Which reminds me, United Airlines has applied for Federal permission to outsource piloting, and employ cheaper, less well-qualified, foreign pilots. A friend shared this with me:

“Do you want the experience of military trained or airline trained experts, or some kid who chose between goat herding and airline flying (kid…take the goat herding!) from some third world nation that pays their pilots with grain and rice? You don’t see this happening? The pilots of United, Aer Lingus, Continental and most other large U.S. airlines do. This goes beyond union propaganda and labor issues. It goes beyond party lines. It goes into the category of AVIATION SAFETY.”

To return to the movie/pilots analogy, maybe we need to get rid of all the expensive (good looking, uniquely talented) movie stars. Perhaps all movies ought to be cartoons shot using computer animated “Poser” people.

Dave, I don’t know what your idea of a marginal cost is. Some authors can write a pretty good book in a month, if they work all day every day at it (I can’t). That’s a lot of time and effort. To copyright a work costs around $40. Editors, cover models, cover artists, copy editors, typesetters all need to be paid too. Also, distribution agents, also vendors.

I’ve never yet seen a pirate torrent offering to share someone’s blog.

Apparently I need to start including a disclaimer in every post: “Patrick Ross supports any decision regarding any creator’s works, whether she wishes to give it away or hide it in the bottom of her piano bench.”

The key here is that the creator, through the rights given to her, has choices, and we should respect those choices. We as consumers have no right to dictate — through piracy, anyway — what business models we think she should or should not choose. We can attempt to sway her in the marketplace by not honoring ones we dislike, but not by violating her rights.

I wonder sometimes why so many skeptics of copyright jump to the conclusion that because I defend one approach to exercising creators’ rights, I somehow “rule out” other exercises. Perhaps it’s because they have decided one exercise is the “right” one and choose not to honor others as a result, and thus assume their opponents also insist on believing others are “wrong” and not worthy of pursuit.

In the motion picture industry, the unions handle that level of interaction with and support for the “music studio engineers and movie crew people.” For example, there is IATSE which represents the technicians and craftspersons for the entertainment industry in both the US and Canada. There is also the Producers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, to name a few.

You might be surprised if you glance at their websites at how much they do take care of their union members in the ways you suggest above. For example, IATSE offers college scholarship awards for their members’ kids and they also provide other services to help pay for college. If you dig deeper, you will find a whole slew of information on benefits and services for union members.

You might also be surprised to know how much piracy affects unions. Things that unions provide for their members, like health insurance and retirement pensions, come from residual movie and DVD sales. So, every time a movie is pirated and a DVD sale is lost, that’s less in the pot for the union members to divide up. That’s less that they have to live off of and fund those emergencies that you mention.

I find it sad, really, that though so many of us in society claim that we are for the hard-working creative worker, we are still able to justify hurting them by pirating movies (music, etc.) and take away that which they work so hard for – health insurance, emergency funds, and pensions.

It would be a real, sincere way to show the corporations are serious about protecting industry jobs when the industries are losing money.

But they’ll never do it because they are greedy, corrupt and unethical.