Do these laws help the artists/creators to collect royalities & to benifit in a way that they can continue to create without having to give up creating to seek their bread & butter elsewhere, maybe when hell freezes over? I tend to believe that more artists covering copyrighted material are willing to pay directly to the original creator the royalities due them than the giant firms unless the creator has the ability & finiances (2 Live Crew, example above) to demand of these companies what's due them. Example a Boston Irish group back in the 70's, the Battering Ram, cut an LP, great band, great music. Rounder Records recently rereleased their LP on CD. Yet no one has make any attempt to contact the group of even tell them of their rerelease & they don't have the ability to demand what was by law due them, not a cent (If any Rounder people are reading this the contact for the now disbanded Battering Ram would be Seamus Walker, listed in the Boston telephone directory). In theory if this group were recieving royalities it might be the incentive for them to regroup & maybe once more try to earn a living by creating. It also seems to me that the more an artist can aggressively promote their material & themselves the better off they are which in some cases may mean they may need to have more bussiness savy which again may deminish there creativity. This could lead to less creative material or those of lesser talent taking the lion's share of the market & robbing the public of the creations that these laws were originally meant to foster. It also means that those of great talent & no bussiness savy should not quit their day jobs in pursuit of a fruitless & fading career choice. It also might tend to bring out the gravy hunters & navel gazers & cause an onslaught of mediocre material for profit instead of profit for creativity & flood the markets with inferior & substandard art while at the same time killing off creations or the potential of higher quality creating in the name of commericialism on the creators part & greed on the industry's part. Artists usually create, that's what they do, if they were great bussiness people or bloodsuckers they wouldn't be wasting their time & energy being taken by those that create nothing yet live off the backs & minds of them that do what they do for love & hope to be able to survive while doing it. Not a great case for the arts & the artists. Barry