How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
No e-book version exists, so I can't start reading it right then; and my local library would, at best, have to order it in (since it wasn't very popular in its time) so I likely can't start reading it for a few days. I might be able to order it from Amazon/eBay, but that's a high toll for something that I'm not sure has any value at all yet (this is the same reason iOS apps are legitimately "valued" at $0.99 -- value illegibility between "this is awesome" and "this is worthless", with no try-before-you-buy.)
I sometimes dream of starting a company that does something similar to Google Books -- scanning+OCRing books to put them online -- but for in-copyright works: creating beautiful eBooks from them, and then, instead of posting them publicly, offering the book's original copyright-holder a deal to become their digital sublicencee, with no additional work or cost on their part. This company would then offer free TOC + chapter samples, an area where the original author could submit errata, an option of subscription-pricing rather than by-book pricing, all that other good stuff.
I suspect that in many organizations, it is quite literally impossible for anyone to authorize the assignment of limited rights for a cost because that much responsibility does not concentrate on any single individual. Even if it did, that person would be loath to take the risk of being "that guy who gave the rights away for pittance", when he could safely make no choice at all and "protect" the rights.
Or maybe the rights end up in the hands of someone who is happy to see the work lost forever. Authors themselves are sometimes happy to help their old work get lost forever.
There is a company that does this, but only for out-of-print Sci-Fi books, it's called Singularity & Co: http://savethescifi.com/
They vote for one out-of-print book each month, get the rights-holders permission (if applicable), digitize it and publish it as an ebook. It's great! Check out the list of current candidates: http://savethescifi.com/index.php/books
Is this really that big of a deal? If you haven't read it in the 20,000 days since it's been published, what does it matter if you have to wait a few more?
offering the book's original copyright-holder a deal to become their digital sublicencee
Yeah...good luck with that
It is if I only had the barest whim to read the book in the first place. Of course I'll spend however long it takes to track something down if I'm absolutely sold on it. If I need to look at the book to decide whether I'm sold on it, though -- then being unable to do that means I stop caring.
There's this thing called Interlibrary loan. That free technique can get you a book for free for a period of time... enough for -you- to scan it and do as you see fit.
Of course, if it ends up pirate bay, oh well. Its not like some rights holder is going to starve because an out of print book is pirated.
1. Run TOR
2. Use a proxy server in opposition to the country you are in.
3. Use public wifi
4. Use a dead-drop
5. Use Mega or MediaFire
6. Find random anonymous FTP
7. Overseas VPS
Suggesting he get the book via interlibrary loan and then OCR'ing it themself would surely take longer than Amazon delivering it. And then I still maintain that distributing it illegally over Pirate Bay is risky. Yes, you can take a few good security steps. But all they'd need is the public library assistant to notice you are uploading to Pirate Bay or something. Yes you can take steps, but this is already way beyond a casual look through the book.
Realistically, it's probably available for $1 + shipping. Really, how hard is your life that you might need to wait a couple of days to receive a book in the mail or go looking for it in a used bookstore? I'm no fan of the current copyright regime, but complaining that it's not worth even trying if you can't find it as an e-book comes off as lazy.
On the other hand, overseas customers, like myself, pay a much higher shipping rate for used books purchased from third-party sellers.
If I buy a little out-of-print paperback from an Amazon Marketplace seller, I will pay the listed price, plus $16.95 for shipping. If the weight of the book is over 1lb, then I'll be paying $23.95 for a single book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_2...
It used to be a single rate, $13-something. Before that, it was $11-something. I can remember it being $9-something not many years back.
That hasn't stopped me from buying used books from Amazon altogether, but it has made real impulse, curiosity-driven buys less frequent.
That said I still prefer haunting second hand bookstores, which are far more fun that browsing online. I'll sometimes spend a year or two looking for a book even though I know I could find and order it in a 2 minutes on Amazon...but there's no satisfaction in doing so, whereas finding a book through diligent searching is enormously rewarding.
