The Golem predates Frankenstein's monster, though both of these are good candidates for the modern meme's origin. I would say that the idea of artificial servants must have been around much longer than that, but then it occurred to me that prior to the Industrial Age, the idea of "unnatural" entities would have been pretty alien. The Golem may have been an exception due to Kabbalism's "hax0ring reality" approach... but what about the Alchemists?
Anyway, what's the earliest image [of a robot] in the Eastern World.
Re:Unions are just looking to save their jobs
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Um, everybody does this. That's how most radio stations get interviews with artists: they receive a CD with all the artist's interview answers recorded as separate tracks, and the liner notes are the complete script, with questions and answers highlighted. The local DJ reads from his part of the script (the questions), and then queues up the right answer tracks in response.
What? You thought that rockstars personally visited every radio station in from here to Springfield? Bwahahaha!
Re:Unions are just looking to save their jobs
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 1
This is just a simple case of a radio station using technology to bring high profile talent into a market.
Maybe they're bringing the high profile into the market, but I don't think a person's talent can be conveyed in the manner described. Of course, if the profile is high enough, talent is no longer necessary. And if the profile distribution is efficient enough, it becomes a vicious cycle: the profile is high because of wide distribution, and it's widely distributed because it's so high. Talent doesn't enter into the equation at all.
Which makes Carson Daly the obvious choice for this procedure.
ClearChannel, knowing that it hasn't yet achieved world domination, expected the news of their ploy to break sooner or later; in fact, they planned on it.
They obviously had the Michael Jackson song story prepared in advance, so that they could present it as evidence that there were still human beings, with human weaknesses, at the heart of the machine.
The truth, of course, is quite different, but this canned tale of human error keeps us safe from this ultimate and awful knowledge.
Still weird. They've had no problems letting me plug things in myself, and I've never had to wait for a callback--they've even called me back in response to emails I've sent them, and sometimes just to make sure everything's okay, and that my latest request has been satisfied. I've never had to deal with chargebacks, or warrany replacement issues, so I can't really speak to that... but it sounds like they just hate you, personally.
You know what? I surf pretty indiscriminately, but aside from the occasional Yahoo(!) page, the things you're complaining about aren't even noticeable.
I'd like to know what pages are so cool and important that they keep coming up on your web browser, even though they're also so unbelievably lame and annoying that you shun flash completely because of them.
P.S. Everything in your life is made possible by your support of technologies that exist primarily to exploit consumers just like you.
Weird. I've never had better support for anything than I've had from Speakeasy. Certainly better than what I was getting from SBC Internet for their own broadband service.
And it always will be. One-handed bandages would be much more complex, and much more expensive. Distributing them as standard equipment to every soldier (as the current bandages are) would not be practical.
Since the military rightly uses a buddy system where no soldier is ever deployed without one partner, plus the larger squad and platoon teams of which the buddy teams are a part, it's only sensible to plan on having at least one other soldier available to apply the bandage (and all the other immediate first aid). This is how they're trained (and not just for first aid, either), and it's a good system. It reinforces teamwork, and helps to ensure small-unit cohesion; both valuable commodities on the battlefield.
Obviously, special troops with special missions might be exempt from the universal buddy-system rule, and fielding small numbers of special variants on the standard equipment probably is feasible (and probably already happens).
Assuming that war is not always wrong, but also that it is sometimes unavoidable, the Geneva Convention (and similiar treaties), attempt to preserve the humanity and humane-ness of the combatants as much as possible. They're also a method for the signatory nations to assert their commitment to humane-ness, even (especially!) in the brutalizing context of war. Laughing at it seems kind of foolish. Or do you think that soldiers should be given carte blanche to induldge the worst kind of behavior they can imagine, since war is already pretty brutal to begin with?
I would do two things: rescind the human rights currently recognized in corporations, and limit them in scope and lifespan. I realize that this is a utopian dream, and that it has more problems than I will ever--unfortunately--called upon to solve.
I always thought the SAT was criterion-based. The way I took it, there was a 900(?)-point scale, and each test question had an absolute value that related to a number of points on that scale. You took the test, and were graded against the correct answers for each question, not against the other people taking the test that year. I scored 750 on the verbal test, and I can guarantee you that's nowhere near the norm! FWIW, I managed a measly 500 on the math test, which may be more "normal", but wasn't because I sucked more at math than most of my peers. It was because because I just plain sucked at math.
