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As opposite to newspaper articles?

The problem with recent elections is not the availability of information, but the availability of misinformation.

How is this problem unique to the recent elections? Mark Twain wrote his Running for Governor in the 1870 — you really ought to read it to get rid of these silly beliefs, that our contemporary politicians are somehow uniquely bad and good.

Great writers don't tend to be highly intelligent (if they were, they'd get work that pays better)

Money isn't everything.

Case in point, the novelists, essayists, philosophers, poets and journalists, among others, whose work has been chosen for preservation by the Library of America.

So there was no "new" art prior to the invention of artificial copyright?

Not as much as the geek likes to pretend.

The non-profit Library of America reprints the best of American literature in compact and handsome hardcover editions, including the best in journalism, genre fiction and so on.

It couldn't be made plainer that most of this wonderfully diverse company of authors are of lower and middle class origins, working writers --- professionals --- who were products of modern copyright era,

All property rights are "artificial" in the sense that it is the power of the state that defines and enforces them.

Incidentally, if you think Disney is done ripping off the public domain, then you've missed John Carter. Wondering why on Earth Disney would create a film about a Civil War vet who is sent to Mars to save the Princess of Helium?
Because it's based on the now public domain A Princess of Mars
Disney is, to this day, still profiting off the public domain, while refusing to allow anything they have made to ever enter it.

There was an obscure direct-to-dvd live action adaptation of "The Princess of Mars" released in 2009. Princess of Mars Disney is the first major studio to take on Burroughs Martian tales in 100 years --- in a high-riisk $250 million dollar production.

This is why you make the movie:

The world of Barsoom is a romantic vision of a dying Mars, based on now-outdated scientific ideas made popular by Astronomer Percival Lowell in the early 20th century. While depicting many outlandish inventions, and advanced technology, it is a savage world, of honor, noble sacrifice and constant struggle, where martial prowess is paramount, and where many races fight over dwindling resources. It is filled with lost cities, heroic adventures and forgotten ancient secrets.

Barsoom

"A Princess of Mars is singularly important... in that it innovated the grammar for the American version of the lost world romance." --- Junot Diaz

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Princess of Mars

MGM in its prime was the home of the prestige big budget production based on works in the public domain.

Disney was a small independent studio that used animation to remain competitive. That meant looking for stories that could be best told through animation. Legends and fairy tales, and fantasies like "Pinocchio" were the obvious way to go.

The geek doesn't know popular culture as well as he thinks he does. A casual search of IMdB will expose hundreds if not thousands of adaptations based on the same public domain sources used by Disney. Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Cinderella," for example.

But many of the Disney classics were not based on public domain sources: Dumbo, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmations and so on.

If you steal, you reduce the impetus for people to create. Simple as pie.

You can also deny them publication:

In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers --- but only if their countries reciprocated.

This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.

But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance, rather than vice versa, in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.

The non-profit Library of America publishes the classics in durable hard cover editions. The LOA has been generous to writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London.

You look at their catalog and one thing becomes perfectly clear:

The working-class writer - and working class themes and values in American writing - do not exist in recognizable form before the era of extended copyright.

The geek will argue that a musician should make his living on the concert tour. Mugs and tee-shirts. But what if the musician is too old or too young for the rigors of the concert tour?

I looked up the First State of the Union Address (from whence the Washington quote was supposed to have come), and indeed, the Wikiquote version is correct:

"A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies."

Regardless of his exact meaning, that statement cannot be considered to support my point. Conceded. Wikiquote states that my first Jefferson quote is "falsely attributed". However, the author of that claim did not sign it, and it has no other citations or references, other than a casual mention of someone unnamed doing a search of Google Print, so I have no reason to take that seriously. On the other hand, monticello.org does say that it is likely a spurious quote, but that Jefferson DID say:

"No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements]." (Second draft of the Virginia Constitution, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:353.)

