What happened to copyright?
Copyright is a long standing tradition whereby those producing creative work own it and therefore generally get paid for it both on the first purchase of the creation (book, play, film, etc.) and also when it is reused.
Well, that was the original theory anyway. In the good old days the actors, director and so on performed live and therefore you definitely had to pay again if you wanted to see the play once more. The arrival of books muddied the waters a little in that you bought the book once and could obviously re-read it without paying for it again. Home video came along somewhat later and similarly took the pay per view aspect away from the modern day equivalent of plays ie films.
Now of course, it’s open season for the most part. The users of YouTube have a very loose appreciation of copyright with many short films being loaded onto the site in breach of copyright as no payment is made to the owners of the films nor to those acting in them. I suspect that’s probably the worst excess of copyright theft these days although google seem set to take it to new heights by making entire books available in due course (project Gutenberg and others have only typed up out of copyright works before).
And, of course, there are original works such as you are reading right now. I’m sure you’re not planning on paying me after you’ve read it (although, if you’d like to pay, do get in touch!) and yet it obviously took me some time to write it. However, what about the various news aggregators that will pick up this particular post? This blog gets around 250,000 readers each week from Reuters which is a pretty respectable readership all by itself and that’s just one of a number of aggregation services that pick up our feed.
Everything can’t be free of course. After all, if authors, actors and other creative folk aren’t paid in some way then the various creations that they produce will eventually stop getting produced.
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