what if you were a poor author, with poor student children to feed, clothe and educate, who needs the money because his book on maths is highly dis-regarded?
-tsaint
One of the things I would like to see is a transition to authors becoming their own publishers, which is much easier to do with e-books.
The way it is now, the publisher a lot of say about how much money the author gets from sales of his books, and I think that putting that say back into the author's hands would be a good thing.
I don't pretend to know how any of this will shake out - applying traditional anything, from business models to laws and back again to the reality of it all being free for the taking is kind of like if someone brought you a pair of shoes that you wore as a baby and told you to put them on!
One of the things that makes it so fascinating to read the different points of view is that invariably so much of it keeps coming back to culture.
In some cultures, people are glad to sacrifice even the health and futures of their own children if they can help large companies become stronger. In other cultures, medical treatment would not be seen as a commercial product at all, but a basic human right, and it would be unthinkable to have people losing their savings, even their homes, because they or a family member had a serious injury or illness.
Both sides have very strong beliefs, and both sides might say that the other side is "wrong." Such is the nature of culture and belief!
With issues like intellectual property, it is no different. Some cultures include very strong beliefs about it, for other cultures, it is more of a huh? File not found - which would translate, in terms of behavior, to strong beliefs in a different direction.
So, will it boil down to a question of numbers? To what percentage of the planet are culturally inclined toward a strong belief in intellectual property as a concept?
In other situations, we would have to say, well, that would depend on what those cultures have. If they have more money, and again depending on culture, weapons, then even people whose beliefs might be different could be obliged to submit to the cavedude with the bigger rock, as it were.
But what makes this all so fascinating is that here, we are talking about actual individuals having more autonomy in their behavior, and that behavior not really being as controllable by a government, or even large companies, as is the case in other areas.
In the other rant, one example I used had to do with countries whose governments might want the citizens to visit only websites that reside on servers in that country, or just want them to avoid visiting other websites, and go to great lengths and employ some very talented people to effect that programatically.
But there are other people who are not affiliated with any government, who are also very talented, who will come up with a workaround for the citizens of that country who would like to visit any website they wish to!
Or take the example of a very large company that wishes to track your surfing behavior, and they have so much money that they are able to get other companies, whose websites are very popular, to install their software to that end.
And how many of us have such companies in our hosts file? Even that big, huge company, who might even send representatives into legislatures to write laws that all must obey could be receiving either nothing, or junk data from the computer of a poor person, and there is nothing they can do about it!
There is so much knowledge in the heads and hands of so many ordinary people now, all over the world, that I am not even sure that the companies could shut down the internet, if they ever did feel that it would be more profitable for them to do so!
Just ponder that!
