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Without marketing, there is little difference between the old vanity press and the new except instead of printing up books and storing them in your garage, you eprint books and store them on a server, all unseen but by the author with his shattered dream. The days of thumbing through books to see for oneself is replaced with a few first pages or selected at random. It is impossible for me to judge that way for non-fiction, and for fiction there is a necessary judgment of the basis of style whereby a kitschy style is evident from the outset, but a subtle consistent style is not. Vulgar is marketable; tawdry sells, and others have to find their way into their markets even if interesting plot and characters also sell. Oh, and what a bad idea for an author, except  for porn, to sell by the page. Kindle Unlimited used to pay the author the whole royalty if 10% of the book was read, and now it pays according to any large or small portion read. Never assume any publisher traditional or digital ever once has the interests of the author:

https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2016/0 … unlimited/

it is easy to see why many authors were upset by the change to pay per page. Before KU, if you wrote a 150 page eBook, and priced it at $2.99 you would make $2.09 (after Amazon’s 30% royalty) off of a sale of that book and you would realize that revenue as soon as a reader downloaded the book. Under KU, that same book nets you $0.75, and that is only once a reader completes the entire book, which may happen within 24 hours or 6 months of the reader borrowing the book. Additionally, as an author you do not know what the payout per page will be until the following month, so it’s hard to determine what the max. value of your book in KU is in any given month.

... but the advantage of KU or Lending Library is that there is an implicit Amazon marketing for the book. However, the possible difference between $2.09 and $0.75 a book means that marketing is not free and reaches the level of a scam because neither the author nor reader, really, is served well. Once a reader has read past the first 10% of a book, he may judge a book, except for some literary fiction, perhaps, but having read 11% or 85% does not mean he has read the book and could be incentivized, if bound to pay the full price, to read it to the end, if $2.99 over $0.32 (11%) means much. There is all along a fundamental problem of pricing ebooks too low even when discounting for the fact that the book does not incur the cost of paper printing. The author should always be given a high fraction of the price for an ebook that involves no more than the cost of standing overhead for the ebook-server merchant.

That has been a primary tool for the Feds to get around the Constitution. It needed to have applied to international situations for a while after the Founding but not in 1898 Wong Kim Ark, for example (may be the first example), when it was asserted 14th century English Common Law (but not later explicit 17th-century law)  over-rode the words in the Constitution that gave Congress sole discretion respecting citizenship. I,8,4 of the Constitution was deliberately put in to monopolize all citizenship not natural born (to U.S. citizens born to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil) to the discretion of Congress.  Indeed, Justice Marshall did usurp power to SCOTUS via Marbury v. Madison on the logic of "precedent" and to this day is even a failing of "conservative" judges like Scalia but not Thomas.

At any federal level of the judiciary, with no human quality at all but rather an impartial sorting of conflicting or contradictory law. English Common Law judgement is inappropriate above the state level. What we have now with "constitutional law"  above the Constitution is the product of nine mullahs.

That does not reflect over history what has happened. The new law would cover those already covered by the old law in the same way a driver on the road has to obey a new traffic rule and not follow the old rule. Application of new law can work both ways to advantage or disadvantage a citizen in an existing situation. You suggest a situation that is phantasm: that, for example, Congress has every decade simply extended copyrights another decade. 

apart from International and Digital-Age complications, Congress has acted to significantly change the law only five times since 1790, and four involving the sort of extensions you worry about..

1790
Extensive revisions - 1831  twenty-eight years with the possibility of a fourteen-year extension irrespective of the lifetime of the author, 1870 (administrative), 1891 (International provisions), 1909  twenty eight year extension, 1976, extended protection from life of the author plus fifty years , 1988 (International provisions), 1990 (Computer software), 1992 (automatic renewal), 1996 (computer provisions), 1998 (Bono Act,  extended protection from life of the author plus fifty years to life of the author plus seventy years), 1998 (computer provisions), 2007 ("fair use"), 2010-present, courts busy with sorting out digital-age complications.

Disney just happened to be a beneficiary of the Sonny Bono Law which extended all copyrights to his entertainment-industry pals.  LIMITED TIME can mean a century if that is what Congress wants. Too bad SCOTUS did not give the absolute constitutional prerogative that belongs to Congress over citizenship, too.

Do you mean the distinction between corporate trademarking of an image which is perpetual and an individual's copyright of art that can have a long life but not perpetual after death because the assumption is that a corporation is chartered into perpetuity and a human being cannot be so? Why is a drug patent seven years and Disney's Micky Mouse copyright was 96 years? A patent on a product is seen as most productive within a short time span, but the economic benefit from art may not accrue even within the lifetime of the artist -- in traditional sensibility, that is, and not in the phenomenon of Pop music which is rather more like a patented packaged manufactured product.

Sorry, either it was an forced error caused by a glitch, or I was replying to the post before it but clicked the wrong "quote" link (or something unintentional like that).  Notice, if I had clicked on "quote" again, I would have sent it through a third time but didn't.  I also noticed rather  than taking any opportunity to respond essentially, you chose to assume I was evil and not fallible, and you bitched.

The distinction dithers on the parody/satire/criticism exception that almost never applies to Fanfic, and Salinger is a later decision, though not to the Appellate level,  and dismissed arguments for parody exception -- which in detail was obvious, for it was an unauthorized sequel, and The Wind Done Gone is obviously a distorted, exaggerated version to emphasize contempt for GWTW.   

To meet this legal bar, the specifics of the contest would have to require a parody/satirical nature.

I was more responding to Rhiannon than to you on the matter of a good author relying on CMS or any grammar and style handbook to reinforce his memory of something he knew already rather than on the matter of a bad author relying on an editor whose job is to scam him to put lipstick on a pig.

I haven't commented on the vast bureaucracy of ladies who cannot seem to have found husbands or a government jobs on the basis of worthless English or History college degrees and whose jobs are to pick candidates for publication.

I also did not comment on the farther reach into maintaining that Progressive Hegelian hegemony which senior editors do.

Fanfic is theft of intellectual property. Salinger, et al. vs. John Doe, et al. U.S. District Court, NY. (2010)

Why is an editor correct, and a competent author not? Aside from final publishing-house-rules edits -- which means the book has already been accepted -- I see there is an implication an editor is needed at all. Why is that?

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