Nine pound round | 05 Jun 2021 4:56 a.m. PST |
Does anyone know where a copy can be found for a moderate price? It's unusually hard to find a reading copy online for anything under $150. USD PDF format would be great, if anyone has it. |
parrskool | 05 Jun 2021 6:30 a.m. PST |
read for free on "internet archive " ? |
robert piepenbrink | 05 Jun 2021 6:36 a.m. PST |
Add it to the long, long list of "out of print but still under copyright" Nine pound. And speak to your congresscritter about the Google Settlement which never went through. Looks as though it's one of the ones Google scanned which they are not permitted to print out and sell. (Archive says "not in library" by the way.) My list includes Massacre by James Warner Bellah, Junger's On the Marble Cliffs and Philip Youngman Carter's All I Did was This. Oh. And the complete Jorkens stories, of course. |
John the OFM | 05 Jun 2021 9:03 a.m. PST |
Would someone please explain to me why Google should be allowed to print and sell out of print but still in copyright material? If a stop was put to that it's a good thing. "But I want it!" is not a legitimate reason for a huge mega-corporation to run roughshod over copyright. Stick to the Gutenberg Bible or Newton's Principia. Copyright exists for a reason. |
Stryderg | 05 Jun 2021 1:16 p.m. PST |
Looks like it was published in 1936. How do you find out who owns the copyright? Google searches for "who owns the copyright to "Memoirs Of An Unconventional Soldier" just takes to pages where you can buy a copy. Google is becoming more and more useless as time goes by. |
Stryderg | 05 Jun 2021 1:19 p.m. PST |
Looks like the Australian War Memorial has a copy: link Not sure if they would do an inter-library loan, especially internationally. But it might worth an email. Government of India has a copy: link |
robert piepenbrink | 05 Jun 2021 6:05 p.m. PST |
John, pay a little attention to the problem before you start whining. Right now, about 3/4 of anything ever published in English is both under copyright and out of print. Given the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act, copyrights go on so long with no action required on anyone's part it's frequently impossible to find out who holds said copyright--which might easily be half a dozen people who do not themselves know. (Fuller died in 1966. Under current law his 1936 memoirs will be under copyright until 2056. Good luck tracking possible heirs to that copyright.) Google, having gone to considerable time and effort to scan entire libraries, cut a deal with the Authors Guild: anything not in print could have been printed out POD, and anyone holding copyright would received 15% of the gross--better than they're likely to do in the local bookshop, setting aside the whole "out of print" business. If no copyright holder could be located within five years, the money would be donated to a literacy foundation. A federal judge denied the POD aspect, so it would require a change in the law. If you've got a better program, I'm interested. "Copyright exists for a reason" all right. So do patents. But they also don't last forever for a number of very good reasons. Seventeen years renewable for 17 more was reasonable. The reason for 90 years from the death of the author was to protect Disney from losing their grip on old movies. So our current copyright standard was created to let a huge mega-corporation run roughshod. Interesting you should support that one. |
Skarper | 05 Jun 2021 7:50 p.m. PST |
Copyright does need a radical rethink. It's not doing what most people think it should and it's enriching mega-corporations while denying people access to content. I'm sure JFC Fuller would want his work to be read and has no need of the royalties… |
John the OFM | 05 Jun 2021 8:03 p.m. PST |
My question was not answered. What gives Google the right to assume that they are in effect the deciders of what is right and wrong regarding copyright? "Waaah! But I want it!" Is not a valid excuse. If it means that much to you, contact your Congress persons. Who are we to decide what Fuller "really wanted"? Who is Google? Who is anyone to decide whether or not his heirs (if any) are competent to decide? I for one am not willing to let Google, Amazon or Facebook rule the world and decide what is what. |
robert piepenbrink | 06 Jun 2021 3:50 a.m. PST |
No, John. You let Disney decide. Are you sure that's an improvement? And my first comment said "speak to your congresscritter." |
Legion 4 | 06 Jun 2021 9:56 a.m. PST |
I don't think some get it … High Tech companies are in control. They are Big Brother … |
Nine pound round | 20 Oct 2021 12:26 p.m. PST |
Found a facsimile version of the 1936 edition, which was done in the UK in 2015. Good reading copy at an economical price. |
Nine pound round | 05 Nov 2021 2:11 p.m. PST |
And as entertaining as you would expect. Fuller was about as much of a man of action as an intellectual can be, and the book is full of lots of thoroughly entertaining pen portraits (particularly of Henry Wilson). But it's clearly a work of its era, and the conclusion – that Fascism is the way of the future- did not age well. But worth reading for the page and a half summarizing the ten memos that a request for a drawing compass generated….some things are eternal. |
mkenny | 06 Nov 2021 2:32 a.m. PST |
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Nine pound round | 06 Nov 2021 7:40 a.m. PST |
The application at the link loads perpetually; what is it? |
Steve Wilcox | 06 Nov 2021 8:47 a.m. PST |
The application at the link loads perpetually; what is it? Try this: link |
Nine pound round | 07 Nov 2021 8:03 a.m. PST |
Looks like the 1936 edition, which was the version I found in reprint. It is a revised version of the 1935 edition. I don't know that it was reprinted after WWII. After the war, Fuller revised some of the books he published between the wars to tone done some of his conclusions, but the closing of this one would have been hard to revise. Fuller is an interesting guy: strange, brilliant, and in many ways, the prewar theorist who came the closest to "getting" the way armor was to be used in WWII. It's unfortunate that his embrace of Fascism made him too toxic to employ; he might have made some interesting contributions to the Allied war effort. |