[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Sturgeon's Law has gone and squared itself, or maybe cubed itself. We don't have ten Twains or Dickenses or Kiplings writing today. We don't even have one.

Sure we do. Many of them.
You just can't *find* them for all the schlock being published. (And I'm not anti-schlock; I enjoy Harlequin romances and urban fantasy, no matter how formulaic they are.)

When thousands of books were published every year, a discerning person could read a few reviews (okay, a lot of reviews), and with a bit of effort, track down one or two very good books, and over the course of a decade, pick one that stood out as truly enduring and likely to become part the foundations of literature as we know it.

Those books are still being published; they're just swamped. Writing quality hasn't dropped any (although publishing editorial review has, in many places), but the difference between finding one or two books among thousands, and ten or twenty (or 100-200) good books among millions is beyond human capacity. A single person no longer has the time to find the really good books; he can happen across some by luck, but has no way of systematically searching for them.

Add in the self-publishing nightmares--since the 1980s, everyone with a printer thought he could write a book. And some of those people are excellent authors who couldn't possibly have reached mainstream publishers (because they write about subjects too weird, or because they're socially maladapted, or because they excel at blog posts not novels, or whatever) but most are just talentless amateurs who've been fooled by spellcheck programs into thinking they can write. Sturgeon's law applies to mainstream published works; I think it's closer to 99% for amateur work.

There are *gems* out there... but we've moved from "find the needle in the haystack" to "find the grains of diamond sand on the beach."

There's no more great literature being written today than there was fifty or a hundred years ago.

Sure there is. Including in genres and styles that couldn't be published a hundred years ago. There's just so much more of everything else that it's much, much harder to find.

I've seen novels written as fan fiction, by amateurs, that are better than a disturbing percentage of the published novels out there. ... Some of them write abominably, most of them write simply poorly, a few write well, and a rare handful write on a professional level. Without royalties. Without reading fees. Without any money at all.

I suspect that the reason no publisher or author has actually sued a fanfic writer for copyright infringement, is that the court failure would crack open the marketplace in a way that *terrifies* the big trademark-fandom companies. There've been C&D orders, but AFAIK no actual lawsuits for copyright infringements.

Because while a lot of fanfic, like a lot of any other kind of literature, is badly-written tripe, some of it is breathtakingly excellent--and some of the best writing is the stuff that the original authors would be most deeply offended about.

Therefore, there is no social benefit to extending copyright beyond a writer's lifetime, and even less to authors getting paid any time someone reads their work.

The social benefit to extending copyright beyond an author's death is to encourage late-in-life publications that he knows will benefit his family. It's also to encourage his family to publish posthumously; otherwise, why should they bother? Why not just put their own names on the work and get the benefit of copyright? Books "by the son of Stephen King" (if he were hit by a bus tomorrow) wouldn't be quite as popular as books by Stephen King, but if the other choice is releasing it to the public domain, the family might take the loss in sales.

It also prevents weird murders; if copyright ended on death, I'm sure it'd have occurred to *several* companies & weird individuals that Rowling doesn't normally wear a kevlar vest. Harry Potter books, movies and merchandise are worth millions; that's more than enough motive for murder.