Re: author's guild discriminates?

[Eric Scoles]

SteveC wrote: Well, once you declare that you don't care about the actual issues, the actual law, and the actual composition of the industry today, there's not much left to debate, is there? {g} So it's a good thing that no one declared that, isn't it? {g} Philosophically, I'll just declare that for me the entire argument begins and ends on "infringing means I'm not getting paid." And for once, the law is totally on my side. Well, no, it's not. UNLESS you constrain the discussion to Kindle 2's text to speech AND NOTHING ELSE. Which is really not a very interesting discussion, since, as you point out, it's all just about what the rules determine. But if you extend beyond that, and if we extend the principle that 'infringement means i'm not getting paid', then in fact all of those cases Craig cites in his followup are in fact implicit. If 'infringement means I'm not getting paid', then indeed it is infringement every time someone engages with the work without getting paid. For what it's worth, the LAW has in fact established that people can 'fairly use' content. That's copyright. What's at issue w.r.t. Kindle 2 text-to-speech is that Amazon was facilitating the transformation. The interesting legal question, if you'll deign to entertain it, is whether it would be a violation of license if the Kindle 2 supported the installation, by  users, of software designed to convert text to speech, and that software was in no way funded by Amazon. Open Source, say. What then? Is anybody in violation of the license agreement in that scenario? Is anybody in violation of copyright law? These are interesting and important questions. If the discussion is just about What The Rules Mean, then... well...probably it should be happening on a forum dedicated to the practical, workaday details of contract law. Not on a speculative literature forum. The more interesting discussion to me would be around how we decide what rules we want to have to live by.  That would be a truly SF'nal discussion -- after all, that's what a lot of the best SF is really about. If we start from the position that we're just going to determine the "winner" or "loser" of a discussion based on what the rules ARE, then we're really not having a very speculative discussion, are we? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to r-spec@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to r-spec+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---