Re: "Against Intellectual Property"

On Mon, Aug 07, 2000 at 02:14:44PM -0400, Dodi Schultz wrote:

>... 
>.... Part of the income due to

As a former work-for-hire writer for a Reed Elsevier publisher (you can see some of the stuff I wrote on their Internet pages--I don't get any royalties from them) I actually agree with you, Dodi! I'm a bit ashamed of that, because Elsevier was the only publisher in the world who was willing to take on Galileo's writings--which are still not on the Internet.

Some of the online publishers who are willing to take authors' money and "publish" works online are really not doing authors a favor--these publishers generally do not market books effectively--they don't send authors on book tours--and so it is easy to cheat authors, who could do the same thing themselves if they or their children were technically inclined.

I think authors' rights definitely ought to be strengthened vis a vis publishers. A phenomenon that is being hidden by the superficial debate about "eBooks" is that publishers will claim rights to authors' works in cases where they had not before, and thus be able to get a lot more profit from the works, while the author may get the same or less royalty. The same thing might happen with "print on demand". There have been a few arguments between authors and publishers on electronic rights, and mixed results. I would agree that the Copyright Clause mentions only "Authors" and "Inventors," not big publishers (who indeed fought the Statute of Anne that established copyright).

I'm not saying this applies to all publishers. Although the amici for the other side in my case Eldred v Reno includes (only) the following

The Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust; The Sherwood Anderson Foundation; American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; AmSong, Inc.; Association of American Publishers, Inc.; Broadcast Music, Inc.; Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.; National Music Publishers Association, Inc.; Recording Industry Association of America, Inc.; and The Songwriters Guild of America

there don't seem to be any literary authors' groups determined to fight for a term that extends 70 years after their death instead of 50--what happened to them--are they all dead already? Or would you like to join them?

I'd like to work with authors groups to preserve the best role of copyright to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." A sensible term limit would be good, but accomplish little. We need to make the arguments based not on lobbying power but on factual studies. In cases where we can't leverage the law, maybe we can get together to set up some non-profit institutions to do much the same thing. Received on Sat Sep 02 2000 - 01:20:15 GMT