This isn’t really about copyright, its about them promising to pay X for work Y, then refusing to pay X. The bigger authors in this case can afford good lawyers so they don’t have this problem. Its the authors who make 40-70k/yr where taking this to court would cost them most of the money they are owed.

If this goes in Disneys favor, than any transaction under the cost of legal action you can ignore paying if you are a large company.

A large companies legal costs per case is also lower as they have lawyers on staff and you don’t, so you end up paying the consultant rate (~3x more). The goal of the staff lawyer would be to drag the case out as long as possible to make you want to give up or run out of money (yours or lawyers contingency) to keep the suit going.

This (if it stands) would also be a great counter for your patent auction idea as they could just setup a shell to “buy” it, sell the patent back to themselves for $1 then have the shell declare bankruptcy (reality will be more tangled than this example) because they owe you money.

>They're not being paid for their work, they're collecting royalty payments based on a government granted copyright monopoly.

yeah, which they have because they didn't get paid for their work, took a risk that it would sell, it did, and because they hold the copyright they can get a share of the money when it sells.

at any rate copyright and patents are not the same thing either, although they are certainly related.

Let’s go back to the fact this is partially started by a guy who has cancer and a company is selling copies of his books without paying him any money despite a contract saying he should get a exceedingly small portion of sales, being the original creator of the thing. This pie in the sky “well systemically this guy fighting cancer should just starve” isn’t a great position.