[As1287]

Poor billionaire Rowling has no protections against the evil corporations. Everyone using this argument has no clue about artists and and writers.

Yes, corporations take a large cut, but creative people welcomed copyright and made the bargain and got fame in the process. Which was always better for them than let Twitch take 70% and be a sharecropper.

Silicon Valley middlemen are far worse than the media and music industry.

[graemep]

The individuals who get rich from copyright are a rarity.

Most mid-list authors make very little from copyright. A lot of the "authors" who make a lot of money from writing are celebs who slap their name on a ghost written work.

> Which was always better for them than let Twitch take 70% and be a sharecropper.

Copyright predates Twitch or giant corporations and was designed to protect the profits of the publishers from the start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

[lstodd]

This is so, but note that publishers were the "giant corporations" of the time.

In this nothing changed. Authors never were and still are not the point of copyright/IP.

[graemep]

Comparatively big for the time, but very small compared to publishing companies how.

[oblio]

Giant corporations started in the early 1600s and back then they had gunboats :-p

[graemep]

there were very few of them though. They constitute a far larger proportion of the economy now.

[jacquesm]

The reason you mention 'poor billionaire Rowling' is most likely because she's the only billionaire author that you know by name. If authors regularly became billionaires you'd have left out that name.