Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
...Or to put it another way: Your desire for Product X in Format Y Right Now, Dammit does not legitimize the total disregard of an author's wishes, a publisher's rights, or international copyright law.
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Meaning what? That a rights holder should be required by law to publish a book in a format that you demand, or lose those rights?...
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We're straying from the point of the OP, but what the heck, it's not the first time that's happened here.
Keep in mind that I am referring to how the world would be if I wrote the law, not my interpretation of the law as it currently stands.
I have sympathy for living authors, but not much for anyone else in the loop.
It is my view that once a work is released to the public, the author, etc., should not have the legal right to later withhold it from the public.
I know very little about the book publishing industry other than what I have read here in the past year and a half. I have for many years been keeping my eye on the music business, and am familiar with their issues, some of which, I believe, pertain to books.
It appears to me that there are a couple of similarities in the development of the two industries over the past few decades.
I gather that books, like music, has seen a number of mergers and acquisitions. This has had two unfortunate results.
The first is that the remaining corporations are run by people (often referred to as "bean counters") who have little passion for the product they sell, and are almost exclusively interested in producing smash hits.
The second is that the remaining corporations now own such a large amount of product that their staffs cannot effectively manage what they have. I am referring to back catalogue.
Copyright law grants a monopoly on a specific product to the copyright holder. In my view, this monopoly should be contingent upon the "use it or lose it" philosophy. The govt should not enforce the rights of the copyright holder who does not keep his work available to the public.
Let us consider music:
a) The European (and most of the world) period of copyright is fifty years from the date of recording. Today small European record companies are releasing (without permission required) jazz records from the fifties that the large corporations haven't kept in print for years.
b) In the US, small record companies are licensing sixties jazz recordings from the "majors" who consider their sales potential to be too small to make the effort.
Now back to books.
Yes, if a corporation feels that the sales potential of a back catalogue title does not justify the effort of putting it out, I believe that anyone else should be free to publish it without fear.
If a corporation does not have the staff to do what it takes to publish its property, then the govt should not recognize its ownership of that property anymore. If the corporation wants to keep its copyright without doing the work, it should farm it out to small companies like the record companies do.