Legality :: essays research papers

Today the vast majority of authors get little or no income from copyright royalties. For instance, scientific, expert, and academic journals usually pay nothing to their authors, and most scientific, technical and academic allows earn only a few atomic number 6 dollars in royalties. Newspaper writers work on salary, and so do magazine writers, or they are free lancers who are paid a flat rate, not a royalty. Only a tiny percentage of authors rush whatever significant portion of their personal income from royalties. Even in the case of daybooks, typically only around five percent of the retail price goes sanction to the author. Yes, it is good for writers to be paid, but copyright royalties are a actually inefficient way of doing it.So why was copyright developed? It was because of the foundation of the printing press. For thousands of years, the only way written works could be duplicated was by means of a slow and extremely expensive process of copying by hand. But then th e printing press was invented and it became possible to produce an untrammeled number of inexpensive copies.However, there was a catch. To produce a printed book requires a very large expense ahead of time for things like editing, typesetting, running off at least a few hundred copies of the book, and promotion. A publisher would be willing to invest all this notes only if it knew it would have exclusive rights to publish the book. Otherwise any book that was a hit would immediately be copied by other publishers, and the pilot light publisher would get little or no return on its investment. So copyright law was created to promote publishing so that the semipublic could know the fruits of the new technology of printing.We have copyright for music recordings for the homogeneous reason. The invention of the phonograph made possible cheap copies of music. However, a cracking deal of money is required to produce the record--recording studio time, paying musicians, editing, produc ing a master, producing records at a factory--and also for promoting and distributing it. Copyright for music guarantees exclusive rights to grass a record, so music companies are willing to put up the money ahead of time to produce records in hopes they will make a profits from them.So copyright was invented so that society could enjoy the fruits of new inventions for reproducing works. But now we have new technologies that radically counterchange the economics of reproduction.