Re: "Against Intellectual Property"

On 7/31/2000, Eric Eldred <eldred[_at_]eldritchpress.org> wrote:
>
> If you wish to conduct an ad hominem argument, you might need to
> know that I am disabled and am proud to be able to contribute
> something to society in this way.

Eric,

You've mentioned more than once that you're disabled, although you've not made clear what relevance this has to your ideas about copyright. There were also disabled authors, including Homer, Byron, Milton and Joyce, who never made a nickel from Ulysses because he wasn't able to copyright it. Today it sells about 100,000 copies p.a. Not a nice way to treat a disabled author, or any author.

On the issue of moral rights, I believe the disabled have a moral claim against society at large to accommodate to their disability. That's why seeing eye dogs for the blind are, and should be, allowed in places that other dogs cannot go. But the disabled have no more right than the rest of us to break laws, or to take advantage of others in the quest for pecuniary returns. So I don't understand your introducing that you're disabled, that you were a conscientious objector, that you worked in a hospital (presumably for a salary), etc. If you think the world owes you something extra because of these circumstances and activities, I'd be interested in knowing what it is, or how it relates to your apparent determination to deprive authors of the legitimate fruit of their labors.

> Not at all. I pay for the books and magazines and newspapers I read.
> I heartily approve of authors bypassing big publishers and selling
> their works directly to readers, as for example Stephen King with
> his new work, "The Plant." See:

Nice idea, but not yet practical at this point. The set-up costs are still too high to be practical for most authors. I've actually looked into it, as I'm working on the second of a series of three books. Unfortunately, authors still need publishers, and the big kink is management and distribution. I don't have a staff to keep track of orders and fill them, or the time to personally deliver paper copies to bookstores. If you want to do something more constructive than suing people, why not study what the impediments actually are to direct selling, and design a service to fill in the gaps. I can actually do a well-designed paper copy of any of my books right now, off my computer at home. I even have a spiral binding machine, and the time to bind one or two copies -- but not dozens or hundreds or thousands. Nor the time for the bookkeeping associated with orders and with distribution. If you can design a way to provide these services, I'm sure you'll have a large clientele. But nobody's been able to work out the kinks thus far, and direct selling by authors is still largely an unworkable fantasy.

pat

Pat Sloane
<patsloane[_at_]aol.com> Received on Mon Jul 31 2000 - 11:47:10 GMT