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Greg Bear, Others Cry Foul on Project Gutenberg Copyright Call
Nova Express writes "Recently a lot of science fiction stories from the 1950s and 60s (including work from still-living authors like Frederik Pohl and Jack Vance) have been showing up on Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain. However, according to science fiction writer Greg Bear and his wife Astrid Anderson Bear (daughter of Poul Anderson, some of whose works were among those put up), Project Gutenberg has made a mistake: 'After conducting legal research on the LEXIS database of legal cases, decisions, and precedents, we have demonstrated conclusively that PG was making incorrect determinations regarding public domain status in many, many works that originally appeared in magazine form ... In general, Project Gutenberg is doing a tremendous service by making available texts that have truly long since fallen out of copyright, but they are clearly overstepping their original mandate. They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping of works that are under copyright protection.'"
>These works have been forgotten about a long time ago. They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
That's your opinion, but it's someone else's rights you are talking about. If I said your rights should be abridged (not only copyright, but any rights) how would you respond? I find your tagline most ironic, because it seems you want other people to pick and choose which of your rights should be defended.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Wholesale kidnapping?
Who, exactly, is "kidnapping" the stories in this case? The people who are putting them in a publicly accessible format so that everyone can look at them, or the people who are keeping them behind an iron wall of intellectual property?
I was under the impression that it was the people doing the imprisoning that were generally the kidnappers, not the people granting freedom. Silly me.
Is this all about semantics? I mean, Project G is very clear about this: If a copyright holder makes a claim, they take the material down. I would think putting this stuff out there, rather than letting it rot is hardly a disservice to the authors/publishers.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They should be in the public domain.
Works that are not in active circulation will likely be forgotten and effectively lost to the world if they are not allowed to transition into the public domain in a timely fashion.
Copyright needs reformation.
I think your rights terminate when you do.
Wow, sounds almost as bad as piracy... If they really think PG is doing a "tremendous service" then what's the deal with the loaded language?
They are not merely exploiting orphan works, but practicing a wholesale kidnapping...
Wow. Hyperbole much?
Seriously, that little tirade is just shy of "won't someone think of the children"...
I have troubles taking any point seriously, regardless of how valid I think it may or may not be, when it's attached to gross, blatant hyperbole of this sort. Make your point in an intelligent manner and people will respond. Make it sound like the sky is falling and doom is eminent and you'll quickly be ignored.
"should" - either take it up with your representative (congress if you're in the US) or be aware that civil disobedience carries penalties.
At least some of these works are in fact in circulation, by the way. See the original article; there are stories that were first published in magazines and then in books.
60 years isn't actually very long as copyright laws go (sadly) - when I'm researching images or my Web site, http://www.fromoldbooks.org/, I frequently find images over 100 years old that are still in copyright. Sometimes even older.
As for "lost to the world," well, I agree, but note that there are "dark archives" (e.g. at the Library of Congress in the USA) where items are held until such time as copyright expires.
A difficulty with copyright law is that it's the publishers who make the money, and hence have the most representation at governmental levels. I'd guess that with wider representatoin, copyright terms could be simplified and shortened. However, in the US, you also have to remember the Disney Laws. Protectionism and corruption.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
The theft of the public domain by companies and politicians is the true criminal act.
I hope Project Gutenberg adheres to the letter of the law but doesn't give an inch of generosity to grey areas.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
A decade or three of exclusivity is a reasonable incentive to create. Carving out chunks of language and idea space for your own exclusive ownership practically forever is not.
Our shared cultural heritage is far more important that someone's "right" to continue profiting from work they or their ancestors did half a century ago. And if no one is profiting but the works are simply being suppressed because they're out of print but "protected" anyway then that is a crime against humanity.
The rights of the dead should not infringe upon the rights of the living.
Here's my proposal:
Movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc.: 10 years from first publication. No extensions, although a "new and improved version" rerelease is copyrighted separately. This puts plenty into the public domain: Star Trek up to Insurrection, the classic James Bond films, the first few Super Mario Bros. games, and so on. However, it also provides plenty of time to make a profit, and even when something enters the public domain, some people will still buy it (see The Lord of the Rings, the original printing of which is PD in the US due to an oversight)
Genuine inventions: Patent lasts 10 years. Extension can lengthen it by another decade if you are actively using the patent in a product. This cuts down on patent trolls, but otherwise keeps the system as-is.
Software/Method patents: Six months. This is mostly to make it easier to strike down the 20-year patents: it's less of a jump to say "this was patented in the wrong category, and as it has been X years since registration, the patent is no longer valid" than it is to say "this thing should never have been patentable".
