Quote:
Originally Posted by jasonkchapman
I was in complete agreement up until this one. There may be reasons for a book being out of print other than publisher neglect, like a limited edition chapbook, for instance. Also, the point at which a book goes out of print is generally when, in current contracts, the author can regain publishing rights to the work. That would be the exact wrong time to force an end of copyright protection.
I don't think society gains anything from an OOP cutoff that it doesn't already get from a fixed (shorter-than-now) span of time.
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You might be right about that last. I certainly wouldn't want to deny an author a chance to re-negotiate rights. But I think authors that
don't renegotiate rights, say, for 5 years or something, might be effectively abandoning their franchise. I'd support a compulsory license style compensation at that point, but not the continued abandonment of the work altogether.
I don't know if I agree about limited edition chapbooks. I've never been a fan of artificially imposed scarcity. If I get an electronic version of such a chapbook, it's not going to reduce the value of the limited edition print, which was probably signed or at least numbered.
In thinking about the ethics entailed in the legal system(s), I think a distinction needs to be made between protecting the rights of the author to be compensated for their work, and protecting the ability of the author to attempt to manipulate value through scarcity. I believe the first is critical, and will continue to be in the digital era. However, I think the second is going to go by the wayside. Comparisons to apples or cars or whatever are irrelevant (until they can be reproduced digitally). The market pressure of an environment in which digital works can be reproduced essentially for free is going to make the scarcity technique of manipulating value unworkable. Perhaps our task is to distinguish between these two aspects of current law and custom and make sure we don't lose author compensation as scarcity manipulation becomes extinct.