Copyright has a chilling effect on book sales...

[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Sounds like our current system with different entities having different rights with formats and distribution over a single work. How would you go about changing this?

No, its nothing like the current system. In the current system having different entities holding different rights is negotiated. If I write a novel, I can grant all or some of the rights to a publisher. Further at the end of any contract period, the rights will revert to me. It is like the fact that with the current life +70 copyright period that you often times have multiple parties holding a share of the copyright, some of whom might prove impossible to find or might hold up publication despite the desires of the majority of rights holders.

--
Bill

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by bill_mchale

I have no objection to making sure the author of a work profits from the work they have produced. However, an accident of birth should not provide someone with an immediate right to collect profits. Even someone who inherits a major corporation has to work to ensure it remains profitable; not so with the inheritor of the right copyright.

The inheritor of a copyright, like the inheritor of a business, can often count on market inertia providing some profit for a while. After that, however, it'll take work to convince the market to keep buying.

A copyrighted work is only profitable if it has (1) an audience who's willing to pay for it and (2) a marketable form to bring to that audience. Owning the copyright doesn't bring you profit any more than owning a storefront does.

Even worse after a couple of generations, it might literally become impossible to track down everyone who has inherited a stake in a book. Even with life +70 years it is often difficult to track down everyone who owns a share of the rights.

And it's much worse with multi-creator works, like movies and a lot of songs. The reason there's no digital versions of a lot of movies from the 30s-50s isn't because nobody wants to make them, nor because the copyright holders are demanding too much money... it's because nobody feels safe enough with the permissions they can get, because they know that failing to track down the person with the rights to a snippet of music somewhere in the middle, or the font designer for the title sequence, can mean bankruptcy down the line.

The problem with L+70 copyrights isn't that "those lazy heirs can just coast on their grandfather's hard work"--people have always been allowed to hand off a profitable business to descendents who hopefully won't have to work as hard--but that often, those heirs can't be identified or tracked down, especially when one or more "heirs" is a publishing company, which may have been bought by another company, which may have gone bankrupt & had its assets sold in an auction, and nobody knows what happened to the copyrights.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The problem with L+70 copyrights ... that often, those heirs can't be identified or tracked down, especially when one or more "heirs" is a publishing company, which may have been bought by another company, which may have gone bankrupt & had its assets sold in an auction, and nobody knows what happened to the copyrights.

I just read where this happened to a publisher. They wanted to release a deceased author's backlist but couldn't as they were unable to locate some of the 12 descendents (at least) who owned the copyrights. Even if they did find them the negotiations (trying to get them to agree to terms while spread throughout the earth) and title search would have been cost prohibitive. Evidently, there was no estate manager.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by bill_mchale

No, its nothing like the current system. In the current system having different entities holding different rights is negotiated. If I write a novel, I can grant all or some of the rights to a publisher. Further at the end of any contract period, the rights will revert to me. It is like the fact that with the current life +70 copyright period that you often times have multiple parties holding a share of the copyright, some of whom might prove impossible to find or might hold up publication despite the desires of the majority of rights holders.

--
Bill

It doesn't matter when it happens (during or after the author's life), it's up to the rights holders to negotiate the terms. If ownership gets fragmented over time and it becomes financially unfeasible to track down and bring the parties together, then too bad.

Society does not have a right to any work of art due to a passage of time. It's up to the rights holders to make that determination.

[CommonReader]

My pet example for the excessive length of copyright protection today is the German author and WWI hero Ernst Jünger. He published his diaries of the Great War "In Stahlgewittern" (Storm of Steel) in 1920. He then went on to live to the ripe old age of 102 years, dying in 1998. His work will therefore be protected until 2068, giving "In Stahlgewittern" protection for almost 1 1/2 centuries. Who is the main beneficiary? Most likely his publisher as the people closely associated with him have died long ago.
Authors themselves have received inspriration from the public, right down to the very tools of their trade, letters and language, therefore their own works shall return to the public after some time.
BTW, the Industrial Revolution spread so fast because everyone was busy stealing British intellectual property (who themselves were also happy to grab intellectual property wherever they could get it). The spread of knowledge is therefore a common human interest and this limits the property rights of the author or inventor.
As a side note: Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" is currently not printed in Germany as the State of Bavaria claims to have inherited Hitler's rights to the book and refuses any permission for print. It will be interesting to see what they will do when the book goes into public domain in 2015.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

