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Re: [h2o-discuss] Fatbrain
Amazon.com Advantage Program Instructions and Rules is a similar
development. Aside from copyright matters, I think this is great. It is a
way to empower people and avoid censorship of the individual; take some
control away from the owners of production, and get your stuff out there, so
that the culture is shaped by who is in it. A few people have become
mainstream this way, and picked up by the big publishers. I think one author
wrote a book called Chat and another book Connect-and sold it on the website
and then her contract was picked up by the mainstream publishers. There are
copyright issues to be sure with this phenomenon, but the bigger one is
democratizing culture, and access to each other, way sof reaching other
without corporate barrier and control.
>From: Alex Chudnovsky <b9678050@wlv.ac.uk>
>To: "James H. Johnston" <jimjohn@erols.com>
>CC: h2o-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
>Subject: Re: [h2o-discuss] Fatbrain
>Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 13:20:53 -0400 (EDT)
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>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
>
>
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