Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
And sure, people can still give away their creations if they want. Cory D can do it, and it helps him, because he's already an established author, making a living, and giving away material for free helps spread his already-established name, making him more money.
|
To be candid, although I just read his Wikipedia entry (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow), I'm not clear as to Doctorow's fame before he published his first novel. What I DO know is that from the start he published under Creative Commons.
I also know that copyright (and in fact any kind of intellectual property) is something relatively new (about two hundred years) and has
wildly varied over times and regions of the world. For instance, for a very long time, the US didn't have any IP law because it suited them that way. Interestingly enough, there are quite a lot of countries which have been recently strong-armed by the US and EU into having such laws (many of them in South-East Asia). However, these places used to have a striving market (of now IP'ed products) without these laws before.
I'd invite you to read this:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/95psa.html
or a significantly longer work on the same subject here :
http://www.dklevine.com/general/inte...al/against.htm