I had no idea about the coffee.
Maybe more than anything, this is what hit me. That final sign off with a fact about coffee I was totally unaware of.
On the activity comment, if you are active enough in the right ways, sooner or later you draw someone else into the conversation because they found topic showing up in a search and it is being discussed here, not somewhere else. It's a very slow slog at the beginning. Might take months to draw one comment. Sooner or later it starts. From there if you stay at it, it snowballs.
With MSL his post is larger and would take some text space to answer fully. There are pluses to copyright and it's limitations but there are far more limitations that have been stretched over time to favor more and more the IP holders. There's no one lobbying and willing to pay large amounts to have the other side of the conversation heard.
To hear big content's way of stating it, there would be no culture without someone paying the author to create and that creation would instantly stop were it not for copyright. That's not true and can be easily pointed to that long before copyright existed, groups of people were going from town to town as actors, as troubadours, as entertainers, making a living without the benefits of copyright.
Nor is that the only example. Patrons of the arts have long set the stage for famous artists, painters, sculptures, whose works survive even today and are often found in museums for all to see.
When you get into the cost of a ticket, you see where these restrictions hit you personally. You don't see the side deals that made it happen where countries, cities, and states made deals that cost them big money to have it happen in their local area. Called tax breaks, very often the place that hosts the filming gave away tax income to make it occur there and not somewhere else. The hope being that local labor and talent will be employed during the filming. That's not what actually happens.
The deal is made, local supplies are used for the set and for things like catering that can't be shipped in. The talent is flown in. Those places making the tax breaks actually get screwed. Due to laws made in their favor, flim studio's then get tax breaks to edit and produce the final film somewhere else in another country when the filming is done.
This follows with other dirty deals, such as the filming company, made strictly for that film is a legal setup. By that I mean it will host all the bills but not all the profits. It is purposely made to lose money. Then when an actor says, "Pay me a percentage of the film's take instead of full wages", they are ready to make the deal. Mainly because the studio knows at the start the dummy company will never make a profit (on purpose). The money will go elsewhere and be collected elsewhere and the magic of Hollywood accounting will make it all look proper.
Topic: Interesting Parallels Between The Cannabis and File-Sharing Debates (Read 3888 times)