Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Sorry, but in America you have a right to speech (publish), but you don't have a right to discoverability. You have a right to not have the discoverability being artificially limited by the government, but that's about it.
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I guess I wasn't precise enough in that comment. Freedom of expression is not a right, except in the very limited context of the government not being allowed to limit it as a rule, so even though discoverability impacts your freedom of expression, it isn't a right, either.
However, competitors do have a right to exist and to be viable. When one company gets big enough to make competition infeasible (and Amazon is rapidly approaching that point), it impacts their right to make money by selling books (and thus expanding your books' reach). In that context, an antitrust judge would see limits on your books' discoverability as a symptom of a larger market distortion (violating the rights of their direct competitors) rather than a rights issue per se.
Of course, there's another legal approach that might actually make discoverability a more direct rights violation. Because Amazon sells books through its own self-publishing platform, it is serving as an agent of the publisher, which in effect makes it a publisher itself. This in effect means that it is competing with any publisher whose products are disallowed on Amazon's selling platform. This is stretching the definitions pretty thin, but there's a
small possibility that such an argument might fly....
