[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by petrucci

I wish to see a level playing field, so that new authors do not have to compete with free classics. The old books should be in copyright and cost money, just like new books.

Who should control the copyrights for them, and make the money for those sales?

If you need examples, who should get income for:

• Plato's works, written thousands of years ago, and translated to English a few hundred years ago?
• William Shakespeare's works?
• Jane Austen's works?
• H. Beam Piper's early works?
• Civil-war era newspapers scanned to online archives?
• The Bible?

If the copyright owners you want to assign to them decide to make them all free to distribute under Creative Commons, how will the copyright help new authors?

Why should new authors *not* have to compete with the entire public domain? After all, they have always lived in a world where those works are widely, cheaply available, and for the last several decades, thousands of those works have been free from Project Gutenberg.

Do you think that forcing Austen back into copyright, assigning an heir to get profit from her books' sales, and assuming that greed will make the price of those books rise, will help new authors? That people will therefore decide to buy New Author's work instead of Austen's, since they're now all the same price?

(Also: does your notion of removing works from the public domain apply to all copyrighted materials, or just books? Are photographs, movies, and songs all to be assigned to someone for perpetual copyright protection to "make a level playing field" for new artists? Should new composers and lyricists not have to complete with free versions of Greensleeves and Deck the Halls?)

I certainly appreciate your point of view. However, there are laws about selling products for less than it costs to produce them. There is a real danger from subsidised merchandise. Authors will not be able to afford to write a better book, as the market will not bear the price.

What do you mean, "less than it costs to produce them?" Books are *always* sold for less than the cost of production... if "time the author spent writing them" is part of the equation.

If it takes six months to write a book, the ebook certainly isn't selling for "half a year's rent, utilities, food, and other expenses" per copy. Each book is priced low in order to make those costs up by selling many copies.

If a book takes six months to produce, what do you think the minimum cost for the ebook should be? Should fast writers charge less per book than slower ones?

If the author is not otherwise working, then writing the books and distributing them freely is a form of price subsidy.

I don't get this. What's being subsidized? Who is getting money from an outside source?

Authors with a day job are welcome to distribute books for free, but retired or disabled authors have to charge $5 a copy? I don't follow your logic at all.