Right now anything you say or write I can re-print, to a point. You write a really bad book I can take and post/publish excerpts from it to show others. I just can't copy the whole book. However the context of this thread is "out of print scenarios". So in that context, lets go back the my first post/comment. If "MMP/AH/and whom ever here", has an out of print item and I have asked them for a copy of it, and been told "sorry OOP". Should the law be changed to allow someone else to provide me a copy?If someone still has the copyright, why not simply ask them for the right to copy the scenario?
I'm not sure a law that compels entities to publish information is a good idea. What if said work was a defamatory book that I had worked years to get pulled from the shelves? Now, all of a sudden, my critics can put that work back into circulation because it is OOP?
What if I was someone REALLY rich, like Bill Gates, and I bought the rights to ASL and decided I was going to let it rot since I got spanked one time while playing it? Then the rest of the world is out of luck?
So as you can see all of a sudden anyone with money can now control what you have access to read, or even play.. That to me is a very scary world. (this has been going on in Hollywood for a long time, People going back and buying early "stag" movies thay made before they "hit it big" trying to change the past.)
At least with the internet most people have learned that "information wants to be free", as in out there for people to read, share and talk about. This is one of the reasons that the Gov prevents most large companies from buying all of the radio stations in one area (Clear Channel has gotten around this somehow) and deciding what your going to listen to on the radio.
The point I guess I'm trying to talk about here is: With all of the electronic forms of moving information around, why do we still have to wait for someone to "print" out a document before we can buy it or even read it?
I'm not going to go into the whole "stealing" and what not, face it, there are people out there that would not bother to pay for it if they could get it for free. However, if MMP decided to allow us to buy PDF's of XYZ from them, most of us would spend more money on them. Maybe a few of us would even go as far as to print out the PDF's and have an electronic copy as well as a hard copy. And I think even more of us would buy the electronic copy alond with the printed copy of XYZ.. Why do I say this? Ask yourself how much "copied" ASL stuff is there out in the wild? Not much, sure some one will be kind enough to burn you a copy of a chapter from the RB. But I really don't think your going to find someone that will send you the whole RB.