Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Some people simply must write, be it good or bad, commercial or not, just as some must make music or paint or sculpt or participate in any number of other arts or hobbies. The comparison to sport, where many participate but few professionally is not an entirely irrelevant one. There will still be books written if there is neither copyright nor monetary reward of any type. The Roman Empire had no intellectual property laws, yet still managed to produce works still admired today. Most authors in modern times are never able to make a living from their work, though many are motivated by the prospect that they might. Without some reasonable incentive for authors there will still be stories told. There will still be books, or at least ebooks, and they will be very widely available at little or no cost. But the unfortunate fact is that the standard generally will almost certainly fall, and there will be huge numbers of books which will simply not be written. Including many great books.
Our current intellectual property laws including copyright are badly broken. At worst they do positive harm. At best the bulk of the rewards that they provide accrue not to the actual authors or creators but to that group referred to as "rights-holders", who hold those rights for obscene and unjustified amounts of time. Certainly a fundamental review is long overdue, but will not happen because of the power of lobbyists and vested interests. Such a review should also consider whether a statutory monopoly is the best way to provide the desired incentive. Personally I suspect it may be though in a much shorter and restricted form. But other alternatives should also be considered.
I am not publicly condoning piracy nor suggesting that people break the existing laws, even though I consider them to be very bad laws in many respects. I hate to see authors not getting paid but must admit to not shedding any tears for some rights-holders in that position.
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This is something we can agree on. If you look at how authors made money through various time period, it has varied. Through out much of time, authors were either wealthy, belonged to a religious community or had wealthy patrons. With the rise of the newspapers, authors started making money selling stories to various newspapers and magazines. We saw a big jump in the number of authors when newspapers and magazines came into being.
Ben Franklin, the main proponent of putting copyright into the Constitution was a newspaper publisher and wrote to fill space in his newspaper, not to sell books. He wanted copyright to keep other newspapers from simply printing his stories in their papers. Even up through the 50's the vast majority of fiction was first serialized in magazines. Form followed payment. Dickens and Verne wrote lengthy, somewhat repetitive books with chapter lengths that made each chapter easy for serialization. For example, A Tale of Two Cities, was first published in 31 weekly installments in a literary periodical.
I suspect that a tiered copyright system would solve a lot of problems. Heck, I suspect that even something as simple as making copyright holders file for copyright and then renew the copyright every seven years (the original term of copyright in the US) might solve a lot of problems and save a lot of orphaned works from obscurity.
In the US, the primary driver for long copyright periods is movies and music. Publishers and authors simply don't have the economic hefty. I've more sanguine of improved results than you are. Eventually, something will happen that crystallizes a new business model.
Culture leads laws, not the other way around. Culture in the US, IMPO, is heading towards having everything available. Kids are use to using YouTube to watch video and listen to music. I would not be terribly surprised if at some point, something similar to the consent decree that made it practical to play music on the radio occurring for other media. There are too many people working towards that point.