Honestly, if your interest in a book is so little that you can't be bothered to even remember the title or wait three days for it to arrive from Amazon, why are you even bothering to read it? It sounds like these recommendations don't actually carry much weight. And if you do value highly a friend's recommendation, is a few bucks and a few days really such a high toll? Really, your objections don't seem add up to much if, as you say, you are actually interested in these books.
There are ways to get the books cheaply and quite quickly, just not instantaneously. If you require everything to be delivered to you instantaneously and must abandon everything that cannot be, then I don't know what to tell you.
The publishers might have responded differently if the creator wasn't Google.
"Google" Books is an existential threat to them. Somebody "not google" books is less so.
However, with ebooks replacing print books, libraries will increasingly be unavailable to fill that role. There are both legal and technical (but mainly legal) reasons that libraries can't hold on to ebooks and lend them out, lacking explicit permission from publishers, like they can with print books.
On the other hand, maybe ebooks won't go "out of print", due to significantly lower marginal costs of production? I am definitely not confident of that though; as any software developer knows, there certainly are costs associated with maintaining a software product working 'forever'. Ebooks won't be immune from this, and I have no doubt that some will go 'out of print' when publishers do platform migrations, or when the consumer environment changes and new formats and packaging methods are needed, etc.
Libraries also tend to have worse coverage of books from abroad. American library holdings of books only published in the UK are much worse than of those published in the US, and vice-versa. And only a few specialist libraries have significant holdings of out-of-print non-English books, even the most important ones.
I've been particularly noticing this in the past few years, as an American working at a university in Denmark. The holdings here are quite good: they include just about every book ever published in Denmark, plus a huge number of foreign books. And they're integrated into a central catalog containing the holdings of all public and university libraries nationwide. But there are still many books I run across, especially American books published in, say, the 1930s-70s, where no library in the country has a copy. It's not even that uncommon for a worldcat.org search to turn up that no library in Europe has a copy. So then my next move is to start looking for a PDF. Sometimes I just give up and decide the book might as well not have existed.
Something that would be quite cool, if the data is available, is some kind of access map quantifying that. If I am at [lat,lon], what % of books published in the U.S. in the 1950s do I have available within 100mi?
Now, an anecdote: I used it to get a copy of Neal Stephenson 'The Big U'. He had refused to reprint it and copies were on ebay for over $100. But raggedy copies through ILL were free.
> Stephenson has said he is not proud of this book. By the time Snow Crash was published, The Big U was out of print, and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed it to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.
As it stands now, a perverse incentive has formed to lock away works that can't be executed on a very large commercial scale forever.
Who has said that? I think there should be zero IP protection laws, but I believe that artists should expect to be paid for their work, and indeed would be paid for their work.
Indeed, money is as inseparable from the most popular art forms as gravity is from rocketry. Entire mediums wax and wane in response to the flow of finance. Film, opera, books, television, to say nothing of architecture are almost evntierly defined by the commercial melieu. Mastery of this dimension provides the very cornerstone of professional accomplishment, since nothing else is possible without the requisite budget.
To the extent that time is money, every creative type who values the often considerable amount of time it takes to produce the work they want to produce understands the constraints of finance in their bones. They all do their best to do the most with what they can get. That a big part of the reason they get so frustrated with audiences who refuse to pay.
How can you possibly fail to recognize this?
This is possibly true, but ignoring the fact that many artists still continue to release their work under copyright vs. some sort of free license without any compensation.
Also yes a large body of small time artists have to work other jobs to pay their rent, so many use copyright to try and secure income. I'm not sure how this is a bad thing. Just because you can easily subvert the system due to mp3's and fat bandwidth doesn't mean it should somehow now be legal, copyright is moot, and we tell every artist to "deal with it."
This legal innovation became the bedrock for the massively collaborative forms of media that went on to define the 20th century (newspapers, encyclopedias, literary anthologies, films, broadcasts, video games to name the biggest).
Also, the point of copyright is to resolve a very specific problem, which is reconciling the high capital costs of content creation with the low marginal cost of duplication. Of course, none of the people who casually and dismissively say "just figure out a different model" will be ever be clear about exactly what problem needs solving.
