How long should a copyright last?

[calvin-c]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

They aren't available commercially, and they won't be PD for another 54 years, assuming they are not extended again. Nobody is making any money off of these copyrights, please explain to me why this Corporate hoarding to so important...

Tax deductions? I'm constantly amazed at how most people (including MBA's) misunderstand cost/benefit analysis. If there's no quantifiable benefit to relinquishing ownership then even the small cost of preparing the document to do that makes the cost/benefit ratio prohibitive. Yet, I've seen MBA's use equally unquantifiable costs to offset known benefits for other decisions-so why go the other way on this decision? Probably office politics involved but I have no idea what they are.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Actually, much radio was recorded, for rebroadcast in market that couldn't be reached live. They were recorded on huge vinyl discs called "transcription discs". They were 16 inches (just under a half metre) across, and many still exist. (Bob Hope kept the copyright on his and all the discs of his shows. I have some commercial CDs of his shows in WAV format, made from them, the sound is mono (of course) but top notch, as good as it would have sounded when broadcast.

However, most radio shows didn't bother, and the public didn't have access to the equipment to play them back, so they often got junked. Even today, there isn't enough market to justfiy high quality transfers from the existing masters. (Bob Hope released around 20-40 shows during his lifetime, they didn't sell enough to keep re-releasing them. He did a show a week for 20 years or so, that's around 1,000 shows.)

TV is more of a mixed bag, sometimes it was recorded with a specially synced movie camera (synced at 60 frames a second) filming a matching TV screen, sometimes not. This technique was call a Kinetoscope. Once again, there is no market for old Kines, a hugh hoard of early '50 to late '50 Kines was found in an abandoned mine in the Sierra mountains, under perfect storage conditions, but nothing has come of it, no market exist to make it worthwhile to transfer...

For more detail on "transcription discs" here's teh Wiki link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_disc

So, vis-a-vis the Kines--even assuming PD, what's the process to turn those into something usable today? Seriously asking, this is not my area of expertise. Would anyone buy them? Or is the idea that "someone" would make them available in a usable form, like a PG-type effort, and then people who want them would download them for free?

Or, for that matter, the early radio recordings? Does it require a PG type approach? (And, WRT Bob Hope, his miserliness and greediness is the stuff of legend, so that is just one example that's highly skewed.)

Hitch

[petrucci]

As I have written in other threads, I believe that there is a danger in reducing the duration of copyright. Classic texts have value. The greater the number of such texts that are available at no cost, the harder it will be to earn money from writing. The value of human labor is at an all time low due to the soaring population. We need not make matters worse by competing with past generations.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Many of the posts about books disappearing into the ether seem to indicate/imply that books owned by corporations, outright, can disappear into the ether for all of eternity (a hopeful reader's lifetime, anyway), for the copyright period of X (life + 50, whatever it ends up as, if it even changes).

Perhaps. And I found your post educational. But my thought was that rights disappearance typically comes after the book reverts to the author.

This could be exaggerated, although it comes from an usually reliable source:

. . . specialists say orphan works could make up the bulk of the collections of some major libraries.

This is less extreme and thus seems more plausible:

A conservative estimate of the number of orphan books as a percentage of incopyright books across Europe puts the number at 3 million orphan books (13 % of the total number of in-copyright books). The older the books the higher the percentage of orphan works.

Also significant in my last link:

The cost of clearing rights may amount to several times the cost of digitising the material.

High costs mean no eBook.

I don't think that justifies the more extreme proposals. But confusion over rights certainly is a good argument again ever again lengthening copyright, and suggests need for countries with the longest copyright lengths to reduce them.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Perhaps. And I found your post educational. But my thought was that rights disappearance typically comes after the book reverts to the author.

That may well be. I can't guesstimate as to when/how rights disappear; I think it would take a pretty massive effort simply to estimate that accurately, as opposed to guesstimation or analysis-based-on-agenda. (That's not in any way directed at you; I've just found that many of the "sources" of things asserted as facts in this and other copyright discussions turn out to be mere opinions asserted by other people at some point in history.)

