All these can no longer be thought of as mostly
creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property
rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael
Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least
as much as they are artists.
Economically and rationally, we should expect that the
costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its
market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights.
Consider a publishing house.
A book which costs 50,000 DM to produce with a potential
audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like
this) - would have to be priced at a a minimum of 100 DM to
recoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (thereby
shrinking the potential market as some people will prefer to
buy the cheaper illegal copies) - its price would have to go
up prohibitively to recoup costs, thus driving out potential
buyers. The story is different if a book costs 10,000 DM to
produce and is priced at 20 DM a copy with a potential
readership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy (illegal copying)
should in this case be more readily tolerated as a marginal
phenomenon.
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