Or also

“Joanne K. Rowling and Michael Ballack”

A short time ago, I wrote a comment about the call for a regulation of managerial income. Athletes, diverse popular stars and authors, however, often earn more than managers. Consequently, the following question comes to mind:

Is it justifiable that a young hard-working athlete earns several times as much each year as a qualified engineer will earn through all his life?
Or:
How can it be that an author becomes extremely rich out of nowhere?

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I found nothing about the wealth of Michael Ballack in wikipedia. It is common knowledge that Joanne K. Rowling earned a billion US dollars in a few years after having invented Harry Potter.

Although it probably does not make much sense for an individual person to earn this kind of money, I do not begrudge her that wealth. Her stories contain a profound humanity, they are almost philosophical.
Exorbitant income is only possible if many pay for it. For sought-after content, the media really collect.

Licences loom everywhere. “Pirate Copying” (!) is severely punished. If you want to see a soccer game (which used to be a public event) on TV, you have to pay licence fees (Pay TV).

An entire industry profits from the mass processing of creativity as displayed by stars like Michael Ballack and Joanne K. Rowling. The end user has to pay both the stars and – considerably more for – the holder of exploitation rights.What protects stars and holders of exploitation rights is the copyright. For managerial income, a limitation by law is considered. When the copyright was originally drafted, the technical limitations made it almost impossible to generate the absurdly high income we witness today.

For instance, it is conceivable that managerial income be limited insofar as it springs from copyright. If, for example, a private person earns 100 million Euros through “copyright”, it could be legal to call the content common good. Yet, the process is not as easy as it sounds.

The current copyright law is just as antiquated as the high managerial incomes and needs to be reformed. Some people say there is even a party concerned with these kinds of issues.

RMD
(Translated by EG)