Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I suppose, technically, to be pedantic (because these discussions do get bogged down in terminology debates) the stated argument should be "people should pay for what the author releases as pay-for-reading material," because nobody is saying that anyone is obligated to pay for reading Cory Doctorow's ebooks. (And I think that "pay for what the author wants to sell" is an interesting idea, even a useful one, but has never been a mandatory part of being an avid reader.)
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Yet, except for in a select few situations, anyone who says that their words (or speech) should be paid for before others are allowed to "understand" or listen to them will be laughed right out of the classroom. Except for when you're talking in a social setting called a "lecture", there is no way you could get people to pay for what you tell them.
The point being mostly that copyright is a very special exception to the rule of
free speech, which is tolerated to a point, but deemed unworkable in pretty much any other situation. And that will never be determined solely by an author who chooses whether to release a statement of some sort or other as "pay for reading" or not, but just on the simple fact that the whole notion of it's ridiculous to think that everything an
author says is worth paying for.
The point being mostly that there is no obvious "sweat/toil" argument to make that explains why copyright applies to some cases of speech
production but not others. The right to profit from your "creation" is very much circumscribed, and only recognized in fairly few cases. It is, in any case, by no means inalienable, nor "natural". It is granted by society, although it has been legally buttressed to ensure these given rights were not ignored.
The problem, however, is that this allowed the authors to accrue money their readers do not have, at least in those amounts, which allows them to mount attacks (both legislative and legal) on those parts of those limited-time protected monopolies that they dislike, forcing people to "pirate" stuff that they previously could have gotten or done things with legally.
Intellectual Property Rights limited-time monopolies existed first and foremost to stimulate innovation and literary output, and now that it's there it's very hard to get rid of, because every author and his grandmother will claim that there will be "insufficient incentives" for new authors to do their thing. This claim is attacked left and right, however, but because their suggestions are so counter to earlier wisdom, they're deemed too unlikely to want to risk trying them.
I'm pretty tired of this conservatism, though, as well as of the lack of empirical data generally in this debate about "right and wrong".