Super-Negotiation · 9 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
In P2P And Putting In Place A Workable Business Model Chris Gilbey is right to observe that the obvious alternative or adjunct to a monopoly on the manufacturing and distribution of copies is a tax on the distribution of copies. In other words, if people start ignoring the monopoly by making and giving away their own copies they can be taxed for the copies they distribute.
Unfortunately, all this is ‘obvious’ only from the perspective of a monopolist publisher. What those publishers and their friends in high places don’t want to recognise is that not only was the monopoly of copyright an iniquitous piece of legislation in the first place, but a tax would compound it.
Instead we should recognise that the publishers are being rightly ejected from their privileged position in the value chain. They aren’t needed for manufacturing copies, distributing them, retailing them, or even promoting them. The public can do this all by themselves thanks to the Internet, or as Chris describes it: ‘super-distribution’.
What may easily slip one’s notice is that hand in hand with super-distribution goes super-communication. In fact the former came from the latter.
One of the key commercial advantages of copyright in the 18th century was that it removed the then considerable costs involved in what should have been communication/negotiation between the customers of books (words, not paper) and the authors thereof. The printers (in pursuing their monopolies) were thus in an ideal position to commission the author’s work – to negotiate a price of the work on one hand, and the price of each copy on the other.
Now just as super-distribution renders the monopoly of copyright ineffective, super-communication also renders the prospect of an author negotiating with their readership feasible. They can eliminate the costs imposed on the value chain by the printer, publisher, distributor, and retailer, eliminate the promotional costs of copyright, and thus negotiate what may well be a more lucrative commission from their readers directly. The market for printed copies is thus free and independent of the market for the intellectual work (qv WikiTravel & WikiTravelPress).
What should have happened in the 18th century was that the readers commissioned the author directly (via subscription), and then printers competed with each other in a free market to print copies of the author’s work. No doubt subscription technologies would have improved no end in the absence of copyright – and the price of books would have been a tad lower.
Today, with copyright ineffective, necessity is spurring the invention of efficient subscription or negotiation facilities. This is what I’m working on (ContingencyMarket.com), a means of enabling the author to haggle with readers, the audience to haggle with the artist, to make a collective bargain concerning the exchange of art for money, money for art. After all, it’s art the audience wants to pay for, not copies.
So, I don’t think the future business model for intellectual work will be quite as complicated as Chris suggests (no compulsion, levy or tax should be necessary). It should actually be rather simple, e.g. the author says “I’ll sell my book for $10,000”, and 9,000 readers say “We’ll buy your book for $1” and then the author says “Aw, alright then, done!”. Well, perhaps that’s an oversimplification. The negotiations and exchanges will no doubt be far more subtle and fluid (low friction) – or will be when this approach takes off. But, the point is, the author no longer needs to pay the publisher for printing, distribution, and promotion. They simply need a tadette of money from their readers, their customers. In exchange, the readers get the author’s words, and their liberty restored to share and build upon published works.
As Chris says, we need to “get people to the table to negotiate”, and that’s the artist and their audience: the negotiator with the art, and the negotiator with the money. Having enabled their negotiations, and once their deal is done, both sides have what they want. The artist has their audience’s money. The audience has the artist’s art – and both retain their liberty (there’s no longer any motive to preserve the monopoly in the production of copies). As with WikiTravelPress, if any CD manufacturer reckons there’s still a market for copies of the art, there’s no monopoly stopping them. After all, you can still buy CD copies of Red Hat Linux, and there’s no monopoly to prevent anyone else making and selling copies of that.
We could call this direct exchange of art and money between artist and audience super-negotiation.
IP Triumvirate · 17 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
There are three theories as to how intellectual work should be recognised as property (or not):
- Privileged IP – extended by unnatural monopoly
- No IP – material property only
- Natural IP – no unnatural monopoly
Privileged IP is the predominant and received thesis. Moreover, to the most extreme of IP maximalists, the privileges of copyright and patent are seen as actually deficient, that the reproduction monopolies should be perpetual, and are otherwise dilutions, albeit tolerable if in the public good.
No IP is the predominant counter-thesis, that there is no such thing as intellectual property, that the only thing that can be the subject of property is matter, not information. Thus if a poem written on a sheet of paper is stolen (from someone’s private possession), only the theft of paper and ink is recognised, and if a copy of the words is stolen, no theft is recognised to have occurred at all.