I don't have much sympathy for the crammer, because he didn't really learn the material - he just went through the motions. But the student who worked all quarter is probably the A student - and it takes a very good professor to bring out that difference in actual grades.
Or maybe just a professor who weights his grading in favor of classwork, homework, attendance, &c.; over exams?
Re:Offtopic, but ontopic regarding your message
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 1
Actually, your argument is based on faulty reasoning. Attempting to deduce the properties of the stock market by comparing it to a 1-mile run is just silly. The only thing the the two have in common is that people say it can't be done. I say it's impossible to draw a Euclidean triangle whose internal angles sum up to more than 180 degrees. Should I remember the 4-minute mile and reconsider my claim?
And since my example actually involves mathematical principles, it's much more apt an analogy than physical effort. Better still, of course, would be to skip the analogy and argue directly from the facts.
...probation which kept him from using his First Amendment rights or being able to make a meaningful use of his technologic abilities.
Um, that's what "probation" is, isn't it? I mean, probation means you can't do certain things, not necessarily because they're illegal, but because society can't trust you to be responsible about them. He could have been in jail for that extra time, not using a computer. I'd rather be outside than in, regardless of the other components of my sentence.
As far as not being allowed to use his right to free speech, I'm not very familiar with this case--what exactly was he not allowed to do? Speak about his experiences as a hacker and a criminal? Or was he simply prohibited from using a computer to do so?
If it was the latter, then it wasn't an abrogation of his rights at all. There are plenty of other ways to speak--nobody is entitled to use any particular forum, especially if the use of that forum puts the community at risk. Which the court decided it did.
Now Kevin, having behaved well over the course of his probation, is no longer considered a risk to society, and he can use computers again, which means he again has the privilege of exercising his right to free speech on the Internet. Since he's also published a book, it seems highly unlikely that his speech was restricted across the board.
It's my understanding that the original point of a corporation was to limit the business of individuals--to regulate transactions between entities, and restrict individual liabilities for the outcomes of these transactions.
The problem seems to be that individuals have begun taking advantage of the limited liability to enjoy limited responsibility as well. A CEO can cloak himself in "the corporation", and defend his policies as responsibility to the stockholders, or industry-standard business practices, or whatever. Now, these are good things, of course, and I'm very proud of my own CEO's commitment to fiscal responsibility, &c.; but they can also cloud the issue. Originally, corporation law was developed for the good of the community--nowadays, corporations see themselves as independent entities, whose primary responsibility is to themselves. Because of this, they tend to attract the greedy, and the power-hungry, and all those who desire personal wealth over communal well being (an overgeneralization, but I think the principle is sound).
When the RIAA says its policies are better for the artists, we know it's lying. When it says its policies are better for the customers, we know that's not true. When legislation is passed in support of these policies, we know it's been bought. So what are we to make of the individuals that comprise this particular group of corporations?
What if we give them all the benefit of the doubt? What if the employees all say "hey, I'm just earning my paycheck, fulfilling my obligations, doing good work... I'm not killing babies, or raping nuns, and anyway people do buy our product, so what am I doing that's so bad?" What if the managers all say, "I treat my employees well, I carry out my directives responsibly, and I provide well for my family"? What if the directors all say, "I'm fiscally responsible, I return good value to my shareholders, I'm serious about keeping the company in business and all these people employed, and I'm fincancing artists and bringing music to the world"?
Then what? The corporation itself is still lying, and bribing, and cheating. All of these good, nice, humane people, all contributing to a powerful negative force in our society.
My worst-case scenario is that the freedom offered by corporations attracts corrupt individuals. Your worst-case scenario is that the freedom offered by corporations causes pure individuals to participate in corrupt actions. And both scenarios are being played out right now, in the content industry.
If I am corrupt, the corporation gives me the power to tyrannize citizens. If I am pure, the corporation will corrupt me. This isn't the way it's supposed to be, is it? If this is the price of unlimited business, then we absolutely need more limits on their business. As I said, corporations should serve us. We should not serve them.
The story is a compelling account of what it's like to record an album in the studio, from the recording engineer's perspective. vgrep for "Alsihad"[1] for a strong indictment of ProTools' guarantee to suck the life out of good music through the magic of digital editing. Apparently it makes editing easier, but not better.
