3 ms·

Another shot in the arm for the author's guild and the copyright champions of the world. Its just frustrating how we let these arm-twisting lawsuit-happy sleez

by prayag 16y ago

Another shot in the arm for the author's guild and the copyright champions of the world. Its just frustrating how we let these arm-twisting lawsuit-happy sleezeballs become the gatekeepers of the entire body of knowledge the human race has ever produced.

anigbrowl 16y ago
It's swings and roundabouts. The bad side is the lazy rent-seeking activity, where publishers collect royalties for longer than the average human lifespan and generally pass little or none of the proceeds onto the original creator, often a starving artist. This has gotten to the point of complete regulatory capture in the US; although the very unreasonableness of the current law is the greatest factor behind technical progress designed to circumvent it, for the present it results in a huge economic waste. On the other hand, it's only very recently that the digital distribution has become universally available at negligible cost. Up to very recently, the cost of providing a single copy on demand was so high that only mass production made any economic sense, and few authors had the resources or desire to invest the required amounts of time and money. So if it wasn't for the publishers, humanity's body of knowledge would be all that large in the first place. A few centuries back, printing and publishing were the edgy disruptive industries which upset the existing model of hand-copying manuscripts for powerful patrons like the aristocracy and religious institutions. Rather than worrying about the general public downloading and copying, those gatekeepers were worried about the general public having the ability to purchase and read things for themselves, instead of being told what a priest or sheriff thought fit for them to know - and a good many publishers along the way paid for their insistence on democratizing information with liberty or even life. So their failure to adjust to near-zero marginal costs of copying over the last ~30 years other than via outsize lawsuits seems relatively mild in the historical scheme of things. I think the key to speeding this transition is to provide authors, editors, and other people whose creative work is a necessary input with better ways to make a living than working for a publisher. Up to now, marketing and distributing content or creative services (eg editing) has been too difficult and expensive for individuals to offer a good return...which is one reason that marketing often accounts for 75% of a publishing launch budget nowadays.
dantheman 16y ago
The problem is copyright, and intellectual property in general, it should not exist. Property is based on scarcity, IP actually restricts what one may do with their actual physical property.

by prayag 16y ago

anigbrowl 16y ago

It's swings and roundabouts. The bad side is the lazy rent-seeking activity, where publishers collect royalties for longer than the average human lifespan and generally pass little or none of the proceeds onto the original creator, often a starving artist. This has gotten to the point of complete regulatory capture in the US; although the very unreasonableness of the current law is the greatest factor behind technical progress designed to circumvent it, for the present it results in a huge economic waste. On the other hand, it's only very recently that the digital distribution has become universally available at negligible cost. Up to very recently, the cost of providing a single copy on demand was so high that only mass production made any economic sense, and few authors had the resources or desire to invest the required amounts of time and money. So if it wasn't for the publishers, humanity's body of knowledge would be all that large in the first place. A few centuries back, printing and publishing were the edgy disruptive industries which upset the existing model of hand-copying manuscripts for powerful patrons like the aristocracy and religious institutions. Rather than worrying about the general public downloading and copying, those gatekeepers were worried about the general public having the ability to purchase and read things for themselves, instead of being told what a priest or sheriff thought fit for them to know - and a good many publishers along the way paid for their insistence on democratizing information with liberty or even life. So their failure to adjust to near-zero marginal costs of copying over the last ~30 years other than via outsize lawsuits seems relatively mild in the historical scheme of things. I think the key to speeding this transition is to provide authors, editors, and other people whose creative work is a necessary input with better ways to make a living than working for a publisher. Up to now, marketing and distributing content or creative services (eg editing) has been too difficult and expensive for individuals to offer a good return...which is one reason that marketing often accounts for 75% of a publishing launch budget nowadays.

dantheman 16y ago

The problem is copyright, and intellectual property in general, it should not exist. Property is based on scarcity, IP actually restricts what one may do with their actual physical property.