The Missing 20th Century: How copyright protection makes books vanish | Hacker News Reader

The Missing 20th Century: How copyright protection makes books vanish

theatlantic.com

113 pointsbootload34 comments

In other words, it has taken the ridiculous cultural productivity of the internet era to even balance out the downward drag of copyright.

Do you think that graph would look any better with a mere 50 years of suppression? Or even a minuscule 20?

There is no period of time that is short enough. Even a year, three months or a week is too long. Copyright can't keep up with the speed of our culture anymore. The same goes for patents and progress, essentially. It's time to get rid of this artifact of the 20th century (along with the eternally backwards industries around it), it's holding us back.

The shortest time worth considering is a full publishing cycle - from pitch to advance to raw product to publication to break-even to profit. Given all the queues in each of the pre-publication phases and the slowness of making back the cost of preparing a work, I doubt you could squeeze that under 20 years. Otherwise it's just a cruel tease.

If this way of publication can't keep up with reality anymore, then I'm afraid it's not a viable business model, and should be scrapped, not kept on life-support with increasingly ridiculous monopoly laws which ultimately harm humanity as a whole.

Without copyright, there would be no legal basis for a Free Software license such as the GPL. I think having some kind of copyright is rather important, as long as it isn't unfairly biased towards corporations etc.

Without copyright, there would be no need for the GPL.

GPL can do one thing that "without copyright" can't: protect derived works from becoming "trade secret" (unprotected, but published as binary only).

Still not worth it.

It takes far less copyright than we currently have to make the GNU GPL effective. In fact, when the GPL was first proposed in the mid 1980s, copyright was much less draconian than it is now.

The irony is that the GPL's ju jitsu turns copyright's strength on itself -- the stronger the protections of copyright, the stronger the terms of the GPL. And so long as copyright is about allowing authors and publishers to set terms for the distributions of their works, this will be the case. The GPL is just a case of a particularly philanthropically minded author/publisher.

I haven't watched the video, so this question is just based on the article: does he take into account multiple sources for the same book?

For instance, when a book is still under copyright and is available on Amazon, it is usually available from one publisher. When a book is not under copyright and is available on Amazon, it is often available from several different publishers.

If one book is available from 10 publishers, will it be counted 10 times in his numbers or just once?

If copyrights and patents are "(intellectual) property" and valued accordingly, how much revenue could the government obtain if they made companies pay annual "property taxes" on them?

How would you value it? One way would be to look at the revenue generated each year...

It turns out they already tax that, though.

They can set the value at whatever they want. And the government, or anyone, can buy the rights at that value, 5 years after creation of the work.

Value the same way as in case of copyright infringement. One song worth $1000 or some other absurd amount.

It seems we are now in the midst of an all out assault on the concept of intellectual property. A lot of people see no reason why their right to consume should be limited or why creators should have some control over the use of their creations in an advanced civilisation.

Maybe because it's effectively free to duplicate said property without depriving the original owner of it? Intellectual property to physical property is apples to uranium. Our economic system is out of date in many aspects and needs an overhaul.

It depends on what your basis of physical property is. I don't want to expend thousands of words discussing the matter so I'll just direct you here if you're interested: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.htm...

Personally I am uncomfortable with the parasitical nature of taking somebody else's artistic creation, for its entertainment value, without any sort of consent/compensation involved.

Thanks for the link.

>An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form.

And here, in the very first and central assumption, in my opinion, lies the problem. An idea is not a physical object. It does not have the properties of a physical object and does not act like one either. It has often been said that knowledge is power and, by extension, granting monopolies on knowledge also grants a monopoly on power. Funny how these monopolies are considered to be for the greater good when they directly harm it.

>Personally I am uncomfortable with the parasitical nature of taking somebody else's artistic creation, for its entertainment value, without any sort of consent/compensation involved.

As someone who creates art, I welcome this with open arms. The "pay what you want" business model for artistic creations has been demonstrated to work better than the old model (e.g. http://bigthink.com/ideas/41602). Yet it's not just the people who pay the equivalent to the full price who benefit but everyone - rich or poor. It's an inclusive model which respects peoples' financial status and removes the cultural pay-walls. Open Source Software has also been proven to deliver robust, high quality products without bleeding everyone's pockets dry. The Creative Commons is taking off and I suspect that it will be another such success story.

How can our society be so comfortable with putting a price on culture when it's our intellectual bread and butter? By limiting the supply of food, we starve innovation and ensure that what's here today is what's here tomorrow. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to evolve, not revolve.

For further evidence, exhibit B - http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/03/30/the-one-graph-that-expla...

If you're gunning for book immortality, one of the worst thing you could do is to copyright it.

Is very hard to find a large audience for a novel without some level of commercial publishing being involved and they will want standard copyright terms.

An interesting exception to this is in the comic book industry where there are a few successful self publishers.

In the States, the act of copyrighting a book makes it eligible to be stored in the Library of Congress. This more-or-less guarantees its immortality.

Wait, if a book isn't copyrighted, it's not eligible for inclusion in the LoC? How does that make any sense at all?

Yeah, that's false.

The act of copyrighting a book includes depositing a copy with the Library of Congress. The LoC used to accept all submissions; now it only accepts submissions filed pursuant to a copyright.

In the United States, writing a book makes it copyrighted. It's impossible to not. You can then grant it to the public domain, but it was still copyrighted at conception.

Copyright here has two different meanings: the default copyright which applies to all works from the moment of creation, and registered copyright, which the above post is referring to. Registering a copyright includes depositing a copy of the work with the LoC.

No, copyright doesn't have two different meanings. He was talking about registering his copyright on a book, which is what does what he's talking about, not copyright.

For legal purposes, there is very much a difference between a default copyright and a registered copyright. One is actionable and allows for damages without proof of injury, the other is not actionable (in the U.S., though EU copyright law differs).

Yes, registration does makes getting damages easier.

However, that's not the point, the point is that the poster who I originally replied to thinks copyright is copyright registration. Copyright is granted upon creation in the US.

Registration is something you can do with a copyrighted work to make damages easier to gain.

While the state grants a car title and a car registration, they're different things. Same with copyright.

Copyright before the modern era required eventual registration to be valid, and I believe that's where much of current misunderstanding on the topic comes from:

http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

Does it matter if it sticks around forever if it isn't being read?

How would you determine that a book isn't being read?

Well if the author/ copyright holder stops publishing the book and no one else is allowed to it is going to quickly fade into irrelevance, even though there are a few copies out there being kept safe indefinitely. Whereas if the book is in the public domain, the quality of the book and popularity will decide whether it continues to be read, rather than anything artificial.

Except for piracy, which gives information when the government won't allow copyrights to expire.

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