[WalterBright]

The reality is, essentially nobody makes money by creating music. Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. A Taylor Swift impersonator would make no money singing the same songs. A cover band wouldn't do any better.

It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them. It's so paltry I don't really understand why authors are so concerned about copyright infringement.

People steal my copyrighted stuff all the time. I long ago stopped caring about it. But I do very much like Github as it protects me from others accusing me of stealing their code.

If you want to make money, you'll need a plan that does not require copyright protection.

[kiba]

I care more about attribution than copyright infringement.

[WalterBright]

So do I. At least Sid Meyer did that!

[saghm]

> Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live.

People want to see her performing...her music. She would not make nearly as much money by going up on stage and sitting quietly for a few hours.

It's also worth nothing that she literally re-recorded several of her albums due to someone else getting the rights to them instead of selling them to her, and the proportion of streams and sales they got compared to the original versions was so high that it effectively forced the person who had bought them from the previous owner to sell them to her in the end anyways.

I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point you're trying to make, but saying that she doesn't make her money from selling her music doesn't really seem accurate.

[WalterBright]

I'm sure she makes some money selling the music, but the big bucks are from filling a stadium with people paying insane prices to hear/watch her perform.

There have been many stories on HN over the years on rock bands making a pittance from record sales and having to tour to make any decent money.

[PearlRiver]

Taylor Swift is an interesting personality.

So many people can probably reach her level of music but have the charisma of a door nail.