Which of course is not the same thing. However, my second Jefferson quote appears in a letter he wrote on Nov. 13 1787, to New York senator William Stephens Smith. His meaning there is very clear and exactly as I stated above. The other quotes are also accurate as I have presented them. Thank you for pointing out the errors. I have corrected my collection of quotes.

http://www.loa.org/

I suggest you stop reading sites quoting the Founders, or any other critical person of history, until you actually buy their published writings from the Library of America and absorb their observations and philosophical debates, in their proper context. You'll soon discover 95% of the statements are either out of context, dead wrong or both. They are 95% of the time flat out BULLS***!

Some places produce real works of literature and others crank out pulp-fiction.

But which is likely to prove more enduring and more memorable?

The Library of America has published two anthologies of crime noir, two or three volumes each of Hammett and Chandler.

Three volumes of Philip K. Dick. One of Lovecraft. A two volume anthology of American horror tales since Poe.
 

Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection"

Too often and too easily the geek rewrites history to serve his own needs:

In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.

This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.

But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.

Dickens was never forced into quite such desperate straits, but neither was he so indifferent to "heaps and mines of gold" as he made out in Boston. He had, after all, spent part of his childhood in a debtors' prison, and as the most popular writer in the world, "of all men living I am the greatest loser.

In private he sarcastically mimicked his hosts: "The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have?... As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing.'"

Copy Wrong

Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.

Before you can write or draw, you must eat.

Before copyright, the writer had a substantial independent income or he had a sponsor or patron.

The church. The government. The merchant price. Each with their own agenda.

A J.R.R Tolkien or C. S. Lewis can navigate that environment and thrive.

But the American writer - particularly the writer of genre fiction - mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, suspense, the thriller - and so on - tends to be an outsider. He and she didn't come into this business to serve their betters - to win their way into the Establishment.

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now, The Philip K. Dick Collection

Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection"

Too often and too easily the geek rewrites history to serve his own needs:

In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.

This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.

But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.

Dickens was never forced into quite such desperate straits, but neither was he so indifferent to "heaps and mines of gold" as he made out in Boston. He had, after all, spent part of his childhood in a debtors' prison, and as the most popular writer in the world, "of all men living I am the greatest loser.

In private he sarcastically mimicked his hosts: "The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have?... As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing.'"

Copy Wrong

Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.

Before you can write or draw, you must eat.

Before copyright, the writer had a substantial independent income or he had a sponsor or patron.

The church. The government. The merchant price. Each with their own agenda.

A J.R.R Tolkien or C. S. Lewis can navigate that environment and thrive.

But the American writer - particularly the writer of genre fiction - mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, suspense, the thriller - and so on - tends to be an outsider. He and she didn't come into this business to serve their betters - to win their way into the Establishment.

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now, The Philip K. Dick Collection

I beg to differ:

The Library of America is a non profit publisher of the best in American literature, classics published in handsome hard cover editions.

The editors quite clearly do not believe that genre fiction is beneath their notice:

Philip K. Dick, Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Ubik

Philip K. Dick, Five Novels of the the 1960s and 70s: Martian Time-Slip - Dr. Bloodmoney - Now Wait for Last Year - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - A Scanner Darkly

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales: The Call of Cthulhu - The Colour Out of Space - At the Mountains of Madness - The Shadow Over Innsmouth - The Shadow Out of Time - and 17 other stories

What counter-revolution?

You look at countries like China and what you see is a second capitalist revolution - a world recast in the mold of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates.

60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S. and it is seeing 30% growth in emergent markets like China - each quarter.

Wunderman scoops 10 Dubai Lynx awards at 1st Dubai Advertising Festival [Dubai based agency wins awards based on campaigns for Microsoft and others]
Xbox 360 championship [Microsoft sponsors competition that launches Dubai's Mid-East champion professional video game team on a world tour]

How about "expanding" fair use in the US to what the founding fathers envisioned, and "limiting" the endless copyrights that would have appalled them?

