[cc-community] No Hard Copy Distribution Condition (Let's discuss)

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Fri Feb 15 22:01:07 EST 2008



> Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince
> are used to prepare rulers so they certainly have
> an influence on the life of thousands. You can't
> fairly compare Cordwainer's IOM to Mao's Red Book,
> you know, many were willing to rise in arms and make
> revolution by Red Book, but few would do the same
> by IOM. More people model their lives on the Bible
> than on Herbert's Dune.

Good grief, what are you talking about???

The point of copyright law is to create a reward
to encourage folks to create new works.
The point of Creative Commons is to allow people
to leverage various rights in exchange for something
else, such as community contributions for something
like ShareAlike, or community advertising for
something like NonCommercial.

Both are social structures intended to encourage
the development of works.

You can't do that with something like the Bible.

Copyright and CC are intended as different sorts
of reward systems to encourage individuals or
communities to develop works.

Something like the Bible has power because it is
something far more influential than anything that
copyright law or a creative commons license could
ever give it.

You can't design social structures such that these
sorts of "serious" works will suddenly be developed.
You can't design a social structure such that without
that social structure, these sorts of serious works
are NOT developed.

World-changing works such as the Bible, the Quran,
Hobbes' Leviathan, Marx's Manifesto, and so on,
are not works that require copyright protection
to encourage their development or moral rights
to protect their "seriousness" after they've
developed.

If you are really talking about these kinds of works
then copyright law, licenses, and moral rights are
totally moot and irrelevant in effecting such works.

One might as well debate what it will take to make
the sun rise in the morning, as if it was something
within our influence. We can encourage the creation
of works like the bible and protect them about as
much as we can force the sun not to rise tomorrow.

Anything else means you don't get that fundamental
point.

> Now I feel more relieved about moral rights.

The importance of something like the Bible is not
proof for the need of Moral Rights. If you think
it is, you've missed the point by a barn's width.

Moral Rights is, and always has been, a circular
argument.

Alice wants Moral Rights to control every aspect
of her work after she's sold it to someone else,
based on the argument that it could reflect poorly
on her character, her status as an author, etc.

But it can only affect her status as an author
if she has power to control every detail of how
her work is used by consumers and does not exercise it.

If she does not have Moral Rights, then it is not
a reflection of her personal character that her
work is being sold next to works of pornography.
She can't control where her book is stacked in
every single bookstore in the world.

Unless she has moral rights in the entire world.

And if she does have moral rights, then any time
her book is being shelved next to pornography,
and she doesn't do something about it, then it
does in fact become a reflection of her character.

There are no authors whose works are so "serious"
that they need legal protection of Moral Rights
to protect the sanctity of their works. If an
author's works are that world-changing, then the
world will protect the importance of the work by
its memorization of the work.

"To be or not to be" is a work that altered the
world. And the world will not allow it to be
twisted and turned without reminding us of the
original version.

Any author who thinks their works are that important,
but needs legal protections to maintain their purity,
doesn't get that by the fact that they need legal
protection by its very nature means their works
really aren't world altering. If you need legal
protections to protect the "sanctity" of the work,
then that's only because the work didn't inscribe
itself into the world consciousness.

Copyright is a bounty, an reward incentive system
intended to encourage authors to create new works.
And the United States has two centuries of authors
creating works without these "Moral Rights" that
others would argue are needed to defend the
"seriousness" of their work.

And that says to me, that Moral Rights aren't needed
to encourage plenty of people to create works.

Certainly, just like some authors want Life-Plus-N
terms to protect their works, other authors will
demand Moral Rights.

But just as the US history shows plenty of authors
creating works for far shorter, fixed terms, the
history of the US also shows plenty of authors
creating works without Moral Rights to defend
the "seriousness" of those works.

And that says to me, that Moral Rights are NOT a
required part of a copyright incentive program,
are NOT needed to get plenty of authors to create
new works.

copyright, licenses, and moral rights
are irrelevant to the creation of truly world altering
works. The bible was created without copyright.
So was Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's Prince.
Copyright, licenses, and moral rights are little
more than grains of sand that have no effect on
whether the sun rises in the morning. And two
centuries of US history show that plenty of authors
don't need the guarantee of Moral Rights to create
new works, just as it shows that plenty of authors
don't need infinite copyright terms to create new
works either.

Debating the best incentives to encourage the
development of world-altering works (or how
to best protect them after they're created) is
little different than two fleas arguing over how
best to get the dog to turn left. It is a waste of
time based upon the fallacy amongst the fleas
that they have some sort of influence on the
dog, when in fact they do not.

To put it bluntly, this is NOT the email list
for that discussion.






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