Re: Re: Romance Publisher Launches Kickass Antipiracy Campaign

On 13/06/2011 05:17, auwg wrote:
> --- In [email protected], Jon Jermey wrote:
>    
>> Because it galls me to see great advances for the human race held back by legal constraints that were designed when the most effective copying system was a scriptorium full of monks.
>>      
> Extreme nonfactual exaggeration doesn't win points.
>
>    
>> Imagine that you still legally had to drive your 150 hp automobile at 5 mph, with a man carrying a red light walking in front, just because the red light manufacturers and the Walking In Front Union had a stranglehold on the legislature. That's the current situation with eBooks -- except that the speed is coming down over time from 5 to 4 to 3 mph...
>>      
> More exaggeration.
>
> As I see it, we smaller authors and pubbers have been caught up in a war between 'everything free' thieves and 'bleed them dry' robber barons of the book/movie/music industries.
>    

<snip>
> Ed
> Ed Howdershelt - Abintra Press
> Science Fiction&  Semi-Fiction
> http://www.AbintraPress.com

Ed, Your response to Jon left me with just one further point that may be 
worth making. And Jon, this may not be the first time I have responded 
with such information!

There was nothing that in any way equates to what we understand now by 
*copyright* before the eighteenth century Queen Anne Act. Strangely that 
act was initiated because the English printers wanted the thieving Scots 
(er, I mean enthusiastic pirate Scottish) printers to pay for printing 
the stories 'owned' by the English printers. This became a possible 
action because of the political union of England and Scotland into Great 
Britain a few years before.

By some stroke of genius and recognition of fairness the Act was 
actually used to establish the rights of the creator to control their 
works, rather than the big business of the day, the Stationers Company. 
This, so far as I am aware, was the first law that protected the 
creative workers. It may be no coincidence that a great flowering of 
creativity occurred in Britain following that - equivalent perhaps to 
the explosion that followed removing the dead hand of the RC religion in 
England in the decade before Shakespeare and his peers.

The next important move in copyright followed great agitation in Europe 
over the treatment of creatives there. The Berne Convention came into 
force around the end of the nineteenth century. Britain quickly became a 
signatory and had already extended copyright to music around 1840, when 
the term was life plus seven years. For interesting comments see the 
contribution to that debate by Thomas Babington Macaulay.

What Jon, as well as many creatives, is actually railing against is the 
skill of big business in turning this to big business advantage. Killing 
the creatives, which Jon and others seem to have their sights on, is not 
the way to release material. Reform of company and contract law is much 
more useful.

Joseph



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