So under ordinary circumstances, when they do their Controlled Digital Lending, for each copy they lend out there's an actual dead-tree book sitting on a shelf somewhere?
I might sound radical here, so feedback is welcome. But this reads to me like anti-free-market: Invent a product, sell product with protections to limit theft of the idea, market evolves and the product and derivatives stop being profitable, no active market for product but protections continue... There's a logic break in the logistics there.
Maybe some protections allow them to transform the original product for a current market, but if that does nothing about the market for the original product, unauthorized distribution is immaterial to the holder. They can't lose revenue on a product they weren't exercising due diligence to earn revenue on at that time.
That all being said, I still agree with you. I really don't care how much money Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony wants to make on decades-old games, at a certain point it becomes a cultural artifact. Snow White and other century-old movie properties should be public domain nowadays as well. At this point we're debating about the core values of trademark law though, and I'm not sure you wanted to do that.
A similar debate revolves around what the law should say about "dead" games. These are games that, for example, rely on a central server that has been shut down. Many of these games were incredibly popular in their day, and some "radicals" (like myself, lol) argue that game companies should be compelled to release the server source code in an effort to preserve the game. Here's a great overview/rant on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Why does time need to pass for that to be true?
Or, in other words, Rai Stone coins, but books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
I'm not sure how to get from there to "screw copyright." Yes, it's weird that the law requires (at least under normal circumstances, and if the Internet Archive is wrong, also today) physical copies of books as essentially "reserves" for scanned versions of books. I don't think that it follows that it's weird that the law requires that you have to pay per copy.
In the pre-digital world, if a library wanted to lend out ten copies of a book, they'd have to pay for ten copies, and that wasn't weird. And this isn't an argument about zero-marginal-cost products, because a good chunk of the money the library spent would not go to the physical cost of book printing. (In fact most people's intuitions would say it's fairer that there's a profit beyond the marginal cost, because that way the author and editor get compensated more for more successful books.)
Yes, it'd be significantly better if the Internet Archive needed to have one physical copy (or even zero). I don't think it's weird that if they or any other library wants to lend out ten copies, they have to buy ten copies.
(I'm sympathetic to arguments of the form "information wants to be free," but, well, people want to eat, too. If injustice A is mitigated by injustice B, snapping your fingers and getting rid of B without having a plan to deal for A isn't a just action. Whether or not authors should depend on copyright for their livelihood, many of them do. And yes, several don't - so in particular, I'm much more sympathetic to the Internet Archive's action when it comes to textbooks, journals, etc. written by people who have a primary livelihood other than book-writing, such as college faculty, and much less sympathetic when it comes to books written by people who's job title is "author.")
Digital books are not paper books. They are fundamentally different things. Paper books are scarce, digital books are not. Information is not scarce.
In the pre-e-book world, libraries could always copy books on their own. They could say, we're buying one copy of this book at $25, and then we'll print another thousand copies ourselves at $5 each and sell them to other libraries. Quality might have been lower, but it would have gotten books into the hands of more people, right? Why didn't they?
> People have to eat, but having to sell books just to put food on the table is also obscene. Food is a basic human right and should never be staked on whether or not you can successfully sue your audience.
I don't disagree. But that's not the world we live in. Food shouldn't be staked on that, but it is. Let's solve that first, and then we can start taking people's livelihoods away.
This is kind of like saying "Tipping is an unjust and evil and stupid system, so I'm not going to tip." Yes, it is an unjust and evil and stupid system - but the practical effect of not tipping is nothing more than underpaying people who, for better or worse, rely on that unjust and evil and stupid system. Fix the system first (e.g., petition your favorite restaurant to raise prices and have a no-tipping policy, and patronize those that have already done that), then you can stop tipping without hurting people
You can sell them for whatever people will pay for them. You can sell the bandwidth for the eBook for whatever people will pay.
>In the pre-e-book world, libraries could always copy books on their own. They could say, we're buying one copy of this book at $25, and then we'll print another thousand copies ourselves at $5 each and sell them to other libraries. Quality might have been lower, but it would have gotten books into the hands of more people, right? Why didn't they?
Because of the same broken copyright system which is going to have lawyers burning down the doors of archive.org once they're allowed to leave their caves post-coronavirus. They should be copying these books and sending them to other libraries for a fraction of the cost.
