triadruid

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, answer these questions. Pass it on. You can't use the artist I used. Try not to repeat a song title. Repost as "My Life According to (ARTIST NAME)".

• "Cold and Shitty", to the tune of Chamillionaire's "Ridin' (Dirty)";
  
• "Too Much Salt On My Roads", to the tune of Styx' "Too Much Time On My Hands".

featherynscale

1. Intellectual Property protection is broken. Even I, who try to avoid piracy whenever possible, can recognize that. There's just no way to put the genie back in the bottle, and with recent changes to copyright law in the U.S. and the ability to patent "ways to amuse a cat (or other animal with a chase instinct) with a laser pointer", maybe little reason to want to do so. Many publishers appear to be acting from a pure profit motive, not the original protection-and-promotion-of-creative-works standard.
   
2. At the same time, remuneration of creators for their work is important to encourage further creation. The dirty little secret of Open Source Software is that a lot of it is done on "company time" or "when I get around to it". That's not a terribly productive model for encouraging future output, quality assurance, or continued employment at said company. But as copyright infringement and unauthorized distribution continue to outpace protection schemes (similarly to the War on Drugs and other failed "Ideological battles"), at some point either a paradigm shift or system collapse seems inevitable. Bruce Sterling's Distraction touches on one simple way to do this; in an economic 'war', broad distribution of all English-language intellectual property on the 'Net by China brings about the essential collapse of the American economy.
   
3. The recent strike by the Writer's Guild of America and the ongoing dramatics regarding royalties paid to musicians, for example, seems indicative that something is off-balance (this is, of course, debatable, as I don't have full facts to hand) between publishers and producers.
   
4. In addition to #3, I'm aware that there's a dynamic tension between the ecological/economic (econological?) benefits of such institutions as the used bookstore and the public library, and my native desire (which you are welcome not to share, or argue) to remunerate the creator directly. Needless to say, it's a little difficult to track down a way to send 6% or whatever to every author whose work you like... but then last year I read something by Lawrence Watt-Evans (which wasn't all that good, truth be told), but it eventually led to a page on his website describing an adaptation of the Street Performer Protocol to allow fans of his Ethshar series to fund the writing of another novel in the series, after his publishers discontinued support for it after lackluster sales. The experiment worked, twice even, which I find interesting. Webcomics seem to be another example of this... on the other hand, both Stephen King and Jason Kottke failed to make a sustainable wage with this type of 'micropatronage', although that could be for any number of reasons.
   
5. Copy-editing, as you've no doubt heard from both featherynscale, fionnabhar, or myself, is a Dead Damn Art. Nobody seems to want to pay/expend the energy for anything beyond the Microsoft Office Spell/Grammar Check, so you get things like "imbedding" on the first page of a recent book I read. First page! At the same time, many fans of particular authors/creators are ready and willing to stand in the rain, freezing wind, and what have you for the first chance to gain access to early/first releases; even Microsoft has been leveraging that for years with the way they utilize the pre-Service Pack 1 release as an "open beta" (in practice, if not in name).
   
6. So I have to wonder if there would be some sort of 'trust network' or patronage setup that would allow writers (in particular) to release drafts to a small set of loyal readers, wherein they could catch some of the grammatical/logical/ideological flaws in the manuscript (similar to how Wikipedia does a good job with fixing minor details in copy). That may be incompatible with my statements earlier about IP being broken, but I'm sure there's someone more clever than I out there thinking about this...