That's because acknowledging the mathematically inevitable failures awaiting any endevor with high R&D costs and low manufacturing and distribution costs make the logic of copyright clear. Either we create legal protections for the business or let it die. Given the extraordinary value offered by intangible goods, advanced economies have made the smart choice of creating legal protections in case where markets left to themselves would leave many of our best and brightest high and dry.
That's a ridiculous argument, which is clear if you apply it to other detrimental things like wars, murder, and disease.
Intelligent people also recognize that "detrimental" is a pretty broad category, and that you can't necessarily make an apples to apples comparison between two things simply because they're both detrimental.
Copyright is a legal and social institution. Wars, murder, and disease are not. Neither are earthquakes for that matter, or volcano eruptions. Detrimental as they may be, they're hardly things we can simply legislate out of existence (even I that's exactly what one of the Carolinas is trying to do in response to rising sea levels).
If you want to make a proper apple to apples comparison, pick something that is, at least, remotely analogous. Slavery, for instance, or the poll tax. Just make sure it's something people can actually legislate one way or the other, and not something that is obviously beyond the reach of the law.
I also like how you first imply that social institutions cannot be travesties, then you give an example of a social institution that is a travesty.
Which is not to say that copyright represent injustices similar to either of these institutions. But at least you'd be saying something only halfway stupid instead of something completely stupid.
What I do know is that the material underpinnings of the creative forms which remain the most popular took generations—and sometimes centuries—to reach their current stages of development. Like old growth redwood groves, they can't be easily replaced if people decide that chopping them down was a mistake.
In other words, we're not talking about "creative destruction" here. Just destruction. Saying "prove the unprovable or die" is not an admirable way to care for something that vast numbers value highly and which lives by careful passage from generation to generation.
Indeed, it seems like you don't know much about art itself. When you note that artists used to rely on patrons for money (for materials and living) you forget that patrons also told the artists what to create. This meant lots of Biblical scenes for the Church, plenty of portraits, sculpture, and landscape paintings for the Aristocracy, and not much else.
One of the most important cultural developments in the history of cultural developments has been the emergence of artists a autonomous creators. This is what elevated their roles from those of highly skilled craftsmen to leading intellectuals, pushing the boundaries of human perception. Culturally and creatively, we started to live in a totally different universe once the artistic class freed itself from the very narrow, conservative, and self-glorifying interests of the patron class.
I'm sorry, but the idea of "going back" seems like going back to government by heridetaty monarchy, alchemy, candle-lit everything, and anastesia-free dentistry. It's not what most people want.
Copyright leaves a lot to be desired, and it has plenty of room for improvement. Even so, it is vastly preferable to the alternative.
Why not admit that copyright and culture evolved together, and that suddenly trashing one does irreparable harm to the other?
I'm not saying that reforms aren't in order. After all, the 21st century is its own special thing. But it has yet to replace art forms that have spent (no exaggeration) centuries developing with the aid and support of copyright.
To the extent that nobody has come up with a better solution to the problem of high capital requirements and near-zero marginal costs, it's the best arrangement we've got, especially when the preference for expensive productions is as clear as its ever been.
You are confusing correlation with causation. Copyright as we know it today is the result of a change in technology -- the printing press -- which also caused changes in culture. Prior to printing presses copying books was a vital service, worthy of praise and encouraged by society as a way to preserve knowledge (at least among those societies that gave a damn about such things). Ancient Greek science was preserved because Arab scholars copied Greek works. The Library of Alexandria had a vast collection because books were copied by law.
Ironically, we might never have developed the technology that led to copyright law had it not been for such copying.
Of course, how technology left to copyright is very different from how that technology changed culture. Copyright was the result of many years of efforts by the British government to censor printed material, which ultimately failed for political reasons. The censorship effort did create a very powerful lobby of printers who pushed very hard to reestablish the monopoly they had enjoyed during that effort, and who ultimately managed to get what they wanted in the form of copyrights. This is basically orthogonal to the cultural changes.
"the preference for expensive productions is as clear as its ever been."
