[Ojc-announce] Re: [Newspoetry] good time to start boycotting amazon.com

[Joe Futrelle]

On Tue, Dec 28, 1999 at 12:33:09PM -0600, sigfried at shout.net wrote:
> Joe Futrelle said:
> > 
> > On Tue, Dec 28, 1999 at 09:07:06AM -0600, sigfried at shout.net wrote:
> > > gillespie william k said:
> > > > Being asked to boycott Amazon.com is like being asked to give up the first
> > > > amendment.
> > [snip]
> > > The bigger issue is copyright and patent
> > > law in general.  I don't yet have a proposal for replacing copyright law with
> > > something else.
> > [snip] anyway, what
> > > do you think of copyright law?
> > 
> > I think it blows.  It only protects owners.  The free flow of ideas is
> > critical in countless ways.  Imagine a law where you could only
> > copyright original ideas, and your rights were limited to being cited
> > when someone used them.
> 
> Yeah, but what about the rights of authors?  What if publishing companies
> could publish anything they wanted without asking permission, and only
> mentioning the author's name, no royalties.  Whoever had the biggest,
> fastest press and distribution system would make all the money on published
> books and authors would get nothing but recongnition.
> 
> No special copyright scheme (copyleft, public domain, defensive copyright,
> etc.) protects against this except for standard copyright.

Copyright doesn't protect authors, it protects owners.  For instance
people pay royalties to Michael Jackson whenever they play a
Lennon/McCartney song, thanks to a deal cut after John Lennon died.

Without copyright laws to create an artificial scarcity of copies of a
work, publishers could not afford to produce and sell works, which
people after all would be free to copy and distribute to one another.
Authors could not make a living by restricting people's rights to copy
their work; there would need to be some other system for supporting
authors (such as electing authors as public servants), or we could get
rid of authorship altogether.

- Joe "Thinking Outside The Box and Inside The Sphere" Futrelle
(sorry about the mind)