[Hitch]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

The problem is, there are legitimate reasons on both sides. Of course there is a need to make writing and publishing profitable enough to have a good market and many new books. But books aren't just like most other products. We as a culture have an interest not just in books but in reading and making them available. There is a reason, why we have libraries and allow the sharing and use of ideas. Nations have even libraries which collect all books published in it or even in the language of it.

It is always difficult to balance the public interest with making a profitable market and the legitimate interests of authors and publishers. If it is copyright or drm or even prices of books (like in Germany or France).

As a personal note: while I understand that the Internet and the new digital age puts pressure on the traditional business, I have the feeling that many "solutions" just limit the rights of consumers and ultimately harm the public interest. And I find it ironic, if big publishers repeat that books are special and want therefore a special treatment, but are fighting in the same time every thing that is special about them but not in their interest, like libraries.

Dick:

No offense, but IMHO, that's begging the question, in the correct usage of the phrase.

The whole "public interest" argument is based in the language of the very creation of copyrights, expressly for the purpose of ensuring that creators made enough money so that they would be induced and enticed into continuing to make creative content, whether that's books, music, movies, or whatever.

Madison's original note: "To secure to literary authors their copyrights for a limited time." And while the Statute of Anne (1710) insisted that authors no longer had control over the use of the BOOK, once it was purchased (and hence, borrowing), that's utterly inapplicable to eBooks, isn't it, as they are licensed--not purchased. They aren't physical personalty. Moreover, they have the unhappy capability of being endlessly reproduced, at no expense whatsoever to the reproducer. And virtually (yes, pun intended) no consequences (unfortunately).

The "public interest" argument is constantly corrupted into meaning something it never did--that somehow, it's a profit-bridle on corporations, individuals, authors, etc. It was never--ever--intended to act as some sort of governor, a limiter, saying "oh, well, you've made enough money, now you have to give it to the public," except after the expiration of copyright. THAT is the limiter. Not the desires of individuals to give the work away to other people who haven't paid for it.

In short, it was simple: here, you can make money from your work, so keep writing. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Aunt Sally argument about lending physical books is just that: a straw man argument. We all know that while you can lend physical books, it's not like you're lending them 20 or 30 or 50 or 2,000 times. Nor can you lend it simultaneously to multiple people.

There's a constant undercurrent to this argument; I don't mean with you, personally, or even anyone else on the thread, but generally, and it's nothing more than "you guys made enough money, you big evil publishing corporation. I want to see/read/use/play this, and you've made enough. I just don't wanna pay for it."

This has now morphed, with the advent of Word, Amazon, et al, into a pretty overt disregard for the rights of authors, because there's a consensus that authors are now nothing more than people who type. I mean, everyone and anyone is "an author" these days, right? So...what the hell, why pay for that crap?

I don't see this serving either side well. The "class" of authors--writers who used to really work it, who went to writing classes, critique groups, suffered the slings and arrows of rejection letters, etc.--has diminished. I know several writers who've simply given up, because even though they spent years honing their craft, the glut of cheap crap on the market, at free or $0.99, has rendered all those years of work unprofitable. When their work is stolen, it just adds to their frustration.

So the "wanna-bes," the ones that have nearly no talent and less experience are publishing unfiltered dreck like crazy, keeping prices low. I know factually that many (real, formerly trade-pubbed) authors are making LESS money now, not more, even with greater numbers of sales, because even though they USED TO be able to sell books at $5.99 or $6.99, now they've had to drop prices to compete with the mountains of freebie-trash. So now, what, we're going to insult them even further by saying, "oh, by the way, on that book you just made $0.33 on, we're going to let that person lend it 20 or 30 or 50 times?"

It's like being a webmaster, and having to fight with the old MFA (Made-For-Adsense) sites...your site might be loaded with quality, but those "making pennies a day" guys from the Third World might be killing you. It's not one iota different now for authors, who are competing against MILLIONS of other guys--all of whom might be thrilled with 10 sales a month in a vastly diluted and frankly, heavily polluted pool.

I'll tell you right now, I'm glad I'm NOT an author. I don't know if I could face that 10,000 hours of hard work being flushed, just because nowadays, it's a disrespected profession, diminished even further by the digital age mindset that anything in digital form has zero value, because it's not "made of" something like paper, tree, bark, fiber, or a cassette. And that because it's easy to take, it should be taken.

So, here's my question: how is killing off the best talent, due to diminution of income even further over existing market forces, going to meet James Madison's original exhortation? How does this help the "public interest?" I just don't see that it does. And while no one--none--can do anything about the glut of worthlessness, making it worse by legitimizing the extended lending of books that are ALREADY nearly free is just not going to help. And the "illicit lending" of de-DRM'ed books simply adds to it.

The "rights of consumers" were simply that if they bought a physical book, they could do whatever they wanted to with it, usage-wise. They could prop up a table leg with it. They could burn it. They could lend it to ONE person at a time. They couldn't replicate it. They had ONE item that they could lend--that was it. That's not remotely the same as "oh, here's a digital book that I can now lend to 50 of my closest and dearest friends" or more. Or "give away to 1,000 of my friends that I don't know." Nor did the consumers have any "right" to get 20 different versions of the print book, one in Hardcover, one in PPK, one in big print, etc. They got ONE. How does making the provision of ebooks identical to that harm the public interest?

Folks, the books are already so damned cheap--why not just buy the frakking things?

</rant>

Done with this discussion. Not angry; it's just fruitless. People can always justify some reason to take something that doesn't belong to them, and rationalize it away as X or Y or Z. I've made the argument here numerous times, and I'm sure it's never changed one person's mindset. The reality is, you can be honest, or not. Everything else, argument-wise, is window dressing. Done now.

Apologize for the length.

Hitch