Article from The Atlantic, the charts show how dramatic the impact is:
Everyone agrees that authors should be compensated for their work. The way it works out, unfortunately, is that their work goes out of print until the copyright expires. That means that the majority of authors don’t get compensated beyond their sell-by date.
On the other hand, a lot of those books would still be available via libraries, if they didn’t get culled to make room for more recent books.
Many people think that libraries are repositories for books and store them for posterity. Not our library. You won’t find anything older than a few years if it doesn’t circulate.
Digitizing books may change this. The cost of storing a book electronically is constantly going down, is cheaper now than the cost of shelf space, and can be “lent” more readily.
I am not a fan of copyright, but I question some of the conclusions of this article. Just because a book isn’t in print doesn’t mean it is unavailable to the public. I often find out of print books on eBay and Amazon, and the charts do not take that into consideration. They do suggest that a shorter copyright term would be beneficial, but I understand there is a movement in Congress right now to extend the term once again (more Sonny Bono).
The only thing I find shocking and startling is that the author of the article finds this shocking and startling. The graphs show precisely what I would have predicted. It just stands to reason that, if only one entity holds the rights to a work, it’s less likely to be republished/printed than if anyone who wants to can do so.
Nowadays, thanks to ereaders and sites like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, it is easier than ever before to gain access to books, even relatively obscure ones, that are in the public domain.
It’s ironic, considering that the declared purpose of copyright is to enrich the general culture by encouraging writers to create more. Instead it has had the opposite effect, making many books less accessible and keeping older works that SHOULD be part of the furniture of our culture the private domain of corporate trolls whose only interest is exploiting the profit potential of profitable properties.
Now let’s hear a chorus of “mine mine mine gimme gimme gimme forever!” from the Usual Suspects … I’m really surprised they haven’t dropped by already.
Limit it to 25 years. Fuck Disney.
Here we go again with that Disney nonsense.
Currently, there is a termination right whereby the original author can rescind a deal after 35 years. I would be in favor of a new kind of termination right such that an author would get back control of a work if the publisher takes it out of print for more than one year.
So we do away with evil, awful, oppressive copyright.
When Google digitizes the book and anyone on earth can view it or download it or even print out their own warehouse full of it, how does the author get compensated for that use?
Answers from people who have created works for profit preferred; I already know what the generation that’s grown up expecting to find everything for free on the net thinks.
I’ll tell you that eliminating copyright will be far worse for the author than the current system.
First, if completely eliminated, what’s to prevent Amazon from taking the book, selling it, and paying the author nothing? Without copyright, the authors are just slave labor for Amazon.
Second, authors make money reselling their work. I’ve been paid three times for one novel and twice for another. Without copyright, that would be impossible – someone could just take my work and sell it and give me nothing.
Third, if people are paying for your work, it’s only right that you get some payment for actually creating it. Without copyright, there would be no payment.
Now, there are issues with the current system. The length is too long (it should go back to life plus 50, though life plus 25 is OK). (And thanks, Ascenray for pointing out that Disney had nothing to do with the extension, which was required by the Berne Convention.)
The second issue is orphaned works. One big reason why works under copyright aren’t reprinted is that no one knows who owns the copyright. If you die, are there any heirs 20 years later? Who are they, and how do you contact them? That’s a big hurdle.
The Copyright Office is developing rules for this, but it’s a tricky issue. The goal is for publishers to put in an effort to find the heirs, but if that’s not possible, be able to publish the work anyway. The problem is that you can’t trust publishers to do a search.
A solution would be for publishers be required to put money into escrow in case the heirs make a claim. The amount could be set by regulation, and the money freed up to the publisher after a certain amount of time. That seems to be the way it’s headed; if so, the problem will be ameliorated.
Who’s arguing for totally abolishing copyright?
25 years sounds pretty good to me.
What about twenty-five years, with an option to repeat every 25 years, by either the holder (or their estate)? So it’s up to whoever holds the copyright if it’s still in their best interest.
You bring up some excellent points.