My pet example for the excessive length of copyright protection today is the German author and WWI hero Ernst Jünger. He published his diaries of the Great War "In Stahlgewittern" (Storm of Steel) in 1920. He then went on to live to the ripe old age of 102 years, dying in 1998. His work will therefore be protected until 2068, giving "In Stahlgewittern" protection for almost 1 1/2 centuries. Who is the main beneficiary? Most likely his publisher as the people closely associated with him have died long ago.
Authors themselves have received inspriration from the public, right down to the very tools of their trade, letters and language, therefore their own works shall return to the public after some time.
BTW, the Industrial Revolution spread so fast because everyone was busy stealing British intellectual property (who themselves were also happy to grab intellectual property wherever they could get it). The spread of knowledge is therefore a common human interest and this limits the property rights of the author or inventor.
As a side note: Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" is currently not printed in Germany as the State of Bavaria claims to have inherited Hitler's rights to the book and refuses any permission for print. It will be interesting to see what they will do when the book goes into public domain in 2015.

"Mein Kampf" is a perfect example for the value of eternal copyright in some cases. This rambling drivel should disappear from the face of the earth and we would be better off for it. But of course, in most cases life +50 or life +70 seems more than enough. Only a few choice works will be popular enough to still attract people who value them enough so that they want to spend money on them. If we had eternal copyright, then most works which are not commercially viable anymore would just be forgotten. Of course, I can understand Tubemonkey's position that it is wrong to just make a law to take away people's rights "for the good of society" after a certain period. So what is best? Perhaps requiring a payment to extend the copyright after a certain number of years. You don't pay, your copyright expires.

[Thasaidon]

[QUOTE=HansTWN;2027754 Of course, I can understand Tubemonkey's position that it is wrong to just make a law to take away people's rights "for the good of society" after a certain period. [/QUOTE]

It was a law that gave these rights in the first place so why is it wrong for the law to take them away or change those rights?

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Thasaidon

It was a law that gave these rights in the first place so why is it wrong for the law to take them away or change those rights?

It wasn't law that gave them those rights, it was just a laws that protected their rights to what was theirs in the first place. You create it, it is yours -- I agree with that statement 100%. You created it, not society.

[LuvReadin]

Originally Posted by CyGuy

Copyright should last no more than 10 years with no renewal possible.
Patent should last 10 years with one 10-year renewal allowed.
Trademark should last 10 years but be renewable indefinitely.

That doesn't seem very fair. Copyright is generally owned by one person. Patents are often taken out on things that take a long time and a lot of money to develop. Trademarks are usually owned by companies (even if they start out as one person, they usually get bought out if they get successful). Thus, ordinary people would lose most from this, either directly (because their income i.e. from copyright or a patent, is diminished) or indirectlly (because companies won't put money into something that won't give them a return - e.g. drug companies won't bother researching into rare illnesses or ones for which there are existing drugs but maybe not the best ones there could be), while big companies would continue having their products protected.

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

It wasn't law that gave them those rights, it was just a laws that protected their rights to what was theirs in the first place. You create it, it is yours -- I agree with that statement 100%. You created it, not society.

Unfortunately, the "what's mine is mine" isn't actually the law as it applies to copyright, no matter how much some think it should be. It was in fact the law that created copyright for the purpose of encouraging the creation of more creative works for, you guessed it, the benefit of society. The Copyright Act of 1790 in the U.S. granted creators a limited monopoly on their creative expressions of 14 years (renewable once if the creator was alive I think).

Given the long history of copyright law, it's a little silly to suddenly ignore all of that and say that copyright is only for the benefit of creators and ignore the rest of society even though copyright was/is meant to benefit society.

[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

It doesn't matter when it happens (during or after the author's life), it's up to the rights holders to negotiate the terms. If ownership gets fragmented over time and it becomes financially unfeasible to track down and bring the parties together, then too bad.

Again, you are missing a big part of the whole point of copyright. A big part of the justification for copyright in the first place is that it encourages authors and rights holders to publish their works so that they will be available to the public. Regardless of whether copyright expires or not, if copyright does not serve to make works available to the general public, then it is failing in its very reason for existance.

Society does not have a right to any work of art due to a passage of time. It's up to the rights holders to make that determination.

