Day 129: Copy Right Scam Revisited

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 127: Copyright Scam
and related to:
Day 132: Does Copyright Make Sense? Or Just Cents?

So let’s have another look at the scenario of the man who bought textbooks overseas at a cheaper price than what they are sold and the US – and then sold these online in order to pay for his study tuition and living expenses – and then got sued for it.

One of the comments on Facebook on the previous blog had the following point in it:

Intellectual Property is a strange area - you need to protect the people who create it because they invest a huge amount of time and effort (and risk) into doing so - however obviously it can easily be exploited if not carefully monitored.

With regards to educational text books its an area which needs protection imho as they're incredibly arduous to undertake and require a lot of research etc. - yet they have a miniscule market in reality compare to a traditional novel etc.

What's being looked at here is the point that people require 'protection' --where in this case, the people making textbooks require 'protection' because their work requires a lot of time, work and investment -- and they need a point of 'safety' which is apparently why the books are being sold so expensively. Yet at the same time, the student also requires protection. In a lot of places in the world, study fees are very high and many need to resort to student loans which they may not even be able to pay off -- being shackled to debt for life.

This is because in our current economic system, we do not have a platform of support that supports and ensures even basic survival. The textbook producer is scared for his survival, and so is forced to move to expensive prices for their textbooks. The same way, the student is scared for his survival and is forced to find ways to make money to pay able to pay for his expenses -- which in this case he did with selling cheaper textbooks from overseas within the US.

Now, how would this scenario look like if a basic platform of support was in place, where each one receive an unconditional income? The survival point falls away: the textbook writer does not have to fear for his survival and ask a high price for his book, and the student can simply focus on studying without having to struggle his way into studying because of fear of not being able to afford to study.

This point is typical to the dynamic of supply and demand, where the supplier's point of Self-Interest lies within selling their products/services expensively -- where he wants to get the most amount of money out of it -- while on the demand side of things, the consumer wants to buy and goods/services as cheaply as possible -- like that he or she can get the most amount of goods/services for the money he/she has available. Within having a basic platform of support in place -- each one's personal point of Self-Interest is removed -- as they both are trying to 'get the most out of it' for the sake of their survival, where each one's Self-Interest lies at opposite poles. Once the point of self-interest is removed, one can instead of looking after one's own ass only -- look at what's in the Best interest of All Beings involved -- and come up with ways that works for both producer and consumer.

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Day 127: Copyright Scam

There is currently a court case going on concerning a man from Thailand who went to go study in the US, and to be able to pay for his studies and other living expenses, he asked his friends and family to send him foreign editions of textbooks, which he would then sell in the US, as they can be bought cheaper there.

So now this guy has been sued for copyright infringement and lost, though the decision was appealed and is now being heard in the Supreme Court.

The point which is being debated is whether copyrighted stuff which was made and created aborad can be bought and then sold in the US without requires the copyright owner's decision.

This whole care opens up a whole can of worms on the whole 'copyright ordeal':

the stakes could prove enormous for those who buy and sell books, movies, music, artwork, perhaps even furniture, electronics, automobiles, and clothing -- anything that may be considered "intellectual property."

"The idea -- upheld by the Supreme Court since 1908 -- is that once a copyright holder legally sells a product initially, the ownership claim is then exhausted, giving the buyer the power to resell, destroy, donate, whatever. It's a limited idea -- involving only a buyer's distribution right, not the power to reproduce that DVD or designer dress for sale."

"We're going to help the global economy with this," said Theodore Olson, an attorney with Gibson Dunn hired by the publisher. "The whole idea of the copyright laws is to provide people with an incentive to create books, movies, or other works of art. If you take away that incentive, you're not going to have creators out there doing things that give us pleasure or educate us."

"--Libraries would have to either purge their stacks of every foreign-printed work, pay a royalty, or essentially go out of the public lending service."



I mean, the whole textbook business is such a scam -- where people are forced to buy very expensive textbooks for school, which sometimes -- you do not even really need. Or where you have to buy a book, and you want to save yourself some money because hey, school's already so expensive -- and you want to buy it second-hand -- but then it turns out that you need the 9th Edition, which juuuuust got out this year, and you can only find the 8th edition version -- and then when you compare them, there's only a few sentences added and some punctuation corrected.


So now this guy is getting sued, for buying cheaper textbooks overseas and selling them in the US. The issue isn't even 'who owns what' -- but what profit was made and 'that profit should have been mine'. There's a general mentality that everyone has the 'right to make profit' in the liberal economic and democratic system -- that's exactly what this guy is doing. He's playing the Game we've all accepted and agreed upon to play: He saw an opportunity to make money and he took it -- isn't that what all the textbook companies do? They see they can make a lot of money and then they do it?

The whole point of 'incentive' that if this copyright points goes down the toilet, that people won't create 'art' and 'entertainment' anymore is such BS. Yes, everyone should have access to basic necessities to be able to live a life of comfort -- there's no reason why people should not do something simply because they are not getting a grotesque amount of money. There's lots of people creating 'free stuff' simply because they enjoy doing it and want to share what they create with everyone else without expecting anything in return.

If everyone has equal access to resources to live a life of comfort and explore career possibilities without monetary restrictions such as in the Equal Money System -- people would still create art and entertainment and do it because they like doing it -- and without going into Greed of wanting a shitload of money just because you can.

Investigate Equal Money -- we can make a better version of this reality.

Also check out the College Conspiracy documentary to get some perspective on our current educational system of a scam.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/26/justice/court-student-copyright/index.html

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