Copyright has a chilling effect on book sales...

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Books do NOT belong to the copyright holder. You might wish them to, but they do not. What the copyright holder owns is a limted time governmentally granted monopoly on copying the book. The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation. Copyright does let authors gain financially from their works, but that is not the purpose of copyright, it is a means to an end.

Books are not analogous to land. Physical property exists even if government does not.

I really don't see the difference. Physical property rights don't exist without government if you can't defend them yourself. Without government, if someone stronger comes along takes a club to your head and demands the lock to your treasure chest, what will you do? Society defends your property rights, be it physical or intellectual property. Now for intellectual property, it has been decided that there is a time limited this property can be passed on after death. The first European versions of copyright were for particular works and expressly granted to provide income for authors.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I really don't see the difference. Physical property rights don't exist without government if you can't defend them yourself. Without government, if someone stronger comes along takes a club to your head and demands the lock to your treasure chest, what will you do? Society defends your property rights, be it physical or intellectual property. Now for intellectual property, it has been decided that there is a time limited this property can be passed on after death. The first European versions of copyright were for particular works and expressly granted to provide income for authors.

And how does society protect your property rights? By having a bigger club (or more of them) than anybody else. There's a difference?

[QuantumIguana]

I am pretty sure that the public domaine had little to do with it as these (and other) authors have been published/analized/rewritten relentlessly by various people and when producing a movie the cost of the script is pretty negligible overall.

They can be published and rewritten because they are in the public domain. If people had to pay to put on a performance of Shakespeare. it would have been rarely performed, and probably faded to obscurity. Shakespeare wasn't always held in the same regard that it is today.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I really don't see the difference. Physical property rights don't exist without government if you can't defend them yourself.

Ability to control use of land exists outside of governments. We invented governments to make "guy with biggest club" not the biggest landowner. But the fact remains: guy with club, and a couple of friends, can demand that other people not be present on the land they've decided to control.

Ability to control use of a literary or artistic work does not exist outside of governments. Guy with club cannot follow everyone who's heard his poetry, read his book or seen his painting and prevent them from making a copy. The physics involved are drastically different, and that's before we touch on social issues.

There's a longtime understanding throughout most of humanity that where you live and sleep is, or should be, under some level of your control. There's an equally longtime understanding that the words you say and the acts you commit... are not. That your friend can go to *his* friend and say, "Hans told me [repeat Hans' words]."

We invented governments in part to limit people's ability to club each other and throw them out off land they wanted to control. We wanted *less* physical controls attached to physical property rights, and we established social controls so that people wouldn't want to rely on the obvious physical solutions.

And we invented governments to expand people's ability to control use of their words and actions... to declare some acts as private, some information confidential, some works only allowed to develop profit in certain directions. We wanted to establish social controls to make up for the lack of possibility of physical controls.

(All that is tangential to whether or not it's "correct" that these rights get passed to someone else after the death of the first rightsholder. So this may be nothing more than a distraction; sorry.)

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

works for land

It's hard for me to think of much land, in any country, that has legally transferred from one owner to another by some non-violent legal process going back to 1512. What I am missing?

Paul Heald's chart is dead-on. If an outstanding book is old, but not public domain, there's generally no eBook.

Just today, considering what would be a long-term reading project, I checked to see if there's an eBook for Churchill's World Crisis. There is none. But Churchill's youthful public domain works are all eBooks. This is a concrete example of what the chart shows.

If it's in the big twentieth century trough shown in the Heald chart, Project Gutenburg should be given a crack at it.

[Rob Lister]

Originally Posted by gweeks

Only because you have to pay property tax on it. If you don't pay the tax, the state takes it away in about 3 years.

Greg Weeks

so tax the copyright every year. or 10 years. or 50 years. no pay=public domain.

that makes everyone happy.

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

I really don't see the difference. Physical property rights don't exist without government if you can't defend them yourself. Without government, if someone stronger comes along takes a club to your head and demands the lock to your treasure chest, what will you do? Society defends your property rights, be it physical or intellectual property. Now for intellectual property, it has been decided that there is a time limited this property can be passed on after death. The first European versions of copyright were for particular works and expressly granted to provide income for authors.