Actually it does. If you choose to take advantage of the protections offered by copyright (i.e., when you publish), you have implicitly accepted a social contract. That social contract explicitly states that copyright will expire after a given amount of time. Therefore, by virtue of you using copyright to protect your work, society does in fact have a right to that work at the end of the period of copyright.

--
Bill

[bill_mchale]

Another thought on this. The protections of copyright are very broad. Perhaps overly so. They don't merely protect the work that is copyrighted, but also protect any potential derivative works that could be made from that work. Thus if I write a novel, no one else can make a movie based on that novel, even if the movie is only loosely based on the novel and is in most respects a very different work.

This very broadness of copyright protection implies that it is protection is not merely meant to protect the authors work. But such protection can be so burdensome (over the long haul) that it is unreasonable to assume that such protection should last in perpetuity.



--
Bill

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

Unfortunately, the "what's mine is mine" isn't actually the law as it applies to copyright, no matter how much some think it should be. It was in fact the law that created copyright for the purpose of encouraging the creation of more creative works for, you guessed it, the benefit of society. The Copyright Act of 1790 in the U.S. granted creators a limited monopoly on their creative expressions of 14 years (renewable once if the creator was alive I think).

Given the long history of copyright law, it's a little silly to suddenly ignore all of that and say that copyright is only for the benefit of creators and ignore the rest of society even though copyright was/is meant to benefit society.

We discussed this previously in other threads, the first Western example of copyright I know of was granted by the king of Spain to Antonio Pigafetta in 1523 (Pigafetta was the chronicler for Magellan's expedition and the king did not want to pay him, so he gave Pigafetta 20 years copyright on the published expedition record. This agreement even stipulated large fines for any offending printers). There were earlier cases, but I don't remember the details. Chinese copyright (they had printing presses much earlier than Gutenberg) dates back to 1068. The earlier Western cases were all expressly to protect the rights of the authors and their publishers. Before printing presses copyright was pretty much useless, you had to thank the heavens if someone took the time to copy your book by hand.

The act in 1790 you mentioned was the first general copyright act. As you can imagine they didn't sit down and decided out of the blue "now we will introduce" copyright. At that time they already had 100s of years of experience to look back onto and just went from case by case to general copyright. But the 1790 was the first to mention anything about "the public". The origins of copyright were not concerned with the public good. And lest we forget who "the public" in 1790 really stood for. White, male property owners.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

The act in 1790 you mentioned was the first general copyright act.

In the US maybe.
The Statute of Anne in the UK beat it by 80 years. The US 1790 act takes several elements from the UK 1710 act, including the 14 year renewable period.

http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html

An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.

It also required copies of each book to be deposited in what would nowadays be called Copyright Libraries, and a process whereby members of the public could complain about prices which were too high or unreasonable.

[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

We discussed this previously in other threads, the first Western example of copyright I know of was granted by the king of Spain to Antonio Pigafetta in 1523 (Pigafetta was the chronicler for Magellan's expedition and the king did not want to pay him, so he gave Pigafetta 20 years copyright on the published expedition record. This agreement even stipulated large fines for any offending printers). There were earlier cases, but I don't remember the details. Chinese copyright (they had printing presses much earlier than Gutenberg) dates back to 1068. The earlier Western cases were all expressly to protect the rights of the authors and their publishers. Before printing presses copyright was pretty much useless, you had to thank the heavens if someone took the time to copy your book by hand.

The act in 1790 you mentioned was the first general copyright act. As you can imagine they didn't sit down and decided out of the blue "now we will introduce" copyright. At that time they already had 100s of years of experience to look back onto and just went from case by case to general copyright. But the 1790 was the first to mention anything about "the public". The origins of copyright were not concerned with the public good. And lest we forget who "the public" in 1790 really stood for. White, male property owners.

1. "Public" was not limited to white male property owners, even if the franchise was limited to them.

2. Comparing the laws from an absolutist monarchy with those in a democracy on an issue of copyright can lead to dangerous even wrong conclusions. Lets keep in mind that the role of literature plays a much more important role in a republic or a democracy than it does in a monarchy. Thus while the framers of the Constitution may have been inspired by outside examples, it doesn't mean that they were establishing copyright for the same reasons. Therefore, their notion of public good must be taken as seriously as other motives they had.

--
Bill