Thursday, November 03, 2005

Pecuniary Printing

Forbes posted this nice piece on Google Print by Nick Schulz from TCS. One of my favorite points:

The way the current copyright law works, I can take a book out from any library, read it and write a review of it for publication on the Web site I edit or in the pages of Forbes.com or anywhere else.


Google Print is just more of the same. To those that say people shouldn't make money off their work not only forget that's been true long before Google or even Amazon (reviewers have been doing this for a very long time) but they miss the big point. It doesn't matter. It is completely absurd to claim that getting a check for doing a job is morally worse than being compensated solely by the person's own sense of satisfaction.

Pecuniary gains and non-pecuniary gains both make people better off; the distinction is meaningless for this argument.

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