Perspicackle's Comments (8)

“There isn't anyone I know of who doesn't know of office affairs. It is silly to expect people who work together not to be attracted to one another. If they are married, it's wrong, but if they're single and both are willing, so what?? As long as someone doesn't get promotions or demotions as a result of their involvement, I don't see what the big deal is.”

“And the truth is, it's not a no-no at all in most offices. HR just wants to know about it to fend off any potential problems.”

“unless it's the oval office...”

“I didn't deny that it is a complex problem and that it can be psychological. If you read what I wrote the central message was the sheer speed of the epidemic. It is happening so fast and broadly that it is quite frightening. And just to get rid of the idea that I am a thin person beating up on fat people I need to lose a good 10 to 15 kilos myself so I am in the problem too but at least I am aware of it. There is something wrong with either our eating culture or food supply. As for the French paradox you can fly from Sydney to New Caledonia which is a French speaking island 2.5 hours away. They eat a French diet and have a French eating culture. On the plane back to Sydney you can actually spot the Australians by their weight. The difference is amazingly obvious.”

“(Then, of course, we have to set up a system whereby other people aren't allowed to use my design without my permission; that way, you can't get out of paying me my $5 by slipping the design to another carpenter, one I don't have a deal with, and going into business with him. And your competitors can't copy the design you paid for. Without a system like that in place, it would be almost impossible for me to make money; as soon as I showed a design in public, everybody would be copying it for free. I'd lose my incentive to design new chairs, and you'd lose your incentive to pay me to design new chairs, and society would have fewer chairs to choose from.)

That, in a nutshell, is how the residual system is supposed to work. Copyright and residuals are good for society; they replace the system of patronage (or work-for-hire) that you're advocating, in which only very wealthy people and corporations and governments can sponsor artists to create art, with a system that allows people to hire artists to create art without much financial risk, while giving artists incentive to work hard by allowing them to share in the fruits of their work. That means more chair designs for us to choose from, which are more innovative (because the risks are spread out more) and better-designed (because the people who designed them have a vested interest in making them appealing). Everybody wins!”

“So how can we make this fair — or, more to the point, how can we make it so I have an incentive for designing chairs, so there are a lot of good chair designs for society to choose from? Well, one way is for you to pay me six months' pay up front — that way I'm compensated for my six months of work, and you can go on and make chairs to your heart's content, and I don't care what you do with the design. That's called work-for-hire, and if you have a lot of capital — say, if you're a big corporation — that might work out. Lots of creative work is, in fact, paid for that way.

But you're just a carpenter, and that's a lot of money; you don't have six months of salary for me lying around. So what do you do? You say, "Hey, jere7my, how about this: I'll pay you a little bit up front, and then, every time I sell a chair for $100, I'll give you $5." That sounds good to me (if my chair is popular, I get more money) and it sounds good to you (if I designed a lousy chair that doesn't sell, you don't have to pay me very much). Even better, unlike work-for-hire, it provides direct incentive for me to provide you with quality designs, since my income is tied to how many chairs you sell. (continued­...)”

“Perspicackle, the difference is between intellectual property and real property, and it works out to be better for society as a whole that the makers of intellectual property have copyright and residuals to rely on. Here's why.

Let's say you're a carpenter, as in your example, but instead of doorframes you make chairs. Once you sell a chair, one person can sit down on it at a time. Any time somebody new wants to sit down, or any time a chair breaks, they need to come to you (or somebody like you), and pay you for a day's labor so you'll make a chair for them. You've got a continuing source of income, as long as people want to sit. And the better your chairs are, the more people buy them, and the more money you make. If you're really good, you can make and sell a chair a day and live very happily on that.

Now, say I'm a chair designer. You need me, or someone like me (unless you want to make half-assed, uncomfortable chairs), so you hire me to design you a nifty new chair that more people will want to buy. The trouble is, it takes me six months of research and computer design and prototyping to come up with a new chair design, and once I've sold it to you, that's it — you can make as many chairs as you want from my design, and only need to come back to me once people get bored with it. What's more, you can make your money back by selling the design to other carpenters, and I'll never see another penny for it — ideas, unlike chairs, can be copied trivially. You can photocopy them, email them, sketch them on cocktail napkins...­and soon enough there's nobody out there who wants to pay me for my design. If I sold you my prototype design for the price of a chair, I'm out of luck — I got paid one day's salary for six months of work. (continued­...)”