Which "founding father" would that be?

Ben Franklin - who owned the printing press?

The Franklin whose independent and solidly middle class income made charitable gifts of his inventions possible?

In the 150 or so authors represented in the Library of America how many men and women of working class origins do you see before the era of extended copyright and how many after?

Thomas Jefferson, born into the southern plantation elite?

The gentleman farmer who could spend half a lifetime in Europe and never see the industrial revolution in progress?

"Fair Use" doesn't have much meaning in a world where only the slave owner can safely read, write or publish anything - and the only reward for the laborer is bare survival.

It is a world in which the geek can seem altogether too comfortable.

Alexander Hamilton, the tireless campaigner for a strong central government?

The quintessential New Yorker - linked forever to the capitalist's universe of private property, banking, trade and manufacturing? Oh yeah- I refuse to honor ANY copyright held by a corporation. Only a writer or painter or other artist should hold a copyright. Disney can go to hell (actually he probably already did).

The geek has no conception of art as a collective or corporate enterprise. Shakespeare began as an actor and retired as part owner of a theatrical company. Disney as an independent - largely self-taught - animator in Kansas, of all places.

The geek is obsessed with his right to free entertainment from the major studios. His right to produce derivative works. Fan fiction by any other name.

Let's be honest here.

Steamboat Willie is eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a thin narrative thread and synchronized sound-on-disk. The geek doesn't want Steamboat Willie.

What he wants is the instantly recognizable characters, character designs and voices of the Mouse and Pete as they have evolved in eighty years in of Disney films, comics and videos.

He wants a known-good set of blueprints. He can't hack it on his own.

This is true of bad science fiction, just as it is true that bad literary fiction is overly abstract, botches its metaphors, and is incoherent. The same thing might have once applied to Gothic fiction like Poe's -- who I read for high school -- or to fiction with strong Gothic elements, like Wuthering Heights. Good science fiction is still good fiction, and has even become canonized or recognized in its own way, as the Library of America edition of Philip K. Dick shows.

Quality is not necessarily indicated by genre -- it's only indicated by quality. I am also highly skeptical about your Chinese friends, who are probably either abnormally educated or about whom you're making bad judgments. If they've lived in China their whole life, it is highly improbable that an education system that refuses to acknowledge the Tiananemen (sp?) Square massacre, a small but significant nation off its coast that is independent only because of the threat of a greater power, and the horrors of the Orwellian "Great Leap Forward" would produce people with a deep knowledge of history or appreciation of it at more than a superficial level.

Speaking of Orwell, he couldn't even be assigned in Chinese schools, but many consider 1984 science fiction, along with Brave New World and other writers that are canonized or nearly so. I think students should be exposed to a broad array of reading that emphasizes what is perceived to be the literary canon, but that also includes other relevant material like what the original questioner appears to want. If there were one thing I wish I could've handed to my eight- or ninth-grade self, it wouldn't be a book, or a poem, or whatever: It would be this essay from Paul Graham. It's not really science or math writing, but I suspect students would find it more valuable than almost anything else.

I'll ask you to name one - just one - significant author of lower or middle class origins from the classical to the modern era.

A man who could live and write with freedom without a substantial independent income. A man without the patronage of the the church, the state, the lord of the manor, or the merchant prince.

I'll ask you next to name the authors in the Library of America.

There are the aristocrats, of course. Men with names like Adams and Jefferson, Parkman and Roosevelt. But there is also Baldwin, Wright and Du Bois, Hammett and Chandler, Lovecraft and Poe, Kaufman and Thurber. London and Steinbeck.

Twenty volumes dedicated to works by women, ten to American journalism, eight to the classics of American Noir, the hard-boiled crime novel with its roots in pulp fiction.

Over sixty volumes of twentieth century fiction, plays and essays. This enormous and engaging body of work the product of a society that is elementally democratic and capitalist to the core. Copyright not copyleft.