that they let out of their hands (make Aunt Martha sign a contract promising she won’t publish your travel photos before she sees them, and make sure she won’t show them to anyone else. Never can be too careful, you know). Everyone’s just gonna go along with that with no complaints.
But why pay someone to make something “unique” if anyone can use it for anything else, thus confusing the public? If the Apple logo could be used for Apple drain opener, Apple-a-Day Dentist, Apple lamps. Gee, that logo’s worth a whole lot when anyone can use it for anything (as long as it’s not computers, of course).
And I assume that I can conjure up a free broadcast of Sibelius’s Origin of Fire too, right? They’ll play that for me, on demand, and let me know when it’s going to broadcast, will they? All for free, of course. Must be free.
If it wasn’t cumbersome and convoluted, people would be doing the way you propose already.
But these “services” are a bit different, aren’t they? These are “services” are not doled out in the same manner that someone performs a task like fixing a leaky roof. And if enough people decided to stop providing these “services,” the world would keep plugging away. It isn’t mandatory to have books to read, or music to listen to, after all. We’ll all survive just fine without them. So perhaps a lot of people will just decide that it’s not worth the hassle, trying to deal with a public with such a sense of entitlement—who think that whatever they (the artist) does is owed to everybody, by default.
It can’t be any worse than what I have to go through to get on a plane, and there’s no popcorn with delicious yellow topping on airplanes.
But note that most decent internet copies of first-run movies are inside jobs, not made by patrons with camcorders, and trying to prevent people from making copies of the movies would be as fruitless then as it is now. Movie theaters in a world where movies aren’t copyrighted will have to focus mainly on providing a better experience than watching a bootleg copy on a tiny home screen, which is something they’re already doing.
They can’t. If you use someone else’s trademark without permission in a way that causes confusion, that’s a trademark violation.
I have no idea why you seem to think I said they’d do that. Radio is not a general substitute for downloading MP3s.
Only because they’re treated differently by the law. If roofers could collect royalties from everyone who ever lived in a house that they worked on, don’t you think they’d do it?
They should be treated the same, and doled out in the same way: A roofer gets paid for fixing a leaky roof, by someone who’s interested in seeing that roof repaired. A musician gets paid for writing or performing music, by someone who’s interested in seeing that music written and performed. A painter gets paid for making paintings. A novelist gets paid for writing novels. If he wants to get paid twice, he can write two novels, just like if a roofer wants to get paid twice, he can fix two roofs. He gets paid for the act of writing (i.e. the part that depends on his unique contribution as a novelist), not the number of people who read his work (i.e. the act of copying, i.e. the part that anyone can do for free).
You could say the same about plenty of service jobs. The world will keep plugging away if all the hairstylists, manicurists, and masseuses close up shop. Society won’t collapse if sports announcers go on strike, or if pizza stops being delivered. No one will die if they can’t find a dry cleaner or a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn.
And yet, people who provide those services still manage to jump through that “cumbersome and convoluted” hoop: they find someone who’s willing to pay for their labor, and they do it before they perform the service, not afterward.
Perhaps one day all those barbers and pizza delivery boys will decide that getting paid isn’t worth the hassle of finding employers or customers, so they’ll go to dental hygiene school instead, and then we’ll all be sorry, won’t we! But somehow I doubt it.
Hmm, nope. I’ve never seen anyone claim that artists owe their labor to anybody. “Whatever they (the artist) do” is creating art, performing their artistic labor, not making copies. (Making copies is what Steve, Steve-o-rama, the Stevemeister does.)
No, you missed the history lesson. One of the main reasons Vaudeville died was because of the advent of movies. Actors and performers who used to be able to make a living performing in one theater after another no longer could. Audiences could simply watch a movie of such performances. It was not that more talented artists were available giving live performances. It was that cheap copies of these more talented artists were available.
OK, I get that. New technology meant that an entertaining performance could be delivered to theater patrons with less acting labor needed. Instead of having to perform every night, someone could perform once, and that single performance could be enjoyed over and over again. This reduced the demand for acting labor.
