books hardly make money, so book sales is not the top incentive for most writers. i would be willing to bet that most books pay less than minimum wage, when considering the labor hours it takes to write the book and how much a writer is ultimately paid out. if not less than minimum wage, then certainly less than the expert's typical hourly rate.

can you believe that people can be incentivized by means other than money?

I think that would wholly destroy the ability of writers to actually make a living writing novels. The fact that the living isn't great now does not justify this.

People wrote great works before copywrite.

People write for reasons other than money from the sales of the book. This accounts for most authors, who aren't famous enough to negotiate a great deal with a publisher.

And we don't need to abolish copyright outright. Just require that it is continually published at a steady or decreasing price, or it becomes public domain. And put works in the public domain a little sooner.

People did write before copyright. Copyright was established to make it more likely.

Yes, people write for other reasons (e.g., self-promotion). But that does not account for "most authors" I would actually want to read.

I'm not against copyright being different, especially for things that are written as work-for-hire. But that's a fight with Disney. Good luck.

> People did write before copyright. Copyright was established to make it more likely.

No, it was established to make investing in printing presses more profitable, which is why the rights initially attached to printers. Authors as the locus of rights were a later change.

> People wrote great works before copywrite.

Yes, wealthy aristocrats wrote whatever they wanted and less wealthy authors wrote what they got paid to write by their wealthy aristocrat patrons.

Copyright and the publishing industry changed that to make it possible to live by writing for ordinary people.

And now wealthy aristocrats have been replaced by staggeringly wealthy megacorporations like Disney and WB.

Its disgustingly dishonest to appeal for "poor" authors where casual glance immediately proves that modern IP law exceedingly profits only a few massive corporations and their shareholders.

Yeah, these were rich people like Jane Austen and Mrs. Percy Bythe Shelley. Copyright makes it possible for the non-rich to create these works and make a living from a willing audience.

> If everyone is allowed to steal books

Nothing was stolen- just copied.

ah, yeah, i'll just make a copy of your credit card. fine, right?

That's not really the same, you could have a copy of my credit card, but you using it to make purchases would become an issue. Regardless, that quickly steps out of the domain of intellectual property.

If I use your copied credit card to buy software, all that happens is (a) some bits get written to my computer's hard disk and (b) some bits get written to a Visa or Mastercard server's hard disk. Why would you get upset about that?

EDIT: ok, it's fun playing obtuse, but more seriously it is also very obtuse to pretend that intellectual property is not property. I think you have to be pretty stupid to not understand why an author who spends a decade painstakingly creating a work of literature is entitled to ownership of reproductions of that work.

It is not playing obtuse to think "I also have a copy of an ebook" is different from "I have literally stolen your property".

Unless the contents of the ebook are my property, in which case you have stolen my property.

As a book author, I can say that, "Yes, something was stolen. My opportunity to earn a living taking care of readers."

Now you may believe the incredibly self-serving baloney from big companies like Google. You may want to pretend that infringement isn't theft. To you, I hope that some homeless kid breaks into your home, starts squatting, and says that, "Hey, this isn't theft. Nothing has been destroyed."

squatting monopolizes space, only one person can own it at a time

cool thing about information is when you make a copy, you've doubled the information - plenty for everyone! if only housing worked the same way

As a book author, what's your feeling on libraries, out of curiosity?

> Nothing was stolen- just copied.

This typical semantic-pedantry line from piracy apologists misses the point - piracy is theft-adjacent even if you get to pick your use of "theft". Incidentally, my definition of "theft", and that of most content creators, includes the act of consuming something without compensating the creator on their terms - which includes piracy.

It's pretty wild to see how piracy - the act of robbing a sea vessel - gets equated today with reading a book you weren't supposed to read.

"Pretty wild" - standard emotional manipulation. Not appropriate on HN.

Patents and copyright is like "steal an idea" which is kinder garden level of reasoning.

"I thought of it first! It was my idea!"

It is in no way comparable to theft.

A fundamental property of theft is that the action deprives someone of something they had. Piracy is not theft-adjacent. It has nothing do to with theft. It's a completely different concept.

No, a fundamental property of theft is that it is the taking of that which does not belong to you - which clearly includes piracy.

That's an interesting thought. So when I overhear a conversation which was not aimed at me I am stealing. Quite an interesting definition with widereaching implication

Actually very much the revenue for each purchase that didn't happen this way was stolen. I'm not a pitacy Hardliner and don't see an issue with someone in a bad financial spot pirating things but this is bullshit.

But this is clearly not "everyone". This is just one/two readers. Not even copiers, as the network does not "remember" the content of the book, at least not better than a casual reader. Infringement in this case is more like standing in a book shop reading the book for free, or loaning one in a library for a day, not actually copying for keeps.

The comment they replied to literally said "Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written."

The average full time author in the UK earn below minimum wage, and most authors are not full time.

While removing copyright without some form of mechanism to replace it would be problematic, and I do agree there are second order effects to consider, at least for books the effect may well be less than you'd think.

Plenty of freely published articles and fanfics online