Trademarks: Pretty much as now, although I'd make protection of parodies much more explicit
"Casual infringement": If you "steal" something from a P2P site, the most you can be liable for is the most common trade price of the thing, and the prosecution is responsible for court costs. This would make it pointless to sue people for downloading a few albums, but it would still be possible to sue massive-scale "pirates" or even people running torrent sites if they're advertising "pirated" material.
Its a privilege not a right. Copyright is a bad term. Ideas do not belong to the first being to hold them in their mind. Art does not belong to the artist. I'm not going to say some hippie crap like art belongs to everyone, rather I say it doesn't belong to anyone, it just is. You can't own blue, righteous indignation, the smell of napalm, or the force (sorry Lucas). We grant the privilege of profit for a period of time as a robust method of rewarding people for their efforts in proportion to how much people like the results of their mental labor. We made this law in the hope that it would encourage more such effort. The law was broken by PG, probably accidentally, but this is a legal issue, not a moral one, as no one is having their rights violated.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
all your solution will do is create a market for bumping off newly popular writers.
This is the stupidest argument I have ever seen, on any subject.
Let's be honest. Copyrights expire at death, with a minimum term (like 15 years) to support any children. Or how about death + years until any children are over 18.
Frankly, copyright should be original publish date. If it was published in a magazine, then later in book form. Should the copyright be furthered? The music industry has used so-called "re-mastering" to continuously keep works in copyright.
And we all know that when these 70 yr copyrights expire, a law will be passed to extend it to 100 yrs. And then after that - infinitely. But hey, no one will be alive that will remember anything but infinite copyrights.
DISGUSTING....
1) The works aren't exactly making a ton of money or circulation.
2) They got paid when they sold the books for quite some time, why not give that money to their kids?
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
The rights of the dead should not infringe upon the rights of the living.
Wouldn't this enter on collision course with the idea of a will (before death) act? I mean, can you imagine what the death of a house owner would bring? (relatives stampeding to pick everything before anyone from outside would enter the home and start shouting "Finders keepers").
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
> What did Mr Greg Bear contribute to the literary world that he may reap these royalty
> fees?
Who says he's reaping them? The author's widow is, no?
Greg Bear just happens to be:
1) The son-in-law of the author in question, hence have a personal interest in the matter.
2) A published author in his own right; quite famous in science fiction circles (if you
were not aware of this, a short search would turn it up). This mostly means that he's
maybe thought about copyright more than average.
And as a matter of fact, the works in question are not public domain yet; that's the point of the Gutenberg response that was cited.
These works have been forgotten about a long time ago. They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
From Amazon.com:
Poul Anderson
Author Page. 99 books.
Ray Bradbury
Author Page. 105 books.
Frederick Pohl
Author Page. 60 books.
Jack Vance
Author Page. 54 books.
Copyright gives the author - and his heirs - an exclusive and constitutionally protected right to control the distribution and use of his work. No where does it say that those rights are forfeit because his work isn't making any money.
They should have been in public domain since nobody is profiting from them anymore.
There's lots of open source code protected by copyright, but not generating any profit. Should that all go into public domain and not have any copyright protection?
Didn't know that major corporations could be considered a "poor family"
Apparently the new logic is that kids are to be cut loose, that you're not supposed to leave anything for them, but rather give 'em the boot, and anything you've saved or produced should not benefit them at all.
Actually, that's pretty old logic at this point. The idea is to avoid having a permanent hereditary aristocracy and to require people to achieve success (or not) through their own merits and achievements.
That's really neither here nor there where copyright is concerned. The original goal of the American copyright system (as opposed to the British, which was government control of the press) was to encourage authors to produce more work by giving them a temporary monopoly. Since dead authors are incapable of producing more work, the purpose of the law is not served if their copyrights survive them.
That said, I have no objection to striking a balance between the interests of the public domain and the author's dependents, if he/she had any, by allowing the copyrights to endure a little beyond the lifetime of the author, but seventy years is absurd.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
1) The works aren't exactly making a ton of money or circulation.
How would you know? You don't, do you?
2) They got paid when they sold the books for quite some time, why not give that money to their kids?
Who says they haven't? Anyway, why is it up to you to decide what they do with their money?
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
How about calling it an investment? These are big names who've made it as writers. Do you know how many people are struggling to make a living off writing? Do you know what kind of investment it takes to write a book, putting years of your life into it, and not knowing at all if it will pay off?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
Increased risk.