And even the language of the one sentence in the Google article from 2009 is wishy-washy, as in "specialists say" (none identified) and "some major libraries," not identified. That doesn't mean the author is incorrect; Helft may have simply edited the article down, given the attention-span of today's readers, but I'd feel happier if he'd provided the background material/research/names, via links, etc., so I could his source materials myself.

This:

A conservative estimate of the number of orphan books as a percentage of incopyright books across Europe puts the number at 3 million orphan books (13 % of the total number of in-copyright books). The older the books the higher the percentage of orphan works.

Seems like a pretty reasonable number. Given what happens with families, and WWII, I'm surprised that this number isn't higher. How many authors died without issue during WWII? And conflicts since then, like the Balkans? Surely, many. How many records were destroyed? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands, bombed, burned, or simply lost?

I'm not sure we can compare a copyright period which includes WWII (and to a lesser extent, WWI, vis-a-vis records destroyed) as a decent exemplar of what we can reasonably expect to happen in our future, if for no other reason than data is backed up, backed up, copied, backed up some more, copied as it bounces through servers enroute to nightly backups...see what I mean?

And the likelihood that clearance for any image material is going to be far, far more difficult seems reasonable. Photos? Lord, how many people here have thrown out thousands of family photos, when relatives have passed away, of all sorts? I know I have.

The costs of clearing the material simply means nothing more than: you have to wait. I know that sounds rude, but seriously, folks, you'd have to wait if it wasn't orphaned, wouldn't you? If it wasn't orphaned, maybe the author would digitize it, maybe he wouldn't; maybe he would and put a $25 price tag on it. Being orphaned or not is not actually relevant to whether or not the material is now cheaply or freely available. I have had phone conversations with quite a few authors who simply CHOOSE not to make their books available digitally, because they are afraid that the moment they do, piracy will be rampant. The reason doesn't matter: it's his choice.

So, while the whole "orphaned works" thing sounds very compelling, as a reason to suddenly switch gears, it's only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand. For all one knows, Bob Jones' granddaughter will track down the book, the rights, and digitize the book. For the first person who pooh-poohs this, I have done any number of reclaimed books through our company, so it's not as unrealistic as it sounds. I'd be interested to know what the actual numbers are for US books, as obviously, we didn't have the same type of disruption during WWII--to see how much of a factor that is.

High costs mean no eBook.

Yes, or the author hates digital books, or is too cheap to do it, or just isn't interested. It's not like changing copyright laws will somehow force people to make material one wants instantly available, cheap and downloadable anyway. This is a bit of misdirection, like the "corporations are sucking the lifeblood out of lost works" discussion, when so many books from the 20th century aren't in the hands of corporations, they're in the legal hands of the author's families, even if those heirs are dead.

I don't think that justifies the more extreme proposals. But confusion over rights certainly is a good argument again ever again lengthening copyright, and suggests need for countries with the longest copyright lengths to reduce them.

I think some type of reasonable argument for the reclamation of "lost works" is viable. The EU, which already exerts enormous control over the lives of its citizenry, could fairly easily just say, "step up now, here's our list of what we think is abandoned, if this is your Grandad, say so now or forever hold your peace," and then allow the works to be digitized by PG or whomever. {shrug}. I think preservation is a reasonable argument vis-a-vis abandoned works, and if someone hasn't made a peep about an abandoned work in 20 years, well...that's a reasonable time period for some heir to step up. It's likely that their line died out, or Cousin Janie from Australia is never going to know that Great Uncle Nicholas in Wales left her the rights to his book in his will in 1956. And, if Great Uncle Nicholas is actually famous, Cousin Janie probably already knows she's related, and if she sees a list, she might step up. And, yes: money will have to be spent to clear those copyrights, but none of us can just run around ripping off people's (rights/licenses/whatever) without making some reasonable effort to ensure that that isn't what we're doing.