Maybe those productions are a waste of resources that have been made economically viable by copyright. Do you really think people would be unable to produce and enjoy entertainment without the copyright system? It might mean the death of films that cost as much as it would take to end world hunger, but not the death of entertainment.
The printing press changed how we communicate. Computers are doing so as well, and like it or not, entertainment will be affected as much by this change as it was by the printing press.
It is absurd to insist that the contours of the legal environment governing a trade, and the products created under those arrangements just "happen" to reflect one another (i.e. coincidental correlation), and that they're not products of direct causation.
As someone who has actually worked for years in a field shaped by copyright, I can assure you, the parameters of the law have a tremendous effect on what does and doesn't take place. And programs don't just happen to randomly conform to the legal environment magically, all by themselves. They conform because there are people whose entire jobs revolve around making sure that all the rights and clearances that are needed to make a legally marketable product have, in fact, been cleared. These are non-trivial requirements, and the development, production, and distribution of filmed media are all heavily influenced by these commercial and legal requirements.
It's more than correlation. It's causation. No debate, full stop.
You're also quite wrong about British printers recovering the monopoly they lost following the passage of Queen Anne's Law (1709/10 - the first modern copyright law). This transferred the basic right to print copies from the Printer's Guilds to the authors of a work, with whom it has remained to this very day. There is no longer any monopoly on printing itself and nor has there been for more than 300 years (at least in the English speaking world). The only "monopolies" that exist relate to specific works, and those accrue to the author of that work alone, or to whoever he sells the copyright.
John D. Rockefeller ran a monopoly. AT&T ran a monopoly. No media or publishing company (at least, in the English speaking world) has enjoyed a monopoly for over three centuries. And no, controlling specific properties is not considred a monopoly any more than owning a house is considered a "monopoly" on that particular address.
While it's true that some of today's publishers have become very powerful, this is because they adapted to the legal change by becoming, in essence, highly specialized financiers — the venture capital of the media world, really — and pairing this with development operations that optimized their deal flow as well as making possible the highly collaborative media arts that became the defining cultural forms in the 20th century. But again, these developments weren't coincidental to changes in the law, they were the direct results.
Like I said, the law and the creative forms that most people like the most today are highly inter-related. Everything from movies to broadcasts to recorded orchestras to video games exist because of the law as it currently stands and the underlying business arrangements that it both necessitated and enabled.
All I'm saying I that these two things go hand in hand. Sudden radical collapse of the law — for whatever reason — will have a traumatic effect on the art forms which depend on it. And again, these are hugely popular forms which have taken ages to develop an for which no clear substitutes exist.
It's also flatly incorrect to say that the "overwhelming majority of artists who work with these companies have seperate day jobs." I assure you, nearly every name you see on every credit roll on every film or television program produced by these studios is that of a professional, not a part timer. For one thing, 12-14 hour days and 5-6 day weeks are the norm. There's no time for a second job even if people wanted one. Yes, there are lots of people who hustle while trying to break in, but that's a different story. As with any job highly dependent on specialized skills, producers want to work with people who work constantly because those are the people who have got the sharpest abilities. Frankly, there's too much money on the line to take chances on amatuers.
I can't speak to the realities of the record business, since I don't know it first hand. But given what I do know, I can safely say that (a) you don't really know what you're talking about and (b) what you think you know is demonstrably wrong.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. I just don't want anyone reading this to make the mistake of thinking that your opinions are the product of careful thought or a firm grasp of basic facts because they just aren't.
This is so backwards. Getting paid -- as in getting compensated for work -- is usually something you have agreed upon _before_ you do the work.
Also, people getting paid royalties aren't being paid directly for their labor. They're charging rent on property they own. Copyright law is similar to tangible property law in the sense that people make investments based on how well protected they think those investment are likely to be. No reasonable protection, no reasonable investment.
To the extent that the law is enforceable, people making these investments fully — and reasonably — expect it to be enforced.
If you - personally - feel something is overpriced, leave it on the shelf. That's how you send signals in market economies. I mean, do you honestly think your rights are being infringed upon if someone refuses to sell you something at a price you're unable or unwilling to pay?
