Even if not legally, then morally… At least, in my opinion. We’re talking about the creator giving their stuff to somebody else, and this isn’t some exceptional case like sharing state secrets or something.
Well, opinions on morality… I think the whole artificial paywalling should be abolished as being against the public interest. A large faction here seems to take a very right-wing view on property, including copyrights, and will always side with owner.
How would you turn your moral intuition into a general law?
Unfortunately, I don’t have any good answers, at least not without some major system overhauls first… It seems intuitive to me that the person or people behind a project, the actual creative forces, should have more say over making something more accessible rather than less, that corporations should have less say than individual authors, including the ones those corporations supposedly represent.
Some of that doesn’t even involve tweaking current laws. Some of it just requires enforcing them. Like the case of Disney screwing over Alan Dean Foster.
Tricky intuition. It would mean that authors could not transfer all rights. In that sense, it would limit what they can do with their output. Depending on how far you want to take this, it might not matter or it might not matter a lot. EG how much would you pay for the rights to an ebook if the author can always go and create a legal torrent?
Do you really think it should matter if the new owner is an individual or a corporation? If you only limit corporations, then the rights will simply be transferred to individuals.
