Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Do you really think that your convenience is a sufficient reason to be able to obtain this book for free, Steve?
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As already stated, I was responding to a factual claim by Rob Lister, rather than making an argument.
But to make an argument: The fact that you can get eBooks for almost everything by now-obscure Nobel Prize in Literature winners that was published before 1923, while there are big post-1922-published eBook gaps -- besides works being out of print -- for the gentleman who probably is the most famous Nobel Prize in Literature winner of all time, provides a wee bit of evidence that copyright in Europe and the US is now too long.
If free market incentives were working well at the current copyright length, books published shortly after 1922, when the profit motive comes into play, should be more likely to be available as eBooks than those published before 1923, where the financial incentive doesn't exist.
It may be that this problem will go away when we get to the point where every book still under copyright originally came out as an eBook. But that will be a very long time. And I think Life + 70 (or longer in the US) will still lead to a lot of orphaned works because of legal difficulties, after several generations, in determining who owns the rights.
The works of Winston S. Churchill go out of copyright, in half the world, in 28 months. That includes Canada, where we sometimes visit. I'm a fairly patient person, so no big problem for me.