Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:

Do I understand correctly that the fellow who works in the steel mill should be paid only what is necessary for the steel to be produced? And the waitress in a restaurant should be paid only enough for the orders to be taken and the food put on the table. Well, let's see, how much is the wear and tear on her shoe leather and her apron and the clothing she wars at the restaurant?

You got the point in the first sentence, which is correct. The basic idea of a free market is that producers compete for customers, and as a result, prices drop to what is necessary to produce them, including the salary of the people doing the work, but without undue welfare provisions or other payments that are not necessary to get the work done. -- and to make things even more clear, I am not even promoting a totally free market, because such a market would not have copyrights at all, and actually am for considerable more market regulation in many fields, as I do like to see everybody in a reasonable standard of living. I have lived long enough in India, and half my relatives live in the Philippines in a house smaller than the average American garage to know the realities of "free market" with an surplus of labour. One reason I am working on PG is because I promised myself to provide every school in my wife's province with a decent library and access to sufficient study materials.

For cryin' out loud, YOU CANNOT HAVE LABOR OF ANY KIND, WHITE COLLAR OR BLUE COLLAR, WITHOUT PAYING THE LABORER. Karl Marx and Jesus Christ agree on this, though they disagree as to how it should be done.

Why do you think that was not clear to me? However, who tells me I or anybody should pay for labour we didn't ask for. There is were communism failed, as nobody wanted to work for its ideals anymore, how nice and appealing they are. Sharing, after all is much nicer than being greedy, isn't it?

It is 5:40 PM on a snowy day and we just called the plumber. Why should we have to pay him $35 just for coming here, before he even looks at the problem? Does it cost that much in gasoline? Surely it isn't the cost of the truck, because it's old enough that it's already paid for.

Because you asked him to come, and agreed on that fare beforehand. You have an option of not calling him. Whatever he needs to pay with the money is none of your business. If he can't pay for his cost from his earnings, he will be forced to increase his prices or go broke, if he earns shiploads of money, he will face competition until the profit margins go to reasonable levels, which historically are in the order of 10 to 20 percent of your revenue.

I have been working for SIX YEARS on one book. At the moment it's about 200,000 words long. I have thrown away closer to two MILLION words that I wound up tossing and rewriting. Let's see, what is the cost of the paper . . . and the ink . . . and the computer . . . and the printer . . . Does that sum up the cost of writing the book? And I shouldn't get any more than that?

Having spend such hard work doesn't give you any right to a monetary reward, not even copyright works that way. Your work will have to add value for customers willing to give you money for it. If they don't want your work, too bad, and you loose, if they do, you earn, and only then copyright is your friend - since it DOES give you an opportunity to earn back your investment, which would otherwise be taken away by people who didn't invest those six years, and could copy your work right after you sold the first copy.

WHY? I would make this 100-point type except that it would wind up perfectly ordinary type on other people's machines. Why should the publisher be paid . . . and the bookseller be paid . . . and the ink supplier be paid . . . and the paper supplier be paid . . . and the shipping companies be paid . . . and so on and so forth, for as long as people want to read a book, but the person who wrote the book should fall out of the loop and stop getting paid?

Because, and I can say it in any point size you wish to display to message in, they too offer a service that has value to people willing to pay for it. You seem to be emotional, but I never proposed to abolish copyright, invented to fix the problem of free-riders, only to reduce it to durations that make economic sense.

Life plus 100, or life plus 70, or life plus 60, is absurd. Life plus 25 is not absurd. That's all I'm asking for. But too many people think I should get royalties for 10 years or 15 years and then no more, even when everybody else is still making money from the book.

I consider anything based on the life of the author absurd, as it discriminates on age (why should older authors get a shorter return on their investment, even though the difference in present value between authors who are 25 and 75 is very small), and makes it extremely difficult to establish the copyright status of a work. Having a simple flat rate is both non-discriminatory and much more convenient to society. I can also ask the question the other way round, why should people have the right to stop me from copying your works. It is not your property, and when I copy it, I use my labour, my materials, and do it in the privacy of my house with my effort only, and take nothing from you at all. And still you want to take that freedom away from me? What for? If you look at it another way, should the maker of a taxi always get paid when the taxi driver earns money using that car. No of course not, the car factory sets its price, sells the car, and then it up to the new owner of the car what he wants to do with it. Or should we introduce royalties for car factories, to be paid every time somebody rides a car they made...? Copyright is not a natural law, and should not be confused with physical property. It is an attempt of the legislator to fix the problem of free markets. It is a restraint society offers to book writers due to a particular nice feature of books: they are very easy to copy. But I think, society should not make this offer longer than necessary, since you have a choice not to write the book at all if you don't like the offer, and if you can't earn back your investment in your book, you should either increase your selling price, or turn to another trade. The public interest, however is to have books published, and thus to enable writers to write books, and thus to make an offer that is sufficient to allow them to do so. If it takes you six years to write a book, you probably require about six years worth of a decent income, so actually having 28 years is a very generous offer, and it is actually bad for society if they paid more in two ways: First: they can't spend the money on other authors to write other books, and second, why would you ever write another book if that first one already gives you enough income. If your book is valuable, I want you to write more of them... Copyright is not and never supposed to be a welfare scheme, but has been subverted into something like it by greedy lobbyist. Copyright is to promote science and arts, and should be nothing more than that. To all authors seeking eternal copyright welfare, I can only say, "Get a real Job!" Jeroen Hellingman