Posted by Mikko (193.234.247.51) on May 02, 2002 at 07:36:47:
In Reply to: your last point is simply untrue posted by Diarm (194.125.174.158) on May 01, 2002 at 11:28:54:
: : artists and intellectuals will starve or change profession if intellectual property rights are removed.
: In what universe do artists make money from the system of intellectual property rights? Not this one, that's for sure. All the hit songs are owned (and money made from them) by people other than the creators and original performers.
--Metallica is one of the biggest bands who own all the rights to their music by themselves. (Probably also the reason why they reacted so strongly against Napster)
Original perfomers do get the royalties from record sales and radio play, as do the original writers. In fact, for many hit music makers radio play is one of the top sources of income. I don't remember all the laws exactly off the top of my head, but usually the record companies have either publishing rights or all copyrights to the material, the latter being more common. They haven't got those rights for free, they have paid or constantly pay for the people who made the music for that.
: Any wealth owned by performers comes from other sources like performing, merchandise, interviews, books, endorsements etc.
--For many bands performing is the biggest source of income, true, but not the only one. The rest of the sources can be very meaningful or not, it depends.
: The swiss and dutch corporations couldn't do that, because of their lack of a patent system. So they had no choice but to keep working, making new innovations: which is why they became some of the world's biggest firms.
: The hardscrabble environment where an idea is fair game (as it is in nature) made these firms strong enough to be world-conquerors.
--The last time I checked, they do have a trademark system.
: Last time I checked, Switzerland was the world's richest nation (going by average wealth per citizen), and the Netherlands were pretty close
--Can't say much about Netherlands, except that the country provides vital shipping and harbour services for all of Europe and that makes the whole situation different. Switzerland is rather reach because of its banking business, which in my understanding profits the land much more than making watches.
Mikko