Free Culture

[Murine Press]

You know I publish books, mainly public domain and I admit I am not always that altruistic about it. Well, we all need money, bills accumulate. The other day I was watching this presentation by Lawrence Lessing and it sent shivers down my spine... It is so inspiring, at least to me.

Bargain book publishers too turn to out-of-copyright books for much
of their catalog. When I was retelling folktales, much of my library
consisted of bargain books of classic folktale collections -- books
that disappeared quickly from print in their original editions but
that had timeless value.
People who push for longer copyright terms are not lovers of books --
they are lovers of money. They'd rather see scores of other people's
books sink into oblivion than lose a dime of their own.

Culture should be affordable if not free, copyrights should be shorter than life +70.

Watch this and let me know what you think...
http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

[Richey79]

Interesting post.

Obviously, as a reader rather than a writer, it is in my interest to have a massive public domain and to be able to read vast swathes of vibrant, exciting books.

However, even if the main function of copyright of life +70 is to reduce competition for living authors and help them to make a living, is that really such a terrible motivation? Might we not enrich the literary scene more by allowing more people to take up writing as a career than by allowing everyone to read books from 50 years ago for free?

[carpetmojo]

I must confess to a certain ambivalence about the copywright situation.

I too want to read every book for free, but no income = no (professional) writers, for a start (apart from committed souls in a garrett, naturally) which would be a, well, difficult state of affairs.

I would like to be able to see no reason why the rights to income from a book, fiction or non, should extend beyond the life of the creator.
But we then are confonted by the argument that the writer's estate, i.e. family, or trust, should continue to profit - in the very same way as a building's rent, a painting's reproduction, performances of a play, a new plant, a medical breakthrough, an inventor's patent........

When I look at that lot, I find it very difficult to say that the written word, in book/novel form, is any different.

[GeoffC]

Someone who works for a living, and then retires with a pension - when they finally die the money stops.

Why should an author/artist have a continuing money-stream after they are, also, dead?

[Giggleton]

Until we realize that we have the ability to create a system where our artists will be compensated in a copyright free world, we will always have copyright.

I'm actually right in the middle of reading free culture. Lessig was the lawyer who represented Eldred in Eldred Vs. Ashcroft, Eldred was selling public domain books that were suddenly not in the public domain anymore after Congress enacted the Copyright Extension Act in 1998. Eldred continued to sell his books.

http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2750/free-culture

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

Someone who works for a living, and then retires with a pension - when they finally die the money stops.

Why should an author/artist have a continuing money-stream after they are, also, dead?

Because writing a book is like building a house for the purposes of rent: the income from it only starts after the "work" is complete. If you own a house that you rent out, should it be confiscated by the state when you die, so that your dependants and heirs no longer receive the rental income?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

I would like to be able to see no reason why the rights to income from a book, fiction or non, should extend beyond the life of the creator.
But we then are confonted by the argument that the writer's estate, i.e. family, or trust, should continue to profit - in the very same way as a building's rent, a painting's reproduction, performances of a play, a new plant, a medical breakthrough, an inventor's patent........

The key reason for extending the rights beyond the life of the creator is to provide incentive to publish late in life. This is both incentive for the author to write, even if he's on his deathbed, to allow his family future income, and incentive for the publisher to publish & distribute, so they don't lose their exclusive control immediately on death (or at the first of the next year, which would be more likely).

However, there's no reason for copyright to extend for the life of the author; the publishing industry seemed to get along fine with fixed terms for a couple-hundred years. And if copyright expires and a work is still popular, the author can release an updated version, or annotated version, just like publishers release public domain works with new content. The original text is PD, but the new book is not.

[sufue]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Because writing a book is like building a house for the purposes of rent: the income from it only starts after the "work" is complete. If you own a house that you rent out, should it be confiscated by the state when you die, so that your dependants and heirs no longer receive the rental income?

Agreed, and I think copyright should extend past the life of the author. But life plus SEVENTY years is, IMHO, way too long. Even the value of many houses or commercial buildings will be much reduced or gone after 70 years. Granted I live in California, which doesn't have an old housing base to start with, but there aren't many 70 year old houses in my area that haven't been knocked down and rebuilt, or at least remodeled out of all recognition, often at costs similar to the original investment.

Life plus 20 or 30 years seems much more reasonable to me. Then the author and their immediate family (the ones who probably suffered with them ) get benefits, but not the grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, who were just lucky enough to pick a famous author for an ancestor. And even with a shorter copyright period, the heirs would still get the benefit of all the money that accrued during the copyright period, just not an ongoing income stream after all that time.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by carpetmojo

I too want to read every book for free, but no income = no (professional) writers, for a start (apart from committed souls in a garrett, naturally) which would be a, well, difficult state of affairs.

While there are people suggesting that copyright be done away with completely (I'm sure there's a corollary of Rule 34 about this), that is not the general case. Most people just think copyright should be limited, and 150 years or so is not sufficiently limited. Actually, most people who do not work for (or get their ideas from) Disney seem to think that.

Looking at the past, not counting the days before copyrights existed at all, we see no shortage of professional writers when copyrights were limited. When copyrights in the US were 28 years, and could be renewed for another 28 years, people wrote. The inability to provide income to their great-great-grandchildren did not seem to stop Twain, Voltaire, or Dickens, for example.

