The Propheteer

I wonder if Jim DeLong sees the irony in his purchasing used books. Jim works at a thinktank (the Progress and Freedom Foundation) that spends a lot of its time coming up with reasons for intellectual property to be controlled exclusively by the corporations that distribute them, rather than the people who actually create that property or the people who buy the rights to (or the physical media of) that property. The used book market is one that gives not a penny back to the authors or the publishing corporations that generated those books – something completely abhorrent to the big media interests (the RIAA and the MPAA) of today. They are hard at work making sure that any time their work is distributed they get their cut, and I wonder what they think about DeLong participating with such wanton disregard for the hard work put into printing those books. I wish I could say that the book industry had come to grips with this sort of thing, but they haven’t.