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Are author’s now on the enemies list of the great and good? For every Stephen King there are 10,000 authors trying to eke out a few dollars from something whic
by jshaqaw 6y ago
Are author’s now on the enemies list of the great and good? For every Stephen King there are 10,000 authors trying to eke out a few dollars from something which took them years of hard work. I hardly think the authors of the world are the problem here.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoNot at all. Just pointing out the bias. I fully support authors being compensated, people have rent to pay and food to buy. I do not support authors attempting to subvert fair use (when copyright law is tilted so heavily in their favor already: copyright for life plus another 70 years) in the naive belief that might add a few extra dollars to a royalty check. Would authors take so much issue with the Archive's Emergency Library effort if code was written so every public library could delegate their "copies" of books to the Internet Archive, so that demand could be programmatically and dynamically allocated (think shuffling software licensing around in a large enterprise)? Or would they be dismayed to find that there were enough copies in the national library system to meet peak demand? The longer conversation is that the mechanisms by which we compensate those who contribute to culture (like writers, or pennies per song stream on Spotify) is fundamentally broken. This is one of the symptoms. Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the Internet Archive besides being a recurring donor, but I do take it upon myself to vigorously defend public goods.