First major news event I can remember: Iran-Contra.
And the crooks responsible for that one are still at large.
Unfortunately, the Bushco motivation for this is perfectly obvious: to keep Americans *IN*. Same reason Germany closed its borders before WWII.... fascists all act alike, y'know?
As excuses go, this is right up there with “I didn’t plagiarize my term paper from someone else’s; the roommate who wrote it for me did so.â€
That is one of the greatest analogies I've ever heard. I'll use it next time something like this comes up. (It reminds me of the Republican who confessed to deliberately buying cocaine, but said he wasn't planning to use it -- as if that made him less culpable. What *was* he planning to do with it?!?)
238: "a book by the KLF"
I think it is fair to assume that the "Kopyright Liberation Front" have no problem with other people liberating their kopyrights.
Isn't SFWA a bloody *membership organization*?
The leadership are *elected*, right?
THROW THE BUMS OUT!
P J Evans wrote:
I've been on projects where it felt like 'my kid', and still does more than fifteen years later. (I get unhappy when people mistreat the database I worked on.) The project I'm on now feels the same way, and it has years yet to go.
Turning stuff loose for other people to play with hurts. When their idea of 'play' breaks the stuff, it hurts worse.
The thing is, you *have* to let them -- or rather, control of them -- go. You even have to let your *actual kids* -- or rather, control of them -- go. It's a moral duty in the case of kids.
In the case of things like fanfic, the *non-scarcity* of intellectual work makes it a lot easier. With real toys -- or with intellectual work where you really lose control, as when Prince's record company was controlling the name "Prince" and wouldn't let him us it the way he wanted, or if your copyright is taken by a corporation which can prevent you from making sequels -- there is a serious danger that it might get broken. (It makes perfect sense to me that many authors won't read fanfic based on their work because they don't want to be accused of stealing from the fanfic. It would make more sense, however, to agree to read fanfic if and only if the fanfic writer gave them an unlimited license *before* they read it....)
But with people making derivative works, like fanfic, remember: they're only playing with a *clone* of your work, not the original. You still have the original, and nothing they do can touch it. It's not like with physical objects.
When dealing with this emotionally, I think this takes me to the concept of personal canon. If someone writes "your" characters doing something you don't accept, remember, those aren't your characters in your personal canon -- those are just clones, parodies of your characters.
Heck, some of us do this mentally with books by the same author: I don't consider _Mostly Harmless_ to be "real" in the universe of the Hitchhikers' Guide books; it's just a bad misinterpretation of the characters by someone who didn't get them right. Which happens to be the same author, but that makes no difference.
With copyright, the game theory board has a new entry, and finds a new quiescient point. The people who create new works are pretty much the same as without copyright plus people create works because they can make money off of their direct sale.
This description is inaccurate, because copyright covers derivative works, and those are defined broadly. If copyright did *not* cover derivative works, this would be true. But it does. Because of that, there is a class of people who *would have created new works* based on older works, who *do not create those works* or *do not publish them* because they are afraid of copyright infringement charges.
This is a serious problem even when it only applies to *translations* -- better translations can and do get suppressed in favor of authorized translations or no translations at all, except for public domain works -- let alone other sorts of derivative works.
And the problem is because copyright is an exclusion right. As an economic right, it makes sense to allow the original author to make money off translations. It make no sense to allow him or her to suppress translations.
Copyright should be unbundled. There should be a short set of moral rights, mostly related to accurate attribution, retained by the author and nontransferrable -- and containing *no* ability to prevent the creation or publication of derivative works, or to prevent the reprinting of once-published works.
Then there should be a set of economic rights, giving the author the right to all profits from a copyrighted work or its derivatives unless some other agreement is made -- this would insulate not-for-profit operations permanently (it's wrong to suppress them, and they can't be suppressed effectively anyway), while preventing anyone else from making money off the work without the author's permission. But again containing *no* ability to prevent the creation or publication of derivative works, or to prevent the reprinting of once-published works.
In actual fact, most people will happily pay for "authorized" editions even if there are unauthorized editions floating around. A combination of strict laws making it clear which editions are approved by the author, and which aren't (very trademark-like), and laws making it clear that without the author's permission no money could be made off publication, would most likely make authors just as much if not more money than the current system. (More, because while the author could sign over some economic rights to a corporation, the author could *not* alienate the right to identify the work as the authorized edition, giving the author some permanent leverage...)
Unfortunately, obsolete and badly-written treaties from the Berne Convention on down prevent this sort of sane system, because they require countries to create copyright systems featuring exclusion rights.
Such an interesting discussion; I keep deciding not to comment on things after writing comments.
There's a generally circulating view of property as something innate, or at least something that comes before the state in a moral hierarchy. (There's also some reinforcement for this from the left and elsewhere with some kinds of anarchist, the Georgist single-tax enthusiasts, and so on.)
Interesting. From a somewhat anarchist philosophy, I suppose I would agree what property comes before the state in a moral hierarchy; but it is most certainly not innate. The only things which are innately, morally your property are your body and your mind (that "property interest" *is* absolute). I tend to believe that nearly all other property is artificially constructed by social agreement (good), or by application of force (bad).
It is a pity that most people think of property as innate.
"An even loopier version says that the real reason he wants a war with Iran is that he’s privately concluded that he’s not going to win in Iraq, so he’s casting around for another war he can win before his term is up."
You know, this fits his character and his level of deludedness. I've predicted stuff pretty well based on that so far -- I think this is going to turn out to be right.
Incidentally, regarding the COX-2 inhibitors, the statistical evidence was that
(a) they shouldn't be used by people with preexisting heart conditions
(b) they were pretty much just fine for people who were not otherwise at risk for heart problems
(c) they were only an improvement over other drugs for those people who had to take large quantities of NSAIDs and couldn't tolerate the severe gastrointestinal problems which the alternatives cause. Like, for instance, my fiance.
Pulling them off the market was basically an unreasonable overreaction -- it was saved from being a complete disaster only because they kept Celebrex on the market, which is in fact better than the other two for the majority of patients.
Forcing them to stop *advertising on TV*, on the other hand, would have been an entirely reasonable reaction: the COX-2 inhibitors had been grossly overprescribed because of the ad campaigns. TV ads for prescription drugs should be banned.
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