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Originally Posted by schex86
Hi kennyC. I hail from the Delta Junction/Fort Greely metropolitan area.
Back to scarcity, today's technology has overcome this hurdle. There is now no "real" scarcity due to the difficulties of production and distribution, which were Franklin's main concerns. All that remains is artificial scarcity, forced on us by industries whose services have become exponentially less relevant in the terms of value added to society in general.
Had Ben Franklin, founder of the public library, had such technology available, I make the assertion that he would have utilized it to its maximum benefit. Were the argument made to him that authors or publishing incorportations would be adversely effected in a financial sense, I believe he would have countered that the benefits to society in general, to its education, to its cultural refinement, would far outweigh such petty concerns.
Why are we now so afraid to embrace technology. To preserve author's "rights"?? Yes, I completely agree, authors have the right to write whatever and whenever they so choose, and also the right to hope and pursue contracts and arrangements in which they might receive compensation for their writing.
However, once they have placed their works in the public sphere, and allowed such to become part of a society's cultural identity, it now moves beyond their individual rights to control how other individuals interact with, share, or improve upon their work. And it is certainly not within their individual rights to perpetuate and impose an antiquated business model based on an ineffectual and generally harmful concept of artificial scarcity on all other individuals.
It is up to the society to decide how such public works will be treated, and unfortunately, esp. over the past century, financial compensation with special interest in preserving the publisher system, seems to be the one and only consideration, with the other, arguably greater goods to society left totally out of the equation.
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Thanks that's up in the interior.
As far as your thoughts on publishing and rights. There is a vast difference in public domain and author/publishing rights and I think you are mixing the concepts a bit.
An author has inherent rights to what he produces and the copyright laws were created to protect those rights. (certainly there are divergent opinions about changes, particularly extensions to those laws). But the core intent is to allow the creator of intellectual property to share their work while being protected/provided with a means of gaining benefit from those works.
The idea is to find a medium ground to protect both the creator and to benefit society. To claim one or the other is more important is not useful both sides of the equation must balance.
The digital revolution has thrown many wrenches into the works but we will eventually get through it and move on as both individuals and society.
