[...] The right to pay a fee every time you make a copy of a work or part of work is just bizarre. I mean, you don’t pay an architect a fee every time you enter her building, or just look at it. Or photograph it. Or build another building … [...]…

As I have mentioned, when you contact the authot himself/herself, there’s usually no trouble: he/she’s too glad that you know his/her work and, well, help it divulge through your derived/quoted. The trouble comes when you contact publishers, or agents: here obtaining permissions may not be possible in all cases.

I only talked about text quotes, but the whole thing it’s even funnier when you are dealing with pictures: there’s people who’ll claim rights from a publicity photo of a film (that is, something meant to freely divulge the knowledge of the film) more than 70 years old.

It is curious to own an old still which reads “permission granted to be reproduced in magazines” and not be able to do it because someone who didn’t make that photo somehow “owns” it and feels you ought to pay him/her for that.

But you know, let’s stop letting the publishing industry tell us how to “respect authors rights”. The way to respect an authors rights is to quote the author accurately, and attribute the quote accurately. The right to pay a fee every time you make a copy of a work or part of work is just bizarre. I mean, you don’t pay an architect a fee every time you enter her building, or just look at it. Or photograph it. Or build another building using some ideas from her original.

Authors may be slightly better stewards of a monopoly right than publishers are, but it’s still a monopoly, and it hurts all of us.

I got a big laugh from it as I am working in an article for a School Magazine. It’s a labor of love and I get no pay from it… However, since it’s an article I’m doing from contrasting sources, and this sources are under copyright, well, I’m spending far more time requesting permissions than doing the actual article (again, it’s a non-profit article and it’s for a school.).

Authors usually say “Go ahead! I’m happy that you quote my book!”, the stateholder of a dead author may say “right, just tell me of the quotes you’re using so I know about that”, and grant his permission: in those cases they’ll just worry about the sentence being misquoted or having typos (which sounds perfectly reasonable).

But then there will be the agent, owner of the rights with no connection whatsoever with the deceased aouthor of his relatives who will ask for 70 US dollars per sentence used… Of course, in this case the sentence won’t be used at all.

I of course want to respect author’s rights, and I think creators deserve to earn benefits and get credit for their work… but there’s something perverse about having to pay 70 dollars for a long dead author’s three word sentence: it somehow dooms that author to oblivion, and I believe that no sensible author would like that to be the future of his work when he’s no longer around.

The essay’s argument is that culture has more value the more it’s shared. I’m using this definition of value:

3: relative worth, utility, or importance (a good value at the price) (the value of base stealing in baseball) (had nothing of value to say)

and I’m discussing cultural value specifically: cultural works have more value (worth, utility, and importance) the more they are shared. This is true for any culture, regardless of which group is doing the sharing. It is not arbitrary, any more than evolution is arbitrary. A given cultural work may be of greater or lesser value to individuals within a particular cultural group (”I love Star Wars and watched it 50 times!” vs. “Star Wars sucks”) but its cultural value depends on how many people use it.

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