[CentOS] Another Fedora decision

Wed Feb 11 02:14:22 UTC 2015
Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 5:39 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
> On 2/10/2015 3:28 PM, Always Learning wrote:
>>
>> 3. The Russian's web site is that of a devote cyclist.
>
>
> oh, well, I'm glad that makes the copyright violation of stealing an authors
> work OK in your book.

This thread has gone quite off topic. But as a published author, which
should give me no more authority on the subject than anyone else, who
happens to have had his copyright ripped off, I have to say that I
don't really give a crap. Maybe I give a tiny crap.

For one, the freeloader problem is well understood economically, and
isn't that big of a problem so long as the price and distribution
mechanisms are appropriate in the first place. Second, not everyone on
this planet is on the same page (or even book) when it comes to
property rights; this can't be construed to mean "we're right and
they're wrong". Someone who buys my book and now has these ideas, who
then replicates them with his own physical property (ink and paper)
really hasn't cost me anything. The idea I've lost sales royalties is
sort of a b.s. argument, chances are these people wouldn't have ever
bought the book to begin with. OK, so the argument goes, then these
people shouldn't benefit from these ideas. Well, in my case, they're
not really ideas, they're facts - it's a technical book. And you can't
copyright facts. You can only copyright the prose by which those facts
are presented.

An incomplete search suggests the average middle class Russian annual
income is around $10k-$15k. This book is 0.2% of that salary. The
average U.S. salary is nearly 4x that amount. Does anything think the
price of this book is 1/4 the price in Russian? *shrug*

The whole valuation and pricing of this sort of stuff is bullcrap.
It's a less than a $40 book on Amazon, chances are each author is
making much less than $1 in royalties per book. So who's being ripped
off the most by downloading a bootleg PDF? The publisher. The authors
aren't being injured that much.


-- 
Chris Murphy