I think authors work like musicians, in that either they accept a loan from the publisher to get them by (book deal) while they write the material with the expectation that sales of the work will pay back the loan, and provide some actual profit to the author (if it doesn't sell enough, the author is on the hook to repay the loan); or, they self-fund the creation of the work (through working another, more normal job) and then sell the book afterwards.
That second option is more like standard entrepreneurship: invest some of your own capital into making something, with the potential of receiving a big payoff if you do it well (but also the risk of losing that investment if you do it poorly). However for that payoff to be feasible, you need to be the only one selling the product. Laws of physics protect entrepreneurs who are producing physical goods, but if you're investing time in creating something that can be represented digitally, only copyright provides that protection to your investment of time.
The first option is probably more common, especially for well-known authors. The difference between me and an author is that my employer doesn't pay me a year's salary upfront, and then expect me to pay it back through earnings from working for them. If they did, then I'd be quite hesitant to work for that employer: what happens if I get sick or injured and can't keep working, therefore can't repay the money? That's basically the situation an artist who gets a publishing deal is in - so they're taking on more risk than people with normal salaried jobs.
So with the current system, royalties makes sense. It provides the opportunity to make much more money than a regular job, thereby giving an incentive to take the increased risk.
Maybe the solution is for publishers to pay their creatives a salary like everyone else; an author would then just work 9-5 writing stuff, and be paid a regular salary for as long as they're working for that company. I would think the publishers would have the power to do this and it'd be fairly attractive for at least some writers, so I guess they (the publishers) feel the current system suits them better. Possibly just that most people can only produce good material for a limited time or in limited circumstances, and you don't want to be stuck paying a salary to someone who's producing rubbish. Safer for the publisher to offload the risk to the authors.
All rights are the arbitrary creation of people - organized into entities called states, with governments.
If I choose to kill you, the only thing that makes the idea of you having a "right" to live is the decision of a government to enforce it, and punish me. All political rights are a collective fiction.
So 50 years is the minimum; US law goes above and beyond that to 70 years to protect the rich Disney family
Fixed that for you.
And natural rights are just things which various governments have concluded really ought to be protected.
How exactly do the rights of the dependents encourage the dead person to go on creating works?
Because the creator, when alive, is motivated by the knowledge that her dependents will be provided for when she is dead. If you care about what's in your Will (and especially how big your estate is so that your Will matters to anyone), you probably would care about copyright extending beyond your death.
So you support a 100% Death Tax (a tax on one's estate), so that you can leave nothing to anyone when you die... it all goes to the State.
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
They abided by the law of the land of the time, and there was no obvious moral conflict with abiding by those laws. We can certainly change the laws for people in the future, but if we want them to uphold those laws, we will have to make sure we honor past agreements.
I'm all for copyright reform, but this idea that authors are somehow different than anyone else in that their literary works, while still under copyright, shouldn't be part of their estate seems ridiculous to me.
What do you mean "different than anyone else"? If I'm a plumber, should the pipes I install somehow continue generating revenue for my kids after I've stopped installing them? I can pass on the money I've made without any need for some sort of perpetual revenue stream, and so can authors.
If you're a plumber shouldn't the business you invested in pass to your kids?
If my kids operate my plumbing business, they're going to have to actually work to make their money, not just sit back and watch the royalty checks roll in.
If the children of famous authors want to make a living by writing books, they're more than welcome to, and they actually have a significant leg up on their competition due to their name recognition, contacts in the industry (you can bet that Brian Herbert's offerings never languished in a slushpile, even if I think that's where they belong) and the opportunity to have learned their craft from their parent. Not to mention the inherited money, which may free them from having to do other work while they build their own reputation.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You've got it completely backwards.
A 100% estate tax would be extremely regressive against the less well-off, quite unfair, and certainly unequal.
In case A, I am wealthy. I have more money than I could spend in 100 lifetimes. My coat tails could extend for generations. Faced with a 100% estate tax, I simply give a large amount of my money to family and friends before I die.
Since I can afford the best lawyers and accountants, I likely end up with close to nothing left of my personal fortune when I die. In fact, I've given everything away and live in a house owned by my children when I die.
Death tax paid as percentage of my total net worth at its peak: roughly 0%.
Case B, I am poor. I have a job, but essentially live paycheck-to-paycheck. What little I have, I'd like to pass down to my children before I die.
But most of the net worth is tied up in my house. I am lucky to have a place to live, but I could never give my house away. The gift taxes would be more than I (or my children) could afford without selling the house first.
When I die, my house goes to the state to be auctioned.
Death tax paid as percentage of my total net worth at its peak: roughly 100%.
How is that fair and equal???????????