[Worldwalker]

@edward, if you'll note the topic of this thread, it is about ethics, not legality.

I'm the one who had the hard time getting Steven Saylor's latest in a shelf-fitting format.

Yep, if the only way I can get an ebook would be to buy a hardcover, that won't sell me a hardcover -- that'll sell me nothing. The whole reason I want ebooks in the first place is I've got no freaking room left for books! Or, if I get any more books, I won't have any room left for me.

@riemann42: Authors don't deserve to get paid when I read their work any more than woodworkers deserve to get paid when I sit at their tables, or sewing machine operators deserve to get paid when I wear their clothes.

Authors deserve to get paid when they sell their product, just like people who make tables and T-shirts. I don't have to put money in a meter when I sit down to breakfast. I don't have to pay some kind of royalty to whoever made this T-shirt when I put it on. And if I sell that table, or that T-shirt -- or that book -- at a yard sale, nobody but me gets the money. If I want to saw the legs off of the table and make it into a bench, or sew up the bottom of the T-shirt and use it as a strange pillowcase, I can do that too. I bought them, and I can use them, sell them, or make them into something else (that is, format-shift them) without paying anyone a second or third or tenth time.

I've always thought that Richard Stallman's rant about the right to read was a ways out in left field, but it's starting to sound more and more like reality every day. And it's not what's changing.

So it isn't enough that not only has copyright stretched "for a limited time" to mean "long after the author, and his children, and his grandchildren, have died of old age," but now you think he and his distant descendants have some special privilege that the makers of tables and T-shirts don't, to get paid every time their product is used?

Aside from all other issues, it's a Bad Thing for society. The original purpose of copyright was to enable authors to make a living, because the output of those authors was considered to be good for society as a whole. (oddly enough, empowering their great-great-great-grandchildren to collect royalties for a book written by someone who died decades before they were born never entered into it). Its purpose wasn't to benefit authors -- they're no more deserving of special benefits than the makers of tables and T-shirts. It was to benefit society by ensuring that books would be written and good writers could make a living from their books (at least, if people wanted to buy them) so they wouldn't have to give up writing to sell tables or T-shirts to make ends meet. Reading books is good for people. Reading books might be best, in fact, for the poorest people. Books are a path to an education, even if it doesn't involve schooling. So by charging every time someone reads a book (I have to assume this would involve ebooks) you're putting up a barrier to the people who could most benefit from those books. I long ago lost count of how many times I read, say, The Hobbit. But how many times would I have read it if the book was a single-use item, and I had to buy it anew every time I wanted to re-read it? In hard times, when I haven't been able to afford other forms of entertainment, I could always take a favorite book from the shelf and relax with an old friend. You would take those friends away from people who couldn't afford the reading fees? Or make them decide between buying food and re-reading The Hobbit?

"Son, I can't read you bedtime stories anymore. They're charging $5 per use now, and we just don't have the money to spend hundreds of dollars a month on reading fees."

"But Dad, I know my favorite stories by heart. I could tell one to you!"

"No! NO! Don't ever do that! That's book piracy, and you can be hanged at the yardarm."

The world of literature has existed for hundreds of years without the sort of thing you're proposing. The great authors of history wrote classic works despite finding it hard enough to get publishers to pay them, let alone their distant descendants. They sold books to people who could read them over and over again, with no extra fees, and who could do the same things with them they could do with a table or a shirt. Surprisingly, in the time that copyright terms have doubled or tripled, the quality of writing has not followed along. Who is today's Dickens, or Twain, or Dumas? There are 5x as many people on earth now as when Twain was alive, and with copyright terms being at least double what they were in his day, shouldn't there be ten Twains penning great novels? And a dozen Dickenses, and another dozen Dumases, etc. Authors in the 19th century wrote classics while they struggled to pay their bills; shouldn't authors in the 21st century be writing many more books as good or better, since they know that their great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be collecting royalties on those books?

Frankly, it isn't happening. Sturgeon's Law has gone and squared itself, or maybe cubed itself. We don't have ten Twains or Dickenses or Kiplings writing today. We don't even have one. The idea that giving authors' distant descendants (or, more likely, large corporations that some slightly less distant descendants sold the rights to for pennies on the dollar) royalties for decades after the author is dust would produce a social benefit, specifically an increase in the production of great literature, that outweighs the social loss of freeing those books for public use once the author is dead has, in fact, failed. There's no more great literature being written today than there was fifty or a hundred years ago. In fact, there's arguably less. Just more Harlequin romances and celebrity tell-alls. So, given that the "pay their descendants unto the 7th generation" concept has failed, why do you think the "pay them every time someone reads their book" concept will work any better? Whatever the secret is to great literature, how authors are paid (so long as they are paid enough to be able to buy their tables and T-shirts) doesn't seem to be a factor. What might be a factor, on the other hand, is people reading books, reading good books, and demanding good books in the market. And that is exactly what you would choke off with the "re-read, re-pay" model you advocate.

I've seen novels written as fan fiction, by amateurs, that are better than a disturbing percentage of the published novels out there. These are written by people who will never see a penny from their work -- who, in some cases, are even at risk of legal action by some of the more anal-retentive rights owners (though most have realized that suing their most hardcore fans is not, in fact, a good public relations tool). They not only don't have the right to profit from the work for a hundred years or more, they don't have the right to profit from it for a millisecond. And yet they write. Some of them write abominably, most of them write simply poorly, a few write well, and a rare handful write on a professional level. Without royalties. Without reading fees. Without any money at all.

So I would have to say that whatever it is that motivates an author to write well, neither increasing their remuneration (19th century to today) nor decreasing it (fanfic writers who will never see a penny) seems to affect it. Therefore, there is no social benefit to extending copyright beyond a writer's lifetime, and even less to authors getting paid any time someone reads their work.