Copyrights
I'm finally studying Copyrights this year! Here's an interesting excerpt from one of the books I'm reading.
"The granting of property rights in creative works isn't the only way to foster creativity. We could decide not to grant special rights to our writers, and trust that the good ones will be able to get enough money from public or private sources to continue their good work, either by grants or through tangentially related jobs (like playing the organ or waiting tables). But the primary solution our society has adopted, following the model of England and of the rest of the world, is to support the arts indirectly by creating economic incentives for people to create the works.
It's not a perfect system. There are probably many deserving works that for one reason or another aren't going to succeed in the marketplace. But how many starving artists would toil away at their trade if it weren't for the prospect, however remote, that if they make it big they will be handsomely rewarded? Since the odds of any creative person's actually succeeding are rather small, we have to make the payoff, if they're successful, sufficiently large to tempt them.
I call it the lottery incentive theory. If you make the jackpot big enough, a lot of people will wait in line to buy tickets, even if the odds against winning are astronomically high. And it's a relatively cheap system, because you don't have to pay off very many of the participants to keep them playing."
"The granting of property rights in creative works isn't the only way to foster creativity. We could decide not to grant special rights to our writers, and trust that the good ones will be able to get enough money from public or private sources to continue their good work, either by grants or through tangentially related jobs (like playing the organ or waiting tables). But the primary solution our society has adopted, following the model of England and of the rest of the world, is to support the arts indirectly by creating economic incentives for people to create the works.
It's not a perfect system. There are probably many deserving works that for one reason or another aren't going to succeed in the marketplace. But how many starving artists would toil away at their trade if it weren't for the prospect, however remote, that if they make it big they will be handsomely rewarded? Since the odds of any creative person's actually succeeding are rather small, we have to make the payoff, if they're successful, sufficiently large to tempt them.
I call it the lottery incentive theory. If you make the jackpot big enough, a lot of people will wait in line to buy tickets, even if the odds against winning are astronomically high. And it's a relatively cheap system, because you don't have to pay off very many of the participants to keep them playing."