I disagree with my friend Mike Bradley in two respects.
First, I *do* think legal and business-model interests must catch up to technology and public aspirations. The problem is that all the technology is being applied to the open-access side of the equation and none to the fair-compensation side. The publishers, distributors ... call them what you will; the corporations ... with the capital to develop all these marvelous tools could invest relative pennies in royalty systems roughly analogous to ASCAP. Instead, they choose to scorch the earth and dee-double-dare the less powerful players in the marketplace to challenge them. A royalty system wouldn't work perfectly and its precise contours would be open to debate, but you can't tell me that proposed comprehensive solutions wouldn't ameliorate litigation and put more resources into productive economic activity.
Second, I personally place very little, if any, value on the rights of heirs to censor material they might find embarrassing. To the extent that copyright advocates take a hard line on restricting access rather than saying access should be opened up fairly and equitably, I believe they're mistaken.
Irv Muchnick
> > The technology is there. The public's
> > expectations are there. It's time for legal and
> business
> > model interests to wake up and catch up.
>
> I would say, rather, it's time for technology and the
> public to
> realize that they have to act within the constraints of
> the law, even
> if they have the ability to do otherwise. Just because
> you have the
> ability to hack into the Bank of America's computer
> doesn't mean you
> should do it.
>
>
> > As you said, google is driving sales. It is pretty
> > hard for an author who has allowed their work to be
> > published to complain about an activity that drives
> > sales of that published work.
>
> The books that are troublesome are not books that are
> being peddled
> currently by their publishers. Of course, the authors of
> these books
> are likely to want the books to be Googled. It is books
> that have no
> publisher--probably because they are out of print--that
> are the
> problem, in my view. And these books are likely to be the
> majority of
> any library's holdings.
>
> The rights holders of these books may have their own
> plans for
> marketing the books, such as agreements with other online
> outlets.
> They may not want them visible at all, such as the heirs
> of an avowed
> racist whose published books the heirs now view as
> embarassing. The
> author of a book with lots of four-letter words may not
> want the book
> indexed because the index produces a complete list of
> every word,
> giving book-burning fundamentalists an easy target for
> yet another
> burning.
>
> The point is, the rights holders and their licensees have
> the
> *exclusive* right to determine a book's copying.
> Observance of that
> fact has to be fundamental to any plan to copy books, but
> authors
> don't see that in Google's plans.
>
>
> = Mike Bradley
> www.techpubs.com
> ,
>
>
>
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Received on Mon Oct 03 2005 - 22:50:45 GMT
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