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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Just because you published something doesn't mean you should be paid for every single possible usage of it for the rest of your life.

If you created something, why shouldn't you get paid every time anyone uses it? Why should anybody have any rights to a specific thing you created, other than the ones you give them?

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For a start, buying something should grant certain rights over the thing bought.

beyond that though, even to evaluate if something is worth purchasing you need to be able to look at it and at least some of it's contents. People need to be able to talk about it. Reviewers need to be able to summarise it.

Fair use is a pre-requisite to having any kind of fair market for and social culture around books, or any media.

That's the difference between creating and publishing. To publish is to contribute your ideas to the public domain, where they may be picked up and used by others. You're under no obligation to publish your creation. But if you do, you have to understand that your creation becomes part of the same ecosystem of ideas that educated and inspired you in the first place. As a culture, we consider this a valuable process, so we incentivize it with limited and temporary immunity from the perils of free market competition in distribution so that you have the opportunity to recoup your investment and build a name for yourself.

So the electricians that installed your lights should be paid every time you turn on your lights? The carpenter who made your chairs should get paid every time you sit down?

At some point, there must be an end to the rights, because otherwise they'd make life impossible for everybody else.

You can't reasonably have arbitary contracts follow the entire life of an entire class of things and ALL of their uses.

Otherwise you shouldn't be allowed to pretend you're selling anything - you're only renting it out.

For the same reason that you (correctly) use to justify high taxes on high earners. No one works alone. Much of the work that people produce is actually the work of the society that surrounds and enables them.

But all this realistically does is concentrate wealth further.

Now Google reaps all the rewards of the content produced.

How is this fair?

All the users of Google Books (millions of people) also reap rewards.

And anyone else is free to do the same thing Google is doing.

Am I free to go into university libraries and copy every book they own?

Yes.

Well, no. No, I am not.

Try it. See how it goes.

1) Go to library 2) Check out a stack of books 3) Go home 4) Make copies of them 5) Return books to library 6) Repeat many times

You'll be just fine.

The cheap way to scan books is destructive scanning, though.

That's a fair point, but I'm not a big fan of taxing specific things versus a general tax. If I make a bunch of money by selling books, fine, tax me on it. But it doesn't give you rights to my books, or to cut across my lawn...

While it takes money to run a society it also takes ideas. So it makes sense, at some level, to collect tax payments in the currency of ideas.

Why should you? Human culture seems to work better if you don't, for one, moreover property rights over something infinitely reproducible in principle, are a lot more tenuous than property rights based on physical possession. For the former you need consensus and consent at a societal level, and a legal system, to enforce the right. For the latter you just have to hold on to the thing.

So, let us know how you're going to justify the infinite-copyright meme you like to trot out at every opportunity, both morally and pragmatically. Explain how such a regime is fairer to everyone involved, and results in better cultural outcomes.

Because, you do cheerlead for longer copyright terms a lot. Which is fine (though obv I really disagree). But I've never seen you actually back it up.

In an ideal world, maybe. But in the real world copyright just prevents people from using the work at all, rather than using the work and compensating the creator for it.

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