The eternal copyright position requires that the right to intellectual property be a natural right, one that is not dependent on any government. If it is asserted that neither physical nor intellectual property are natural rights, then the position that limited copyright is legalized theft is rendered null.

But even with government, the thugs can still demand your key, it happens all the time. The difference between physical and intellectual property is that you have means to protect physical property without government, for example, locking a door. Government offers protection in addition to what you already have, it doesn't create a kind of property that didn't exist without government.

Intellectual property, on the other hand, is meaningless without government, as it is a creation of government. There is no door to lock, without government, the most you could do is to ask someone not to copy your book.

[cfrizz]

Originally Posted by JoeD

I don't think that's fair on those who die early though. They've not had the same opportunity to accumulate wealth to pass on via inheritance to their family. Making it a fixed number of years allows the copyright to be passed on to family should someone die early in their life. Not to mention the idea of potentially valuable assets becoming public when someone dies could have movie plot line consequences

Sorry, you want to earn money get a frickin job! If you are waiting for someone to die to get their money, you are a loser!

[Justin Nemo]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

If copyright continues to be extended, it may well be that no books ever again enter the public domain. Disney is certain to push for an extention of copyright when the copyright for Steamboat Willie nears expiration, and they may well get keep getting extensions. The last copyright extension was challenged in court, but the Supreme Court ruled that it didn't volate the "limited times" provision of the copyright clause. But there has to be some point where we have to say "this is too long to qualify as 'limited times'". Extending copyright over and over again is in effect the same as eternal copyright.

I'm a supporter of copyright for limited times, but I am an opponent of eternal copyright. Culture and the public domain are inseperable. One of the real ironies is that those who want copyright to be eternal quite often have benefited from the public domain. Where would Disney be without the public domain?

I'm not sure where I stand on this one. If the creator of the work or his estate don't benefit from the sale of the work, then Amazon and B&N etc will. They seem to bring out copies of Jane Eyre for example every couple of years and just change the cover. I think I would rather that someone connected to the creator of the work benefited.

[bevdeforges]

I'm all for the author benefiting from his or her creation during their lifetime. Not so keen on endowing the heirs with long-lasting benefits. If the author didn't bother to put any of the profits away for the heirs, why should the system do so for them? (What if the author didn't want his or her heirs to benefit? What if they have no heirs? Why encourage distant "cousins" to come out of the woodwork like that?)

I'd be satisfied with a life-of-the-author term, with perhaps a fixed minimum (10 years, perhaps). For corporate copyright holders, there should be a reasonable fixed term - perhaps as much as 50 years, but certainly no longer.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I see no difference between land and books. If land can be passed on generation after generation, then so should books.

In the UK, if land is not used, it can eventually be returned to common ownership.
If the same were true of books, we wouldn't have an orphan works problem.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

It's hard for me to think of much land, in any country, that has legally transferred from one owner to another by some non-violent legal process going back to 1512. What I am missing?

Hmm, I think there is certainly land in the UK still owned by the same family/organisation as it was 500 years ago.

[howyoudoin]

A solution could be to peg copyright onto sales numbers. If the copyright owner fails to maintain sales above a certain number, the copyright expires and the book falls into the public domain.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Justin Nemo

I'm not sure where I stand on this one. If the creator of the work or his estate don't benefit from the sale of the work, then Amazon and B&N etc will. They seem to bring out copies of Jane Eyre for example every couple of years and just change the cover. I think I would rather that someone connected to the creator of the work benefited.

You can get them free on Project Gutenberg. Usually the same text. The B&N/Amazon e-books are for people who haven't researched their options...

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

so tax the copyright every year. or 10 years. or 50 years. no pay=public domain.

that makes everyone happy.

That's what the renewal requirement was. I was reasonably happy with that, though I would like to see it more often than 28 years as a requirement to keep a current address on file SOMEWHERE.

Greg