the thing is I just don't think intellectual labour is a special class of labour. I just don't think someone who created an intellectual product like a manuscript deserves the rights to extracting rent forever from physical copies of it more than the person who maintains the printers. I will just never be convinced of this.
This is such a bizarre take to me. I hate copyright but it seems for very different reasons. But also I just don't get what it's complaining about - the publishers always get their cut. In fact everyone typically complains their cut it too big. And their cut pays the person who maintains the printers. And keeps paying it as long as the book keeps getting printed and purchased.
Information wants to be free. Someone who writes a manuscript deserves to be paid for their efforts, if people read it. I fundamentally do not understand the difference between internet piracy and libraries. I value and respect the work of authors. An author contributes more towards the existence of a book than someone who maintains a printer. And especially more for a book that only exists online than someone who maintains a server. Everyone involved deserves to get paid for their work and realistically the one most at risk of not being paid for their contributions to the finished product in the real world right now is the author. If each physical book costs $20 retail, I would say that the author should end up getting more of that $20 than the printer-maintainer. Each of them should get a cut, and does.
I think it is also worth pointing out that the author can only produce a small numbers of books during their lifetime, and most authors struggle enormously to pay their cost of living by just producing books.
On the other hand, the printers can manufacture an enormous quantity of different books from different authors in high volumes to make up the cost of living for their employees.
The author has a greater need for a percentage of that income to be able to sustainably continue to be an author.
The very famous millionaire authors are complete outliers.
