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Nisan comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong
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Comments (574)
Reading this comment is kind of funny after HPatMoR.
And Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone.
Parodies a public domain work, inspired by a free fanfic, and locked behind a paywall.
Am I the only one who thinks that that's just wrong?
The only one? No. But you're not in a majority, either. What people can be paid to do, they are more likely to do.
Hmm, hadn't thought of the arrow of causality pointing that way.
Of course, if the prospect of making money significantly pushed up the probability of him writing it, then I can't complain... I'd rather have it exist behind a paywall than not exist at all.
But I'll have to question if the antecedent is really true. Is the money really more motivating than the prestige of having written an awesome work?
Do you consider selling written works in general to be just wrong?
It wasn't behind a paywall for me or many LWers.
It wasn't? Why was it not behind a paywall for you and your privileged fellows? My (extensive 4.6 second long) search just showed me a page with a download link that asked for paypal login.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/86m/fiction_hamlet_and_the_philosophers_stone/
Anubhav has 50+ karma, incidentally.
Still strikes me as wrong. IMO, you do not create something based on public domain works and then lock it up and demand people pay for it. The social norm isn't there because fanfiction is illegal, the social norm is there to prevent a tragedy of the commons. *
... But clearly, not everyone feels that way.
*(not quite; the original work is still there for anyone to partake of, but they're left with hardly any derivative ones to build upon. It's like starting with the wheel every time you want to build a car.)
So... it'd be fine for authors to create something based on still-copyrighted material, which they need to license, and then they can sell their new work? (And what did those authors base their works on, and hence forth to infinity...)
I'd say the only works that deserve to be paywalled are ones that sprang from a vacuum with no inspiration whatsoever.
Of course, such works do not exist. Therefore, nothing deserves to be paywalled.
But there are different shades of gray. Consciously basing your work on two works of free literature and then paywalling it is wronger IMO than paywalling a work that was created by means of unconscious 'inspiration' from your general cultural ecosystem.
Shakespare based "Hamlet" on the (public domain) legends of Amleth. And yet, I'm sure he "paywalled" it too.
Your argument seems completely topsy-turvy to me. Common sense and common practice is that it's the things that are copyrighted by other that you must not demand money for -- because it's then that you're making oney by piggybacking on the work of others that they could still (and should still be able to) profit from.
But the public domain you can profit from, because anyone could have used the same idea as you, so it's your own contributions that makes it valuable to others.
Ahh, I see - a previous mention. It is of course behind a paywall for me given that I do, in fact, have a bank account but I'll be sure to buy it at some stage. Just as soon as the trivial inconvenience stops getting in the way.
I'll buy it when I can figure out how to make an international payment with my account... Knowing banks, there will probably be a very elaborate set of hoops to jump through.
Or you could, like me, just ask the author for a copy, as I already pointed out. If you are feeling guilty, you can contribute a review back (also like me).
My mind responds to that with 'That is dishonourable!'
I have no idea why it says that; probably some sort of bizarre clash between my identities as a Pirate Party supporter and an LWer. No rational reason, at any rate.
Anyhow, seeing as reading the book isn't a high-priority action for me, I'll let this cognitive dissonance slide for a while.
Am sure some people think that selling anything is wrong.
Oh, spare me the straw men.
Pretty sure that's a real position.
But it's irrelevant to Anubhav's point.
... but it's not a straw man.