rowena cherry 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (22)
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On the post: Publicity Rights vs. Free Speech Goes To Court
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On the post: WordPress A Bit Too Quick In Doing DMCA Takedowns
rowena cherry ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2010 @ 10:40pmDMCA Take-downs
My sympathies are with Ken Follett. I am not clear why people think that it is lawful and legitimate to post links to illegally posted property for the apparent purpose of encouraging others to break the law (albeit civil law).
Most people would object if a blogger were to post the combination to Mike's locker at work (assuming for the sake of argument that he has one, and there's cool stuff in it).
The blogger wouldn't be stealing. Those who followed his link to Mike's locker might do so with the intention of stealing.
Do we have a natural right to steal? Do we have a natural right to encourage others to steal?
Someone will probably say that downloading an electronic book without paying for it is not, strictly, "stealing". It is merely "copyright infringement". Consider that people like this blogger are "giving away" property that does not belong to them, and that they have no right to give away.
Why do you think it is acceptable and a natural right to infringe an author's or a musician's copyright?
Most file hosting sites expressly state that their members may not upload and share files if they do not own the copyright. Only Ken Follett owns the copyright to Ken Follett novels.
The converted e-book should not have been available to others on the file hosting site. Just because it was, does not make it all right for anyone else to tell others that it is there by posting a link.
You might argue that Ken Follett makes what you consider to be "enough" from his writing, and that he won't miss the income from one or two illegal downloads of his work, and that most of the people who follow a link to a "free" copy of his novel would not have purchased it anyway.
According to the law of averages, some would have.
Moreover, an e-book can be illegally duplicated an infinite number of times, and while one private instance of sharing may not be particularly harmful, when a link is posted on a Tweetable public blog the potential is there for thousands of people to make a copy.
And they do. I've heard from debut authors whose first novels hardly sold at all... mere dozens, yet in the week the book was released for legal sale, there were thousands of downloads of those books on the pirate sites.
Piracy may not hurt the big fish authors, but it is devastating the little fish, and piracy begins with ordinary honest people telling one another that it is fine to share links to "freely available" and "complimentary" e-books that are hosted on file-"sharing" sites.
Free Speech
We're talking about "college" players. Under some laws, for the purposes of insurance and financial arrangements college kids are still considered children.
No, they should not be exploited without their consent.
Besides, I don't see how "Free Speech" rights cover the "right" (or lack thereof) of someone else to make money (how is that "free"?) off the images of these young people.