Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position ea
pressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
I had an interesting conversation with the guy who replaced my roof. He claimed I should pay him every time it rains. His reasoning went like this:
Allowing homeowners to pay only once and enjoy the use of their roof forever was unfair and forced older roofers to continue working to pay their bills.
"After so many years of not being compensated, it would be nice now at this late date to at least start," my roofer said. "You've gotten years of free rain protection. Now maybe it's time to pay up."
Well, actually, that wasn't my roofer. That's actually an excerpt from an article in the Los Angeles Times (May 21, 2007) about a proposal to make broadcasters pay royalties to performers every time a song is played. The real quote goes like this:
Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption [on performer royalties from broadcasting] was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.
"After so many years of not being compensated, it would be nice now at this late date to at least start," the 63-year-old Las Vegas resident said in Milwaukee, where she was performing at the Potawatomi Bingo Casino. "They've gotten 50-some years of free play. Now maybe it's time to pay up."
I'm inspired to a number of responses here, none of them sympathetic. Yes, some older musicians have to continue touring to pay their bills. That's called getting up in the morning and working for a living. What exactly does Mary Wilson propose to do with her days instead of performing? The rest of us will get up and go to work. My roofer doesn't collect royalties from me every time it rains, I don't collect royalties every time one of my students uses some of the information he learned in one of my classes, and I don't pay royalties to the airlines every time I wake up at my destination. For performers who don't want to tour, there are alternatives:
Where else, except in intellectual property controversies, do we find the absurd notion that you perform a service - once - and then get paid for the rest of your life every time someone benefits from that service? My roofer is too practical even to think he's entitled to continuing payments just because his roof lasts for years. I don't pay the doctor a fee every time I go a month without getting sick. Street pavers don't sit at home and collect checks from the people who drive on their streets. The guy who made my windows doesn't get to charge me every time I look outside. I don't pay my dentist every time I chew something. Everywhere else in economics, someone provides a product or service, the seller gets money, the customer gets a product or service and they're done. They have no further obligations to each other.
So when the Supremes recorded Stop in the Name of Love in 1965, they signed an agreement with the record company. They would provide a service to the record company - performing a song. The record company would provide them a service - recording and selling their song. The Supremes got a certain amount of money for every record sold. The record company got to keep whatever was left over. If the record was a hit (huge) then there would be more records and royalties. We're done here. Each party is fully compensated.
But what about every time the song is played on the radio? The Supremes are not performing that song. The radio station is playing a reproduction of the recording. The Supremes perform zero work during that broadcast. Why should Mary Williams get paid for a song she recorded four decades ago and did absolutely nothing to broadcast a thousand times all over the country yesterday? Oh yeah, the not have to get up and go to work thing.
Finally, broadcasters are required to pay royalties on songs played over the air. So who gets the money if not the performers? The record labels, people who contributed little to the creative process beyond access to a studio, and nothing to the broadcasting except a disk of plastic intrinsically worth a few cents. So I can definitely get behind royalties to performers. Take them out of the royalties already being paid to the record companies.
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The whole intellectual property zoo is based on a bizarre concept, found nowhere else, that you can continue to profit every time somebody else uses something of yours. Once upon a time it made sense. You invent a widget. You can manufacture it yourself, pay all your bills, and profit from what's left over. Or, you can agree to let someone else manufacture it. You give him a share of the proceeds for manufacturing it, he gives you a share for being allowed to sell it. It still makes sense if what's being sold is a physical object and the object is useful in itself (as opposed to being useful for information contained in it).
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Created 21 January, 2003, Last Update 24 May, 2020
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