Natural IP is the recognition of intellectual work as property from a natural rights perspective. It is offensive/incomprehensible to advocates of both the predominant thesis and counter-thesis, as while on the one hand it holds that the monopolies of copyright and patent are unnatural and derogate from the individual’s liberty, on the other hand it recognises that intellectual property is natural, that individuals have a natural exclusive right to their intellectual work. Thus with natural IP, poems can be stolen (theft of IP recognised with/without any material), though no monopoly over the poem is granted, e.g. purchasers of poems are free to make and sell copies or derivatives.
Copyleft Is Not Enough · 21 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
There are always those in pursuit of power who will corrupt the meaning of freedom toward that end.
I am dismayed to read an example of this corruption in a comment by Thomas Lord as blogged by Michel Bauwens in Why We Need Free Network Services, and not just Copyleft.
Freedom is not about having power over someone else (or what someone else has), it’s about oneself (and one’s possessions) being free of someone else’s power.
Copyright and patent are privileges that give holders power over others (and what they may or may not do with their possessions). Copyleft is about restoring the individual’s freedoms suspended by these privileges. Copyleft is not about giving the author, recipient or user of software, power over others or others’ computers.
There is admittedly a misguided movement in pursuit of that end (qv Affero), but instead of corrupting the meaning of the term ‘freedom’ they’d be more honest to label the power they covet as a privilege: to control others’ computers upon which certain software runs and to place constraints and obligations upon the owners of those computers. The means of simulating such a privilege may well be found within the privilege of copyright, but simply because a license that obtains a specific power operates in a similar way to copyleft doesn’t make such a license wholly ethical or solely a pursuit of freedom rather than freedom+power. And the argument that the power sought is ethical because it is socially beneficial is the same as the one used about the power to prevent copying.
In general, simply prefixing a power with ‘freedom to’ doesn’t mean the would be recipient of that power has a natural right to it. This is one of the problems with the term ‘freedom’, it can be abused as a carte blanche entitlement to power, e.g. “I should have the freedom to control the software I run even if it runs on your computer” should actually be read as “I should have the power to control the software I run even if it runs on your computer”. Sadly, ‘freedom’ can be used as a weasel word.
If the term ‘freedom’ is going to be used ethically it should be used to indicate the seeking of escape from someone else’s unnatural power, not to indicate the pursuit of unnatural power over someone else. We often see this when people suggest the BSD is freer than the GPL, e.g. “Unlike the GPL, the BSD license permits me the freedom to re-apply copyright to my derivatives, which is the power to prevent you making copies.”
So, if we don’t start looking a little more deeply into what is meant by ‘freedom’ (escape from another’s privilege) we might as well redescribe copyright in the same corrupt language, e.g. “I should have the freedom to prevent the reproduction and public performance of my original work by those to whom I distribute it”. And, unfortunately, there are many people who would see nothing wrong with granting such privilege, nor anything jarring in the use of the term ‘freedom to’ in place of ‘power to’.
You should be free to do what you are naturally free to do, which is that which you would be free to do but for unnatural privileges granted to others that suspend that freedom. In other words, you should be free from another’s unnatural power over you. For example, you may be prevented from operating someone else’s computer not by any unnatural power they have in the form of a state granted monopoly, but by their natural right to privacy. To seek freedom from someone else’s privilege is the ethical pursuit of liberty, to seek freedom to do something that is prevented by another’s natural right is to seek privilege, and is the unethical pursuit of unnatural power.
But, back to the title of the article. I agree that copyleft is not enough, but what is deficient about it is not its inability to give the individual more power to control the software they use and the computers it’s run on, but its inability to restore the public’s freedom from copyright and patent completely. To completely restore the public’s liberty requires more than a copyleft license, it requires abolition. It requires that those privileges of copyright and patent are abolished.
- If you don’t want someone else to be able to make copies of your work then don’t give it to them.
- If you want to control the software that you use or the computer upon which it is run then run it on your own computer.
You don’t need, and shouldn’t have, any unnatural power to control someone else or stipulate what they can or cannot do with their own property.
Comment [2]
Not Suicide, Terminal · 27 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
Daniel Conover incisively suggests that the online newspapers’ apparent formulation of a plan to place all their news behind a paywall constitutes a suicide pact rather than salvation.
I’d say it was more like a group of similarly afflicted purchasing a retreat in which they can end their terminal illness away from the public eye.