“Just because a book isn’t in print doesn’t mean it is unavailable to the public.” Right. Some of those out-of-print books from 20 or 30 years ago still turn up all the time at used book sales, or can be bought online for practically nothing + shipping. Even with less common older books, if there’s one you really want to read, it’s easier than ever to track down a copy, via online used book sellers or interlibrary loans. Under those circumstances, it may not be worth a publisher’s while to reprint the book. I would certainly balk at paying new book prices for a book I could easily obtain a cheap used copy of, especially if the author is no longer around to profit from it. But I, and hopefully many others, would be willing to pay a couple bucks for a digital copy, at least if it was competently scanned and formatted.
Digitalization, it appears to me, is a big part of the answer to making those older-but-not-yet-public-domain books available. It shouldn’t cost much to keep an ebook “in print” indefinitely. I hope and, in my more optimistic moments, suspect that more and more copyright owners will realize that it’s better to put out digital editions of their works (or sell or license the rights to someone else who will do so) than to let them languish in obscurity.
The argument has been made, saying creators can make money by other means.
25 years or life plus 25? The former is even worse than the old copyright law for authors; some of my own work would be sold without payment. At the very least, the copyright should last as long as the author, and a few years beyond for his heirs.
Note that it is not the US that set copyright terms. The US has to abide by the length specified by the Berne Convention (If the US drops out, then its copyrights will not be recognized internationally). The convention increased the term in 1994, partly due to the insistence of the government of Munich, which didn’t want the copyright on Mein Kampf to expire. I don’t see Berne being changed, even for a reduction from Life+70 to Life+25.
And people wonder why I distrust e-books. How many times easier do they make the process of disappearing a work forever?
At least print books don’t have DRM on them that make archiving them difficult/impossible, and the format can still be read a thousand years hence (barring language issues, of course).
There may also be another force at work here that has nothing to do with copyright: Thor Power Tools.
The Wikipedia page is fairly technical and at first glance the connection between it and publishing is not obvious. But prior to the ruling, publishers kept books in print and in warehouses for far longer than they do today. Now, for tax purposes, you have to eliminate your inventory by the end of the year. The result was that publishers couldn’t keep books in print unless they were selling strongly.
I know of one publisher who found it cheaper to box up the books on December 31 and ship it to himself so they arrived on January 2. The cost of shipping them to himself was less than the taxes that would be assessed if he had them in inventory on January 1.
There used to be a midlist of books – those that sold slowly but steadily for years. That’s dead due to the ruling, and books go out of print even when they’re selling steadily because the taxes on keeping them are more than what they’re bringing in.
And we’re stuck with it, since even it were overturned today, publishers would keep up what they’re doing now and pocket the money they save in taxes.
But this change may be an important factor in what’s going on.
Yeah, that would be nice. If the original publisher doesn’t want to publish your work anymore, it seems only fair that you should be able to shop for a new one.
Usual Suspect here, ready to make my Usual Claim that this is as much wrong as you can stuff into a paragraph.
The first and overwhelming point is that corporate trolls do ***not ***control the copyrights of books. Individual authors do. That knocks out any support for any point that EC might have, but let’s beat that post into the ground for a while, just for shits and giggles.
Does copyright encourage writers to write more? Yes. Absolutely. Hell yeah. And my cite is that very same Atlantic article in the OP. Look at that second graph. There are more recent books - vastly more - than the sum totals of decades of the totality of world literature available at Amazon. Of course, anybody without an ax to grind would know this. The number of books published has risen from an estimated average of 50,000 per year in the U.S. to an estimated 250,000 per year. This is the Golden Age of book titles. This is also the Golden Age of shit, but that’s the chance you take. Most books, even from long ago, are shit and don’t deserve republication. That you can republish every book that is in the public domain is not remotely the same as saying that you can republish a book and expect to earn back your costs for doing so. There is a wonderful historic purpose toward republishing public domain titles, but that’s totally removed from the realm of commerce, which the book industry and authors are a part.
The availability of past titles and copyright encouraging authors to write more currently are so totally and obviously two separate subjects with little overlap that I’m surprised the Internet didn’t throw up when the two were conflated by EC. Yes, the copyright laws do have an effect on the republishing of older titles within copyright. THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN TRUE. Nothing has changed with the current copyright law, except the period in which older titles are in this condition. The period of copyright that held during the period that the article considers a dip was 28 years plus a 28 year renewal. That was established by the Copyright Act of 1909. The copyright holder had to make a positive effort to renew the copyright after 28 years, but the granting of that application was automatic. Virtually all major works were renewed, either by the author or publisher. In 1956, therefore, not a single work of 20th century literature was in the public domain.* Nothing significant has changed in my entire lifetime as a reader.
