Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

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>Should JK Rowling not have been receiving money from the first Harry Potter book (published in '97) for the last 6-11 years? Sure she's rich enough already... but why should she lose out on that money which she arguably earned?

She can continue to earn money by making a competitive product. A copyright is a short-term monopoly granted to ensure that authors can recoup expense before the rush comes in. It's not meant as anything more than that. Whatever she makes in the first five years since publication is all she "earns" simply by holding a copyright. The rest of her money must be earned by contributing further to the progress of science and useful arts (perhaps by writing a sequel, which would have its own copyright term...) and/or competing on the open market with everyone else.

If the public takes the time to integrate your story into its culture, if they read your book and pore over the characters and develop their own interpretations and feelings, they should be able to share these commercially within a reasonable timeframe. When you publish something, it's not your own anymore.

I think Joss Whedon had a cool quote from a reddit AMA a while back. It was something like "Art is not a pet that you keep forever, which follows you around loyally without criticism until the end of its days. Art is a child, and it grows up and moves out and talks back to you." The real quote is probably better, but that was the concept.

What if, like the second best selling book ever, it takes almost a decade for the book to begin selling well? If books can cease to produce money just as their popularity begins to crest, then I imagine publishers will be less eager to publish things that aren't likely to be immediate hits. I have the impression that many of the books which our culture treasures weren't immediate hits.

The thing is that books DON'T cease to produce money when copyright lapses, the copyright owner just loses their exclusive monopoly on the work. If they continue to offer the most compelling reproductions of the work (in the case of a book: form factor, bindings, indices, appendices, cross-references, etc.), they will continue to make money. The competition would greatly enrich the consumer experience.

>A copyright is a short-term monopoly granted to ensure that authors can recoup expense before the rush comes in. It's not meant as anything more than that.

This is one view, but to say that "it's not meant as anything more than that" is not accurate. Even John Locke believed that authors had fundamental rights to their creation. (source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1983614)

The Continental Congress resolution to pass copyright legislation was inspired by author Joel Barlow who wrote in his 1783 letter to Congress:

"There is certainly no kind of property, in the nature of things, so much his own, as the works which a person originates from his own creative imagination: And when he has spent great part of his life in study, wasted his time, his fortune & perhaps his health in improving his knowledge & correcting his taste, it is a principle of natural justice that he should be entitled to the profits arising from the sale of his works as a compensation for his labor in producing them, & his risque of reputation in offering them to the Public."

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