Frankly, given the Google settlement, many "lost works" will be available for view at libraries, and the Rights Registry may clear up a ton of this. Patently (pun intended) Google is likely already doing the same thing in Europe. If the EU were smart (sigh), they'd let them. I mean, wouldn't a Rights Registry be the obvious first step? Assuming arguendo it doesn't already exist?

So, as I have already, at extraordinarily great length, said, let's make sure we know what we're talking about when we talk about copyright. The orphaned books problem isn't directly related to length of copyright; it's related to dead people, massive wars, massive destruction in an age of paper, no centralized registry, and the like. Even if those orphaned books weren't--even if heirs existed--it wouldn't necessarily make the works available in a format that would make the "ebooks-only" folks on this thread happy. In that context, they ought to positively adore Google for making millions of purportedly orphaned books now available through libraries and other sources.

If folks want "missing or abandoned or lost" works to be made available, digitally, then something has to occur--either zillions of donors (time) at PG have to step up, or someone like Google bears the burden of the costs. We all know what the volunteer pool at DP looks like. Money doesn't grow on trees, and to clear books will take money and time. If Goog wants to do clearances, and then be recompensed via a percentage of fees from usages, I think that makes sense, for the period of the original work's remaining copyright. After that time, it should be donated to PG or some equivalent location or simply free from Goog, or with some small (small!) additional time allowed to recover the initial costs of scanning, digitizing, etc.

Or, we all pitch in and start another "arm" of PG--we take on the massive task of clearances, volunteer-wise, and that's how it happens. We'll need donor lawyers, etc. Clerical workers to send out snail mails and emails. Then, and only then, would we be in a position to make those abandoned works "free" for people to access at this other arm of PG. Unless volunteers do all that work--or, like so many things in Europe, the government picks up the tab (13 million books?). But Europe seems to be saying, it's too expensive, and from what I read in that report (thanks for the link--fascinating), it is.

So: volunteers recognized by the various governments as a licensed body, or a corporation. That's about it. There's not going to be some magical free-for-all in the offing; it's simply too complicated. Too many wars, too many deaths, too many records destroyed...it's unfortunate, but that is the situation.

I do not believe that any intelligent discussion about copyright, in general, should be sidetracked by a discussion about orphaned works, because we all know that the 20th Century is a particularly bad starting place, with two World Wars and any number of smaller conflagrations muddying the pool. We didn't have computers, we didn't have the Net, we didn't have databases as we now do. Let's focus on the actual issues at hand: how long should a copyright, for its creator, last?

(And I'm done on this for a few days. This is freaking exhausting.)

Hitch

[sun surfer]

I am in favour of fixed lengths. Perhaps 50 years. Then, even if someone miraculously writes something at age 0, they could still be receiving money for it until age 50. And if they write something in their 20s or 30s, then they'd have the copyright into their 70s or 80s. Seems perfectly fair to me.

While I don't spend much time worrying over it, I'm not in favour of "Life plus X years" policies and I'm really not sure how it became a thing. I just cannot fathom a work written at age 24 by someone who dies at 95 receiving a copyright that lasts 70 years longer than a work written at age 24 by someone who dies at 25. For "life plus 70", for those examples, one copyright would last for 95 years while the other lasts 165 years. Does this sound fair?

"Either/or" laws where Life+ and fixed length are combined are a step in the right direction, but still I don't see why someone that lives longer should enjoy a longer copyright just because. It doesn't seem fair or necessary.

I couldn't care less about an author's grandchildren being provided for by the copyright 100 years down the line. They surely would've heard of a thing called "work".

When you think about it, many laws are either "life plus 50" or "life plus 70", and so if an author wrote a smash hit and died the day after publication, their heirs would only get 50 or 70 years anyway, so really no different than a fixed limit of 50 or 70 years. The only difference is that with "life plus x", authors who live longer would get more years (and money) for their copyright for themselves and their heirs. Doesn't it seem doubly unfair that authors struck down young also have the ignominy of their families receiving a much shorter overall copyright than an author who has the luck to live longer? In what world does it seem fair that the family of an author who wrote a hit at 24 and lives to 95 be able to receive moneys for a quarter of a century longer than the family of an author who writes a hit at 24 and dies at 25? I say a fixed length is much fairer, and though I'd err towards a lower number, I'd still be more in agreement with a fixed length of 100 or 150 years than "life plus x".