The copyright on a literary work (or anything else) is not the same as the ownership of a physical object. As evidence, consider the US Constitution.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Clearly, there is an intent to distinguish between physical objects and copyrights. Were there not, that could have been made simpler and clearer just by saying "The Creations of Authors and the Designs of Inventors shall be considered in all ways the Equivalent of physical Objects." No ambiguity, no questions, a book is just the same thing as a bookcase.

So why is that? The simplest reason is that no book is an island. Shakespeare's plays, for instance, did not spring full-formed from his head; they were based on -- and often perfections of -- other plays that existed at the time, going back generations, and of stories and histories going back centuries. Shakespeare drew from the common well -- that body of literary work that is the heritage of all of us -- and in time, his work returned to it. That is true of all writing, good and bad.

As for continuing payments, there's something else missing there: let's say someone is a carpenter as well as an author. He writes books, and he builds bookcases. For the sake of discussion, we'll say roughly half his income comes from each aspect of his business. Selling books makes him about as much money as selling bookcases does. The writing of a book, therefore, is much like the building of a bookcase. Sure, one book will get more money from a publisher than one bookcase will from a store, and you can build a lot of books in the time it takes you to build one bookcase, but that's just a matter of time: it's faster to build a little bookstand to go on a desk, too, than to build a wall-sized, elaborately-decorated shelving unit. So we have this writer and carpenter. When he sells a bookcase, he's sold it. He doesn't get more money when the buyer sells it to someone else. If you buy one of his bookcases at my yard sale, I don't have any obligation to track him down and send him additional payment for his bookcase. As far as any income to his heirs, his great-great-grandchildren will not be receiving payments for the repeated reselling of bookcases he built.

You're correct in that the written word is not any different from at least four of the six items you list. But that's because they're basically the same thing. A painting's reproduction, performances of a play, a medical breakthrough, and an inventor's patent are all covered by statutorially-created rights: two copyrights, two patents. Saying "copyrights are like copyrights" is tautologically true, but not very illuminating. The other two are real estate, which has its own collection of rights, but which is quite different from a book. Patents, by the way, expire far sooner than copyrights -- and yet people don't seem to be inhibited from inventing things.

Here's one way in which they're different: Let's say that I own a building and I write a book. My ownership of that building, no matter who I rent it to, doesn't affect your ownership of any building you own. You don't even need to know or care that I own a building; you just rent yours. We may own, let's say, identical Philadelphia rowhouses, but that doesn't affect either one of us. On the other hand, if you're also in the writing business, my book does affect you. You can't write a book exactly like mine. As various cases have shown, especially those swirling around Harry Potter (both the Nancy Stouffer case and various Russian copies are instructive) you can't even get close.

Unlike buildings or bookcases, books never go away. Were copyright to be perpetual, every possible story would eventually be locked up by some owner. Nobody could ever do anything better. For example, if Il Pecorone had been locked away from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice could never have been written. If The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet had been unavailable to Shakespeare, not only the play but subsequent movies, West Side Story, and many other works could never have existed (by the way, Shakespeare has no living descendants; even if we were supposed to pay his estate after all these centuries, who would we pay?) In more modern creatino, if Nancy Stouffer had proven her case (instead of being sanctioned by the court for intentional fraud!), the Harry Potter books, and everything connected to them (including the many thousands of jobs thereby created) would have been forever blocked by the existence of a piss-poor story about some glowy radioactive guys ... forever. And it would just keep increasing. Consider the concept of "draw death" in chess -- the idea that eventually every possible combination of moves would be so well analyzed that neither player could ever win, because their opponent would always follow a line of moves that led to a draw. In a simpler form, consider two skilled tic-tac-toe players: neither will ever win. Now expand that to all possible books -- remember, because you don't have to use the exact words ... consider The Wind Done Gone ... just being in the general ballpark would count as infringement. Sooner or later, every concept would have an owner, and writing new books would become virtually impossible.

That's why rights to books are not the same as rights to real estate, or even to furniture, and they can't be.

[Worldwalker]

By the way, my suggestion for length is the life of the author or 50 years from creation, whichever is longer. That prevents ghouls from profiting from books an author published last year if he was run over by a bus this year, without locking those books away from the society they came from for a hundred years or more after they were created.

[Catlady]

Regardless of the length of copyright, there's no income stream for anyone if the work goes out of print.

A book that's out of print doesn't benefit the author, the author's heirs, or the public at large. To continue with the "house" analogy, it's like a perfectly good house that's sitting empty and useless.

Suppose you have an author who starts writing in his or her thirties and lives to age ninety. Those early books wouldn't become public domain until about 125 years after they were written.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Richey79

However, even if the main function of copyright of life +70 is to reduce competition for living authors and help them to make a living, is that really such a terrible motivation? Might we not enrich the literary scene more by allowing more people to take up writing as a career than by allowing everyone to read books from 50 years ago for free?

I don't really see copyright as an incentive for people to write or as a barrier for people to read for free. But it is the extra 70 years that I would question the need for. If the writer is dead there is no point having an incentive for him to write more.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you own a house that you rent out, should it be confiscated by the state when you die, so that your dependants and heirs no longer receive the rental income?

Yes it should. That would go a long way towards fixing the mistakes made in the early 80s.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I don't really see copyright as an incentive for people to write or as a barrier for people to read for free. But it is the extra 70 years that I would question the need for. If the writer is dead there is no point having an incentive for him to write more.

That'll be when the 'ghost writer' comes for his share....

[alan ryker]

I wonder if Disney will be able to continue to extend copyright indefinitely, just knocking it ahead a few years at a time to keep Mickey theirs.

It's ridiculous.