Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
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As Mike L pointed out, the laws involving copyright are written as they should be, media-independent.
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As usual, Steve, you made a good point.
AFAIK, alas, media-indipendency fo the law is not so well performed in the real world.
In a media-independent world, when I buy a book, I buy the content of it. I buy access to the ideas within it, and the Law should enforce my right to access them whenever I want, independently from the medium chosen to bring that content to me.
In such an ideal world, I pay for the book a fair price (free market decides it). And from there on, I only pay additional fees for the raw materials and the work needed to make other copies of it (if they're for my personal use). If I make the copy by myself, e.g. by reading aloud in the memory of my phone to listen to the book while commuting, I should not pay again. If a professional printer makes me a hardcover copy, I should pay him for his work and for the material he uses. But I already paid the author, the editor and the publisher with the first copy, so I owe nothing to them.
In this world of Utopia, copyright laws have been written to ensure content creation, and to provide artists with means.
Author are paid, like every other individual working for the content creation and distribution, readers have their book on every device they want, and they can even choose the page size or the font to display it with.
In the end everybody is happy, with the obvious exception of greedy people, being they authors who want to be overpaid or downloaders who want to read without compensate the one who writes....
In the real world, copyright laws and their enforcement have little to do with content creation and its incentivation, compensating authors and similar utopian amenities: the intent of the Law is to make me pay more than once for the same content.
And, by all means, it can be called robbery, fraud or theft.
