Re: "Against Intellectual Property"

On Fri, Jul 28, 2000, Pat Sloane <patsloane[_at_]aol.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

I, too, believe that authors should be compensated for their work, and I doubt that anyone on this list disagrees. I have to protest, though, two bits of unreasoned stereotyping in Pat Sloane's posting. First, I see no correlation between being rich and having or not having talent. Second, I see nothing "nasty" about "capitalist profit," which is, after all, why we in capitalist countries have jobs, and why we enjoy a comparatively comfortable standard of living.

Robert C. Cumbow
 Graham & Dunn PC
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 rcumbow[_at_]grahamdunn.com
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        Big law firm experience
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