A right to read?
Richard Stallman has taken up arms against the Canadian injuctions focussing on the 14 people who were sold Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before it’s official publication date.
This is far from a “human rights” issue, as Stallman tries to frame it, and it’s essentially a tempest in a teapot. To attempt to slant it to be larger than that is to engage in the slippery-slope fallacy. It does not follow that compelling these folks to remain silent on (indeed to not even read) the contents of that book means that other publishers will use the same precedent to quash other, more controversial books, or even if they tried that they’d be able to do so.
Perhaps enjoining these buyers not even to read these books was a tad extreme, but I think the publisher has the right to expect that they can exert a certain amount of control over when the contents of the book are made public. What’s between those pages is a trade secret as certainly as the formula for Coca-Cola is. Beyond that fact, the publisher isn’t insisting that the contents be held secret indefinitely; only until the publication date.
I think as far as “human rights” are concerned we as a race have larger things to worry about than this “violation”.
I’m not linking to Stallman’s page here, but if you want to go read it you should also read what Doc has to say, which is where I got it: The Doc Searls Weblog : Plot burial. I can’t tell what Doc’s take on the subject is, in fact he almost seems not to have one.
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