>I don't disagree. But that's not the world we live in. Food shouldn't be staked on that, but it is. Let's solve that first, and then we can start taking people's livelihoods away.
I didn't suggest we immediately transition to a copyright free world. I said "screw copyright".
And, for the record, we are already in a world where this works. Thousands of content creators in all fields of media are making a living based on crowdsourced funding and free distribution of content to their audience. This model has been consistently growing and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. A lot of people are making more money with this model than they would be with traditional publishing and suing everyone who coughs on their book and lets someone else look at the tissue.
Hell - all businesses face the risk of needing to pivot. Same holds true for authors. If the current approach isn't working because people are sharing your books, then you need to change your approach.
True, you didn't say that - but that's kind of what the Internet Archive is doing. I'm definitely in agreement with the position that we should work towards a world where a lending library like they're running is both ethical and legal. I don't think the Internet Archive unilaterally running such a library is a measurable step towards that world, and it also seems to have made a bunch of people who previously only cared about their copyrights in theory (because piracy wasn't significant and so they didn't actually ever think about suits or lawyers) start caring about them in practice, which seems strategically like it gets us farther fro that world.
Re crowdsourced funding - yes, it's very promising and I'm excited about it, but I'm a little hesitant of extrapolating to it making copyright irrelevant. A number of people who produce creative works under Patreon-style models still rely on copyright: they produce works that are available only to paying subscribers, and people who say "this is a zero-marginal-cost product, so I can duplicate it" undermine their ability to get subscribers. Or, in other words, there are some creators who are funded by enthusiastic supporters who would pay either way, and there are some creators who are funded by customers who are still paying to get access to zero-marginal-cost products (except that the mechanics of how they pay is a little different), and these look very similar from the outside.
I'm genuinely glad and excited that the model of enthusiasts funding free software development is working for many people (including you), but free software has historically worked on models different from how book/music/article/video/etc. production has worked. For instance, it's already pretty well established (by Red Hat) that you can make a successful free software company by charging for support. I don't think we've figured out what the equivalent of "charge for support" is for, say, books.
First: that's not what they're doing - they're taking emergency measures during a national crisis to ensure that people still have access to books. They have made explicit their plans to return to business as usual once the nation returns to normalcy.
Second: the first step to change is often civil disobedience. I look forward to seeing how this plays out in court, and I commend their bravery in taking a stand for what's right. What "measurable steps" towards this world would you suggest they take?
>A number of people who produce creative works under Patreon-style models still rely on copyright: they produce works that are available only to paying subscribers, and people who say "this is a zero-marginal-cost product, so I can duplicate it" undermine their ability to get subscribers.
I think I'm qualified to tell you simply that you are wrong. This is not how it works. You can give away your products for free and rely on the voluntary generosity of your audience. Many, many people do. In fact, most people do. Those publishing exclusive content for paid supporters are in the minority in this group.
A huge issue with it is that the creative bears all the risks of chargebacks and payment processor issues. Chargebacks can eat up funding tremendously quickly, and can lead to being banned even from the service that manages patronage for you. And using services like paypal is another existential risk; paypal can freeze or ban you. If anything a publisher's check is more stable.
There's also issues with how much earnings can fluctuate for small creators based on whale donors. People who donate large amounts each month can really hurt small creators if they withdraw. Selling books for example kind of limits the impact of any one sale since all are the same price.
Oh, and patron stuff is bad overall for creativity. A lot of it is porn, a lot of it is just rewarding successful people already, and the demands of self-marketing and maintenance take a lot of time away from the artist to make stuff. It's the same with "indie" culture, it wound up being spamming things like harem gamelit or series books, because that's really what the financial system rewards now.
I think eventually it's just going to implode.
I would instinctively agree that the model doesn't work super well for authors / musicians / etc., and being a well-known free-software hacker whom people are willing to support is actually pretty unusual, but I don't have data to back this up.
The fact that CDL is allowed at all is a victory against these greedy copyright types.
That's still not entirely in keeping with the limited domain that libraries used to have, where lending out a book came with a physical cost of getting it to the patron. But it's close enough for reasonable opinions to differ.
So it's about preserving the structure by which book people (not just authors, but editors, publicists, publishers, layout, cover artists, etc) get paid.