Jumping the licensing shark

> I'm genuinely curious how you can think of copying information being expensive is NATURAL. How do you define natural? Did cavemen pay royalties when they were retelling stories because that's the natural way to compensate whoever originally came up with the story?

Okay, to pick on this particular example, but let's separate "performance" from "copying". Telling a story by the fire is a performance. The guy may have been paid with food, with status, whatever. But the performance probably hasn't been recorded, hasn't been copied, *hasn't been memorised!*

Your bard, on the other hand, has invested a lot of time and effort training his memory to retain all this stuff. Okay, back then, their memories may have been better thanks to regular usage - what evidence we have suggests that such copying was actually pretty accurate! And that includes down the centuries!

In the past, the making of accurate, durable copies, has always involved significant investment of one sort or another. Today, we copy like kleptomaniacs, because it's so cheap (I do, too, ...).

Cheers,
Wol