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Its clear that the music industry has a long history of exploitation and its an interesting comparison to the software industry. Record labels taking the product of the artist and giving crumbs or often nothing at all back to the artist (or in the past a large loan to be repaid).

But hasn't the law tried to catch up to those abusive tactics? An artist can split their copyright into multiple tiny pieces for specific use cases, often time limited, and there is even laws that gives the artist the ability to break a contract after a number of years. There is also very little "work for hire" that I can see where the record company owns the work and the artist just got paid once. Occasionally I see the odd article where an artist is in a constant legal fight with a company because they signed off on a one-sided contract and the product of their work happened to be worth millions.

I am trying to imagine what would happen if the software world would get the same protection as current day laws and practice for musicians. No more work for hire, software being split into "performance", "internal", "on-demand-download", "CD", "combined/synced with X", and so on. Here in Sweden we have state funded public radio and TV so maybe a stated funded repository where a small tax pie is distributed based on some form of statistics. In this world, what kind of licenses would be popular?




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