If you'd like to argue that the "life plus x" is a fine length even if the author died the day it was published, then how can you possibly argue that a fixed length of that same "x" is too short, since in that example they'd be the same length? Or how can you possibly argue that "life plus x" instead of "flat length x" is necessary for the rights of an author's heirs when the heirs of an author who dies the day of publication only receive a flat length of "x" (and to add insult to injury, those poor heirs may very well also have less works to receive moneys from since that author would've died much sooner and had a shorter time span to produce works).

But let me tell you how I really feel. Honestly, it's just one more thing that doesn't affect me much, so I can't worry about the world. If Mickey Mouse makes copyright 1,000 years long eventually then oh well; I'm sure at that point there'd be discussion threads out there somewhere with people defending a thousand year length as necessary to provide for an author's family tree and such. And I'm fine with that. And I like Mickey Mouse despite it all, so there you have it.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Hitch

So, vis-a-vis the Kines--even assuming PD, what's the process to turn those into something usable today? Seriously asking, this is not my area of expertise. Would anyone buy them? Or is the idea that "someone" would make them available in a usable form, like a PG-type effort, and then people who want them would download them for free?

Or, for that matter, the early radio recordings? Does it require a PG type approach? (And, WRT Bob Hope, his miserliness and greediness is the stuff of legend, so that is just one example that's highly skewed.)

Hitch

The process to turning a Kine into something useable today is the same as for any other piece of sound film. The film is run through some sort of scanner and the the output is digitized. You can then do whatever post production cleanup (or none) as you see fit. A Kine is just a film of a televison screen.

There seems to be no market for old live television shows that nobody today have heard of...As to PG, you would run into the performace copyright issues. See the next paragraph.

No Radio recordings from Californa or New York, (and certain other states, it varies from state to state) will be in the public domain until 2067. Period. No exclusions. These copyrights are performace copyrights under state laws that were subsumed into Federal law. (1989? Shrug). They were alway based on at set date in the future - usually 2047. And that is even if the scripts were works-for-hire and allowed to expire after 28 years, (no guaratee of that) the performance copyright holds until 2067. No PG or equivalent is possible.

I mentioned Bob Hope, because his shows were preserved and at least some were made available for commercial purchase. A few others have been made available, mostly in anthologies. the rest have been "pirate" editions or oblivion...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

No Radio recordings from Californa or New York, (and certain other states, it varies from state to state) will be in the public domain until 2067. Period. No exclusions. These copyrights are performace copyrights under state laws that were subsumed into Federal law. (1989? Shrug). They were alway based on at set date in the future - usually 2047. And that is even if the scripts were works-for-hire and allowed to expire after 28 years, (no guaratee of that) the performance copyright holds until 2067. No PG or equivalent is possible.

There are a hell of a lot of US radio programmes from the 1940s onwards at http://www.archive.org. They claim to be in the public domain.

[Greg Anos]

Hitch,

Here's one for you.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...vanish/278209/

Question why should there be more editions available of books from the 1840's than the 1940's?

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by HarryT

There are a hell of a lot of US radio programmes from the 1940s onwards at http://www.archive.org. They claim to be in the public domain.

We discussed this awhile ago.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=219148&page=5

Whether or not these recordings are in the public domain is open to question, but anyone can purport that they are, and see if anyone complains....

The copyright would be a state copyright, not a Federal copyright. (Both New York and California, where most of the Radio shows were produced and broadcast from, had state copyright laws covering performances, hence the Radio shows).

[Greg Anos]

Hitch,
Much of the confusion over copyright versus publishing rights on this forum are due to the nature of the history of copyright extension. It has not been the creators proper who have been continually lobbying for copyright extensions. The main money (and lobbying effort) has been by large corporations, who hold large portfolios of copyrights made as "work-for-hire", for which there is no copyright ascribed to the creators. (There may be negotiated contracts with the copyright holders for residuals, but they are not from copyright, per se, merely parts of the "work-for-hire" terms). For those copyright holders, there is no distinction between the publishing rights and the copyright. For work-for hire, they are one and the same. This has led to the "common person's" viewpoint that the are one and the same.

