Samuel Delaney makes most of his money on his academic salary - in fact, most academics write prodigously while getting only a small amount of income directly from that writing.
More accurately, most writers devote the bulk of their time to another job (be it academic or not) because the publishing industry has more say in the success or failure of a book than the public does. Most academics are not writers and most prodigious writers are not significantly employed while they are writing prodigiously. Some writers get cushy jobs after they've written a significant amount, but it is very difficult to devote significant time to writing fiction and, say, teach a term's worth of writing classes at a university.
I do believe that there's room for some sort of legal protection about[against?] financially profiting for[from?] the uncompensated work of another. And representing someone else's work as your own is also fair game for intervention (as fraud). It's clear from all this file-sharing madness that copyright has little to do with any of that. I want to err - and err soundly - on the side of fair use.
It's good that you believe that, but i'm not sure what it accomplishes. There are two issues here -- one is compensation and the other is credit. You propose a system whereby a writer would have to arrange for compensation before writing a book from some entity unable to profit from the sale of said book. I'd like to live in that world, but the wrong side won the cold war for that to happen. Even if it could, though, there would be no new writers. Writers tend to be highly skilled and highly educated. The financial incentive to write must be significant in order to, say, entice these educated people to become writers instead of investment bankers. Writers have families to support and children to send to college, just like everyone else, and in order for writers to keep writing they must be able to do so without sacrificing the future of their children.
Perhaps more important, though, is the problem of credit. If a work is freely distributed then fraud charges would not apply to someone who claimed credit for a written work that passed through his hands. If I went and bought a Rembrandt, scratched out his name and wrote my own, and gave it away, then I'm stupid, not a fraud. Fraud requires some form of direct compensation for the deception as well as an intent to be compensated for said deception. If I give you sugar pills and tell you they'll make your headache go away, that's legal. If I charge you for them, that's fraud. If I redistribute a bunch of your stories claiming credit for them then the only possible way for me to be charged with any crime would be for someone to offer me a position in one of these altruistic writer's paradises as a result of reading your work. In order for that to be fraud, though, you'd have to prove that I had been intending to deceive this writer's paradise when i claimed credit for your work. that's hard, especially if I'm already an investment banker making a ton of money while you're on the street trying to write your way into one of these paradises. The only real recourse you would have would be a civil suit which you could only file after you could prove that I had damaged you financially, all of this assuming that you knew i had even doctored and reproduced your work and could prove same.
Software is different -- it primarily does something rather than is something. Music and photography are being revolutionized because the means by which those art forms are created is changing dramatically. Painting and sculpture, well, they are hard to duplicate and it's relatively easy to control who owns the original and who is given access to make a near-copy. Movies have a technology edge built into them -- theaters will always be better than the vast majority of home setups. Writing still needs copyright because nothing has changed. It's cheaper to make and ship books, but not cheaper to write them. Writ
The whole point is that there are a plethora of better words (filtering, neglect, spin, etc) that do not trivialize the plight of people who actually go to jail if they say things the government doesn't want them to say.
That seems like a difference in degree to me. Filtering/Neglect/Spin all fall under the umbrella of censorship when the lines between those who run the media and those who run the government are blurred. You may argue that they are independent enough, but I just don't feel comfortable when:
* The companies that own our news sources have profit motives in which courses of action our so-called democratic government chooses to take.
* The media itself makes more money from advertising by cross-promotion and celebrity scandal than by inflaming a docile public with stories of unethical/illegal government practices (for example).
* The media, and those who own it, make significant contributions to the political campaigns of the politicians they're supposed to be covering for the public.
In the interest of disclosure, though, I think a self-interested, profit-driven media has an incentive to play fast and loose with the facts and skew the truth in order to effect political change. If nothing else, the media has an incentive to create a story when there really isn't one (See Monica & Bill) while they also have an incentive to stick with the big, flashy story when there may be something more subtle but far more important going on (Kobe or Ben/J.Lo, or even the war itself getting top billing over the current administration's questionable information disclosure regarding the conquest of Iraq and its repeated lies to the international community regarding same). I think they're all wankers, media and politicians alike, but the big problem is that they're all the same wankers, and as a result it's hard to determine the veracity of what the media says as well as what the media isn't saying...
"It would be the end to art, wrting and music as manufacturing. As long as people still want art, copy, and music produced, they will get paid to produce it. It will be a matter of getting paid for the hours, not the goods."
So what hourly wage would you suggest we give to writers? Would all writers get paid the same? who would pay them? How would their works get distributed in a form true to the vision of the artist? How would we know who to credit in the world without copyrights if anyone could just put his name on someone else's work and redistribute it? How would we know who we're reading and whether we should invest time in another story by the same author or not?
