Authors don't make a living from their work now. I've known many authors and they all do it as a side gig.. to promote their career while making a few extra bucks. None of them were even close to doing it for a living.
If you want to encourage writing you'll need a different system than copyright.
Someone who spends years perfecting a recipe has no similar protections, yet they've certainly done work. Their options for making money off of it comes from maybe associated works, or a restaurant, or hiding the recipe. Maybe authors will have to read works out loud? Create different types of value in a world where we will have AI generating stories en masse?
They're not making a living from that comment, and they are worried that authors will not be able to make a living from their writings.
Taking a big step back, I guess that question is: Do we value people who write enough that we want some full time writers? We can then structure our society accordingly.
The recipe itself isn’t protected by copyright but the rest of a cookbook is. E.g. their writings about the recipe and the photography. Usage of one’s likeness is also subject to protection. E.g. you can’t market a cookbook on Amazon as Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa even if the contents of the book are exactly her recipes. I don’t think it’s a good analogy.
I mean that's exactly my point -- one needs to find other ways to "making a living" from the work done within the framework of laws which may or may not appreciate or have the means to protect ones work.
Books of recipes are copyrightable though. You can use a recipe, but you can't just copy the book and sell it as your own. What you can't copyright is a simple set of instructions, which is what a recipe is.
Not sure where you get the idea that comments can't be copyrighted. As far as I know, if they are original works of authorship in a tangible medium, and you don't agree to waive that right in the terms of service, you own the copyright. In other words, the usual tests of whether something can be copyrighted.
In any case, comparing comments, recipes, and books as though they were the same thing doesn't make sense to me. I'd like to hear the ways in which they are equivalent, and why authors of novels should be stripped of their current right to claim the sole right to make copies of their own work.
> Not sure where you get the idea that comments can't be copyrighted.
Hm?
I'm just pointing out that all kinds of content creation occurs and they have different types of value. I absolutely think a comment has value and could be copyrighted. But, for certain types of creation that are "work" do not have equivalent protections. So, are we just trying to protect work?
A book in the public domain can be sold, so probably by selling books. Or other jobs. This seems really interesting to me as someone who does not write books full time.
They established early copyright because publishers would just print copies of books and never pay the authors at all. The middlemen aren't going to do it voluntarily, and if they do, they'll be undercut by those that don't.