Plus, it looks like musicians generally don't spend any time editing their music in the studio anyway (that's the recording engineer's job). So it's not like a lack of ProTools is cutting into their valuable "focusing on their music" time, or anything. Presumably, those musicians who cared enough, and had clout enough, to edit their own albums, would prefer to produce higher-quality music, not necessarily faster, cheaper music.
Perhaps this is all different in the electronic music genres, where the life of the track comes from places other than the musicians heartfelt manual playing of their analog instrument.
Finally, consider this congruent argument: "People said the same thing about VHS. Now everybody and their grandma is using it. Why?" (Hint: not because it turned out to be the superior format.)
Of course, given the past quality of self published books, only time will tell if this is a good thing.
Heh. Given the past (and present) quality of self-published anything (looked at a Geocities webpage recently?), I'm betting that the first publishing company to evolve into a reviewing and filtering company will dominate the new market.
Re:Another grand idea... wasted.
on
Copyright Rumblings
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The problem is the content industries feel they "deserve" the original copyright term, and that the digital age is simply infringing on their "rights."
I think you're being to kind to the content industry in your assessment. As far as I can tell, the content industry couldn't care less about deserts--they're simply framing the issue as a case of "desert", and "rights", because that's the strongest and most sympathetic presentation of the issue for them. In reality, they simply want as much money as they can possibly get.
Clothing their naked greed in "rights" rhetoric is misleading, and cheapens the whole idea of rights. We've got a whole society who now believes that "greed" and "rights" are morally and ethically equivalent, and that the proper way to defend one's rights is through political and legal manipulation--in short, that "rights" are whatever you can pay for.
Personally, I don't see why corporations should have rights at all. Rights are for individuals--for people. Corporations have become my peers, and my masters. Aren't they supposed to be my servants, and my tools?
Countless centuries of creativity prior to the passage of the first copyright laws in the 18th century attest to that.
A good point, but a weak one. Prior to the 18th century, the barriers to entry were prohibitively high. Who needed to worry about copyrights when anybody who wanted to copy your work needed to be a well-educated, literate, well-funded individual with enough free time on their hands to spend days or weeks or months or more to laboriously copy your works out by hand?
Not to mention the fact that the same costs applied to the production of original works as well. You couldn't just run off a few thousand copies of your most popular work, throw it on a bunch of camels, and start reaping the profits from your bazaar retailers by the third quarter. And keep in mind that at the contemporary rate of information flow, you could very well be dead before most of the world had even heard of you, let alone figured out how cool your latest book was.
I can think of three good examples of customers of pre-18th century works, and none of them had any real reason to care about copyright.
First, wealthy patrons who could afford to finance the artist. They were absolutely paying for personally hand-crafted works, created especially by the author. A "pirated" copy, presented to such a patron, would get the pirate executed, just as soon as the patron stopped laughing at the sheer idiocy of such a scheme.
Second, patrons (either individuals or States), who had an interest in academic works. They were paying not so much for the work itself, as for a record of the ideas of the philosopohers who produced the works. Multiple copies would be welcome, assuming you could find the time and money to produce them. In fact, the Great Library of Alexandria did a booming trade in allowing foreign scholars to come and make copies of the works housed there. It's true that some visiting scholars got in the habit of walking out with the originals, and leaving the copies behind, so perhaps some sort of copy control might have been a good idea...
Third, religious patrons (such as the Catholic church), who had a vested interest in preserving and propagating their theologies and holy texts. Where they could, they established stables of copyists, supported by donations and church investments, who labored at the church's expense to make painstaking copies of the works. Anybody who could copy your works was a trained artist, fluent in latin, and able to spend their time copying rather than producing food or shelter or tools. In other words, they were priest-copyists already in your employ. Unauthorized copyists were prosecuted (persecuted?) for committing heresy, not for profiting from your "original" work (which was derived anyway, many times over).
It wasn't until some time after the invention of the printing press, combined with more efficient means of transportation, financial management and tracking, communication, &c.; that finding a relatively well-educated and wealthy mass market for your work, conveying your work to that market in a cost-effective manner, and receiving a reasonable share of the profit for that work even became possible. Only then did it even become conceivable that a work had value as a revenue stream, rather than purely for the ideas it expressed. Once a work became cheaply copiable and distributable, then copyright law became worth considering.
Saying that people did just fine without copyright law before the 18th century is probably true, but it's also true that the whole question of copyright law didn't even come up until unauthorized copying for profit even became possible--sometime after the start of the 18th century.
