• 72 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • There’s the real strategic concern that escalating too quickly will have nuclear repercussions. But the deeper reasons are visible if you view most governments as military industrial corporations stacked under a trenchcoat. The true motivator is that the longer the war continues, the more money will flow from their respective tax payers into their pockets. They don’t care about Ukrainian lives, they don’t care about Russian lives. The popular support for the war and lack of domestic casualties means they get to ply their trade of death, and they come out smelling like roses. Opposing Russian colonialism is a noble cause, but the nobility belongs to those who are dying in the foxholes, not the warmongers who are squeezing this crisis to get more capital.

    Western leaders don’t want Ukraine to win. They want Russia to lose. A quick cauterized wound is less damaging than a slow bleed out. Total bankruptcy of the Russian war machine is the objective, the economic elimination of their primary trade competitor.














  • Why do you assume because I listed the most prominent example of GOSH’s censorship, that it was the only one? GOSH also litigated against Canadian author J. E. Somma. In both cases, GOSH settled out of court, and in both cases GOSH enforced a lack of transparency over the settlement as part of the terms. The point of these examples is to demonstrate that GOSH went beyond the bounds of mere royalty collector when they saw the chance, not to demonstrate chilling effect.

    Chilling effect is not about the books that survived the gauntlet of publication to make it to the litigation stage; it’s about all the ideas that never had a chance to blossom because the threat of copyright enforcement nipped them in the bud. Part of what makes this kind of corporate theft so insidious is that it is impossible to count the works it prevented from existing, or judge the social good they would have done.





  • Are you saying that ALL royalties for derivative works/use of IP are an abridgement of free speech in your view?

    I do believe copyright, its continued extensions in favor of rights-holders, and associated attacks on the fair use doctrine are abridgements of free speech. I also believe each addition of complexity to copyright law is a gift to copyright law firms and the consolidated publishing corporations who can easily afford to employ them, as well as an attack on small publishers and authors to whom employing solicitors and barristers is an onerous burden. But that’s not what I’m arguing here.

    I’m saying that granting eternal royalties from Peter Pan to GOSH creates a monetary disincentive for anyone but GOSH to publish derivative Peter Pan works. This creates a chilling effect on the republication of Barrie works and re-use of Peter Pan characters, and is worthy of outrage. This is similar in effect to the intractable libel laws that financially disincentivize publishing negative news about powerful figures and institutions in Britain, which is even more outrageous. I’m also saying that the special copyright status of Peter Pan and larger problems like the libel law situation are evidence of the same underlying issue: Britain’s relative disinterest in protecting free speech.



  • I think a solution where the community gets some kind of codified constitution is a good one, but it requires both a knowledge of organizational law and a understanding of what makes the community great. If things get nailed down too soon, or get something wrong, it could really mess BeeHaw up. Maybe it’s a good long term goal.

    I do wish people would not use start-up terminology like ‘runway’ - it’s a aviation metaphor, and implies an eventual ‘take off’ which is usually the point at which a start-up goes public or is sold by the capital investment firm to take their sky-high profits.