Everyone is getting paid, except the writers, photographers, illustrators, and graphic artists who created the works that are being copied and distributed. The librarians are getting paid. The scanner operators are getting paid. The programmers are getting paid. The builders of the server farms are getting paid. The system administrators are getting paid. The authors, and only the authors, are getting nothing.

I was thinking about this topic re all the wonderful videos that are going around Youtube and Twitter and Facebook right now of musicians singing and actors reading and other artists putting up work for free. Who's making money?....well, Youtube and Twitter and Facebook and the advertising companies. And doesn't 100K streams of a track on Spotify earn a musician something like a couple of thousand bucks? (And gee, suddenly we really really need reporters and newspapers and investigators....) It seems like creators are getting less and less money the more advanced the tech becomes. Not due to the fault of the tech, but the people who are on top and manipulating it.