Re: [GD-General] Pro-IP bill passed the house: User-created conte nt providers, beware!

[Troy G. <tro...@gm...>]

> http://questioncopyright.org/promise

Just an initial thought... the point is made here that copyright
"serves no one's interests but the publishers'." Of course, this
article uses "publishers" in the same vein as the RIAA uses "file
sharer", that is they vilify it to serve the purposes of their
argument.

In fact, they stress time and again that the Internet has brought
about "instantaneous, costless sharing" which apparently is
justification enough for not charing for information -- something I
don't quite understand: why is that because something is "costless"
(even though it's not *actually* costless, but it's pretty close for
most scenarios) it's wrong to charge for it anyway? I mean, it doesn't
cost me anything to play my guitar, but I'd certainly not be in the
wrong to charge people to listen to a performance (and that seems to
be the "solution" for artists offered up by copyright-squashers).

But something I don't see addressed... in this "Internet-era" we see
many, many more artists that are also self-published. So, these
arguments and vilification of "publishers" and championing of artists
kinda breaks down in a world where there are a great many
self-published artists. In effect, you could substitute artist for
publisher in many of this article's statements with the result being
an argument for stripping *artists* of control over their work and
their ability to derive income from it! Yikes!

Explain to me this: in a world where copyright is abolished, how does
an author earn an income? Let's say Tom the author writes a book and
sells a copy to Bob. Bob works for Random House. He goes to work and
hands Random House Tom's book. He says, "I wrote this. Let's publish
it." Random House prints thousands of copies and with their marketing
strength drowns out any attempt by Tom to promote and sell his own
work. And without copyright, he has no recourse because Random House
has done nothing wrong ("information wants to be free, man...").

So, tell me, practically, given the world we live in today (or
tomorrow, or 10 years from now), how would a creator of IP earn a
living?

Troy.