You downplay the importance of the "old copyrights" in your discussion, but they are solely the reason for copyright extensions since 1909. We are told to focus on Life + X here in the US, but these terms are meaningless for US copyrights. Nothing has fallen into the public domain under the Life + X terms, nor are any expected to in the future by the commenters on this forum. The only meaningful terms in the US copyright law, are the backward looking extension of pre -1978 copyright. This have been driven by Big Media Corporations, in order to continually maintain their large libraries of work-for-hire copyrights. Everything else is "collateral damage". Every extension, from the half-hearted joining of the Berne Convention in 1978, to the Sonny Bono Copyright extension act of 1998 (The Mickey Mouse Perservation Act in the vernacular) have made certain that overrides to Berne were made to preserve those works-for-hire.

Because of those overrides, an author, who died in 1924, and whose work(s) were published and copyrighted in 1923 or 1924, and were renewed under the 1909 act properly, will not go into the public domain until 2018, assuming, of course that another extension of the copyright act is not added to those pre-1978 copyrights. That means that works, in this example, that would have gone into the Public Domain in 1974 or 1975 under Berne's Life + 50 (actually quicker under US copyright law), or 1994 or 1995 under Life + 70, will not actually go into the Public Domain until Life + 94, at best. Whereas a work by the same author published in 1921 (1922 is a special situation) would have gone into the Public Domain in 1977.

There has only been one year that has fallen into the Public Domain since 1978, (1922) and that was because of a logjam in Congress that kept the extension from being implemeted on time. (It was to have been slipped in during the wee hours of the last day of the session, but the time ran out before it could be brought up for a final vote.)

Copyright is frozen in the US. You can bring up all the "poster children" dependent on extended copyright all you want, it doesn't stop the fact that works that were created under one copyright rule set, are being continually blocked from going into the Public Domain for no other reason than Corporations refusing to accept the concept of Public Domain, and they have the money to br - excuse me - lobby - suffcient politicians to get their way, no matter what happened to the public.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Hitch,

Here's one for you.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...vanish/278209/

Question why should there be more editions available of books from the 1840's than the 1940's?

What? I'm sorry, I genuinely don't understand what there is about this that would be surprising. Books from the 19th century are, pretty much without exception (we all know the Holmes' argument), in the public domain. Thus, zillions of free copies of everything from Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights to the more obscure works (I had fun proofing some silly book on etiquette on DP sometime recently). Of course there are more of those available than those that are still under copyright. Plus, a lot of books from earlier periods were re-issued--some even set to a press for the first time--in the 19th century, due to technological innovations. This was precisely the time in history that reading, on a large scale, became available to the general public, and publishers raced to put out editions of works that had been written far earlier. I suspect it may have been the largest publishing boom in history until the advent of the KDP.

Plus: this is (pretty much) all based on an Amazon crawl. We all know that there are hundreds of editions of every popular PD book on Amazon, ranging from the ubiquitous Pride and Prejudice (6,266 various versions) to War and Peace and who-knows-what else. The skewing of those numbers is just...you'd need hundreds of hours of research to de-skew and de-weight those figures. I think the median of "four" copies per PD title is just...not a viable number. That's merely my opinion, but we've all seen the vast numbers of PD titles on Amazon.

Even using the WorldCat graph, it simply shows that books from post-WWI to now are still under copyright, and many of those copyright holders, lost or otherwise, choose not to republish their books. If the copyright holders are known, they've made that choice themselves. It's not our choice to make. If those copyright holders are unknown, we've already discussed this in my last very long post about the effect of wars, lost records, and the like.

I'm not getting whatever it is you are trying to say, other than, books under copyright aren't freely available. We already know that; I think that's the topic under discussion.

