Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
We are not dismissing your "realization" outright. We would just like to see some of the empirical data that supports it. Yes we certainly would.
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This is from a book I read recently called "How To Fix Copyright" by William Patry,
"Even under our current system of automatic, formality-free copyright, the vast majority of creators have no use for copyright. This has always been the case. Prior regimes in the United States, which required compliance with formalities such as affixing a notice or registration in order to either obtain or maintain copyright, provide empirical evidence of the relatively minor importance of copyright protection to many creators.
In the legislative committee reports to the 1909 Copyright Act, Congress examined the effectiveness of the copyright laws passed in the 1800s. Those laws required an initial registration with the government and then a second application to be filed after the first twenty eight-year term of protection in order to enjoy another, fourteen year renewal term of protection (called the “renewal term”). In other words, unless you filed the renewal application, your work went into the public domain after twenty-eight years.
Filing the application was cheap and easy. In examining how many copyright owners availed themselves of this easy ability to get another twenty-eight years of protection, Congress noted that only “a very small percentage of the copyrights are ever renewed.” Why? Not because of the difficulty of renewing, but rather because Congress found that the economic value “ceases in most cases long before the expiration of the [first] twenty-eight years.”
The percentage of copyright owners who bothered to file for renewal under the governing acts in the 1880s was a mere 15 percent. Keep in mind that this is not 15 percent of all works, since the majority were never registered in the first place and therefore could not be renewed. Copyright was of value to the owners of less than 5 percent of all works that could have received protection. If copyright is such a necessary incentive, why did more than 95 percent of those who could have obtained protection never bother to get it?
We can also see proof of the limited importance of copyright to creators in other government records. Records assembled by the Library of Congress and private researchers indicate that more than 21,000 books were published in the United States between 1790 and 1800, but only 648 copyright registrations were made in this same period, resulting in a registration rate of 3.28 percent at a time when registration was mandatory to get protection in the first place. Of this paltry 3.28 percent, an unknown percentage was renewed, but based on other data, the number renewed of those published must have been tiny, less than 1 percent.
The lack of interest of most authors and publishers in copyright led Congress to reject, in the 1909 Act, a proposal that would have granted a term of life of the author plus thirty years. Such a term would have extended copyright well beyond what copyright owners had themselves shown they needed by their failure to renew after the first, twenty-eight-year grant."
There is of course more to think about...