Because, of course, mass-marketing a paperback isn't an act of labor in and of itself.
The original author labored to produce the original work. His publisher, whoever that may be, labored to publish, market, and distribute the original work. They both profit from that labor.
Seventy years later, somebody else labors to mass-market the book in paperback form, and make a profit from that labor--as well they should.
If mass-marketing the book is so all-fired profitable, then why didn't the original author do it their own self?
And if they couldn't be bothered, and the work is in the public domain (which it ought to be, sooner or later, anyway), then what right on earth do they have to complain--or demand a share of the profit--when somebody else actually undertakes the labor involved?
Slashdot Mirror
The Golem predates Frankenstein's monster, though both of these are good candidates for the modern meme's origin. I would say that the idea of artificial servants must have been around much longer than that, but then it occurred to me that prior to the Industrial Age, the idea of "unnatural" entities would have been pretty alien. The Golem may have been an exception due to Kabbalism's "hax0ring reality" approach... but what about the Alchemists?
Anyway, what's the earliest image [of a robot] in the Eastern World.
It's "... Mars explores you!".
What? You thought that rockstars personally visited every radio station in from here to Springfield? Bwahahaha!
Maybe they're bringing the high profile into the market, but I don't think a person's talent can be conveyed in the manner described. Of course, if the profile is high enough, talent is no longer necessary. And if the profile distribution is efficient enough, it becomes a vicious cycle: the profile is high because of wide distribution, and it's widely distributed because it's so high. Talent doesn't enter into the equation at all.
Which makes Carson Daly the obvious choice for this procedure.
The explanation is obvious.
ClearChannel, knowing that it hasn't yet achieved world domination, expected the news of their ploy to break sooner or later; in fact, they planned on it.
They obviously had the Michael Jackson song story prepared in advance, so that they could present it as evidence that there were still human beings, with human weaknesses, at the heart of the machine.
The truth, of course, is quite different, but this canned tale of human error keeps us safe from this ultimate and awful knowledge.
Still weird. They've had no problems letting me plug things in myself, and I've never had to wait for a callback--they've even called me back in response to emails I've sent them, and sometimes just to make sure everything's okay, and that my latest request has been satisfied. I've never had to deal with chargebacks, or warrany replacement issues, so I can't really speak to that... but it sounds like they just hate you, personally.
You know what? I surf pretty indiscriminately, but aside from the occasional Yahoo(!) page, the things you're complaining about aren't even noticeable. I'd like to know what pages are so cool and important that they keep coming up on your web browser, even though they're also so unbelievably lame and annoying that you shun flash completely because of them. P.S. Everything in your life is made possible by your support of technologies that exist primarily to exploit consumers just like you.
Weird. I've never had better support for anything than I've had from Speakeasy. Certainly better than what I was getting from SBC Internet for their own broadband service.
Question: What will happen in the Middle East, in the next ten years, if nobody attacks Iraq? No, seriously.
And it always will be. One-handed bandages would be much more complex, and much more expensive. Distributing them as standard equipment to every soldier (as the current bandages are) would not be practical.
Since the military rightly uses a buddy system where no soldier is ever deployed without one partner, plus the larger squad and platoon teams of which the buddy teams are a part, it's only sensible to plan on having at least one other soldier available to apply the bandage (and all the other immediate first aid). This is how they're trained (and not just for first aid, either), and it's a good system. It reinforces teamwork, and helps to ensure small-unit cohesion; both valuable commodities on the battlefield.
Obviously, special troops with special missions might be exempt from the universal buddy-system rule, and fielding small numbers of special variants on the standard equipment probably is feasible (and probably already happens).
Indeed.
Assuming that war is not always wrong, but also that it is sometimes unavoidable, the Geneva Convention (and similiar treaties), attempt to preserve the humanity and humane-ness of the combatants as much as possible. They're also a method for the signatory nations to assert their commitment to humane-ness, even (especially!) in the brutalizing context of war. Laughing at it seems kind of foolish. Or do you think that soldiers should be given carte blanche to induldge the worst kind of behavior they can imagine, since war is already pretty brutal to begin with?
I would do two things: rescind the human rights currently recognized in corporations, and limit them in scope and lifespan. I realize that this is a utopian dream, and that it has more problems than I will ever--unfortunately--called upon to solve.