But today, the situation is different: file sharing isn’t reducing the need for artists’ labor, it’s separating their labor from the works they produce with that labor. Anyone can distribute a song, but most people still can’t write and perform one. The musician himself is no less important today than he was 20 years ago.
Way to gloss over how much people love the process of going through airport security. And you want that in more places? Gee, sounds great.
I’m very well aware of that. Which would make the funding of movies (in an era where no one “owns” the movie) much harder.
Who is going to be able to afford to even risk working on a project that may cost them thousands of dollars, take perhaps months or years of their life, if they have to ask for all “payment” they will ever receive up front? “Uh, I think I can make a really great movie, but since I haven’t done anything yet, and since I can’t expect to get paid after I finish the movie, I need to ask for all the payment I’ll ever receive for the movie now. But if I could get the money, I’d make a great movie. Honest. So give me some money.”
That’s going to go over really well. As it is now, some people (unknowns) will risk their life savings on a movie, because they have the hope that after it’s done they’ll earn it all back. (The film Happy, Texas was such a movie.) But if they can only hope to get any money before the film ever is made, how will that work? Should they put in their life savings anyway and make the film? Why? Once it’s done, anyone can copy it and not give them a red cent. How will they find any investors when at anytime, anyone who has “access” to the finished film can make a copy and spread it around before anyone pays anything? How will they keep the access to the film so restrictive to prevent unauthorized copying, while at the same time showing it to enough people to get all the funding they require?
But as technology improves and big screen LCD HD TVs become the norm, one can have a pretty damn good viewing experience in their own home. So why bother going to a theatre and paying for greasy popcorn?
And how does this apply to live performances, where, if the bootlegger can sneak in, they can freely distribute copies of the performance hither and yon? Theatre owners are going to be more motivated than ever to want to prevent that.
I don’t think Apple Drain Opener will cause confusion, but it will dilute the custom-made logo and make it less special. Why pay a lot for a non-special, run-of-the-mill logo that anyone can apply to whatever they want, as long as it’s not computer related? Apple Day Care Center of Toledo Ohio. No one is seriously going to confuse that with Apple computers, but it still helps make the Apple logo common and unspecial.
Yeah, but you brought radio up as an example of something that is “freely” given, and something that you can record and play over and over again. But free radio isn’t as easy or convenient as seeking out and downloading an MP3, so it isn’t anything like it. So why even bring it up?
And the roof he repairs affects one house, and one family. The labor he performs does not benefit a multitude of people. If it had the potential to seal a hundred leaky roofs instead of just one, he’d very likely charge a lot more for his service.
And if the musician holds a concert, does he and the people who run the concert get the same amount of money if one person shows up, as compared to a thousand? Are they paid for the actual service (playing of music) or for the amount of people who pay to see it? (Ticket sales.) If his performance affects more people, shouldn’t the people running the concert, and the musician, get paid more? Or, do you think that they should receive a flat fee, and that’s it? If that’s the case, then why not charge only the first 100 people (or whatever number) who want to buy tickets (because that will pay for the flat fee and the rent of the hall) and then let everyone else in for free? Everyone’s been paid their flat fee, after all. They shouldn’t be entitled to any more money.
Is he paid more for a painting that will be used in a big ad campaign, for instance? And since I assume that he is giving up all rights to the painting when he sells it, if he has any savvy at all he’ll charge for any potential use of that painting. Maybe it’ll be used in a movie poster, to help bring a profit for the movie company. Maybe it’ll be used on a book cover. So the artist must charge for all these potential uses up front, because that’s all the money he’s ever going to see for that painting. So, he should charge several thousand at least. Just to make sure. Who is going to pay that? The first person who wants to use the painting? Why should they pay that steep a price for a painting, just so that someone else can use it as a book cover or movie poster later on?
The difference between quoting a price for roofing and quoting a price for a novel is that roofing is pretty self-limiting. It’s a repair of one roof. One house. That’s it. A book may be used in a movie. A TV movie. A comic book. A sequel. How does someone charge for something that may have so many potential uses, and so many benefits, before the job is actually performed? How can they possibly know how much the work is really worth in the long run, when nobody knows, maybe not for years (or decades) afterwards?
