Z-Library Responds to U.S. Crackdown, Asks Authors for Forgiveness

And herein lies the problem with socialism...

See for example:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical-Copyright_Protectio...>

Mechanical royalties based on exposures and prevalence are already well-established.

I'd suggest a combination of a basic income plus some level of extraordinary royalties, given that writing's reward is exceedingly uneven, both in distribution amongst authors and over time. Present "tentpole" revenues in publishing (and television, film, and music) reflect this within a market context, where blockbusters support far smaller, often much higher-quality (from a literary, cinemographic, or musical sense) works. A replacement scheme should offer a similar mechanism.

Alternatively, a bidding system in which tranches of works are offered differing levels of compensation, based on various quality-criteria assessments, genres, and classes of works, might be used. Meme-generation and investigative journalism, for example, should arguably not be compensated equivalently.

RMS's "Internet Sharing" proposal (2012) suggests a popularity-based mechanism:

I propose instead to pay each artist according to the cube root of his or her popularity. More precisely, the system could ascertain the popularity of each work, divide that among the work's artists to get a figure for each artist, then compute the cube root of that figure, and set the artist's share in proportion to that cube root.

The effect of the cube root stage would be to increase the shares of moderately popular artists by reducing the shares of superstars. Each individual superstar would still get more than an individual non-superstar, even several times as much, but not hundreds or thousands of times as much. Shifting the funds towards moderately popular artists means that a given total sum will adequately support a larger number of artists. Furthermore, the money will do more good for the arts because it will go to the artists who really need it.

<https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...>

Everything ever published.

Globally, you can effectively divide markets into roughly the 1 billion inhabitants of advanced industrialised nations, largely in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia/NZ, and the 7 billion others. You could reduce this somewhat to the G7: US, EU, UK, Japan, and Canada, and individually France, Germany, and Italy. Australia and NZ are among the notable exclusions.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7>

Combined, the G7 have 10 percent of global population (roughly 800 million), whilst accounting for half of global net worth and 32--46% of global GDP.

I'd be reasonably comfortable with some construct based around a core of the G7 underwriting the bulk of global knowledge creation. They already do, though there's notable cultural creation as well in India (Bollywood) and China (no toponym of which I'm aware).

There's the question of independent creation outside the advanced core and how that might best be compensated, especially where those works aren't widely accessed from industrialised countries. I'd still suggest a similar general framework.

But in general: compensation would be within countries or economic unions, paid by residents of those regions to creators within them.

Pre-production financing might be achieved within such a system as well, if production companies or studios were organised as recipients, particularly for large-scale creative works. That ... doesn't seem like a deal-breaker, and there's long-standing precedent in the form of commissioned works, artistic creative organisations (theatres, orchestras, etc.), which have managed long-term sustained funding. Mechanical royalties for any remotely-viewed / streamed productions would seem to offer greater stability and equality of opportunity in such regards.

I agree with you generally regarding the evolution of present copyright regimes, and their lack of efficacy in their (US-jurisdiction specific) stated goal to "promote the progress...". (Note that copyright justifications in other jurisdictions differ, often strongly, see for example France with its emphasis on droit d'auteur.)

There are a few questions at play, and they may suggest a variety of different approaches. What I will note about the universal licence / tax-based / broadband-fee approach is that it seems to have been independently arrived at by numerous parties, and several of those are long-time copyright minimalists. Notably Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation.

A tremendous problem in the policy field is the "getting there from here" issue, or even determining where "there" might be.

The policies which tend to be the most successful, in the long term, create entrenched constituencies in favour of those policies. Traditional copyright (and most other property-based schemas) do just this.[1]

Ideally, what you want to do is yoke personal interest to public benefit, or as I prefer to refer to it, common weal. The best of enduring welfare-state policies have done this, both in the form of direct beneficiaries and something of a support industry built up around them. (This is a case where less-than-total governmental solutions may prove more robust than conceptually cleaner and more efficient alternatives.)

In the case of shortening the scope of copyright, you might want to ask yourself what are the specific benefits manifested? and what other paths to that goal might be acceptable despite continuation of copyright?

And for the defenders of private copyrights, what are the fundamental problems which are meant to be solved?

Under the US Constitution, the justification for copyright is a way to provide income and compensation in exchange for a temporary monopoly. There are those who might say that the concept of "limited times" bears absolutely no relation to present law, myself amongst them, and I strongly suspect you. Lawrence Lessig, who argued Eldred v. Ashcroft against the 1998 CTEA's extension has said he may have made a mistake in pursuing the "limited times" clause rather than the "promote the progress" element: retroactive copyright extension has no bearing on the promotion of works already extant to which those extensions apply. Sadly, that wasn't his argument, and the extension stand.

Still: if the problem is lack of access to works further compounded by excessive costs to the public to even gain access, then a means-graded payment affording unlimited access effectively neutralises that concern.

There are other considerations: an individual might, say, wish to have a work withdrawn entirely from availablity (see, for example "revenge porn", or perhaps juvenile / early works which prove personally harmful later in life). A mechanism for total withdrawal from publication under some circumstances should probably exist. But as a means for simply denying any access to huge classes of works, and in particular abandoned or orphaned works, or those to which copyright status is entirely unclear, a universal licence would obviate those hurdles, permit compensation to a legitimate rightsholder (should one appear), and return published works, that is, works made public[2] to the public sphere.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Which suggests a ... whole vast and fascinating topic of why private-property based legal domains and polities have proven so incredibly robust over at least the past couple hundred years, if not markedly longer. I say this as no real fan of those concepts at least to an unlimited extent. I'm going to resist the siren song for now, however....

2. The etymology being, of course, "make publicly known, reveal, divulge, announce" <https://www.etymonline.com/word/publish>

1. This is directly contradicted by multiple accounts.

2. The Boston US Attorney's office was notified of the risk, and ... responded with disturbingly little empathy:

Andy Good, Swartz's initial lawyer, told The Boston Globe: "I told Heymann the kid was a suicide risk. His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said, 'Fine, we'll lock him up.' I'm not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I'm saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless."

<http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/15/humanity-deficit/bj8...>

3. The DoJ, and specifically Stephen Heymann, threatened far longer terms:

Swartz's attorney, Elliot Peters, stated that ... Heymann "threatened that he would seek for Mr. Swartz to serve seven years in prison

<https://www.scribd.com/doc/130344110/Aaron-Swartz-Lawyers-Ac...>

Not mere months, but seven years.

Your certainty is grossly misplaced. And tremendously callous victim-blaming.