In the future this history of our present will be understood as obviously as children today understand that the Earth orbits the Sun. That is to say that everyone will know why newspapers were doomed, and why journalists were not. However, if any time traveller ventured to enlighten the minds of his forefathers he would have been burnt as a heretic.
So in an attempt to avoid heresy, here is a simple test that anyone can perform upon themselves to see if they have a mind that is so supple it can quickly make the paradigm shift:
Conceive of a future without copyright, one in which authors exchange their writing for their readers’ money, but one in which printers no longer pay authors for their writing to sell copies of it to readers.
If you can open your mind to the possibility that the market for copies has ended, then your mind is open to the possibility that there remains a market for intellectual work.
Newspapers are doomed. Journalists have a bright and prosperous future. These are not contradictory statements.
So, if you are a journalist, don’t charge your readers for copies, invite them to pay you to write, to pay you for your writing. Your readers are now your customers, no longer the printer’s. That traditional publisher can no longer pay you for your writing, because they can no longer sell copies of it, they can’t sell your readers’ eyeballs, and they can’t charge your readers for reading online copies.
Newspapers are white elephants in a barren desert of their own making, desperately wandering from watering hole to watering hole, but the revenue flowing from each tributary of their 18th century monopoly on the sale of copies is drying up. Neither fencing off the copies nor reinforcing the monopoly will help. Their business model faces absolute drought. So they collect, not to commit suicide, but to assemble their graveyard.
Our own technology reveals the fundamental natural law governing information and intellectual work. The age of commercial privilege is ending. Natural rights must resume.
Copyleft vs CopyZeroFriction · 29 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
I’m obliged by Lucas Gonze to reappraise CC0 having read his blog article entitled advocacy for CC 0 over BY-SA which responded to Victor Stone’s article Consider: Zero.
I think we’re seeing the crossover of friction vs constraint between software and other art.
The GPL is a license that restores liberty to the public (otherwise suspended by copyright and patent), albeit at the expense of friction (easily surmountable by coders used to it). CC-SA is somewhat similar.
The CC0 is a license/waiver that unencumbers the art from constraint by the author’s copyright, and friction due to (well intentioned) licensing conditions, albeit at the expense of not being able to liberate anyone apart from the immediate users. It may be that opprobrium will be enough to prevent derivatives of CC0 works from being re-encumbered with copyright.
There is a similar issue (and confusion) between manumission and laissez faire between the GPL and BSD licenses (as between CC-SA and CC0). The GPL is actually freer (in restoring more people’s liberty), whereas the BSD is least encumbered by licensing conditions (the licensee is free to suspend others’ liberty).
There is a FAQ for the CC0.
It is disheartening that in conflating legal rights (privileges) and natural rights (moral rights, etc.) CC is giving ‘rights’ a bad name by suggesting that CC0 is a way of surrendering/unreserving as many rights as possible, as if this was a worthy aspiration. It compounds this insinuation by saying that in some jurisdictions it is difficult or impossible for some rights to be waived or licensed. That’s because they are natural and inalienable rights, not commercial privileges!
As I’ve often said before. Artists should surrender none of their rights. They should divest themselves only of their privileges, and by so doing restore the public’s rights their privileges would otherwise annul. Rights are good (natural rights and derivatives), privileges are bad (copyright and patent).
Copyright (via CC license) may provide a holder with the apparent ability to demand attribution, but there is no natural right to it. What there is a natural right to is truth, and thus a right against misattribution. Lawrence Lessig created this confusion in the first place, and now people who are relinquishing their privilege to demand attribution will assume they are also relinquishing the right not to be misattributed.
Somehow I suspect CC has a hidden agenda in conflating the privilege of copyright (and all the ‘legal rights’ it engenders) with inalienable, natural rights, i.e. that it wishes to cement the popular delusion that copyright is a natural right, in order to facilitate legislation that secures it as if a natural right (making infringement a crime). To thus provide liberal licenses/waivers with one hand whilst reinforcing the privilege as if a right with the other hand is crypto-IP-maximalism.
The Employee's Conditions of Employment · 31 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
As a condition of my employment, I retain the copyright arising in my works whether produced in the course of my employment or through my use of employer provided facilities. Any such works that I deliver to my employer, will be provided under one or more non-exclusive licenses of their choice from FSF, OSI or CC. Cases of joint authorship may be negotiated separately, however, I will not be excluded from my intellectual work nor be alienated from my liberty to utilise or communicate it.
