[Hrafn]

Originally Posted by gmw

For example The Game of Thrones is not far off twenty years old now (and he's been writing the series for over twenty years), and the series isn't even finished yet.

The Game of Thrones is a TV series. A Song of Ice and Fire is the book series. The first book in the series is titled A Game of Thrones. It is 17 years old, and ranks only #1,002 at Amazon. The latest, A Dance with Dragons, now two years old, ranks #81. guess which one contributes the vast majority of George R. R. Martin's royalties? As I said above:

Originally Posted by Hrafn

To put it another way, to sell your back-catalog, you've got to keep yourself in public view, and the main way to do that is to publish a new book that sells quite well. But if you can do that, the question has to be do you really still need the monopoly on the earliest parts of your back catalog?

You are grouping everything that is covered by copyright as one huge monopoly - which is a very strange definition that would appear to cover absolutely everything. "Oh yes, it's a monopoly that's run by millions of independent people selling their own thing independently, getting paid separately and competing with one another for sales." Are you sure that matches the dictionary definition?

You keep harping on about a difference that makes no difference! The fact that " it's a monopoly that's run by millions of independent people selling their own thing independently" makes little or no economic difference. In economic language, books are highly imperfect substitutes for each other, and therefore impose very little competitive pressure on each other. What matters is that nearly all books are subject to this monopoly system.

One of the reasons why copyright is structured as it is (automatic and of some defined duration), is to make it self-tracking as far as possible. The system is not perfect (copyright ownership becoming lost etc.), but registration systems in the past have not been perfect either. Publishers these days are required to submit a copy of published works to relevant state and/or federal libraries, and while this is not a registration system as such, it does mean that there is less chance of works being completely lost.

"Self-tracking"?

Please explain to me how the fact that a copy of a book is kept in some state or federal library somewhere (assuming of course that the publisher did what they were "required") enables a would-be licensee 50+ years hence to track down the copyright owner? Orphaned copyrights, and the legal risks they impose on potential republishers are a massive cost that the current system, with its overly-long copyright period and non-existent responsibilities to retain copyright ownership, imposes upon the economy. As a physical analogy, if you abandoned a bicycle 20 years ago, could you expect it to still be there, and sue anybody who you discovered was now riding it?

Why should we care that copyright enables so many more books to be written, if it also means that we can't buy a copy of many (most?) of them?