Here is what an esteemed author( an SFF author,even) says about copyright:.
Quote:
Copyright is a limited and carefully designed law to protect authors from poverty. It allows authors control over the rights in their books, so that they, like any worker, can make what profit they can from their work.
It’s called “copy” right because it involves, literally, the right to make copies of the work.
An author contracting with a publisher sells the publisher a limited piece of her copyright: that is, the right to make copies (i.e., publish the work in a certain form for a certain period of time) in exchange for a share (usually 15% or less) of the publisher’s profits.
Discussion: Copyright has existed only since the 18th century. Till then, writers mostly lived by finding and sucking up to a rich patron. Since then, writers have been able to make an independent living… well, dependent on the whims of publishers — but after all, publishers and writers have pretty much the same stakes in the very chancy game of making books.
Only ignorance or irresponsibility dismiss copyright as “irrelevant to the Digital Age.” It’s needed more than ever, to protect authors from trying to live by selling themselves to corporations or selling their text space to advertisers. Copyright law has to be extended and rewritten to work with the new technologies of publishing. The notion that it’s unnecessary makes it all the harder to get that necessary work done.
A lot of people quote Stu Brand: “Information wants to be free.” I wonder why they hardly ever quote the other half of Stu’s sentence: “It also wants to be paid for.”
Information can be free to the user, the reader, and pay a living wage to the originator, the author: Think of the free Public Library.
This balance can extend to the Internet, if we can rewrite copyright law to cover the new technologies.
Sneers and sloganeering ain’t going to butter the beans. It will take hard and careful work. Can you imagine trying to explain to the current Speaker of the House how it might be done and why it’s important to do it?
|
LINK
UKL will likely find it difficult to explain the importance to copyright to those here who "just know" authors are happy to work hard at writing books just so someone can read their hard work for free .