The copyright holder *is *the creator in the vast majority of books. There is no distinction.
How is the public at large not being served today? The only limitation is that some books are only available used or through libraries. Which has always been the case. Otherwise, the public has more books to peruse by an order of magnitude, maybe two, than at any time previously.
I agree that a reasonable number of years for copyright is preferable. What is that number? I think we can agree that 25 is not it. Copyright has been longer for the entire history of the U.S. Can you possibly make a case that for the good of the country, every book written in 1987 needs to be in the public domain? Under what conceivable economic, political, social, or historic theory could that be true?
The question I have for you, therefore is: What has changed in recent times that would make it a good thing to limit copyright more than in the 19th century? What has changed from the situation in 1900 or 1920 or 1940 or 1960 or 1980? How is a record number of books available anti-competitive? Why should anyone other than the copyright holder be allowed to make money on the creator’s work? Other than “it would be nice,” why should you or I be able to publish a work written in 1987 and how does our profiteering benefit the public interest?
Funny, I just wrote out a long form of the Parable of the Broke Sophomore… you know, the guy in the university sweatshirt who’s never paid for a thing in his life and is adamant about open-source software, unlimited music exchange and being able to torrent anything digitizable* (and usually anti-capitalism, anti-wealth and anti-regulation at the top of his lungs, too)… until he graduates and becomes the most ferocious proponent of the DRM that’s protecting HIS big idea.
*At the maximum bit rate his student-rate ISP can manage, none of this fascist “throttling” or any such shit.
It really seems like Germany could set a special case for that work instead of bottling up the whole damned world for it. Talk about Douglas Adams’ “Outside the Asylum.”
To be brutally honest, the public interest lies with the readers not the authors. As a general rule, the public reads and doesn’t write - so in striking a balance between what’s best for writers and what’s best for readers, the public interest would tilt the balance towards the readers.
That said, the long term public interest of the readers would not be served by screwing over the writers. If the writers get nothing in return for their work, they have no motive to write - and that eventually leaves the readers with nothing to read. So writers should get a fair return for their work so that they can produce the work the public wants to read.
As I said, this is probably not what you - as a writer - wants to hear. But it’s no different than saying the health system shouldn’t be designed around what’s best for doctors, the legal system shouldn’t be designed around what’s best for lawyers, the education system shouldn’t be designed around what’s best for teachers, the agricultural system shouldn’t be designed around what’s best for farmers, and the financial system shouldn’t be designed around what’s best for investors. Ultimately, no system should be designed primarily around the interests of the “insiders” - the primary interest should be towards the public who use the system from the outside. Yes, people inside the system should be rewarded - but only to the extent it improves the service the public ends up receiving.
That’s probably one of the most convoluted and nonsensical arguments I’ve ever read here (that was intended to make sense). For one thing, you’ve confused and conflated “public interest” with “popular choice.”
ETA: For one thing, there’s absolutely no basis for even implying that readers have some right to read a writer’s work. That’s the basis of arguments for the “free music” crowd - they really really have some “right” to own/hear Justin Bieber’s latest puling, so it should be free.
Ah. So we’re discussing cartoon characters. Gotcha. The notion of young, idealistic liberals growing into grumpy conservatives isn’t particularly unique to Gen Y.
The “free everything” generation you’re referring to isn’t really a group of people who don’t think content should be paid for (do some people make clumsy arguments at that? Of course; half-baked philosophies and self-justification are always plentiful). We’re a generation that’s realized that content often won’t be paid for. The cap is off the tube, and the only ways to fully put the cap back on require measures that damage the content itself. DRM is generally a bad fallback because it results in an inferior product and a loss of traditional consumer rights.
There are ways to combat this, and people are innovating in numerous ways. Direct publishing is lowering costs and overheads to inspire purchasing. Lower barriers to merchandizing allow for alternate ways to make money. Crowdfunding, while still messy, can allow creators to both ensure revenue before releasing as well as build word-of-mouth and encourage direct audience feedback during the creation process.
That said, I think copyright is still valid and should generally be respected; I just think the burden is increasing on creators to realize that copyright enforcement is increasingly difficult, piracy is a fact of modern publishing, and that figuring out a way to engage and profit despite piracy is going to be the much healthier way to proceed.
To the OP’s question, I do think digitization is going to effectively render this concern moot before too long. Even if you don’t like eBooks, print-on-demand publishing from digital archives should be able to render OOP books a thing of the past. While the overhead of batch printing can mean that reprinting copyrighted books isn’t worth it, that shouldn’t apply to eBooks / POD.
Never said it was, but I’ve known too many Spaniards.
