So are you saying authors don't deserve any compensation for their work unless they produce books in physical form?
I think they shouldn't be attached to that old business model in a world where self-publishing is possible.
I also think generous UBI should exist, but I guess that's another issue.
The key point is remembering that copyright isn't some divine right stemming from the muses blessing the author with their own exclusively-owned words; it's a right societies fabricate because we believe it will incentivize people to build new knowledge that eventually benefits everyone. It's that incentivization that's the goal.
I do think UBI should be a minimum, and people should still receive compensation for work they produce that people enjoy. Just not exclusive rights and perpetual royalties and all this nonsense.
Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen.
Perhaps it’s best not to use straw men and loaded terms designed to emotionally appeal to five year olds when discussing enclosure of the intellectual commons?
Yes, that's how property rights - and in fact all rights afforded through civilized society - are enforced. If you have a problem with that take it up with literally the entirety of recorded human history.
You are confusing rights that are created by the threat of violence, such as copyright, and rights that are protected by the threat of violence, such as the right to not be killed for no reason.
Needless to say there is no inherent right for an author to profit from copyright. It is a wholly constructed right. They do not "deserve" it. Perhaps a society chooses to organize itself that way and perhaps it doesn't. On the other hand, innocent people really do deserve to not get murdered.
I don't much care to get into who deserves what when we're talking about a property right constructed to create general societal benefit. I will instead observe that you haven't gone after anybody at Hacker News for the money they're not paying you to write comments.
Do you think you deserve compensation for these writings? Why not?
Literally everyone from the richest of commercial interests to the kumbaya-est of libre interests will disagree.
Natural rights are fairly easily thumbnail-sketched by "What are your rights if you're on a desert island?" Out of the context of any preexisting society, what rights would you have?
On a desert island, if I find some words scrawled ten feet high on a cliffside, I may do with the ideas in those words what I will: copy them, change them 'round, claim they came from me, claim they came from god. Similarly if I hear some mountain hermit shouting them from their cave. The natural rights as apply to ideas are very, very liberal. We in modern societies (and only recently) have taken up the experiment of constraining those rights with temporarily and contextual monopolies to incentivize creation of more ideas via property law. This works, but in a clunky, hackish way; it is a strange kind of "theft" that leaves us with more of something than when we started.
And like all good wild hacks, it deserves to be considered for refactoring frequently.
We grant limited monopolies on created works to incentivize the creation of the works, but that's it. There's no deeper moral grounding. Words you put out into the world don't belong to you anymore; they created impressions in the minds of other people and those impressions belong to those other people, by natural right.
You're right that it's just as sound a property right as every other, but it's one that cuts remarkably against the grain of the underlying natural rights (for a specific perceived societal benefit), and it should always be evaluated as such.
Every generation should be asking "Does the current copyright regime create more good than harm?" And every generation should correct if the answer is 'no.'