1984 George Orwell and the Kindle

[Alan Dayley]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 6:49 AM, Austin William
Wright<diamondmagic at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> It is this one,
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
>
> Stallman, as usual, is right, even if (I think) for all the wrong
> reasons. Copyright is something that could not exist in a free society,
> the only way it can exist is through the coercion of government force,
> restricting you from doing otherwise lawful things with what you own as
> your property (In fact, even if there was no private property,
> government could still enforce intellectual property). Regardless of
> wither intellectual property should exist, it is of little doubt the
> power grabs by the government and long copyright terms are hurting the
> market for authors instead of helping. I don't know if Amazon would
> still have the right to take back books like they did (without studying
> property rights a bit more, I suspect 'they do but why would they want
> to?'), in any case I don't think that, without copyright as it is, they
> could have pulled it off (no pun intended har har har). At the very
> most, commercial pressures might have gotten them to do so, but another
> publisher would step up offering a better alternative, with no
> artificial hampering of the market by patent or copyright.
>
> I think with Washington, DC the way it is right now there is nothing
> standing in the way of even more copyright expansion (or government in
> general for that matter), like "database rights" in the European Union
> or a broad "workright" where you own the "right" to anything you invest
> time into and all derivatives (like making a copy of a public domain work).

Thanks for finding the reference story.

Alan