And will he be paid by the hour? Several months’ (or years’) work should add up to a pretty penny. Hey, that sounds pretty good. Let’s pay the novelist by the hour. And who is going to pay for that? Whoever pays it isn’t going to get exclusive right to the book, after all.
But they’re getting paid for the services they perform, and for the amount of people their services affect. They know up front how much benefit their work is going to provide, and they charge accordingly. What you want is for artists to get paid for a task, before they have any idea how much benefit their work is going to provide in the long run.
Many who produce creative work have noticed this lately: the public (not all of it, thankfully) is developing more of a sense of entitlement. Demands are sent: “Send this. I want it. Give it to me.” This type of behavior is becoming more and more common lately.
But that doesn’t mean that the public is getting an increasingly better deal as far as copyright is concerned.
Originally copyright lasted for 14 years and you could get one 14 year extension. In most cases that would be long enough to turn a profit even today. Yet copyrights keep on being extended on existing items leading to the possibility that their copyrights will never expire. (I mean a copyright duration of a trillion years is still arguably a limited duration and so is constitutional)
I hope the public finally gets unsatisfied with copyrights so that they prevent copyrights from being extended again… and maybe even start reducing it (to less that life + 70 years…) BTW, for corporations copyright currently about 95 years. They just pay the creative people their salaries and the corporations reap the rewards for many decades (possibly centuries… I’m sure copyright will be extended again… it is life + 100 years in Mexico) Companies make enough money on their movies, etc, after a few decades. I don’t think the company should have an exclusive monopoly on the creative stuff (they can even choose to not release it to anyone)… So as far as the duration thing goes we’re a lot worse off than we used to be. BTW, some benefits of things going into the public domain is that libraries and the public can get old classics cheaper, people can make movies or whatever based on old books don’t need to get permission [if they can] and pay expensive royalties, etc. (BTW, when “the Secret Garden” went into the public domain there were some movies and things based on it). It also encourages innovation - that’s what copyright is supposed to be about… because to survive, companies would have to come up with new stuff (assuming the old stuff all eventually went into the public domain)
“Originally copyright lasted for 14 years and you could get one 14 year extension. In most cases that would be long enough to turn a profit even today.”
I mean, assuming that a creative work is ever going to profitable (based on the amount of money you spent to create it), it would usually make a profit within the first 28 years. (a guess - and it would help if you starting selling it soon rather than 30 years after you created it)
But even this is not true. The mega coroporations which run the music industry are effectively doing to music what movies did to Vaudeville.
I really like the line “I listened to music made by people who were chosen based on the way they looked on an album cover” to describe some modern music. The musician himself is much much less important today than he was 20 years ago. Back then he still had to be able to perform live to gather enough of a following to generate enough album sales for large record labels to be interested. Today, much of that is handled by marketing. There are groups who don’t tour much at all.
The trend over the last century has been away from live performances. Removing copyrights altogether would accelerate that trend.
I’m not sure why you put payment in scare quotes, but OK.
Who will risk it? Someone who has a good idea of how long the project will take, and how much his time is worth. Again, other businesses operate that way.
Well, that’s up to them, isn’t it? If they feel so strongly about making the film that they’re willing to spend their own savings when they can’t convince anyone else to pay them for their labor, then they can do so. If not, the rest of us will miss out on their work, and we’ll just have to settle for the thousands of other works that can now be made and distributed thanks to the elimination of copyright.
Yes, why indeed? If a theater can’t offer anything that you can’t get in your own living room, why should they stay in business? Why should we limit ourselves just to prop up an industry that has become obsolete?
They can go to dental hygiene school with everyone else. And if home dental care products ever improve to the point where people don’t need to go to a dental hygienist anymore, we won’t need to crush that new technology to keep them employed either; they can find something else, just like slide rule manufacturers and Vaudeville performers.
Also note that even today, not all logos are copyrightable. The cites I’m finding (e.g. here, here) merely say that some logo art work may be copyrightable. This suggests that a simple logo like the Nike swoosh doesn’t qualify for copyright protection, and the Apple logo is hardly more complicated. Distinctive, yes, but being distinctive isn’t enough to make it copyrightable - slogans can’t be copyrighted either.