I always thought the SAT was criterion-based. The way I took it, there was a 900(?)-point scale, and each test question had an absolute value that related to a number of points on that scale. You took the test, and were graded against the correct answers for each question, not against the other people taking the test that year. I scored 750 on the verbal test, and I can guarantee you that's nowhere near the norm! FWIW, I managed a measly 500 on the math test, which may be more "normal", but wasn't because I sucked more at math than most of my peers. It was because because I just plain sucked at math.
Or maybe just a professor who weights his grading in favor of classwork, homework, attendance, &c.; over exams?
And since my example actually involves mathematical principles, it's much more apt an analogy than physical effort. Better still, of course, would be to skip the analogy and argue directly from the facts.
Um, that's what "probation" is, isn't it? I mean, probation means you can't do certain things, not necessarily because they're illegal, but because society can't trust you to be responsible about them. He could have been in jail for that extra time, not using a computer. I'd rather be outside than in, regardless of the other components of my sentence.
As far as not being allowed to use his right to free speech, I'm not very familiar with this case--what exactly was he not allowed to do? Speak about his experiences as a hacker and a criminal? Or was he simply prohibited from using a computer to do so?
If it was the latter, then it wasn't an abrogation of his rights at all. There are plenty of other ways to speak--nobody is entitled to use any particular forum, especially if the use of that forum puts the community at risk. Which the court decided it did.
Now Kevin, having behaved well over the course of his probation, is no longer considered a risk to society, and he can use computers again, which means he again has the privilege of exercising his right to free speech on the Internet. Since he's also published a book, it seems highly unlikely that his speech was restricted across the board.
It's my understanding that the original point of a corporation was to limit the business of individuals--to regulate transactions between entities, and restrict individual liabilities for the outcomes of these transactions.
The problem seems to be that individuals have begun taking advantage of the limited liability to enjoy limited responsibility as well. A CEO can cloak himself in "the corporation", and defend his policies as responsibility to the stockholders, or industry-standard business practices, or whatever. Now, these are good things, of course, and I'm very proud of my own CEO's commitment to fiscal responsibility, &c.; but they can also cloud the issue. Originally, corporation law was developed for the good of the community--nowadays, corporations see themselves as independent entities, whose primary responsibility is to themselves. Because of this, they tend to attract the greedy, and the power-hungry, and all those who desire personal wealth over communal well being (an overgeneralization, but I think the principle is sound).
When the RIAA says its policies are better for the artists, we know it's lying. When it says its policies are better for the customers, we know that's not true. When legislation is passed in support of these policies, we know it's been bought. So what are we to make of the individuals that comprise this particular group of corporations?
What if we give them all the benefit of the doubt? What if the employees all say "hey, I'm just earning my paycheck, fulfilling my obligations, doing good work... I'm not killing babies, or raping nuns, and anyway people do buy our product, so what am I doing that's so bad?" What if the managers all say, "I treat my employees well, I carry out my directives responsibly, and I provide well for my family"? What if the directors all say, "I'm fiscally responsible, I return good value to my shareholders, I'm serious about keeping the company in business and all these people employed, and I'm fincancing artists and bringing music to the world"?
Then what? The corporation itself is still lying, and bribing, and cheating. All of these good, nice, humane people, all contributing to a powerful negative force in our society.
My worst-case scenario is that the freedom offered by corporations attracts corrupt individuals. Your worst-case scenario is that the freedom offered by corporations causes pure individuals to participate in corrupt actions. And both scenarios are being played out right now, in the content industry.
If I am corrupt, the corporation gives me the power to tyrannize citizens. If I am pure, the corporation will corrupt me. This isn't the way it's supposed to be, is it? If this is the price of unlimited business, then we absolutely need more limits on their business. As I said, corporations should serve us. We should not serve them.
Well, it is, if you keep in mind that sliced bread really isn't all that great.
[1] For some obscure reason, the author refers to ProTools as "Alsihad".
The story is a compelling account of what it's like to record an album in the studio, from the recording engineer's perspective. vgrep for "Alsihad"[1] for a strong indictment of ProTools' guarantee to suck the life out of good music through the magic of digital editing. Apparently it makes editing easier, but not better.
Plus, it looks like musicians generally don't spend any time editing their music in the studio anyway (that's the recording engineer's job). So it's not like a lack of ProTools is cutting into their valuable "focusing on their music" time, or anything. Presumably, those musicians who cared enough, and had clout enough, to edit their own albums, would prefer to produce higher-quality music, not necessarily faster, cheaper music.