From the author’s POV, writing is a business like any other. That’s a critical distinction that is often lost. Authors are not employees of publishers. Contractually, it is more the reverse. Authors license their products to publishers to do the distribution and supply, just as any other business manufacturing materials deals with firms to sell to the public. Employees do lose the right to future earnings if they quit work or die. Businesses can continue beyond the working years of any one individual. In today’s world, most employees of most large businesses have security past their working years by means of pensions and 401K programs. That wasn’t true during your Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s. Businesses have protection for their principles and stockholders by continuing dividends and stock repurchases. Copyright is a form of business protection for the sole proprietor.
Even so, the author by law gets shafted as no other business does.** Businesses can be immortal, but the law says that everything the author does becomes non-income generating after time. Wow. Stop there and think about that. What you’re doing to feed your family is considered so valuable that it is written into the Constitution that you’ll stop being paid for it so that everyone can share. EC, I assume you feel that your house should be dealt with the same way. After a certain time, anyone who wants to come live there can do so for free. No? Not the same? Oh yes it is.
So the period of copyright protection has always been contentious. It must balance the needs of the author to support a family and children with the needs of the public at large. You can’t, as an author, count on living to a ripe old age and die surrounded by working grandchildren who don’t need your money. Some form of protection is needed, which is why copyright laws around the world have been rewritten to extend copyright for X years after the author’s death. In a global economy, rules work best when they are, well, global. Copyright isn’t, but the Copyright Act of 1976 was written to sync U.S. laws with those of the European Community to put what was then the overwhelming majority of book buyers under a set of consistent copyrights. Copyright was also extended retroactively in the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, and that made for a long period in which no additional works entered the public domain. That period will end in 2018, when all works from 1923 enter the public domain. 1924 enters in 2019 and so on.
Temporarily, we have a condition in which people cannot lay their hands on new editions of every book they want. This temporary period is called the history of the United States of America. I realize that instant gratification is supposed to trump everything else. Maybe that will be true in the future. Today’s supposed “problem” is a period in which more books are available, some for purchase, some freely, than ever in history. Such a problem!
*Well, maybe a single work. Somebody can dutifully run out and find the exception. How about you, EC? You’re so knowledgeable about these issues.
**Patents have a similar time limit, but they are rarely the direct source of income.
Do you, now? What does that generation, who are also the ones most concerned with how to make a living working in the new market, think?
Maybe there should be some kind of “use it or lose it” provision in copyright law. If the copyright holder has not made the work available for an extended period (let’s say ten years) the copyright will revert back to the creator. This would encourage publishers to keep works in print, which benefits both creators and audiences. It would still leave the option of dropping works which they see no commercial potential in.
Another possibility would be some type of fixed licensing program that would fill the gap between the copyright holder having exclusive control of the work and public domain which makes a work completely open for use. There could be some middle period when people are allowed to publish a work but are required to pay a set fee to the creator or copyright holder for the use of the work.
The problem here is that public at large isn’t being served. The unlimited extension of copyrights is simply for the profit of the copyright holders. 25 years (or some other reasonable number) is plenty of time to profit from a work. As you can see the endless copyright system has created an anti-competitive environment that is not in the public interest.
I’m sure you’ll have plenty of reasons to disagree, but if I don’t post this you’ll only have straw men to argue with.
I’ve had work stolen, and I didn’t care for it. Someone took one of my published stories, and sold it to a paying market. It was in a country that wasn’t a signatory to the standard copyright treaties, so I was out of luck.
Clearly, the work did have value, and the copyright would not have prevented it from being published. An editor liked it enough to pay money for it.
I’m sorry that this debate has degenerated into name-calling so soon. We really don’t need “Gun Nut” “Gun Grabber” rhetoric.
Books and Art have value. Some of us who create these things like to be protected by rules that preserve our ownership. Since someone is getting money for it, why shouldn’t it be me? And if the alternative is that it doesn’t get published at all, well, that’s my right.
If Publishing went socialist, and writers and artists got money from the government, in return for which their works were made free for all, that’d be fine too. I wouldn’t object.
I object to something of mine being taken from me and made free without my consent, and to my personal monetary detriment. That kinda sucks.