Good! Numbers to munch. We made the quantitative jump. Very nice. You say your most successful book so far, probably http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0898795184/102-5247226-9968935 took you more than 2000 hours of work and brought about 18,000 USD. That is 6 to 9 dollars an hour of work... Hardly more than the minimum wage in the US, about the minimum wage in France. And one is not even sure to get that when he works on a book. Most books bring their author much less money... Let's make a little detour through the music and record industry, which resembles the book industry in some ways (and is more in the headlines these days). A few months ago there was this French singer on a TV show. | Host: We haven't seen you in medias for a long time. What have you | been doing? | | Singer: nothing! | | Animator: How do you make your living then? | | Singer: the day I opened my mouth and sang "Capri", I made myself a | living for the rest of my life. 40 years after, it still brings me | a good 3000 to 4000 EUR a month. And he said this rather arrogantly. But such people are an exception[*]. [*] Most singers members of the SACEM (a French company managing royalties for music) get nothing but peanuts. Interestingly, if you sign up with SACEM any time in your life, all your subsequent songs MUST be managed by them, you can no longer produce Creative Commons, public domain stuff, editor your records yourself or go and work with other guys. The French music majors have been orchestrating a media public relation campaign for a few months on the subject of file sharing on the Internet. See one of their ads at: http://zmaster007.free.fr/pubsnep.htm They repeat "this is stealing, artists must make a living, saying a CD costs very little to make is like saying the movie _Gone with the Wind_[*] just cost the price of its footage...". [*] Funny he used that example... This is very efficient in timed, reflexionless and spectacular speak, as in medias, but it forgets a number of things: 1/ most of the money does not go to the artists (sometimes majors also say "we spend it on marketing, etc."... as if they really helped discover "new talents"!) 2/ very few people live with their music How many French people make their living with the income they get from the mere sales of their records? books? (and derived products) out of 60 million people? I would say just a few hundreds, maybe thousands. A little more if you kick in people living with concerts but then this looks more like a "real job". Most books are written by people who have a "normal" job on the side. Most music bands people have a job on the side. So less copyright "protection" would not mean less creation. And this "support the artist" idea is bogus: 1/ most artists don't benefit from it 2/ don't deprive millions for the sake a a few tens 3/ creation would go on any way. Much of the time, the biggest successes are made by unknown people. Don't you have in mind cinema movies for which the original one was genuine and the sequels nothing but an attempt to squeeze more money out of the public because the first opus proved to be popular? Anne, that book is 240 pages long. It took you, say, 10 hours a page to make. Suppose you are a very inefficient (or, more positively, an especially caring and researching) author, and it takes most authors less time for every page they produce (how little? 5 hours? 2 hours?). Still, we could derive from sales numbers[*] (is that data available somewhere?) the expected income of all books for each hour spent on it and see whether it is possible or not for their authors to make a living with their typewriter. [*] You dont tell us how many such books you sold. At a "list price" of 16.99 USD, if you were in France and on a typical edition contract, you would make about 1.30 USD for each book sold. It would therefore take about 14,000 books sold to give you that kind of revenue. Now, of course, the question is: is there any point imagining new copyright schemes and new laws here? Even if we could reach an agreement, the road would still be long to any chance of publicizing it.