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>It's a lie, and you know it.

[citation needed] What is the "truth"? That e.g. artists will be fine because they can make more from concerts? Too bad about artists who make incredibly wonderful CDs but have no stage presence. I guess they don't deserve to be artists then.

Or, wait, I know, they can buy t-shirts, stick their name on them and charge 50 times what they cost. People will buy them because they want the artist to keep producing! Do people not realize merchandise sales are just a form of charity? After all media is free, what are you going to do when people get sick of giving to this charity?

>I don't care about the copyright industry's profits

Here it sounds like you're talking about something different than I am. I don't care about the profits of obsolete middle men. I care about someone who's good at music, acting, writing, whatever being able to make a living from it. And not by depending on charity or throwing events.




> Too bad about artists who make incredibly wonderful CDs but have no stage presence. I guess they don't deserve to be artists then.

Too bad about those companies who make incredibly beautiful buggy-whips, but have no other income, I guess they don't deserve to be buggy-whip makers then!

Either we embrace the capitalism-fuelled race to productivity enhancement or we don't, but I fail to see why a minority of the population is entitled to lifetime (and even posthumous) subsidies because they refuse to show themselves in public, while the remaining 90% is not.

> I don't care about the profits of obsolete middle men. I care about someone who's good at music, acting, writing

Then how can you defend a system that was written by and for these obsolete middle-men? A system that sees the overwhelming majority of arts-related profits going to middlemen, while artists starve ? For each billion dollars in the entertainment industry, only a few millions go to a few selected, market-friendly artists, and that's obscene.




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