That’s not so much safeguarding the liberty of the public so much as that of the employee (though it still doesn’t address its derogation by patent). One could arrive at conditions that would restore the public’s liberty to the employee’s work (the public includes the employee), but that probably reduces the employment prospects somewhat. For such employees able to assert their principles I daresay conditions of employment will be negotiated individually, probably stipulating the use of GPLv3 or CC-SA. But then they’d probably only work for an employer that upheld similar principles already.
How Much is All Music Worth? · 32 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
I recently did a rough ‘back of the envelope’ calculation that gives 2015 as the year in which all the music ever released on CD can fit on a $100 hard disk drive – The Total Music Vortex as I put it.
Now let’s imagine that in 2015, in some part of the world (where copyright isn’t as respected as some might wish it were) there’s a company that has obtained a copy of all music ever released and is selling copies of it on 120TB hard disk drives (that sell bare at $100).
What I want to know is how much you’d offer for such a drive for your sole personal use? Let’s pretend it has no resale value beyond the $100 of the drive.
Is your price $101? $150? $200? $400? or even $1,000?
Would you get anywhere near the $12,600,100 mark that it would cost were you to pay say $10 per CD?
Let’s say you calculated that over the next 20 years you might buy 20 CDs that had been released in the previous 35 years (and would thus be included on that hard drive) – you’d probably buy ten times as many new releases (but they won’t be on that hard drive). That would make your price $300 ($100+20x$10). Let’s say if the CDs had been priced more cheaply you might have bought twice as many. That makes your price $400 ($100+40x$7.50).
So, being relatively generous about it by a factor of 2, if the average person would value a hard drive with all music ever released at $700, that puts the average value of a CD at $0.000476 ($600/1.26m), or less than a twentieth of a cent.
Note that the CDs you do buy, you do value at around $10 (you may value some at even more than the retail price), but there are over a million that you wouldn’t pay even a penny for.
Now if the average CD is valued at a twentieth of a cent, I suggest the record labels could make 2,000% markups if they started auctioning off their back catalogue at a minimum bid of 1 cent per CD. They’ve only got half a dozen years in which to do this, because after that it’s too late, people will have shared it all for next to nothing already.
How would such a digital art auction work? Well, a label would create a website where for every CD ever published they invite punters to bid how much they’d pay to have a copy of that CD with a copyleft license (their cultural liberty to it restored). Let’s say 1,000,000 people bid at least 5 cents for the copyleft release of the CD album recording of Imagine by John Lennon. The label could make $50,000 if they sold it at 5 cents. It’s possible 60,000 people might bid at least $1, in which case it would be better sold at $1 for $60,000. 4,000 of those might even have bid at least $10, but $40,000 isn’t so good. This form of auction enables the determination of the effective market price of a digital work as if it were sold as equally priced copies. The auction of each CD continues indefinitely until the label decides its market price has been reached (as it soon will as the market price descends to zero).
There are 1.5 billion punters online (not all of whom can afford CDs at $10 a pop). Anyway, the theoretical maximum realisable value of a CD is about $700,000 (on average). Being realistic about it, I’d say a label selling a CD for $60,000 (once and for all) is pretty good going (if it can be sustained as an average). But, more critically, if they don’t start selling their back catalogue now, they’ll never sell it.
So, there’s a swansong business model for record labels (artists will have a different model as they’ll be selling the production of their music to their audiences, not copies of monopoly protected published works). Even if the average album only fetches $10,000 this means the labels can make $120 billion over the next 6 years, i.e. $21 billion per annum ($14 per online user per annum). After that, they’ve sold their assets and can focus on selling the value they can still add (if any). The alternative is to sit on back catalogue and watch its sale value decrease to a few hundred dollars, given everyone else will soon also have a copy of it anyway.
You might think this is an example of the difference I often try to explain between selling music and selling copies. It isn’t, it’s selling the public’s liberty back to it, inviting the public to pay for its own manumission concerning a copyright protected work. Selling music is what musicians do, and in the future they’ll sell it to their audiences instead of to record labels as they have done in the past.
So, ethically, the labels’ back catalogue already belongs to the public and the labels shouldn’t get a penny for it (given they’ve been unethically granted the suspension of the public’s liberty to share and build upon it). So, realising its asset value (while it still has one) would be prudent from an unscrupulous and mercenary perspective (a perspective one infers the industry is familiar with).
