mss1@cornell.edu (Michael S. Shappe):
>>NOT because I expect either myself or any of my contributors to one
>>day try to make money off of their work, but because I want to prevent
>>anyone ELSE making money off of THEIR work (and my own).
>I have seen expressions of this sentiment many times, but I have yet
>to understand it. Why do you want to stop strangers from making money
>in a way that does not harm anybody? The only motivations I can guess
>for this are covetousness and envy; is this accurate, or is something
>else going on?
Rather interesting psychological analysis.
Anyone who objects to volunteer-built works being
packaged and sold without so much as a "How do you do?" must be
covetous or jealous. (At least he didn't say "Communist".)
It's analagous to CompuServe offering access to electronic mailing lists
via their Internet email service, and charging their customers
for access to all this *really* *neat* *stuff*, the value of which is
enhanced and maintained without any help from the people making money
from it.
Perhaps there should be a FAQ-maintainers' union. :-)
Certainly, we are seeing more and more traffic here dealing with anecdotes
of the fateful day the letter arrives from some publisher's lawyer,
addressed to some poor schmuck (or schmuckette?) without the legal
expertise or intestinal fortitude to deal with a snaky publisher.
And please keep your counterexamples to yourself. If you are doing this
(FAQ maintenance) to profit, fine. If you have happy, bright stories
of cooperation and understanding between angelic businessmen and their
friendly lawyers, and some individual graduate student, great. It'd
be nice to hear it. In the meantime, we are talking about individuals
mistakenly thinking they are armed with all kinds of legal protection
finding themselves in shark-infested waters.
Glib psycho-babble about how "jealous" we whiners are of someone slick
enough to come to the table with years of expertise and in-house
legal assistance serves no purpose except to establish how badly
you want to cheer for the winning team.
+--------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+
|Tony Rzepela |<rzepela@cvi.hahnemann.edu>| |
+--------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+
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