A few months later (1997), I won the coveted Prize
of the Ministry of Education (for short prose). The prize
money (a few thousand DMs) was snatched by the publishing
house on the legal grounds that all the money generated by the
book belongs to them because they own the copyright.
In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses,
the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like
this : if the rights to intellectual property were not defined
and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on
the risks associated with publishing books, recording records,
and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative
people will have suffered because they will have found no way
to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it
is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the
refrain.
But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very
limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only
select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation
(most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael
had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come
close to deriving subsistence level income from their
profession.
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