Lessig Spins Copyright Law

ceebABC writes "In the always riveting CIO Insight magazine, tech-pundit (and professor) Lawrence Lessig examines the copyright laws and how they can be applied to e-books and other electronic forms of rights management... i.e., in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?"

Comments

Goal: Royalties for publisher!

[Maul]

in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?

The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.

No, they won't.

[kwerle]

in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?

Nope. This was tried with new-fangled technology - the pay-per-view DVDs. It failed because folks aren't (quite) that dumb.

If you think that folks will 'buy that' for the written word - a technology that has been around for a long time, you're a fool. Hell, folks won't even buy e-books that they can re-read.

Re:Library Royalties

[Dialithis]

Clearly, an exact duplicate of the existing system with pay-per-read royalties wouldn't work. But what if this hypothetical library can "buy" books for 1/10 of the current price in electronic form, but pay a small amount for each reading?

Small libraries would suddenly be able to have millions of available volumes, and users of the library will have far more choice than before. The tradeoff would be that money previously spent in acquiring actual paper and storing it would be spent in paying for an equivalent amount of "electronic publishing" or use fees.

I don't think this sounds so terrible.

Franklin

[Helpadingoatemybaby]

If Franklin were alive today he'd never be allowed to start a "library." Just like then, it would be portrayed as a way to rip off authors -- but unlike then legislation can now be purchased to prevent these creations.

Lessig brings up an excellent point that only 147 out of about 10000 books from the 20's are still in print. What happened to the rest of this knowledge? The rest of this creativity? It has been lost and forgotten.

We were supposed to build our society on the shoulders of giants. Instead we've institutionally forgotten everything that came before us. It seems appropriate that our attention spans are now short enough not to notice what we've lost.

Societally, we're only a step away from being the old lady in a flannel nighty that keeps wandering away from the old folks home.

Re:I'm glad you're not in charge

[SETIGuy]

But I bristle at your notion that libraries ought to be entitled to distribute recently created copyrighted works, with no compensation whatsoever to the author. On what basis do you feel that government should essentially engage in intellectual theft?

Sorry to point this out, but... At least in the US, copyright is an artifice created by govenment. The government gives you a monopoly on distribution of you books under the assumption that it is in the public interest for you to have that monopoly. Should the government wish to modify the terms of that monopoly, or eliminate it entirely, it is certainly within the powers granted to the Congress to do so, so long as the public interest is served. This would not be theft, because "intellectual property" is not really property. It only exists in this country by act of Congress.

The only purpose for copyright law is to serve the public interest by promoting the "useful arts and sciences." That you can also use it to make money is a side effect. The assumption that the side effect is the purpose seems to me to be "selfish and poorly thought out."

The question with the Eldred case is whether the Congress has passed copyright laws that are no longer in the public interest, and are therefore unconstitutional.