Ending the pandemic would definitely help increase the bottom line of authors like me, and so I would selfishly love it if we brought it to a swifter close by allowing all countries access to life-saving vaccines. https://twitter.com/neilturkewitz/status/1372579105401663491

The only feedback mechanism between “opening vaccine IP” and “author livelihood” is positive, thanks.

I also personally feel that saving hundreds of thousands of lives is a thing we should commit to doing as a society, and if doing so would otherwise threaten someone’s livelihood, we should make sure that person gets assistance so nobody is left behind.

Anyway! I have zero IP solidarity with Big Pharma. We are not in any way alike, and it’s bizarre seeing someone try to claim that relaxing IP to save lives is going to somehow hurt invidual authors.

I also have zero IP solidarity with conglomerators like Elsevier. It makes absolutely zero sense, in a pandemic, for places that house scientific research, to continue to charge wildly expensive prices for access to basic, life-saving scientific research.

Did Elsevier do that research? No. Did they pay for it to be done? Also no.

Why on earth are they paywalling scientific articles about life-saving medical techniques, and thereby preventing doctors who lack access to those articles from saving lives?

Nobody should have to GO to the WTO to request access to scientific articles on best medical practices in the time of COVID! They should already be opening these up.

The guy I quote-tweeted is using an Author’s Guild study to oppose *this*:

I greatly resent my livelihood being used by someone this ethically challenged because he somehow thinks that it will hurt authors and musicians (????) if governments (????) are allowed to share scientific information about the pandemic (??????)

I also personally feel that the biggest threat to small creatives is people not respecting IP. We can’t sue anyone. We don’t have time. We can’t really do anything by way of enforcement.

Mostly, we just hope that people think “I like your stuff and I like you, and it’s no biggy for me if I toss a couple of dollars your way.”

Becoming copyright ghouls is...not going to make people respect our IP more. It’s going to make them say things like, “I don’t like you, and you seem like an absolute troll, so fuck you if you get my money.”

So I personally think people who are like “sorry, musicians and authors need hundreds of thousands of people to die, that’s just the law of copyright” are doing a lot more to hurt the livelihood of authors and musicians than people asking for reasonable accomodation.

And look, if you can save someone’s life by pirating my book, fuck my IP rights, life comes first.

I’m adding my conversation with the original poster here so you can see my acknowledgment that Doctorow thought this was about patent, not copyright, which is why I talked about the copyright aspects later in this thread.

https://twitter.com/neilturkewitz/status/1387185402507890688?s=20

It’s also so you can see that @neilturkewitz has affirmatively dodged the very important question of why affirming a right to share scientific information about how to save lives in a pandemic will impact author and musician income.