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Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

This is what copyright was actually for... Publishers would put out a book, it'd get popular then cut-rate copies would swamp the market. Copyright was done to protect the publisher from this sort of abuse (and secondarily the author, as the publisher was their only means of reaching an audience).

This should be the top (and only IMO) priority of CC enforcement instead of going after sci-hub and the like.

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Originally. But then publishers got greedy ("greed is forever") and instead of a relatively short term of protection before becoming public domain we now have stupid multi-decade restrictions. Those prevent us from printing good out of print books and do not give any benefit to either publisher or the author.

I agree with this. It would be nice to have a reduced grace period for books before they're public domain - something like 40 years seems reasonable to me.

40 years seems excessive. I searched a bit for some reference

> We find that almost all books, regardless of category, peak in the first 15 weeks after publication

https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...

A graph with sales per week/week after publication

https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...

Seems that 2 years after publication the number of copies sold per week declines by two orders of magnitude compared to the peak.

I think I like that idea more. My lean to 40 years is just to satisfy the needs of some academic IPs. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to categorise IP duration though

I think the applications could be protectable, not the pure academic research. If there is no clear practical benefit in 10 years, do not prevent others from working on those findings to try for something more practical.

To me, 5-7 years seems reasonable for technology inventions (patents), 7-10 years for books and other art.

> Publishers would put out a book, it'd get popular then cut-rate copies would swamp the market. Copyright was done to protect the publisher from this sort of abuse (and secondarily the author, as the publisher was their only means of reaching an audience).

Stephen Breyer, the recently retired Supreme Court Justice, wrote an interesting article in 1970 back when he was a law professor about that, called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright".

In it he argued that cut-rate copies swamping the market did not actually happen historically. Books made most of their money fairly shortly after publication. Copying technology was slow enough that by the time someone could get copies made and distributed there wasn't much market left for the book anyway. (Also, there weren't huge booksellers with massive inventory, or book on demand services, further making it harder for a book to get much sales after the first printing).

Now copying technology is a lot faster, and we do have huge booksellers like Amazon and book on demand services and we have ebooks so there is pretty much no cost to keeping a book available indefinitely, and so most of Breyer's points are no longer applicable even if they were possibly correct in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.

That doesn’t sound right. There was a thriving trade in unauthorized editions of American books in England and English books in America in the nineteenth century, since there was no mutually recognized copyright between the two countries and there was money to be made selling, e.g., Dickens’s novels in the U.S., especially if there wasn’t any need to pay the author. The ability to make photographic plates from printed material (a technology developed in the second half of the nineteenth century) also reduced the cost of typesetting.

Dickens is a pretty big outlier in sales longevity. The percentage of books that are still selling copies 100 years after they're published rounds to 0%.

This goes for most entertainment. The vast majority of books, movies and videogames have sales declining after a year.

Theoretically there is a 100 years copyright on StarCraft but I doubt a lot of people will buy it on GoG in 2050.

IMO Safaribooksonline is the gold standard of content piracy. In the sense of how rampant it is.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? The platform formerly known as Safari Books is now O'Reilly Learning, and I have every reason to believe that it is all above-board, with proper licensing from all of the included publishers.

It appears to me that there is little policing of plagiarism.

What do you mean? Authors get paid when you view their content on Safari.

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