Right on, brother
I'm a musician. I write original music, and I produce arrangements of other people's (copyrighted) music. I (unlike many arrangers) always seek permission from the copyright holder before making an arrangement, and so far, it's never been withheld. I get a benefit from the copyright protection on my original compositions (I can charge people for the right to perform them, and would have the law on my side if I decided to pursue someone who performed them without my permission), and I pay a price to other copyright holders in order to benefit from their work. It all seems perfectly equitable to me.
Then organisations like this want to destroy that model, giving me no incentive to create other than "for the love of it". Well, you know what? I DO love creating, but I also need to eat, pay my mortgage and taxes etc. If there was no economic incentive for me to create and share my work, I'd probably still do some creating, but a hell of a lot less sharing. Why? Because I'd be too busy doing a day job to pay my bills. As it is, the modest income I get from sharing my creative work enables me to go on creating and sharing - and I tend to share pretty widely, so I'm "enriching the commons" by doing so, even though it's private enterprise. I don't understand why people feel that I shouldn't have the right to benefit financially from the work I do - it's a similar situation to the current brouhaha over musicians being asked to perform for free for events connected with the Olympics or the Queen's Jubilee. Just because we enjoy what we do, doesn't stop it being work!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