Don’t forget their guests. And any new members who may join their family, and any housemates or tenants who may move in. And any family they sell the house to in the future, and their new children, guests, and housemates, and whoever they sell the house to… etc. A lot of people can benefit from that one fixed roof.
Perhaps he would. Up front. If, OTOH, he came knocking on the door after a new family had moved in, and said they had to pay him because the work he did years earlier has benefitted them, they’d tell him to get bent.
Why? Does it take twice as much labor to play for 1000 people as for 500 people? Does the show run twice as long? I don’t think so. The venue owner has additional costs for more people, but the band doesn’t.
But still, if the band is smart, they’ll ask for a cut of every ticket sold, because they know that more tickets sold = more profit for the venue owner. If the venue owner doesn’t like that deal, he can look for another band, and consider whether that band would attract as many ticket buyers as the first one.
The details of their contract are between the band and the venue. The venue owner can charge whatever he wants to whomever he wants, since he’s letting people onto his property.
The family that lives in a house with a newly fixed roof will see the value of their house rise, and they may sell it to a wealthier family. Or they may convert the house to a duplex and rent it out to two other families. Or they may start running a business out of it (now that the puddles of water aren’t scaring away customers and ruining equipment), or a church, or even a meth lab. How does someone charge for something that may have so many potential uses, and so many benefits, before the job is actually performed?
Yes. Like most other people who provide a service. The stylist who cuts your hair doesn’t know if that new haircut is going to catch a casting director’s eye and get you a part in a big movie, or land you a wealthy husband, or prevent you from having to buy a hat to hide your previous, uncool haircut. The roofer who fixes your roof doesn’t know if that’ll make it possible for you to rent the house out. The mechanic who fixes your car doesn’t know if you’re going to sell it, or use it to commute to your high paying job, or give it to charity and claim a big tax writeoff. They don’t know and they don’t care; they decide how much their labor is worth, and they charge you based on that.
Guess we’ll all have to take your word for it, then. I’ve never seen anyone act that way.
I don’t think so. It’d weaken or eliminate the very record labels who are responsible for fueling the trend.
No, they wouldn’t get traction if it hadn’t become so easy to copy things that you now have a massive body of people desperately trying to justify their leaching.
This is the usual load of Mr2001 crap. How many times is it going to have be explained to you that intellectual property ownership is not the ownership of an individual hardcopy of a work (although it may encompass that), but is rather the ownership of a bundle of exclusive rights, largely concerning reproduction.
Your whole “my wallet can’t be in two places at once” schtick only makes sense when one totally mischaracterises the nature of intellectually property. And of course you do so knowingly, given how many bazillion times we have been over this before.
An exclusive right to reproduce cannot belong to more than one person at a time.
Society does not have an obligation to compensate anyone for anything. It does so because it likes what it is getting. If it stops paying, it will stop getting. If part of it stops paying, the other part will pay more for the privilege of paying for what leachers skive out of.
How do you earn a living mks57? Let’s have some fun with you.
Oh yes he does. You’d better think more about this one.
He makes fries precisely because he knows that the law says that his employer must later give him what it has said it will give him for his time.
Obligations to fulfil contractual terms are legal fictions, as mks57 would say. I bet he doesn’t think that to be a point against people having a right to be paid for their labour.
No way, are you serious? I thought copyright was about nothing more than owning a single printed copy of a work!
Wait, no I didn’t. In fact, that’s ridiculous and has no relation to anything I’ve said in this thread or any other. I hope it will be the last strawman you post here.
Yes, that’s what exclusive means. But why should anyone have an exclusive right to reproduce anything? Whether you call it “an exclusive right to reproduce” or “ownership of a work”, you’re still referring to something that’s entirely unnecessary. This semantic quibble proves nothing.
Indeed, he has a contract with his employer, a promise that he’ll get paid X dollars an hour for making fries. The terms of his employment were arranged in advance, and his payment depends only on the labor he puts in, not on any demand for the finished product. If he makes a batch of fries and no one comes to buy them, he still gets paid for the time he put in.
Forcing people to uphold their contracts is not the problem here. When I say “find someone to pay you in advance”, I don’t mean you should wait until the money’s in your pocket before you start working; I mean you should find a customer or employer before you start working, someone who you can hold accountable if they don’t hold up their end of the deal. Then instead of depending on a bad law (copyright), you can depend on a good one (contracts).
