Alert the Ministry of Irony: German anti-intellectual-property activist gets fat book deal, issues DMCA takedown notice against bootleg .pdf copies.
You can't make this stuff up. Well, you could, but you would be laughed at as a ham-handed Randian hack if you wrote that into the plot of a novel.
"Stehlen sie dies Buch!" Tam, my old man CRS just kicked in. Who wrote that, Rubin or Hoffman?
ReplyDeleteAbbie did.
ReplyDeleteAll of us are guilty of hypocrisy on occasion. One tries to not be so blatant about it. Especially if one is a self-named "Pirate".
ReplyDeleteSo this guy went from being an anti-(intellectual-property) rights activist to being an (anti-intellectual) property-rights realist. Funny. I do recall that the Carter administration changed me from being anti-(Democrat-bashing) to a life of practicing (anti-Democrat) bashing.
ReplyDeleteDanke!
ReplyDeleteAs per the left's unofficial motto:
ReplyDelete"It's Not Hypocrisy When We Do It(tm)"
Although as noted over at Marko Kloos' comments... the author may not have had any say in the DMCA notice, it may indeed be the publishers doing "on behalf of the author", and the author may be under contract not to speak against them, or condone stealing it.
ReplyDeleteThen again there is still hypocrisy inherent, even if that is the case, simply in signing such a contract, or indeed using a commercial publisher and not just releasing it as public domain in the first place.
ReplyDeleteHey, that's MY ox!
And I always thought Hoffman's title interesting. If you stole it from the book store, author and publisher had already gotten their pay. Thus, only pig insurance companies and evil book stores were hurt. Oh, and law enforcement resources were drained if you got caught.
Ah, yes, "all property is theft" except MY property.
ReplyDeleteLOL, that is funny! :-)
ReplyDeleteThen there are modern retail practices where real time tracking of inventory tells you what you should have in inventory and what has actually sold. If an item has unacceptable shrinkage (defined as the difference between what you should have and what you actually have on hand) then the item is discontinued as unprofitable to further carry. Ever wonder why a "popular" item is no longer on a store shelf or is packaged so that it is difficult for you to remove from the now oversized packaging?
ReplyDeleteAh, it reminds me of some of the earliest Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
ReplyDeleteTheir employees stole all sorts of ideas and techniques and set up on their own, and then got all hoity-toity with the patents and non-disclosure agreements, so that their employees couldn't do to them what they had done to their previous employers.
Ah, humans! A dangerous bunch of monkeys.
Reminds me of what happened with Rip-Off Press, which is now among the most ferocious of the copyright nazis.
That is a shame; I loves me some Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics, at a reasonable price.
Fat Freddie's Cat was the dead spit and image of my Dear Dead Kitty, so that does flip me on a raw spot.
Oh god I do miss mah Kitteh!
Schadenfreude
ReplyDelete