On 2009-02-26, delancey <[email protected]> wrote: > > > OK, I wish I'd written "infuriatingly counterproductive" in place of > each instance of "idiotic" and other such adjectives.
There's also the fine distinction between "the guild are infuriatingly counterproductive" and "the guild's *behaviors* are infuriatingly counterproductive." One is, strictly speaking, an ad hominem. The other is a statement about observed behaviors. Of course, sometimes we do want to say, directly, that someone seems to be an idiot based on what they've been doing or saying. I try to remember (don't always) to still talk about the behavior: "The guild are behaving like idiots." I've become convinced it makes a difference. One way of speaking starts from the position that the other party is an idiot (and, maybe, that you're not), whereas the other leaves open the possibility that you can learn something from or about them. SHIFTING GEARS: For what it's worth, I think this issue is past due for the Guild's attention, but that they're ill-suited to address it. Creators of original works have come to have a very privileged legal status in recent centuries. I don't know when the patent and the copyright were invented, but they were invented: They're not basic human rights. (For that matter, neither are 'basic human rights,' but that's another story.) Before some point in the relatively recent past -- I'm going to guess it was during the Englightenment, sometime -- you told a story, it got re-told wherever and whenever someone wanted to re-tell it, however they had the means to do so. LIkely as not it got altered, somehow, in the process. (Literary, and especially poetic, forms came to be in large part to constrain those changes. They were the first document standards, in that way.) We essentially take the basic position in the modern time that the old times were bad old times in that way -- that people ought to have control over what they create. FWIW, I'm with that program, mostly -- I'm a modern guy. But it's clear to me that we have to be willing and able to deal with change as it comes to us, and that furthermore the fighting of losing battles (which this would surely be) is usually a bad thing for society. Better to find a way that the battle doesn't have to happen. Battles waste resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. (I've long believed that the common received wisdom, that conflict normally leads to better 'product', is a crock. *Competition* can lead to better product. It does not inherently do so, and when it escalates into certain types and scales of competition, as far as I can see, the result is usually bad. But I digress....) That the fight to control text-to-speech readings is a losing battle, I see little doubt. I don't dispute that there may well be a legal foundation for the idea that text-to-speech is not permissable use, or at least that Amazon is in violation for providing a means to do that. But as Craig, I, and Jason have pointed out, getting the text into speech borders on trivially easy. So it becomes both an unenforceable and absurd restriction. (I say 'absurd', because we have a pretend-difference, where we let it happen 'for the handicapped', but not for general use: So you could build a Kindle 2 that was sold only to the visualy impaired [or to people who can't read, for that matter], and that would be allowed, but you couldn't sell it to the general public. It would be the over-zealous protection of property rights re-inforcing the Nanny State.) > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
