Quote:
Originally Posted by nabsltd
The whole "limited time" thing was for two reasons:
1. To promote authors to continue producing new works.
2. To allow the works to eventually become part of the shared knowledge of the country, available to all for free.
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I think it's fairly obvious that the publishers of various media have used their lobbying power to hijack those principles. Now authors and eventually their children "own" the property they create. Personally I think that's silly. You can't own words or numbers.
The purpose of copyright, and there's much discussion about this in the writings of the founding fathers, was simply to give creators a head start at profiting from their creations. It was never to establish ownership.
Still, it is the law and it gets a lot of respect among law-abiding people, right or wrong. The fact is that most people pay for their books even if they know how to get them free.
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When I was a teenager, around 1954 or 55, I began buying paperback books to read. Prior to that I'd just read my parents books. My typical cost was 10 cents for a new paperback. Some cost 15 cents and a really big one might cost 25 cents. If we adjust that for inflation, using Wolfram's inflation calculator, that new 15 cent paperback in 1955 should cost $1.38 today. I think we can all agree that it doesn't.
I'm a reasonably law abiding person. I don't speed much when I drive unless the other traffic makes me go faster to stay safe. I stop completely for stop signs. I pay for the books I read as long as I can find them for sale.
I think most people are about as honest as I am. And I think if publishers were as honest as most people are piracy would be a far smaller problem. It's really hard to feel good about paying my money into a system that's lobbying to change copyright further and further to their advantages, charging outrageous prices for books and then doing a sloppy job of editing and preparing them. I find far more mistakes now than I used to when I was younger.
I'll keep paying for my books because I'm not going to let people who do the things publishers do decide how I should conduct myself. But it rankles at times. And it's hard not to feel a lot of sympathy for those people who make books freely available on the internet. I'm not convinced they're doing something immoral. Illegal yes. Questionably moral, yes. But it's hard to say more than that.
Barry