Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Well, while I retain the rights, I do have the right to decide whether I want my work to be released in any particular format... or not at all, which would mean no one would see it until it reached public domain.
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Here I think we disagree to some extent. I think that even if you are retaining the rights once you *sell or give away* a copy at least to someone, your rights are not total.
For example you do not have the right to tell me to read your book only on Mondays, or I should be dressed in a blue shirt when I read it, or if it were an ebook I should read your book only on your favorite device, or... That ... is something that by and large until now has been immaterial in the Western world at least once general agreement about copyright were accepted in the 19th century.
I read recently the superb
Drood by D. Simmons about the last 5 year of C. Dickens life - general release Feb 09 - and one of the *funny* things there was how Mr. Dickens who was tremendously popular here in the US came for a tour and almost broke down and left booed by the public and press for insisting that he actually gets paid for his work, since US was not recognizing the rights of UK authors and the best they could do was to try and place the book with an US publishers and hope the *legitimate* edition will make some money. Of course in the case of theater it was even worse considering the considerable costs of mounting a production, so there Mr. Dickens did not even try hard sometimes..
Sure later in his life he started getting better royalties from the US due to better acceptance of copyright for foreign authors here, but then he started doing reading tours in which he made vastly more amounts of money than from selling his books - though it's true that they took a terrible toll on his health...
So things change even with respect to author' rights and now I think that we are at a moment when we need to reexamine this issue and answer questions about what is legitimate, what not in ways that are acceptable to everyone