The final question is though, can the labels dare to acknowledge even tacitly that their monopoly on the distribution of copies may not last forever (let alone 6 years)? As some of us know only too well, it has already ended, but it’s going to take a few years before everyone else realises it. That’s just enough time for the labels to have a closing down sale – unless of course, they’re hoping for a GM style government bailout in 6 years time – assuming the taxpayer’s credit rating hasn’t already been used up by other bailouts by then.
The Total Music Vortex · 34 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
Let us say that 35,000 CDs have been released every year since 1980, and will continue to be released.
Let us also say that a CD can generally be represented as a 100MiB MP3 file at an acceptable bit rate.
From the ‘back of envelope’ table below we can estimate that the cost of storing all the CDs ever released on a hard disk drive will fall to about $100 in 2015.
I suggest that the next file sharing application won’t be one that lets people pick and choose which CDs to share or audition. It will simply replicate and distribute EVERYTHING. There won’t even be any point in deleting all the CDs one doesn’t like. The problem will be entirely one of deciding what the heck to listen to.
Even so, once we have discovered the musicians we like there will still be the problem of how to persuade them to make more great music. Even all the music ever released can pale next to one more album from a favourite artist.
Don’t worry. That’s the problem I’m working on – enabling a musician’s fans to exchange their money for the musician’s production of music. It’s not rocket science. You just have to bear in mind that it’s not about enabling CD manufacturers to sell copies, but about enabling musicians to sell their music to their audience – directly instead of via record labels and CD manufacturers.
When you’re selling music instead of digital copies you don’t benefit from a monopoly; on the contrary, you want your music to spread far and wide.
| Year | Price of 1TiB HDD | CDs | MP3 TiB | Storage cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | $1,336,434,513.25 | 35,000 | 3 | $4,460,831,447.94 |
| 1981 | $735,038,982.29 | 70,000 | 7 | $4,906,914,592.74 |
| 1982 | $404,271,440.26 | 105,000 | 10 | $4,048,204,539.01 |
| 1983 | $222,349,292.14 | 140,000 | 13 | $2,968,683,328.61 |
| 1984 | $122,292,110.68 | 175,000 | 17 | $2,040,969,788.42 |
| 1985 | $67,260,660.87 | 210,000 | 20 | $1,347,040,060.36 |
| 1986 | $36,993,363.48 | 245,000 | 23 | $864,350,705.39 |
| 1987 | $20,346,349.91 | 280,000 | 27 | $543,306,157.68 |
| 1988 | $11,190,492.45 | 315,000 | 30 | $336,170,685.06 |
| 1989 | $6,154,770.85 | 350,000 | 33 | $205,437,640.87 |
| 1990 | $3,385,123.97 | 385,000 | 37 | $124,289,772.73 |
| 1991 | $1,861,818.18 | 420,000 | 40 | $74,573,863.64 |
| 1992 | $1,024,000.00 | 455,000 | 43 | $44,433,593.75 |
| 1993 | $563,200.00 | 490,000 | 47 | $26,318,359.38 |
| 1994 | $309,760.00 | 525,000 | 50 | $15,509,033.20 |
| 1995 | $170,368.00 | 560,000 | 53 | $9,098,632.81 |
| 1996 | $93,702.40 | 595,000 | 57 | $5,317,013.55 |
| 1997 | $51,536.32 | 630,000 | 60 | $3,096,378.63 |
| 1998 | $28,344.98 | 665,000 | 63 | $1,797,619.69 |
| 1999 | $15,589.73 | 700,000 | 67 | $1,040,727.05 |
| 2000 | $8,574.35 | 735,000 | 70 | $601,019.69 |
| 2001 | $4,715.90 | 770,000 | 73 | $346,302.24 |
| 2002 | $2,593.74 | 805,000 | 77 | $199,123.51 |
| 2003 | $1,426.55 | 840,000 | 80 | $114,279.38 |
| 2004 | $784.61 | 875,000 | 83 | $65,472.90 |
| 2005 | $431.53 | 910,000 | 87 | $37,450.41 |
| 2006 | $237.34 | 945,000 | 90 | $21,389.85 |
| 2007 | $130.54 | 980,000 | 93 | $12,200.23 |
| 2008 | $71.79 | 1,015,000 | 97 | $6,949.38 |
| 2009 | $39.49 | 1,050,000 | 100 | $3,953.91 |
| 2010 | $21.72 | 1,085,000 | 103 | $2,247.35 |
| 2011 | $11.95 | 1,120,000 | 107 | $1,275.91 |
| 2012 | $6.57 | 1,155,000 | 110 | $723.68 |
| 2013 | $3.61 | 1,190,000 | 113 | $410.09 |
| 2014 | $1.99 | 1,225,000 | 117 | $232.18 |
| 2015 | $1.09 | 1,260,000 | 120 | $131.35 |
| 2016 | $0.60 | 1,295,000 | 124 | $74.25 |
| 2017 | $0.33 | 1,330,000 | 127 | $41.94 |
| 2018 | $0.18 | 1,365,000 | 130 | $23.67 |
| 2019 | $0.10 | 1,400,000 | 134 | $13.35 |
| 2020 | $0.06 | 1,435,000 | 137 | $7.53 |
So, if you’re hoping to fill that hard disk you’d probably better get started today.
