THE ROYALTY HOUR

      There is something called a royalty hour, its when an author or
artist spends an hour writing something, and then he sells it to a
mass market that keeps on buying it forever.  Thus he has a steady
stream of income even though in theory he isn't doing anything any
more.

      He spends 10 minutes writing a hit song, or 1 year writing a best
selling novel, that continues to sell for 50 years, and he lives off
the royalties he receives from those sales.

      So the one year he spent writing the book can be chalked up to just
so many royalty hours of work, as they lead to collecting royalty
payments later even when he isn't working.

      Now a farmer planting corn has no such leisure, every year he has
to go out and do it all over again.  There is no royalty hour here, you
sow for an hour, and you reap, then its gone, so you have to sow again
for another hour, for the rest of your life.

      The farmer however has the advantage of multiple return on his
work, he may use 1000 seed of corn to plant a corn field but he gets
back 100,000 seed of corn.  Because the sow and reap cycle is inherently
exothermic, he gets back many times his return on investment.

      The artist or writer however usually spends a lot more writing the
book in the first year than he gets during the first sale, so he depends
on his royalty hours to deliver him his multiple return on investment in
later years.

      Now one is not saying that one way is better or more right than
another, its merely the way things are, its an artifact of the free
market system operating under the conditions of the physical universe
where the sow and reap cycles take place.

      Human considerations about good or bad or how things should be, are
all irrelevant.

      But the physical universe can change, it has very little interest
in humans per se, and where royalty hours may be quite lucrative at one
time, they may be a death sentence at another.

      Just so with copyrights, which are an effort to protect and
maximize the royalty hours of the people who are interested in them.

      At one time copyrights were enforceable, so people took advantage
of that and the kind of art that was produced was the kind of art that
lent it self to royalty hours, as was the kind of business that grew up
around it, publishers, producers, lawyers etc.

      This was neither right nor wrong, it was just how things were, the
climate was right for this kind of growth.

      But now the physical universe is changing again, and the
enforceability of certain kinds of copyrights on certain kinds of
royalty hours is vanishing.  Some may complain that this is not 'right',
but it is neither right nor wrong, it just is, the physical universe
doesn't care about right and wrong, it provides the playing ground and
those that can survive do, and those that can't don't.

      One can resist the change, but there is no future in that.

      That leads only to petrification and death.

      Homer

Sat Aug 15 22:25:48 EDT 2015