I think people should be rewarded if they do a good job. The "authors reward is to be read" is to me stupid thought. To do a good book you need to spend a lot of time, if you don't get paid you have to find another job and you can't write.
He should say: I don't wanna pay for anything, anything should be free.
I copy things without paying, but I'm not proud of it. If I can and the author is good, I buy things, it takes my hard earned money.
To play the devil's advocate, why should the authors be paid in perpetuity for a job that they did only once?
If a sculptor demanded to be paid every time that someone looked at his sculpture, people would think he was slightly crazy. Generally, when people create something, they are paid for the act of creation, and not for the use of what they created. I don't see why this can't be the case for, say, music as well?
Ok, I admit I don't have a viable proposal for a business model at the moment, but the assumption that creators should be paid per use of their creation, instead of for the act of creation itself, seems flawed to me.
You _do_ have a point, but by your reasoning, the business model for most web apps is also flawed. Is e.g. 37signals' business model flawed? Should they not be able to charge for use?
Most web apps are hosted on infrastructure that costs money to maintain, and can't be easily be duplicated. When you pay for that, you're not paying for a product, you're paying for a service. It's analogous the difference between buying a lawn mower (where you're paying the company for a one-time act of producing a lawn mower), or paying someone to come by every week and cut your grass.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the software-as-a-service model, but there is a difference.
There are very few Swedish author who make a living being just an author. The basic premise for copyright is that if you take the time to make something, you get exclusivity for some time. Because creating things will hopefully benefit society. I can see how some time of exclusivity can benefit creation and distribution of certain works and therefor also society, but I have a hard time understanding how exclusivity until 70 years after the authors death benefits anyone.
sometimes....a person has something meaningful that they want to say/share with other people. i know it sounds crazy, and it's a total reversal of the more popular idea: "make sure to post something at least once a week" but it does happen.
fugazi (as i remember it): if you had to get paid to say it, you probably had nothing important to say.
on the other hand..when someone has something important to say, the mind is just looking for any way to get it out there, and above the noise.
i believe that when something is really eating at you, something about society, something about the world, a perspective, an idea -- when things cannot be summarized into a snippet or tweet, or a single blog post, which is to say, when they are truly meaningful - then there's relief once you know it made it to the audience.
all that effort put into the book, or whatever, was working towards that release....this is why some people don't get what makes great art - the creative world seems 'flimsy', lacks orientation, weird -- but the good stuff usually very much has a direction - just an atypical one, that breaks the conventions. there is a drive in these people....and it's not money, it's an idea, and they are its slaves.
huck finn has been described as something inside of twain - huck finn needed to get out. everytime twain talked to his black friends, everytime twain read the newspaper, everytime twain reflected on those trips abroad, huck finn scratched on the inside, trying to get out. yah, the book made money, but i'm sure there was a real high inside of twain when he knew it had been read, when he knew that finn got his say, when the book was being discussed.
perhaps someday an idea will rise up in your mind, not a business idea, not something that can get you some more pillows for your sofas, but a meaningful idea, an idea that affects your core, an idea that you feel needs to be shared, and then you won't wonder anymore why some people write things like an "authors reward is to be read."
like i mentioned earlier, those kind of ideas take a lot of work to share, you don't just write a blog post -- truly meaningful ideas, ideas outside the current social mindsets, have to build up their language, their perspectives, their new contexts, over chapter, over time and to bring others with them, they have to do it well. until they finish that hard work, the idea is festering inside, trying to get out.