As an aside, copyright protection isn't limited to the making of copies. It also covers the creation of derivative works (i.e. adaptations) and the sale and / or distribution of copies and derivatives. FYI.
Getting paid for work and getting paid for selling a copy are not the same thing. The former usually requires some kind of agreement to be made beforehand, the latter requires salesmanship.
The problem with conflating the two is when the sense of entitlement it brings to artists who are unable to sell their work. That sense of entitlement is what makes them equate an illegitimate copy with a lost sale (the way you also seem to do), when everybody knows that is almost never the case.
Here's the thing about entitlement. Sometimes it refers to things to which you are well and truly entitled. When you make a non fair-use copy that, by law, triggers a financial obligation to the author, the author actually is entitled to payment.
You can be as asshole about it, forcing him to insist on payment then disparaging him when he presses the case by telling him he's "being uncool" (or some similar bullshit) by expecting to get paid. And the most likely response? "Fuck you, pay me."
Obviously, you may not have the money to pay. And even I you did, there's no guarantee that you'd spend it if spending were your only option. For that reason, it's wrong to equate every uncompensated copy with a lost sale. I get that. But that doesn't change the fact that you're still in debt to the artist, and that berating him for a "sense of entitlement" is an unmitigated dick move.
To survive, every business needs to things. The first is a product or service that people want at a price they're willing to pay. The second is means to inflict serious damage on those who would satisfy their wants while refusing to pay (try shoplifting if you're curious about what counts as "serious damage").
And here's the critical concept that is absolutly central to this entire debate: Without the stick to back up the carrot farming operation, the price people are willing to pay rapidly drops to zero, at which point it's game over for the business.
When people casually say "just find a different business model" they never mean "find another stick." But without a stick, the model can't be considered a business.
This is free-market economics 101. Unless both parties are free to reject a transaction at a given price, the market cannot function as a market (i.e. as the optimal frame for price discovery).
Without reliable enforcement mechanisms, sellers have no way to set prices. In this scenario, buyers evaporate and get replaced by takers. That closes the market. Unless the sellers set up private enforcement (e.g. the mafia), the market stays closed, and they stay out of business.
In this scenario, the only people with a truly contemptible sense of entitlement are those who think they should be free to satisfy their wants at the price they name, regardless of the sellers consent. If that sounds a bit like rape, you're beginning to see the basic injustice in the position you're defending.
If we have an agreement which states that I should get paid it follows that I can reasonably expect to get paid. If on the other hand I do work for someone without an agreement, say spontaneously sweep the leaves off some corporation's parking lot or make them a website, then obviously I can only hope but not really expect to get paid.
By the way, I think that was exactly the point Mike Monteiro was trying to make in his "Fuck you, pay me" talk.
> When you make a non fair-use copy that, by law, triggers a financial obligation to the author
This is not correct and is exactly what i meant by backwards.
The way it works is that I pay the rights-holder agreed upon sum and THEN am awarded the right to make a copy. It is NOT the case that by making a(n illegitimate) copy I 'trigger' a financial obligation. Of course the rights-holder may sue me for damages, but that's not really how he is supposed to make money.
> Without the stick to back up the carrot farming operation...
I do not agree with what seems to be your underlying assumption that it is piracy that is to blame for the artists not being able to sell their work. In fact I think the piracy issue is a red herring. Rather, I believe that it is simply the march of progress that has rendered a lot of formerly lucrative business models obsolete. Do you for instance believe that copyright infringement is to blame for the decline of newspapers?
Comparing a producer of tangible goods of which there is a real scarcity with one who of intangible works which are only artificially scarce, is in my opinion a fallacy that does little to illuminate the issue. But if you insist, I would say that a better comparison would be with a carrot farmer who insists on selling his carrots at $100/kg and then insisting with no evidence to back it up that the reason he can't sell any must be because everyone is stealing from him.
> In this scenario, the only people with a truly contemptible sense of entitlement are those who think they should be free to satisfy their wants at the price they name, regardless of the sellers consent. If that sounds a bit like rape, you're beginning to see the basic injustice in the position you're defending.