I can’t think of how many arguments I’ve read and heard that oh-so-sincerely nod towards copyright and ownership and such and then self-unravel on some variation of “everyone is getting theirs free so I shouldn’t have to pay either” - with not a little sprinkle of “I can’t afford it and I want it and so there.”
I can make a personal list of ten people I know fairly well who made precisely that arc - bored us to fucking tears about the jackbooted RIAA and evil Microsoft and stinking-whale copyright laws and prattled about open software and free digital libraries and so forth and so on… each and every one of whom went on to “create” a marketable product that they then bored us to tears by complaining about how expensive digital locking and DRM and sales control and the evil Chinese pirates were fucking them out of their rightful pelf. I could list a hundred more by name that I didn’t know personally.
So you can call it a cartoon; I call it art imitating life. The current generation is particularly obnoxious about it, IMHO, because many of them grew up with everything free for the downloading/torrenting and then “discovered” property rights when it was their nuts in the chomper. Most older gens at least knew they were full of shit about all software being free while they pontificated for the alternative.
It looks different to me. I have a hard time equating the public’s need for food and medical care with the public’s need for 1970’s spy novels. Nothing you said really answers Exapno’s question that you quoted.
Maybe it’s time to rethink, seriously, the copyright concept ca. 1776, modified by the ASCAP/BMI era ca. 1914+, carried through to before the digital era? Maybe a major concept modification is in order?
Frankly, I don’t know what that would be, but I think we need to consider a paradigm change, for the good of all.
This may be a shock, but used book stores do still exist. I get a lot of mid-century books from them.
Also - while some libraries aggressively cull books not all do - my county system has plenty of books dating back to the 1950’s, a bunch from the 40’s, and even a few from the 30’s. Most public systems do participate in the Inter-Library Loan system as well, which I have utilized to obtain rare books for reading purposes. Sure, it’s not as easy as getting the latest potboiler but it’s far from impossible.
My vote is for copyright to last the life of the creator. If you want to leave money for your heirs earn it before you die. If you want to keep your creation to yourself you may do so until you quit breathing, after which the world can decide whether or not its worth keeping.
That’s snark, to an extent. But most peoples’ opinions are worth 2 cents on this subject because they simply and literally don’t know anything deep about the issues. That’s fine: the world is filled with peoples’ opinions about things they known nothing about. Politics, economics, healthcare, science. Pretty much everything, to be brutally honest. That’s why Internet discussions can be fun, and also why they can be so frustrating. Fortunately, nobody will ever pay even 2 cents worth of attention to our uninformed opinions.
Almost every writer I talked with believes that the current system of copyright requires major revision, though mostly because all of publishing requires major revision. Other than that, there’s no agreement except that the world is changing beneath us and nobody in the industry can see what the future will be like. The only difference between us and the random opinions on message boards is that some writers know enough to be aware of the issues and the complexities. Just like some lawyers know more about law issues and some doctors know more about medical issues: not enough to solve the problems but enough to be driven crazy by clear ignorance. And absolutely nobody ever knows what “the good of all” means.
That’s life. None of these threads will change anything because nobody’s listening. I’ll still get to have some fun pounding the clear ignorance into the ground. And pointing out that “the good of all” is always defined as taking money out of someone else’s pockets but not mine.
Well, if nobody else is going to call you out on this, I guess I’ll have to.
I have no comment on the rest of your post, but this bit is utter hogwash. Physical objects and non-physical objects have a great many differences. Having a time limit to copyrights is nothing at all like allowing people to occupy a house after a certain length of time. I know you care deeply about this issue and can bring a lot of facts to the discussion, but sentences like that make it hard to take you seriously.
It appears you didn’t understand what I wrote. The public interest has nothing to do with rights (which I never mentioned). It also doesn’t necessarily involve popular choice - there are many cases where the public wants something it shouldn’t have. And I didn’t make any argument that attempted to justify copyright violation.
He asked how a change in copyright law would benefit the public interest and I gave him a reason. You may not agree with the answer I gave but it was an answer to his question.
The number 25 is easy to defend, it was used in another post so I grabbed it.
I don’t have a problem with a longer number, or a lifetime copyright except that lifetimes are getting very long and at some point in time the enforcement of very old copyrights isn’t worth the public resources involved, meager as they are. So for that pick a reasonable number, and a reasonable definition of copyright to go with it, and things will be fine. What won’t be fine are eternal copyrights that attempt to put a lock on an exclusive region of human concepts and hold that long past the time such concepts are absorbed into the culture. There are other problems that are secondary and the definition of a copyright has to avoid allowing exclusive access to works and the creation of artificial value.
