I suspect this may be an unpopular view around here, but i believe that the already-flawed concept of "intellectual property" should not be appropriated by agencies other than the creator for profit.
Does it bother you that the performers of these works are left unpaid for the use you've had?
It bothers me more that the performer receives almost none of the money even when i do pay for the use as it were. For a given CD or download which is sold for $10 for instance, and costs almost nothing to reproduce, it seems there is no reason the distributor/publisher/etc should get more than one or two dollars while the rest goes to the people who actually created the music represented (composer and performer). In reality the situation is almost the exact opposite of that, except that ten percent would be a
very generous artist's share and a more usual amount would be a fraction of one percent.
Conversely, if performers undertook their own recording projects rather than entrusting them to labels, dividing the profits among themselves, the composers (where necessary) and the sound engineers, there would be more recorded music (since it would no longer be such a risk to devote a period of time to learning and recording a composition, as the time and money invested could be repaid with a few hundred sales instead of tens of thousands), distributed through channels that already exist or could easily be created, and both creators and audiences would gain. The only people who would lose out would be the people who control the current record market and methods of distribution, who are in large part the people whom copyright law was created to protect artists from. I don't think the world would miss them much if they disappeared.
I suppose i'm young so i can afford not to believe in perpetuating broken systems just because they're "the best we have", maybe age & maturity will make me a cynic like Mr Hinton