A painting is a tangible thing. A photograph is as well, though it's becoming less so. (Digital photography is making huge inroads in terms of quality while at the same time reducing the cost and time required to produce a solid "artistic" photograph.) Music is inherently a performance art, and even if the artist never makes a dime on sales he/she can support themselves while touring.
Writing is different. Over the last 200 years the means whereby a written work can be reproduced and distributed have greatly reduced the cost to the publisher while the cost to the author, in time and effort, of actually writing the work has remained constant. For example, a work of fiction of significant length would require 1000 or so man-hours of investment for the first draft alone, and if you take into account the time spent revising, hitting dead ends, generating ideas, fighting through writer's block, and just "not having it," a finished book is a huge investment that is worthless until complete. There is no great altruistic figure willing to indefinitely feed, clothe, and house a writer in exchange for a work product that could never be turned into money. That was true 200 years ago and it is still true today -- technology has not changed the fundamentals of writing literature, the practice that copyright was designed to foster.
You can whine about the inconvenience and insanity of many of the modern applications of copyright law, and I would largely agree with you, but if you get rid of copyright, then you get rid of writing (beyond newspapers and such), and that would be a shame. The abolition of copyright would leave writing to be a pursuit of the fabulously wealthy and any serf-like slaves they might choose to employ.
Bringing the news to the people is about choices. Choosing to run a story about how J.Lo might dump Ben while not running a story about how the administration deliberately falsified records in order to gain public approval for the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis is, for lack of a better word, censorship.
The American news media (and probably the news media in general) cares more about a docile, pliant audience than conveying accurate information. Their goal is to encourage you to buy that starbucks frapachino(sp?), not to inflame you to throw a brick through the window. Remember, in America if it bleeds it leads, unless it offends an otherwise friendly government or a key corporate constituency.
This is not to say that I really care, though. I mean, it's not like I could actually make a difference even if I had complete information, and having complete information would probably just make me unhappy or depressed. Never-the-less, it's important to realize that at almost every level there is censorship (you can call it "filtering" or "controlling the flow of information") of one form or another. It's just far more insidious in its current form than it would be if the police state tactics that you normally associate with the word were employed.
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Samuel Delaney makes most of his money on his academic salary - in fact, most academics write prodigously while getting only a small amount of income directly from that writing.
More accurately, most writers devote the bulk of their time to another job (be it academic or not) because the publishing industry has more say in the success or failure of a book than the public does. Most academics are not writers and most prodigious writers are not significantly employed while they are writing prodigiously. Some writers get cushy jobs after they've written a significant amount, but it is very difficult to devote significant time to writing fiction and, say, teach a term's worth of writing classes at a university.
I do believe that there's room for some sort of legal protection about[against?] financially profiting for[from?] the uncompensated work of another. And representing someone else's work as your own is also fair game for intervention (as fraud). It's clear from all this file-sharing madness that copyright has little to do with any of that. I want to err - and err soundly - on the side of fair use.
It's good that you believe that, but i'm not sure what it accomplishes. There are two issues here -- one is compensation and the other is credit. You propose a system whereby a writer would have to arrange for compensation before writing a book from some entity unable to profit from the sale of said book. I'd like to live in that world, but the wrong side won the cold war for that to happen. Even if it could, though, there would be no new writers. Writers tend to be highly skilled and highly educated. The financial incentive to write must be significant in order to, say, entice these educated people to become writers instead of investment bankers. Writers have families to support and children to send to college, just like everyone else, and in order for writers to keep writing they must be able to do so without sacrificing the future of their children.
Perhaps more important, though, is the problem of credit. If a work is freely distributed then fraud charges would not apply to someone who claimed credit for a written work that passed through his hands. If I went and bought a Rembrandt, scratched out his name and wrote my own, and gave it away, then I'm stupid, not a fraud. Fraud requires some form of direct compensation for the deception as well as an intent to be compensated for said deception. If I give you sugar pills and tell you they'll make your headache go away, that's legal. If I charge you for them, that's fraud. If I redistribute a bunch of your stories claiming credit for them then the only possible way for me to be charged with any crime would be for someone to offer me a position in one of these altruistic writer's paradises as a result of reading your work. In order for that to be fraud, though, you'd have to prove that I had been intending to deceive this writer's paradise when i claimed credit for your work. that's hard, especially if I'm already an investment banker making a ton of money while you're on the street trying to write your way into one of these paradises. The only real recourse you would have would be a civil suit which you could only file after you could prove that I had damaged you financially, all of this assuming that you knew i had even doctored and reproduced your work and could prove same.
