Book People Archive

Re: redeeming copyright

On Sun, 25 Feb 2001, talewins wrote:

> Even well diggers at the North Pole get paid.  Writers should too.
> Personal property?  You bet it is.  There's more sweat equity in writing
> than any other line of work.

I think Eric would agree that writers have a reasonable expectation of
being paid, and that writers getting paid is a good thing.  I think that
he was suggesting that an expectation that writers or publishers should
have total control over what people do with their work, or that they
should retain copyright (passed down to their offspring) essentially
forever, is *not* reasonable.

Making sure writers, and other creators of 'intellectual property'
(horrible phrase) get paid, while retaining as much freedom for everybody
else as possible is difficult!  I have a vague feeling that entropy is
against us: many different ways of attempting to do this, and relatively
few ways of doing what publishers etc. want -- lock everything up.

Whatever your preferred solution to the problem, 'life + forever' clearly
isn't the right way.

> Check out my site
> http://www.talewins.com/Permission.htm for a different perspective on
> this matter.

John