Hitch

[speakingtohe]

To add to what Hitch said, the amount of new material available for publication has risen by leaps and bounds since the 1940s. At one time in the period (1907) in the article there were around 10,000 books available to be put to press in the USA. Now there are millions. No wonder books were reprinted in different editions by various publishers.
http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/201...ared-to-today/
In the 50's the term slush pile was already starting to be used as publishers had more books than they could deal with. They dis not have to reprint just to stay in business.

In the 1930s authors were starting to publish multiple books and many of these are in print today in both paper and ebook format, and selling well.

Rex Stout is still popular today and his first book was published in 1938.

I am strongly of the opinion that most authors who wrote more than one book did so because they hoped to make money and lots of it. I doubt that Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers etc. would have been cranking out detective books without copyright. Or Anne McCaffrey, Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov Sci-Fi.

Without some form of copyright most authors wouldn't write and those that did would not be writing many books. No incentive at all these days.

Not that popular fiction is necessary for world development as the world got along without it prior to the 1920s, but I kind of like it.

And saying that there are less editions of 1940s work says nothing. Existing copies might. Or saying that the amount of reading material is severely limited because publishers can't publish everything from the 1940's on willy nilly is kind of suspect. I doubt they would want to if they could. They publish Rex Stout and many others because people buy the books. They publish James Patterson and his gang and others like them because many many more people buy the books.

And of course if all the popular writers today stopped writing then they would publish more backlist books. They would still expect to be paid for them. Gutenberg or not, changing the terms of copyright is not likely to help anyone much. A few would say wow I can download a so-so copy for free of that book I would have had to save up for months for but how many people have a massive TBR list from the 40s where the price is prohibitive and nothing else will do?

Helen

[arjaybe]

Too long copyright hurts other creators more than it hurts consumers. The problem is that the work isn't entering the commons where it could be used to make new work. That hurts consumers a little since they don't get the benefit of the new work, but it hurts creators more by stifling creativity. People should be prepared to honor the copyright bargain.

rjb

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Hitch

What? I'm sorry, I genuinely don't understand what there is about this that would be surprising. Books from the 19th century are, pretty much without exception (we all know the Holmes' argument), in the public domain. Thus, zillions of free copies of everything from Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights to the more obscure works (I had fun proofing some silly book on etiquette on DP sometime recently). Of course there are more of those available than those that are still under copyright. Plus, a lot of books from earlier periods were re-issued--some even set to a press for the first time--in the 19th century, due to technological innovations. This was precisely the time in history that reading, on a large scale, became available to the general public, and publishers raced to put out editions of works that had been written far earlier. I suspect it may have been the largest publishing boom in history until the advent of the KDP.

Plus: this is (pretty much) all based on an Amazon crawl. We all know that there are hundreds of editions of every popular PD book on Amazon, ranging from the ubiquitous Pride and Prejudice (6,266 various versions) to War and Peace and who-knows-what else. The skewing of those numbers is just...you'd need hundreds of hours of research to de-skew and de-weight those figures. I think the median of "four" copies per PD title is just...not a viable number. That's merely my opinion, but we've all seen the vast numbers of PD titles on Amazon.

Even using the WorldCat graph, it simply shows that books from post-WWI to now are still under copyright, and many of those copyright holders, lost or otherwise, choose not to republish their books. If the copyright holders are known, they've made that choice themselves. It's not our choice to make. If those copyright holders are unknown, we've already discussed this in my last very long post about the effect of wars, lost records, and the like.

I'm not getting whatever it is you are trying to say, other than, books under copyright aren't freely available. We already know that; I think that's the topic under discussion.

Hitch

What I am trying to say is that art in general under public domain is more available than art still under copyright after 50 or more years.

I am also saying that the copyright terms under which a work was created should be the terms under which it enters the public domain. All parties entered into the implicit contract fully knowing the terms at the time of creation. I see no reason why publius should be cheated out of it's end of the bargain because the owner of the copyright might lose some profit at the end of the copyright. They knew that when they created.

RSE

By the way, how does a lost copyright owner choose anything? When he/she doesn't even know he has a choice to make?