Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/03/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net> wrote: >But the basic question stands: did Parker or his estate ever get paid for this "taking" of his talent? Are you advocating theft of an artist's performances for personal gain? I'm not an artist, but back in the 1980s I used to compile an annual compendium - a state-of-all-current-projects report - for a well-known magazine in my field. I know of one major US corporation which used to reprint the text for in-house use; it was issued as a reference document to its engineering staff and marketing staff. So my intellectual efforts were being "taken" or "stolen" - use whatever term you wish. Was I ever paid for this? - no. Was I ever worried it was happening? - no. Did I ever report this back to the magazine? - no (I had no legal proof this was happening, and even had the corporation in question placed an order with the magazine for 200 extra copies of that edition, the additional sales would have been a mere 1% of the total.) What the pirated copies did serve as was a great advertisement for the magazine - every time someone asked the user of the information to justify his statement by indicating the source, that source (the magazine) received publicity. Unauthorised recordings or copies may be the only format in which a performance or work has survived. Mouldering somewhere on my hard disk are the texts of three unpublished books. In theory some company probably has the legal publishing rights, but in practice they will never appear in print. Given that I sold all copyright in two of these titles to a now-defunct publisher, any copy of these manuscripts which I provided to a third party would be "pirated". Were such a copy to eventually result in an unauthorised printed-in-Beijing edition, I don't think it would bother me overmuch, as long as the work wasn't credited to another writer! After all, I've already been paid for writing the text... Common sense is, alas, not always applied to copyright issues. Several years ago a Japanese researcher who urgently needed a rare and out-of-print technical book flew to London to visit one of the few libraries which has a copy, paid the equivalent of 30 cents a page to photocopy the entire text, then had the copy confiscated by a security guard when he tried to leave the library. Regards, Doug Richardson