Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
People should have access to the works produced, according to the wishes of the creator... that's fair. (Using it as you wish is subject to negotiation.)
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That is a mind set that has become common among a set of writers, yet it certainly doesn't match the original purpose for copyright as set forth in the Constitution. The whole point of copyright is that it is a trade off.
Without copyright, an author has absolute of control of a book up until the time it gets published. At that point, from a practical matter, he has zero control over it. People may make as many copies as they like since there is nothing to stop them without the power of the government. That's why until relatively recently, authors made most of their money via magazine and newspaper sales and why so many popular books original appears as series in magazines (note this continued all the way through the late 70's. I originally read some of Zelazny's Amber books as serials in SF magazines).
Copyright gives the author a limited monopoly over the publishing rights, i.e. the rights to sale a copy, of a work for a period of time. After that, anyone can publish the book. That doesn't mean that an author can demand that his books never be sold to a library, or any other such restriction. They can't insist that no one read their book on Sunday, only read the book after 5 pm on a week day, pay the author each time the book is read or any other such restriction.
Over time, many restrictions that people have tried to place on copyrighted material has been struck down by the courts as inconsistent with the purpose of copyright (fair use doctrine and format shifting are examples of this). Copyright isn't a right, it's a government granted monopoly, a privilege if you will, that can be taken away or modified at the whim of the government. Sometimes authors forget this, and forget that copyright is basically a compromise between two parties, the author and the readership.