On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:
This is not a flame. It's a careful exchange of views with whoever I'm quoting.
That was Jeroen, and I'll let him answer questions about whether he agrees with Karl Marx and Jesus Christ himself. I have a few comments about this:
...Why should the publisher be paid . . . and the bookseller be paid . . . and the ink supplier be paid . . . and the paper supplier be paid . . . and the shipping companies be paid . . . and so on and so forth, for as long as people want to read a book, but the person who wrote the book should fall out of the loop and stop getting paid?
Making the perhaps foolish assumption that this isn't just a rhetorical question, I shall attempt an answer: _Because the person who wrote the book isn't doing any new work._ The publisher is still printing it, the bookseller is still selling it, the ink and paper suppliers are supplying ink and paper, the shipping companies are still shipping it around...but the writer has nothing to do with this. It's possible that the writer hasn't done anything but sit on the couch and watch TV for twenty years. Perhaps this is belabouring the obvious, but this is the fundamental problem the copyright system is meant to address -- that it's not necessary that the author get paid more than once, since he's already done all of his work before the book is ever printed. Of course, we want authors to keep writing new books, so we agree to give them this legal "copy-right" which necessitates bringing them back into the loop -- now they _are_ performing some economically useful activity (even if it's just agreeing to let the book be published) and so can claim some reward, i.e. royalties, which exceeds what they could have gotten if they'd been paid up front, rewards them if the book is a hit, and so on. If you're concerned that someone is making money off a book while the writer is "cut out of the loop", well, that's an argument for _perpetual_ copyright, not limited copyright. People are printing Dickens' works, making movies about them...hell, the number of showings of A Christmas Carol in the month of December alone is enormous. Lots of people are making a lot of money off Charles Dickens, yet he (well, his estate, but since you argue for Life+, I assume you equate the estate with the author in some way) doesn't see one red cent -- he's been "cut out of the loop". The only way to make sure that as long as anyone makes money off your work, that you (or your estate) does too, is eternal copyright.
Life plus 100, or life plus 70, or life plus 60, is absurd.
I agree. There are those who don't. Some think that eternal copyright is the only fair regime. (If not forever, then perhaps forever less a day.)
Life plus 25 is not absurd.
Maybe. I happen to think it is still far too long. What Jeroen, Robert, Wallace, and perhaps others who I can't remember right now, are saying is that maybe there's a rational way to determine what's absurd or not, what's fair or not. As you say above, this is not a flame, just a careful (and frank) exchange of viewpoints. Brendan Lane