Says dstar:
So make up your mind. Do you want to make more money off of it or not?
I'm completely with Randal on this one. I'm writing a Perl book now.
When it's complete, it will be published by Morgan Kaufmann,
and it will also be available on my web site for free to
everyone in the world. Not because I think it will make
more money that way, but because I think it is a good thing to do.
So yes, I did choose that.
Does that mean I have forfeited my right to complain when
someone else in some other country with
no law enforcement copies the entire book from
my
web site and put it up on their own web site? No, I have not.
I do not want that. I want people to get the book from my site.
Partly because I want them to know about me, and mostly because
I want to be able to make corrections and updates and not have
some old buggy version of my book floating around, embarassing me,
but out of my control to fix.
The money here is a distraction. All the blah blahing about whether
it is 'theft' or 'property' or whatever is missing the real point.
If I meet anyone who says
that I am not allowed to care what happens to my book because
I have made it freely available,
or because copying a book is not theft, or whatever
other stupid excuse the people above are using this week,
I will kick him in the ass. I brought up
my book in this discusssion because
it will be available for free, and I think that sweeps away
a lot of proprty-theory garbage and makes the real issue clear.
A book is an artistic creation. The artist deserves the
right to control the disposition of that creation. It
is not right to disrepect the artist's wishes.
If it turned out that someone was mirroring my book without permission
I would be very grateful for someone else to point it out to me.
I find it astounding that MeowChow
or anyone else would consider this
to be butting in on my business (or the other
person's business), and therefore bad.
There is something deeply sick about this point of view.
When you see someone being
wronged, someone being treated disrespectfully,
when you see someone's trust being abused, it is perfectly correct to try to help them in
any way you can if that is what you want to do. It seems to
me that anyone who recognizes a difference between ethical right and wrong
can see this clearly. It is important to do right,
to use others with respect. Sometimes minding ones own
business is a part of that; sometimes it isn't.
--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia
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Now, don't get me wrong -- certainly you still have the right to object. I just object to the idea that it's costing you or any other author money. It's not.
It's giving you money by increasing sales.
So you say, and I could probably find some counterpoints.
But it's not a right for you to choose as a consumer. It's a right for me to choose
as a producer. And the choice is probably must be made on a case-by-case basis.
If anything, you "stole" the right of the GURPS book producers of the choice of
controlling the distribution. So you did steal, just perhaps not in the way you
see it. And you justified that theft by buying more books. Maybe you bought
those books because of an unconscious guilt? Who knows?
It's a bit like saying "I demand the right to test drive any car I choose
for the weekend, because eventually I'll probably buy that car." Yes,
perhaps, but there's an opportunity cost to that test drive that you might
not be aware of. And that's up to the producer to choose. Again.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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