Re: "Against Intellectual Property"

On 7/27/2000, Eric Eldred <eldred[_at_]eldritchpress.org> wrote:
>
> Those of you who are not Slashdot readers might not be aware of
> this link,
>
> http://danny.oz.au/free-software/advocacy/against_IP.html
>
> "Against Intellectual Property," chapter of a book,
> "Information Liberation," by Brian Martin.

Eric,

I presume Brian is going to put this book on the internet for free, and doesn't need any income from it. It's nice to have people able to do this, and I'n certainly not against philanthropy, including yours. I don't believe, however, that it's necessarily good in the long run to have books written only by those with independent incomes who don't need to be paid for their work and prefer not to be paid for their work. Rich diletanttes have plenty of opportunity to publish now, with all those vanity presses. Or, as Henry Ford did, they can even buy their own newspapers to disseminate their views. I don't think it's ever been shown that rich people who don't need to be paid for their writing necessarily write the best books. To date, it rather appears that they don't.

I think the inconsistency in your theses is that you want to maintain a capitalist society (and even, I suspect, have the opportunity to make a bit of nasty capitalist profit yourself), but you want one class of workers -- authors -- denied compensation for their work. Why involuntary servitude for authors, but not for, say, farmers, doctors, publishers, or truck drivers? Sometimes you even seem to be arguing that you yourself could make more money if authors were to be compelled to take less. It's all very confusing, and I wish you'd get these threads sorted out.

pat

pat sloane
<patsloane[_at_]aol.com> Received on Sat Jul 29 2000 - 03:15:09 GMT