Perhaps this is all different in the electronic music genres, where the life of the track comes from places other than the musicians heartfelt manual playing of their analog instrument.
Finally, consider this congruent argument: "People said the same thing about VHS. Now everybody and their grandma is using it. Why?" (Hint: not because it turned out to be the superior format.)
Heh. Given the past (and present) quality of self-published anything (looked at a Geocities webpage recently?), I'm betting that the first publishing company to evolve into a reviewing and filtering company will dominate the new market.
I think you're being to kind to the content industry in your assessment. As far as I can tell, the content industry couldn't care less about deserts--they're simply framing the issue as a case of "desert", and "rights", because that's the strongest and most sympathetic presentation of the issue for them. In reality, they simply want as much money as they can possibly get.
Clothing their naked greed in "rights" rhetoric is misleading, and cheapens the whole idea of rights. We've got a whole society who now believes that "greed" and "rights" are morally and ethically equivalent, and that the proper way to defend one's rights is through political and legal manipulation--in short, that "rights" are whatever you can pay for.
Personally, I don't see why corporations should have rights at all. Rights are for individuals--for people. Corporations have become my peers, and my masters. Aren't they supposed to be my servants, and my tools?
A good point, but a weak one. Prior to the 18th century, the barriers to entry were prohibitively high. Who needed to worry about copyrights when anybody who wanted to copy your work needed to be a well-educated, literate, well-funded individual with enough free time on their hands to spend days or weeks or months or more to laboriously copy your works out by hand?
Not to mention the fact that the same costs applied to the production of original works as well. You couldn't just run off a few thousand copies of your most popular work, throw it on a bunch of camels, and start reaping the profits from your bazaar retailers by the third quarter. And keep in mind that at the contemporary rate of information flow, you could very well be dead before most of the world had even heard of you, let alone figured out how cool your latest book was.
I can think of three good examples of customers of pre-18th century works, and none of them had any real reason to care about copyright.
First, wealthy patrons who could afford to finance the artist. They were absolutely paying for personally hand-crafted works, created especially by the author. A "pirated" copy, presented to such a patron, would get the pirate executed, just as soon as the patron stopped laughing at the sheer idiocy of such a scheme.
Second, patrons (either individuals or States), who had an interest in academic works. They were paying not so much for the work itself, as for a record of the ideas of the philosopohers who produced the works. Multiple copies would be welcome, assuming you could find the time and money to produce them. In fact, the Great Library of Alexandria did a booming trade in allowing foreign scholars to come and make copies of the works housed there. It's true that some visiting scholars got in the habit of walking out with the originals, and leaving the copies behind, so perhaps some sort of copy control might have been a good idea...
Third, religious patrons (such as the Catholic church), who had a vested interest in preserving and propagating their theologies and holy texts. Where they could, they established stables of copyists, supported by donations and church investments, who labored at the church's expense to make painstaking copies of the works. Anybody who could copy your works was a trained artist, fluent in latin, and able to spend their time copying rather than producing food or shelter or tools. In other words, they were priest-copyists already in your employ. Unauthorized copyists were prosecuted (persecuted?) for committing heresy, not for profiting from your "original" work (which was derived anyway, many times over).
It wasn't until some time after the invention of the printing press, combined with more efficient means of transportation, financial management and tracking, communication, &c.; that finding a relatively well-educated and wealthy mass market for your work, conveying your work to that market in a cost-effective manner, and receiving a reasonable share of the profit for that work even became possible. Only then did it even become conceivable that a work had value as a revenue stream, rather than purely for the ideas it expressed. Once a work became cheaply copiable and distributable, then copyright law became worth considering.
Saying that people did just fine without copyright law before the 18th century is probably true, but it's also true that the whole question of copyright law didn't even come up until unauthorized copying for profit even became possible--sometime after the start of the 18th century.
Because, of course, mass-marketing a paperback isn't an act of labor in and of itself.
The original author labored to produce the original work. His publisher, whoever that may be, labored to publish, market, and distribute the original work. They both profit from that labor.
Seventy years later, somebody else labors to mass-market the book in paperback form, and make a profit from that labor--as well they should.
If mass-marketing the book is so all-fired profitable, then why didn't the original author do it their own self?
And if they couldn't be bothered, and the work is in the public domain (which it ought to be, sooner or later, anyway), then what right on earth do they have to complain--or demand a share of the profit--when somebody else actually undertakes the labor involved?