Jeffrey Peters wrote:
Dear David,
I'm going to donate to their cause.
Music lyrics, just like poems and novels, should not be stolen and published everywhere, and yet it is. It is people like you that give the internet a bad name. I produce my own content and donate it because I chose to. You promote the taking of others who have not consented. To use this list to promote your own selfish desires bothers me.
I would think it would only be right for you to lose access to this list for acting so inappropriately.
Old bullshit never dies. I was just reading an article in a similar vein, "The Ethics of Copyright" by Grant Allen in the December 1880 issue of /Macmillan's Magazine/. It still hasn't grown any roses. . . which says something about its lack of fertility.
By and large those who most loudly harangue about piracy fail to notice that interest here is seldom about reproducing the lyrics of current popular music, but about gathering the flotsam of intellectual efforts. The law of the sea clearly distinguishes between piracy and gathering flotsam. If the taking of music lyrics constitutes theft, no-one is more capable of maintaining that monopoly than the recording industry.
It often seems too that the Law of Copyright comes into conflict with the Law of Supply and Demand. Your excellent articles about various significant poems of the English language may be excellent examples of original research that clearly deserves to be in Wikipedia, but demand is not solely derived from the excellence of an author's efforts. The patent office records are replete with records of ideas that easily passed the test of originality, but whose utility was abysmally laughable. Those inventors, like many authors, inflate the value of their own efforts well beyond the demand, and without regards to the effects of competition. The costs of producing physical copies of even the best articles of literary criticism far exceeds the price that the market will bear. The writer's efforts could be assembled in an anthology, but the the buyer needs to buy a packet of irrelevant material to have that one gem. If that one gem constitutes 5% of an anthology, no publisher is suggesting that I could have a copy of that article alone for 5% of the price.
Novels may contain enough material to support separate marketing, but I would welcome a realistic analysis of the economics of a single sonnet.
Ray
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 6:35 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 25 June 2010 23:04, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/ascap-assails-free-culture-digital-...
They're actually gathering money to fight free content.
We may need to do something about this.
- d.
They are effectively trying to fight contract law though which is unlikely to end will for them.