Here we go again, more hair-trigger bitching and whining from The Authors Guild and its ilk.

No matter how noble or justified the cause for copying may be, the poor little darlings just can't help themselves. They've been screaming and whinging over being supposedly hard done by with respect to copyright royalties even before that arch villain, bully and saint to copyright owners, Victor Hugo, bulldozed unfair changes to copyright through the 1886 Berne Copyright Convention.

…And 'bulldozed' is the right word; for in the early days of the 1880s consumers and end-users of copyright material essentially had no representation at the Berne Convention (as obviously one would expect), thus the power imbalance between authors/copyright holders and consumers/users of copyright material was so one-sided in favor of the former group that if the Berne Convention had been convened today with the same terms of reference as those in 1886 then its deliberations and decisions would likely be deemed to have arrived from corrupt processes.

For starters, Berne essentially never touched on matters such as the fact that authors get their ideas, life experience and knowledge mostly from the public domain and that many were even educated or gained their knowledge at public expense, and thus they should have some reciprocal if not moral obligation to the return at least some of their output back into the public domain. Instead, the Berne Convention so favored authors that they had nothing to do to justify or prove their right over the copyright of a work other than the existence of the work itself. That means that the onus always falls on consumers/users of copyrighted works to determine their status (Berne essentially encourages authors to 'double-dip' or take from both sides, it absolves them of having any obligation to anyone but tothemselves).

In effect, Hugo and his cronies used shrewdness and cunning to get every damn thing they wished for out of the Berne Convention—they had carte blanche, as there was no effective opposition to their proposals. 'Unfairness' was the order of the day.

Trouble is, this mob was so successful at Berne that ever since they've assumed that they've a god-given right to take umbrage and raise utter hell whenever anyone takes the slightest liberties with copyright—even if those actions are lawful.

You'll note there's always one theme that perennially underpins their complaints and that's how little the mean income that authors receive from royalties actually is. Well my response to that is if writing etc. brings in so little income then why do they have it as their occupation? Of course, we all know that being an author (with some exceptions) is often more a case of self-aggrandizement and wanting to be immortalized in print forever than it is to inform the world of new ideas through new works.

As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, one of the major problems in trying to achieve equitable copyright reform for everyone is—with the exception of authors and rights holders—that so few people are actually interested in the subject. Despite the fact that copyright is an important issue, the lack of widespread expertise in the subject together with the fact that little serious public debate on the matter is taking place are both significant impediments to copyright reform.

In the meantime, the whiners will continue to bitch and whinge. I reckon it's best just to ignore them.