Re: [h2o-discuss] Fatbrain

[Alex Chudnovsky <b9678050@wlv.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 01 Sep 1999 16:57:29 -0400 "James H. Johnston" 
<jimjohn@erols.com> wrote:


> make his or her original material available.  Granted, it is not the
> same as hard copy publishing at the moment and big name authors probably
> won't use it, but there may be advantages to other writers.  It also
> means that a work never goes out of print, so that a copyright will
> always have some value.

With all my due respect to the author and this idea in general, I can
not see how the fact that some work available at any given moment
makes the copyright of some value. Copyright (in my non-legal) 
understanding has some sense if it enables an author or his/her agents 
to enforce some kind of policy. So, simple fact of availability has 
nothing to do with copyright. Since, this is an electronic work, it 
might be stolen and copied w/o regard of the copyright. 
All protection schemes were broken, it's just matter of time.

However I do like this idea, I wonder how many students would like to 
sell their A level reports for, say $2 or something like this. I would 
assume this thing will become a major pain for some schools out there. 
Personally I would distribute my own reports for free and wouldn't mind 
to get some pay for them (if I were sure someone will buy them).

>     What is more, people can put uncopyrighted works -- or even
> uncopyrightable ones -- on Fatbrain and try to make money from them.

I guess this means there will be tons of people selling classical 
authors, bummer, but the following project does it for free:

"Project Gutenberg's mission in life is to transcribe all the classics 
of literature to machine-readable form and release them freely for
public use. Download a good book today!" http://www.promo.net/pg/

So, who is going to pay even $1 for something one can get (even 
legally) for free? I highly dount this business will play any major 
role for Fatbrain, nice try though.

> Suppose that I have the only copy of a rare old book for which the
> copyright has expired.  I can put it on Fatbrain and sell copies.

Now this is interesting, how would Fatbrain know the copyright has 
expired? What if someone would like to play dirty, scan and recognize 
some copyrighted work, then pretend it's not copyrighted, then Fatbrain 
sells it and gets a nice little suit against them. I think they risk a 
LOT and would abandon that idea (or require some nasty manual process 
to prove uploaded work is not copyrighted) after the first legal 
problems they encounter.

Alex Chudnovsky