Copyright Royalty Issues Paper

In this paper I am presenting the argument related to the copyright and the royalty issues with the author of the publication. Nowadays the huge majority of authors get slight or no revenue from copyright royalties. Authors of scientific, technical and academic journals are getting almost nothing and majority of them get only a few hundred dollars in royalties. Newspaper and magazine writers work on salary whereas free lancers usually get flat rate, not a royalty. Authors who make significant portion of their personal income from royalties are very tiny fraction of actual numbers. Even in the case of books, typically only around five percent of the retail price goes back to the author. Yes, it is good for writers to be paid, but copyright royalties are a very inefficient way of doing it.

So why was copyright developed? It was because of the invention of the printing press. For thousands of years, the only technique written works could be replicated was through a sluggish and awfully expensive procedure of copying by hand. But then the printing press was invented and it became possible to produce an infinite number of inexpensive copies.

However, there was a catch. To produce a printed book involves a very large expenditure ahead of time for things like editing, typesetting, running off at least a few hundred copies of the book, and promotion. A publisher would be enthusiastic to invest all this money only if it knew it would have exclusive rights to publish the book. Otherwise any book that was a hit would straightaway be copied by other publishers, and the original publisher would get little or no return on its investment. So copyright law was created to promote publishing so that the public could enjoy the fruits of the new technology of printing.

We have copyright for music recordings for the same reason. The invention of the phonograph made possible cheap copies of music. However, a great deal of money is required to produce the record--recording studio time, paying musicians, editing, producing a master, producing records at a factory--and also for promoting and distributing it. Copyright for music guarantees exclusive rights to sell a record, so music companies are willing to put up the money ahead of time to produce records in hopes they will make a profits from them.

So copyright was invented so that society could enjoy the fruits of new inventions for reproducing works. But now we have new skills that radically change the economics of reproduction. The result is that copyright no longer benefits society.

We don't need a huge up-front investment to produce and distribute a book. A word processor program produces readable copy, and the book can be publicized and distributed over the Internet for next to nothing. The same goes for music. Thanks to personal computers, any band can have its own sound recording and editing studio for a few thousand dollars. And it can burn its recordings to a CD or distribute