logo

Against Monopoly

defending the right to innovate

Monopoly corrupts. Absolute monopoly corrupts absolutely.





Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of course we are hungry for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded, you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.


back

The Authors Guild

I wonder how many authors selected the Authors Guild to be there representative. Am i part of something like a class action suit where my representatives oppose my own interest.

Comments

Good question. According to Wikipedia "It has around eight thousand members, among them authors, literary agents and attorneys". Amazon has around 2.5 million titles in its catalog; even if we assume that 80% of the authors are dead (extremely unlikely) and every living author writes 5 books, that's still 100,000 authors. So apparently a self-proclaimed group of less than 10% of all authors gets to represent all of us in court.

This lobbying business seems like a good one. Let's start a "bloggers guild" of us and some of our friends - we'll go around suing large news organizations in the name of all bloggers....


Submit Comment

Blog Post

Name:

Email (optional):

Your Humanity:

Prove you are human by retyping the anti-spam code.
For example if the code is unodosthreefour,
type 1234 in the textbox below.

Anti-spam Code
SevenSevenTwoThree:


Post



   

Most Recent Comments

How to extract money for using copyrighted performances The New York Times Magazine followed up on its earlier piece about The Copyright Enforcers with

NYTimes finds more IP news but doesn't report its consumer cost Enabling people to set up contests or awards of prizes is what I hope my Contingency Market can

NYTimes finds more IP news but doesn't report its consumer cost A couple of things can be done to encourage phamaceutical development without creating a monopoly.

Comment Posting Announcement Justin Levine's post has comments disabled again: Paul Allen Files Patent Lawsuits Against The

Germany Not many comments on that article. I presume that means it has a tiny audience. Oh well, I guess

NYTimes finds more IP news but doesn't report its consumer cost To start with, shift the cost burden of later-stage clinical trials to the FDA and

NYTimes finds more IP news but doesn't report its consumer cost If I may ask a very simple question. What would you do to encourage the "invention" of new and

Free textbooks If you are unable to get free textbooks but need cheap college books, I recommend visiting

Comment Posting Announcement Lewis Hyde's Justin Levine has disabled

Music without copyright Thanks for the healthy info. rent