Re: Academics and coursepacks

On 9/07/98, Randy Nieuwsma <nieuwr[_at_]legacy.calvin.edu> wrote:
>
> Put yourself in (editor) Wells' position: You have spent many hours
> collecting, comparing, evaluating (with experience based-upon a
> lifetime of study), editing; someone else designed your product and
> typeset it. Now, they sell one copy; you get the royalty for one
> copy; and the purchaser gets the intellectual benefit of 200 copies.
>
> Is this fair to you?

Perfectly.

It would seem to me that our basic disagreement is over whether the editorial work of Wells and others merits recognition as creativity, and justifies their gaining rights over public domain material. Randy seems to believe that it does and should. I do not.

I am a professional editor; I have worked as an editor in various amateur and professional capacities for more than a decade. The job of an editor is not to create but to facilitate the creativity of others. We apply consistent, often quite mechanistic standards to generalise meaning and to moderate authors' wilder instincts, and we apply our experience to suggest ways in which authors might restructure their writing to help them better reach their audiences. The work of an editor does not merit copyright protection.

CYa,
JEREMY Jeremy G. Byrne
<jeremy[_at_]iz.org> Received on Fri Jul 10 1998 - 16:45:42 GMT