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Originally Posted by carld
I didn't find any of your answers serious or realistic.
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There's a difference between "you haven't answered this" and "I don't agree with your answers." Fine, you don't think those answers work. And the Agency 6 doesn't think Baen's methods will work for them. Shrug.
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So it comes back to premium editions, and add ons. No, sorry, that's not an answer.
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Maybe there'd be a right-of-sales law, that doesn't have anything to do with "copies," but only the creator & authorized agents were allowed to sell an item. Free copies would be available but other people couldn't sell--and as the torrents have shown, free copies are often going to be lower-quality.
If you can't make money selling the unauthorized version, why spend the extra time & effort making it as good? Free scanned PDFs; authorized well-formatted epubs. Unauthorized epubs--are they auto-OCR'd from the scans, or copies of the authorized versions? No way to tell. If you want to be sure, you buy the authorized one.
Removal of right-to-sale would kill the vast majority of an unauthorized paper book and theatre-movie market; those take real resources. You could make unauthorized PODs, but there'd be so many versions vying for people's attention that discerning readers would pay for the official version--if it didn't cost too much.
Free digital copies would be common, but so would low-quality ones; free paper/disk/film copies (of anything) would be much more limited. And authors and artists could release low-quality free digital versions to cover the market desire for *something*, with the high-quality version available for sale.
Low-quality art is low-res, suitable for the web but not printing. Low-quality books are harder to make--perhaps lots of "first five chapters" released free, perhaps a text-only version with asterisks & underlines instead of bold & italics, and no page breaks for chapters--palmdoc .pdb limitations, .txt limitations--so if you want the nicely-formatted version, you either make it yourself or just buy the official version. Perhaps the author releases a scanned-and-OCR'd version early so it spreads fast. A good conversion would also become available, but people would have to find it; it might be easier to just buy the official version. Or the free release is basic; the official has author's notes and prologue and a linked TOC, which could be sent around free but, again, people would have to know where to look. Or maybe they just release the full version and count on free digital versions to boost physical sales.
Maybe trademark law would remain: you still couldn't grab someone's logo and use it to imply you've got the official version. Legislators could clarify the law enough to make it obvious whether you're getting access to an authorized version or not, and with no money wasted chasing copyrights, companies could go after trademark infringements even on a small scale.
I TRUST HUMAN GREED. Both that of artists, and that of the public who are hungry for more art. Artists are not, as a category, going to starve, even if some forms of art become less financially viable. We are not, as a species, going to remove the ability of artists to make a living as artists; we like art, we want more of it, and we will FIND a way to pay them for it.
Maybe rogue hackers will infest the web with ebook-destroying viruses that seek out all unauthorized versions and destroy them, in order to drive sales to the authors' sites.
If copyright law were abolished, we'd have a massive upheaval in the creative & entertainment industries, because a lot of their protocols count on the support of copyright--but we'd *quickly* start finding other ways to pay artists. No, I can't list which ones would be long-term effective; I, like everyone else here, am hampered by a lifetime of casually expecting copyright to encourage some business formats and discourage others.
Fifty years ago, nobody could've accurately predicted what business models would work, if we got rid of the cost of phone calls & letters for communication. If we allowed instant global communication. If someone had asked, "what if you could instantly teleport your letter to someone else's desk, without a stamp or the post office, how would that change things? How could we still get packages delivered other than paying a single courier to carry them, when letters don't need to be delivered anymore?" -- Of course, that's not quite how it broke down. But fifty years ago, nobody would've been able to predict what parts of business would, and would not, be changed by email, by the removal of a former impenetrable barrier to communications.
Copyright is a barrier to communication and creativity. It's also a method of encouraging creativity and publication. If it were removed, we'd find other ways; we can suggest possibilities, but we can't know which of them would work best.