I have trouble feeling bad for the guy. He was paid what he had agreed to.
And it's understandable that he feels bad about it. So I do feel bad for him. We've all made mistakes.
Given the headline, I had expected more than grief about no royalties. I mean, that is a disturbing old man.
We here in SV have evolved a culture and a set of business practices that do a much better job of compensating us fairly. We make good cash money, and we tend to get a share of the success when things get big. It's not like we as individuals were clever enough to negotiate all of the details; it's a system mostly other people worked out over time.
But we're very lucky in that people with our talents and skills are still much rarer than business types would like. That's not true with artists, and the music industry's default practices, especially then, were generally shitty. There's no reason this guy shouldn't get as fair a shake as we do.
(And before anybody has a personal story of not getting a fair shake: yes, that sucks, which is exactly why you should want to see systemic changes that minimize that happening to others.)
Would you be willing to give the lion's share of the money you were paid to code it back if the site flopped?
> We here in SV have evolved a culture and a set of business practices that do a much better job of compensating us fairly.
It'ss not culture, it's market economics.
> But we're very lucky in that people with our talents and skills are still much rarer than business types would like.
Exactly. The rarity is key here.
> There's no reason this guy shouldn't get as fair a shake as we do.
He did. Plenty of programmers do work for hire and contract work, and aren't paid in partial ownership.
If I'm a farmer, and I hire someone to work in my field, do they deserve a share of my crop just because they worked it? Does the amount I paid them, if what was agreed upon, change their rights of ownership beyond the up-front agreed upon terms?
I don't see this being any different just because it's an artistic work. There may be a disagreement on what was actually sold, the image and all future uses of it or the singular representation that was handed over, but I hardly see that as worthy of some greater discussion of work, it's worth, and how people are compensated. There are worthy discussions to be had over that, and how we deal with it as a society, but a contract dispute in a case because nobody bothered to even create a contract, such as this, seems a poor start to me.
As if the two were separate. The idea of market economics itself is a cultural artifact. But this is obviously culture, not some sort of universal law of economics, because Silicon Valley is a unique ecosystem that people keep trying to copy by adopting behaviors, practices, and ideas. Those are all cultural traits.
> He did. Plenty of programmers do work for hire and contract work, and aren't paid in partial ownership.
Sure. And, back to my initial point, if Zuckerberg, or some other entrepreneur had used that to get his initial product built and then said, "Fuck you, buddy" to the person that helped make him rich, people here would have empathized with him. Some would have called it wrong. Because we are part of a system that believes that the benefits of great success should be shared among those who created it.
The principle is the same. It's disappointing to me that people here will apply that to themselves, but suddenly turn to "might makes right" when it's somebody they don't identify with.
> Would you be willing to give the lion's share of the money you were paid to code it back if the site flopped?
That's why you'd only get a little bit of the money, rather than half. But it still makes a lot more sense than 0%
> If I'm a farmer, and I hire someone to work in my field, do they deserve a share of my crop just because they worked it? Does the amount I paid them, if what was agreed upon, change their rights of ownership beyond the up-front agreed upon terms?
If each unit of crop takes one hour of labor, and you sell it for $2000, you're a terrible person if you still pay minimum wage.
You pay more in taxes, anyway...
(And the other costs and risks in farming are nowhere near 250x the cost of labor, are you joking? Any situation where you're paying minimum wage AND labor costs are less than 1% of revenue is unconscionable, and I can't believe anyone would suggest otherwise. I wasn't intending for anyone to jump up and become a hyper-capitalist strawman, I was using a stupidly huge profit number so that everyone could agree that fair pay shouldn't be unlivably low...)
So? I agreed to be paid a few thousand bucks for a few hours of work. Why does he owe me anything other than what we agreed on?
And in that particular case the visual branding plays a very prominent role in selling the shoes anyway, so the artwork matters a lot, lot more. I remember feeling embarrassed for not wearing shoes with that swoosh logo back when I was a kid, the marketing and subsequent judging by other kids was that overwhelming at the time.
It carried over into adulthood too, because when I bought my first article of clothing that had the Nike swoosh on it (a t-shirt and basketball shorts, no big deal), there was this crazy sense of relief, like "Finally, I'm no longer the outcast," even though it was more than a decade after I was out of school and hadn't seen 99% of those kids since.
> Easy thing to say. But imagine Zuckerberg had hired you to code the first version of his site, paid you a few thousand bucks, and then he went on to be one of the richest men in America?
The GP still has it right. Paid for a task. Done. It would be different if he toiled away for 100 hours/week for no pay, with the hope of having a hit. As originally described, he has no more of a claim than the guy that made Zuck a sandwich at the food truck.
That may haunt me, but I still wouldn't deserve any more than what I got.
But now I look back and I read, "I have trouble feeling bad for..."
Did you silently edit your comment, or did I accidentally misread it? I meant to respond to the topic of someone failing to empathize with another human being, which is a completely different conversation than someone failing to feel pity for another human being.
Imagine if it was just there, without being negotiated. Not a large enough amount to meaningfully affect the budget, just enough for huge successes to give a payout.
If you're worried about someone else getting rich from your work, while you get nothing, but it's impracticable to get royalties because the work will be used to create various derived works in various unforseeable ways, then perhaps the thing to do is offer them, in return for an immediate cash payment, non-exclusive rights for ever, but exclusive rights only for the first five years. You'd probably have to put something in about the purchaser licensing back to you any other necessary rights (e.g. trademarks) to make this work, but it might then mean you'd get a second chance at negotiating five years later. In the case of the cover of a successful record, either they come back to you five years later with more cash, or else you sell your remaining rights to someone else who wants to make T-shirts or whatever. Or you donate the image to the public domain if that's what you prefer. I'm suggesting this approach not so much as a business plan but as a way of avoiding irrational feelings of frustration or indignation, but it might also be a good business plan in some cases.
Personally I like non-exclusive rights. It helps avoid orphaning of works and ridiculous situations in which it's impossible to republish a book unless you can get 19 people to all agree and give permission because that's how many people might have inherited a share in some required exclusive right.
Sure it is. Just because nitpicking is possible doesn't make the basic idea impossible. For example, of course the new owners would know what they were buying.
> Who decides what constitutes wildly successful? Who decides how many percent
Just as an example, it could be "more than 4x the expected revenue cited when doing the original negotiations", and 5%. (Or if "wildly successful" is too likely to get cheated, make it unconditional.)
> and who gets what share of it?
Plenty of ways to do it, just pick one.
The risk of course is that there becomes a boilerplate that strips out such things, and it gets used so much that it becomes the new "default".
Seriously, just a handshake. So fleeting. So trivial. It's just a gesture, after all.