> Because lighting your candle from mine doesn't diminish my candle's brightness.
So are you saying authors don't deserve any compensation for their work unless they produce books in physical form?
So are you saying authors don't deserve any compensation for their work unless they produce books in physical form?
Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen.
Perhaps it’s best not to use straw men and loaded terms designed to emotionally appeal to five year olds when discussing enclosure of the intellectual commons?
Yes, that's how property rights - and in fact all rights afforded through civilized society - are enforced. If you have a problem with that take it up with literally the entirety of recorded human history.
You are confusing rights that are created by the threat of violence, such as copyright, and rights that are protected by the threat of violence, such as the right to not be killed for no reason.
Needless to say there is no inherent right for an author to profit from copyright. It is a wholly constructed right. They do not "deserve" it. Perhaps a society chooses to organize itself that way and perhaps it doesn't. On the other hand, innocent people really do deserve to not get murdered.
I don't much care to get into who deserves what when we're talking about a property right constructed to create general societal benefit. I will instead observe that you haven't gone after anybody at Hacker News for the money they're not paying you to write comments.
Do you think you deserve compensation for these writings? Why not?
I think they shouldn't be attached to that old business model in a world where self-publishing is possible.
I also think generous UBI should exist, but I guess that's another issue.
The key point is remembering that copyright isn't some divine right stemming from the muses blessing the author with their own exclusively-owned words; it's a right societies fabricate because we believe it will incentivize people to build new knowledge that eventually benefits everyone. It's that incentivization that's the goal.
I do think UBI should be a minimum, and people should still receive compensation for work they produce that people enjoy. Just not exclusive rights and perpetual royalties and all this nonsense.