Ok, now I definately get the feeling I'm starting to get off-topic, so I'll
save the rant to this:
> There's this classic economic model of "making money by selling copies
> of the content I've developped" ; this is what Brian Clark, and Richard
Gaskin,
> for example, have been defending.
Nope... not what I'm defending at all. What I'm defending is the "the only
rights someone else has to a work are those the author grants" ... I didn't
mention anything about "selling copies of the content", in fact, that is
rarely a good strategy for Internet-based media.
> A better economic model (a better business plan for your activity) is :
> make money by selling your expertise, your ability to develop new
> content, and *give out* free content as a demonstration of what you
> can do. It's advertising !
There are actually as many problems with this model as any other (after all,
if no one else could make money from your expertise in developing content,
who will pay you to make it?) The true beauty, though, is that copyright law
supports any number of economic models ... as shareware, guiltware,
crippleware, freeware, GNU licensing, etc. shows. There is nothing in
copyright law per se that suggests an economic model - only that authors
have the right to decide how their creations are used (through the licenses
they grant or the strategies they decide to use.)
>So let the copyright-minded people worry about protecting their content,
and
> . . .
> watermark systems : these are the dinosaurs of the net ! The future lies
> with free content.
Amusing, but not an issue. Do you really believe that copyright should be
changed to force authors into one economic model or another? Just because a
work is copyrighted doesn't mean you have to pay access it ... I agree with
you there are gigabytes of free content on the web (including all the
content I've made) ... however, that doesn't mean I've given up any of the
rights of authorship, just because I don't charge people to access it.
While I think these copyright issues are important, I'd like to suggest that
we focus on spiders & robots & copyright law, not whether or not people
agree with copyright law (remember, there's a lot of content that's not on
the Internet and copyrights need to apply equally well to those forms as
well as the Internet forms.)
Brian