Someone who enjoys a monopoly in any market and is used to being able to control the prices, might say the same thing in the face of sudden low-price competition. In fact it seems like they always do.
Indeed, its unavoidable existence provides the reason WHY you'd consider making a deal in the first place, since without the force of law to consider, you'd be free to satisfy your wants without making any recompense to those who carry the costs of the thing you desired.
For artists, legitimate competition (of which there is no shortage) comes from other artists offering different works that are either better or cheaper. Piracy is a different beast altogether.
And for the record, there are no monopolies in the creative world, only exclusive rights to individual properties, an that's a very different thing. To put it in perspective, it's the difference between owning and renting one apartment and owning and renting every apartment building in an entire city.
My question to you is this: are you truly unaware of how the law and limited property rights work? Or are you just inventing warped definitions to justify a one-sided, self-serving, and abusive relationship with authors and artists that you know, deep down, is wrong?
The point that I keep restating is simply that nobody who produces anything, tangible or intangible, can expect to get paid a priori. After you've produced something, you have to also have to sell it to get paid. Consumer's have a right to not buy, and if they don't, you don't get paid. Simple as that. Your talk about big sticks and the law is missing the point.
In places like the music industry that used to be a license to print money (80s and early 90s), it's easy to understand why there seemed to arise the idea that there was in fact such a thing as "the right to get paid". And that it was that right that was infringed upon when suddenly they lost the competition for the consumer's entertainment dollar.
You like they were, seem to be fixated on piracy as the cause, but that is missing the forrest for trees. The internet was what happened, the cause of the disruption of the music industry. The internet is also what is happening to print media these days, and soon will happen to cable tv. These businesses don't have a right to get paid either.
They do what you've done here: mischaracterize it as an unreasonable assertion that they get paid for work, even in the absence of any buyers.
As noted very explicitly, that is NOT what "the right to get paid" means. What it really means is that you don't have the right to opt out of paying.
If you want something YOU MUST negotiate with the rights holder. You're free to reject any and all offers, of course. And if everyone rejects a seller's offer and / or price, the seller is s.o.l. But what you CANNOT do is say "I don't like the price you're asking, so fuck it, I'm going to set my own - which could be $0 if I feel like it."
I'm sorry, but that is NOT a right you have. What "The right to be paid for my work" really means is "I have the power to set the price for my work". You can accept that price or you can reject that price. But you cannot unilaterally change that price.
You seem like an intelligent person, so I don't think this I beyond your comprehension. That's why I don't hesitate to call you dishonest because clearly, you should know better.
And I'm glad to hear you pay for media. But let's be clear, acting like you're doing anyone a favor is a dick move, for the same reason that a boss who treat your paycheck as a favor is being an asshole.
"Yes, but the Internet...".
But no. The fact that technology made being as asshole exponentially easier does not change the underlying ethics one iota. If what we're talking about is something people actually want, the people who created it retain the right to get paid. They don't have a right to a business model (e.g. newspapers can't shut down Craigslist for offering better, cheaper classifieds). That's competition, fair and square.
However, that's not the same as saying "I still want (x), but instead of paying, I'll just not pay." Whatever else you're doing in that situation, you are not acting within your rights.
That is the stated purpose of the power given to Congress. The manner in which Congress has exercised that power since the constitution was drafted has been essentially a clone of the Statute of Anne, a British law created following years of heavy lobbying pressure by the publishing industry. The payment of artists comes secondary; in theory, the businesses that benefit from copyrights need to gather their material from creative workers, and those workers demand payment (in practice the people who create copyrighted works get the short end of that stick).
"Of course this is done by giving the authors exclusive rights over their work"
You make this sound like the most obvious thing ever, yet this was not always the case. Prior to the invention of the printing press it was common to encourage people to copy creative works -- to prevent them from being lost forever. In fact, the Library of Alexandria, one of the important stores of human knowledge of its time, existed because of a law that required books to be copied regardless of the wishes of authors.
