Quote:
Originally Posted by sealbeater
I won't touch the morality question but I'm not so sure the standard would be lower. Ebooks existed long before e-readers were a thing and before there was a market.
As for choice, perhaps but again, I'm not so sure.
There was a cracker, in the original sense, called ORC+ and he wrote a bunch of assembly tutorials in the early 90s and one of the things he wrote that always stuck with me was:
Those who do a work out of love will always exceed those who do a work for money.
Anyway, I just wanted to provide an alternative view. I'm very glad the ebook market is alive and well.
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There doesn't seem to be any meaningful data on what would actually happen. Certainly I think Copyright goes much too far at the moment. However, I suspect the standard would be closer to that of fan fiction in the absence of any monetary reward to the author. And some of our most talented authors may well not write or not write as much or as well. And, as lovely as it sounds, a labour of love by a talentless author is most unlikely to be better than a work by a talented author done simply for the money or the hope of it. I suspect that the demise of copyright would more likely result in authors finding other ways to be paid rather than a diverse and quality body of work done for no reward.
I think the best of all worlds on this is likely a sensible system of copyright, though any review should look closely at whether a statutory monopoly is the best way to reward authors. Certainly we can and should do a lot better than we are currently.