Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Yes, because my work is, and probably most work is done physically and involves time and labour. I am not a product that is infinitely reproduceable, nor is my time or my labour. Now, if they could clone me, or make a robot copy, then we'd have another argument altogether.
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I'm not sure, but I think you're missing the point of the analogy. Regardless of whether you hand copy (e.g, like scribes used to do) or make an electronic copy, you're still using someone else's work. In effect, you
are cloning the author's ideas. It's not the act of typing on a word processor that's the author's work. You could literally put a monkey in front of the keyboard to do that, if you fed him/her a steady diet of bananas. It's the content that holds the value and constitutes the intellectual property (which is why people will pay more for an ebook that's got a linked table of contents than they will for a flat ASCII text).