Software is different -- it primarily does something rather than is something. Music and photography are being revolutionized because the means by which those art forms are created is changing dramatically. Painting and sculpture, well, they are hard to duplicate and it's relatively easy to control who owns the original and who is given access to make a near-copy. Movies have a technology edge built into them -- theaters will always be better than the vast majority of home setups. Writing still needs copyright because nothing has changed. It's cheaper to make and ship books, but not cheaper to write them. Writ
The whole point is that there are a plethora of better words (filtering, neglect, spin, etc) that do not trivialize the plight of people who actually go to jail if they say things the government doesn't want them to say.
That seems like a difference in degree to me. Filtering/Neglect/Spin all fall under the umbrella of censorship when the lines between those who run the media and those who run the government are blurred. You may argue that they are independent enough, but I just don't feel comfortable when:
* The companies that own our news sources have profit motives in which courses of action our so-called democratic government chooses to take.
* The media itself makes more money from advertising by cross-promotion and celebrity scandal than by inflaming a docile public with stories of unethical/illegal government practices (for example).
* The media, and those who own it, make significant contributions to the political campaigns of the politicians they're supposed to be covering for the public.
In the interest of disclosure, though, I think a self-interested, profit-driven media has an incentive to play fast and loose with the facts and skew the truth in order to effect political change. If nothing else, the media has an incentive to create a story when there really isn't one (See Monica & Bill) while they also have an incentive to stick with the big, flashy story when there may be something more subtle but far more important going on (Kobe or Ben/J.Lo, or even the war itself getting top billing over the current administration's questionable information disclosure regarding the conquest of Iraq and its repeated lies to the international community regarding same). I think they're all wankers, media and politicians alike, but the big problem is that they're all the same wankers, and as a result it's hard to determine the veracity of what the media says as well as what the media isn't saying...
"It would be the end to art, wrting and music as manufacturing. As long as people still want art, copy, and music produced, they will get paid to produce it. It will be a matter of getting paid for the hours, not the goods."
So what hourly wage would you suggest we give to writers? Would all writers get paid the same? who would pay them? How would their works get distributed in a form true to the vision of the artist? How would we know who to credit in the world without copyrights if anyone could just put his name on someone else's work and redistribute it? How would we know who we're reading and whether we should invest time in another story by the same author or not?
A painting is a tangible thing. A photograph is as well, though it's becoming less so. (Digital photography is making huge inroads in terms of quality while at the same time reducing the cost and time required to produce a solid "artistic" photograph.) Music is inherently a performance art, and even if the artist never makes a dime on sales he/she can support themselves while touring.
Writing is different. Over the last 200 years the means whereby a written work can be reproduced and distributed have greatly reduced the cost to the publisher while the cost to the author, in time and effort, of actually writing the work has remained constant. For example, a work of fiction of significant length would require 1000 or so man-hours of investment for the first draft alone, and if you take into account the time spent revising, hitting dead ends, generating ideas, fighting through writer's block, and just "not having it," a finished book is a huge investment that is worthless until complete. There is no great altruistic figure willing to indefinitely feed, clothe, and house a writer in exchange for a work product that could never be turned into money. That was true 200 years ago and it is still true today -- technology has not changed the fundamentals of writing literature, the practice that copyright was designed to foster.
You can whine about the inconvenience and insanity of many of the modern applications of copyright law, and I would largely agree with you, but if you get rid of copyright, then you get rid of writing (beyond newspapers and such), and that would be a shame. The abolition of copyright would leave writing to be a pursuit of the fabulously wealthy and any serf-like slaves they might choose to employ.
(btw, serf=?smurf)
Bringing the news to the people is about choices. Choosing to run a story about how J.Lo might dump Ben while not running a story about how the administration deliberately falsified records in order to gain public approval for the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis is, for lack of a better word, censorship.
The American news media (and probably the news media in general) cares more about a docile, pliant audience than conveying accurate information. Their goal is to encourage you to buy that starbucks frapachino(sp?), not to inflame you to throw a brick through the window. Remember, in America if it bleeds it leads, unless it offends an otherwise friendly government or a key corporate constituency.
This is not to say that I really care, though. I mean, it's not like I could actually make a difference even if I had complete information, and having complete information would probably just make me unhappy or depressed. Never-the-less, it's important to realize that at almost every level there is censorship (you can call it "filtering" or "controlling the flow of information") of one form or another. It's just far more insidious in its current form than it would be if the police state tactics that you normally associate with the word were employed.