Assuming a conservative 20Mbps share rate (given an efficient file-sharing system and no network contention) that works out at around 75TiB per year. In other words, all music ever released could be shared via the successor to BitTorrent within two years at such time as it became economic for everyone to store a duplicate set.
Within a decade, those who don’t share published music will be seen as a burden upon everyone else, akin to the way leechers are already perceived today.
Comment [4]
A Pirate Asserts and Defends Liberty · 64 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
As per the fifth definition of Pirate: A pirate asserts and defends the natural right to liberty, here is some prose in apparent agreement from one George William Curtis, 1824-1892
The end of all scholarly attainment is to live nobly. If a man read books merely to know books, he is a tree planted only to blossom. If he read books to apply their wisdom to life, then he is a tree planted to bear glorious fruit. He does not think for himself alone, nor hoard a thought as a miser a diamond. He spends for the world. Scholarship is not only the knowledge that makes books, but the wisdom which inspires that knowledge. The scholar is not necessarily a learned man, but he is a wise man.
If he be personally a recluse, his voice and influence are never secluded. If the man be a hermit, his mind is a citizen of the world.If, then, such be the scholar and the scholar’s office, if he be truly the conscience of the State, the fundamental law of his life is liberty. At every cost, the true scholar asserts and defends liberty of thought and liberty of speech. Of what use to a man is a thought that will help the world, if he cannot tell it to the world?
From Orations and addresses of George William Curtis, VOLUME I. ON THE PRINCIPLES AND CHARACTER OP AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS, AND THE DUTIES OF AMERICAN CITIZENS, 1856-1891
Piracy and Copyright Tricentennial · 64 days ago by Crosbie Fitch
According to the OED one of the first uses of the term ‘pirate’ to describe unauthorised reproduction of a published work was penned by Daniel Defoe:
1703 D. Defoe True-born Englishman in True Collect. I. Expan. Pref. sig. B3v, Its being Printed again and again by Pyrates.
It’s almost as if by such selective quotation the OED prefers people to interpret Defoe’s sentiments as “Help! The bastards are pirating my poem! Call the navy!” But, then how could the OED possibly be biased in support of copyright and against piracy?
In 1701 Daniel Defoe published The True-Born Englishman, and then in 1703 in a later edition included an explanatory preface:
As to Answers, Banters, True-English Billinsgate, I expect them till no body will buy, and then the Shop will be shut. Had I wrote it for the Gain of the Press, I should have been concern’d at its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates, as they call them, and Paragraph-Men: But would they but do it Justice, and print it True, according to the Copy, they are welcome to sell it for a Penny, if they please.
So, rather than making a furious complaint, Defoe appears to be saying “If my motive in writing this was to sell it to a printer in exchange for their ‘protected’ royalty, I would have been upset at any unauthorised reproduction. Instead, people are welcome to sell it for a penny a copy1, as long as those copies are fair.”
It sounds like Defoe had a good grasp of a more principled approach to publication. Perhaps we might even deduce that Defoe was the first author to welcome pirates as good for publicity and promotion?
He goes on to recognise that commerce is the objective of pirates, and supposes that if no-one buys then no-one will write. But he then sardonically suggests that this would mean that none of his detractors would publish their response, given no money in it – insinuating his detractors put money before principle.
Defoe therefore effectively recognises that for some purposes some people will write irrespective of reward (and that for others they will not).
So, with the Statute of Anne in 1709, we have roughly three centuries of piracy and copyright behind us. Hopefully, that’s the way it will remain.
_______________________________
1 This seems serendipitously resonant with my pet project 1p2U (in development) to enable people to pay bloggers a penny for each article they publish (which can then be philanthropically pirated without shame or fear of prosecution).