The Revolt Of The Poor - The Demise Of Intellectual Property :: essays research papers

<a href="http//www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknins Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web SitesThree years ago I published a disc of short stories in Israel. The publishing house belongs to Israels leading (and exceedingly wealthy) newspaper. I signed a contract which stated that I am entitled to receive 8% of the income from the sales of the book after commissions payable to distributors, shops, etc. A few months later, I won the coveted Prize of the Ministry of culture (for short prose). The prize money (a few thousand DMs) was snatched by the publishing house on the legal grounds that all the money generated by the book belongs to them because they own the copyright. In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this if the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishin g books, recording records and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people will have suffered because they will have fix no way to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the refrain. But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very especial(a) group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation (most of them rock stars who own their labels George Michael had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come close to deriving subsistence level income from their profession. All these can no longer be thought of as in general creative people. Forced to defend thie intellectual property rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least as much as they are artists. economically and rationally, we should expect that the costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its market the more its intellectual property rights will be emphasized. Consider a publishing house. A book which costs 50,000 DM to produce with a potential audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like this) would have to be priced at a a minimum of 100 DM to recoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (thereby shrinking the potential market some people will elect to buy the cheaper illegal copies) its price would have to go up prohibitively, thus driving out potential buyers.