They’re one of the legal fictions that are necessary to hold society together. Copyright, on the other hand, is not.
Hey now, let’s not leave me out - I earn a living creating copyrightable works, and here I am arguing against copyright! That must be twice as much fun, right? Maybe not, since I’ve actually taken my own advice and found someone to pay me for my labor.
That’s sort of nonsensical. All sorts of things are developed in the hope that someone will like them and pay for them. The unfortunate problem is that intellectual property is too expensive, on the whole, to produce for one person to pay for the production cost. The development cost is spread over all of the people who like the thing enough to purchase it. The marginal cost of production might be very low, but that’s a fine thing; noneone is attempting to stick consumers for the marginal cost.
Consider, say, shampoo. The cost of developing a formula that people like is expensive. The stuff that goes in the bottle is cheap. The final cost of the product is CoGS + (development cost/number sold) + (overhead that we’ll ignore here). This is true of everything, every product and every service under the sun.
The expense of developing a product, and the need to recoup that expense in small pieces, is one of the reasons for copyright law.
You keep suggesting that creators of intellectual property should switch to a service model, which is odd coming from someone in the software business. Almost everyone has a copy of Excel on their computer. Hundreds of thousands of man hours went into the creation of that product. If each person hoping for a copy needed to contract programmers to write it, there’d be far fewer copies available. Yes, now, today, a decade and change after Lotus 123 came out, tools (created via the same economic model as Excel) exist that mean that any goof can write software, and therefore the value of Excel may have gone down, but not because of copying, but inspite of it. You use the analogy of a roofer. I’ll bet that if re-roofing cost $10,000,000, the roofer would in fact, be willing to accept a little bit of money for the rest of his life rather than one big check. If a roofer were only able to create so many roofs, a limitation that artists labor under, he might change his business model to accomodate that fact. You would be free to retain his services or not.
I’ve read you talking for a couple of pages now about how artists should contract with someone to ensure that they’ll get paid for their work before they start on it, and I honestly can’t tell what that has to do with the argument. They have a contract with the people they sell to; you get this copy, and you may destroy it, lend it, make a copy for archival purposes, but you can’t make copies and give it away. This contract is on every piece of software, book, CD, DVD and video tape I’ve ever seen.
In every case I’ve ever seen where people are arguing against copyrights and intellectual property pre se (rather than against the specifics of limitations, particularly some of the longer protections granted) they have confused cost of creation with the marginal cost of creation. You really don’t seem to be an exception.
I think you’re misunderstanding the service model.
In the case of Excel, the service is not installing Excel on your computer, or having a brand new spreadsheet app written for each person who wants to use it. The service is writing Excel in the first place, and it only needs to be done once for each version: a team gets paid to write 1.0, then in a few months, they (or perhaps another team) get paid to make the changes that bring it to 1.1, and so on.
The customer isn’t a single individual who wants to use Excel; one person could never afford to pay all the programmers whose labor is needed to produce such a large app. The customer could be a large company whose needs aren’t met by any other spreadsheet they’ve been able to find, or a coalition of smaller companies, or a larger coalition of hundreds or thousands of individuals all pooling their money together.
That’s the essence of work by public contract - I might be willing to spend $20 on a spreadsheet, and even though that isn’t enough to pay the programmers, it will be enough if I can get enough of my friends to pitch in $20 of their own. As you wrote, the development cost is spread over all of the people who like the thing enough to purchase it; the only difference is that I want you find those people before spending months or years in development.
I don’t recall signing any contract last time I bought a book or a DVD. Copyright law applied, but that’s not a contract - the industry tools like Mary Bono who push for strong copyright laws have no authority to make promises on my behalf about what I’ll do with the things I buy.
You must be mistaken. Please point out where I’ve confused the initial cost of creation with the marginal cost (the cost of producing a copy). I’ve acknowledged throughout this thread that works cost time and money to produce, and I’ve proposed ways for the people who create those works to be compensated for the effort they put into creation, without relying on laws that prevent people from making their own copies.