You brought up the progress of science, but most scientists give zero thought to exclusive rights over their writing. The point of writing a research article is to share knowledge as widely as possible. You can often find PDF copies of published articles on the authors' websites despite the fact that the authors signed over their copyrights. The only reason scientists ever bothered with publishing companies was that prior to the Internet distributing articles on a global scale required industrial equipment that publishers happened to have.
Frankly, do you really think that a system which requires expert lawyers to draft contracts, enforce royalty payments, and settle disputes by arguing before a judge is the sort of system that is meant to protect the interests of individuals? Everything about copyright screams "made for business." That artists happen to be paid for their work under this system is merely a side effect; the real purpose is to confer an advantage to certain businesses, who (sometimes) happen pay artists/authors/programmers/etc. for their work.
"The 2317 random editions of new books available on Amazon during the fall of 2012 are charted in Figure 1 below by the decade of the original publication date of the corresponding title. Both fiction and non-fiction editions are included. Editions of books now in the public domain (those published prior to 1923) constitute 72% of the total (1665/2317), while editions of titles still under copyright constitute 28% (652/2317).
The high percentage of public domain editions is probably driven by two factors. First, public domain books typically have more publishers and more editions per title, since there is no copyright owner to restrain exploitation. Second, Amazon offers as “in stock” multiple new editions of public domain books sold by a growing group of print-on-demand publishers that take advantage of the recent digitization of many old titles."
"The graph above shows the simplest interpretation of the data. It reveals, shockingly, that there are substantially more new editions available of books from the 1910s than from the 2000s."
This summary is incorrect. Were it correct, the entire paper would be silly, because of course you're going to have more new editions of older books than new editions of newer books: the newer books need fewer reprints or reasons to have new editions.
> But this isn't a totally honest portrait of how many different books are available, because for books that are in the public domain, often many different editions exist, and the random sample is likely to overrepresent them. "After all," Heald explains, "if one feeds a random ISBN number [into] Amazon, one is more likely to retrieve Milton's Paradise Lost (with 401 editions and 401 ISBN numbers) than Lorimer's A Wife out of Egypt (1 edition and 1 ISBN)." He found that on average the public domain titles had a median of four editions per title. (The mean was 16, but highly distorted by the presence of a small number of books with hundreds of editions. For this reason, statisticians whom Heald consulted recommended using the median.) Heald divided the number of public-domain editions by four, providing a graph that compares the number of titles available.
Then, yet another chart, that tries to normalize by percentage of books published in that decade still available....
> But even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade...Heald and his assistants were able to arrive at a pretty good approximation by relying on the number of titles available for each year in WorldCat, a library catalog that contains the complete listings of 72,000 libraries around the world. He then normalized his graph to the decade of the 1990s, which saw the greatest number of titles published.
That way Disney can have their copyrights, and abandoned works go into the public domain.
It's interesting to think that each of these elements is individually protected under copyright laws.
PS: I'm afraid copyright law is an aberration born from the need to enforce scarcity onto intellectual work so it's producers could fit inside a capitalistic society. Because of this inherent asymmetry, it's effectively binary, making any attempt to reach a "fair" compromise fail.
I've seen many claim this ("we can measure if the law is producing a net positive") everytime copyright law, or any controversial law, is discussed. Can you back this up, or is just blind positivism?
Some examples:
- http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf
- http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/01184048...
- http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf
- http://www.booz.com/media/file/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Cop...
I can't vouch for the strength of those particular reports or studies, but clearly people are putting a lot of energy into measuring this stuff.
Why the nihilism?
Good thing about karma. I've brought my kids up telling them the evils of Disney and their harm to society. Suck it Walt!
And where did you get the word 'no'? Talking about the bad things a company has done is not an automatic boycott.
Note that in the U.S. patents are generally granted for a period of 20 years. Why do copyrightable works require or justify more?
Automatic full copyright for 14 years from the date of publication. After 14 years, it can be renewed for next 14 years (and so on) for a low price of 1$/year. If not renewed, the work becomes automatically available to the public under CC (BY-NC-SA) license. After author's death + 10 years, the work becomes public domain.
Those numbers can be debated but the key aspect is that automatic copyright term is limited and explicit renewal is required.
It was posted here a few months ago.