Slashdot Mirror
How Copyright Makes Books and Music Disappear
An anonymous reader writes "A new study of books and music for sale on Amazon shows how copyright makes works disappear. The research is described in the abstract: 'A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows three times more books initially published in the 1850's are for sale than new books from the 1950's. Why? A sample of 2300 new books for sale on Amazon.com is analyzed along with a random sample of 2000 songs available on new DVDs. Copyright status correlates highly with absence from the Amazon shelf. Second, the availability on YouTube of songs that reached number one on the U.S., French, and Brazilian pop charts from 1930-60 is analyzed in terms of the identity of the uploader, type of upload, number of views, date of upload, and monetization status. An analysis of the data demonstrates that the DMCA safe harbor system as applied to YouTube helps maintain some level of access to old songs by allowing those possessing copies (primarily infringers) to communicate relatively costlessly with copyright owners to satisfy the market of potential listeners.'"
I hold lots of "copies" (I rather would call them originals) of old songs.
Holding them makes me not an infringer.
Uploading them to youtube does!
Also I don't feel the need to add a screensaver to an old song and upload that to a MOVIE SITE.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The ability to rapidly consume books and music using the internet contributes to shitty efforts being pushed out of the market at an proportionally
rapid rate.
Also I don't feel the need to add a screensaver to an old song and upload that to a MOVIE SITE.
You say screensaver, I say transformative addition to the original art as a home-made music video (I wonder if that'll legally clear me to monitize the work of others on youtube)...
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
It seems to me that one of the most compelling arguments against the status quo of our IP law is how it ephemerizes most works by preventing their circulation and their movement from one format to another. If the owner of the distribution rights of the works is uninterested in moving a work, say, from a vinyl record to a CD, then the only way to find the work on CD is to break the law--even if the person interested would be willing to spend money for the work. When you add in constraints like the fact that most records are no longer being pressed, you see that the effective "half-life" of the average work is vanishingly short. What this effectively means is that only the most popular (or most lucrative) works make the format transition for any new format. All the other works are left to more or less disappear. Even with my mediocre understanding of the history of art and culture, I am worried by what this means in the long-run. What percentage of the greatest books, albums, movies, games, etc. of the 20 and 21st centuries will be available to future generations? Unless you define these to be those works that enjoyed the most commercial support, I'd say a slim minority. Remember that many of the most celebrated works of earlier eras languished in non-recognition for the lifetimes of their owners--often longer. Shouldn't we be doing more to plan for the protection of our cultural treasures--the things that should someday belong to everyone? We don't know what will and won't be considered a cultural treasure in a hundred years, but the myopia of large media companies coupled with the scarcity created by IP law means that almost all contenders in that hypothetical contest would be disqualified.
Hopefully this will help put to rest the notion that copyright & patents & other intellectual property help to *promote* works, and bring about the understanding that all they really accomplish is to *limit* works (as all they do is make it illegal to produce & use works under certain circumstances).
:P
Is my sleep deprivation impacting my ability to comprehend what is being said here, or are others having trouble understanding what is being said in this article/abstract too? I understand the headline, but I can't quite understand how the words in the article support that simple statement. People who own older copyrighted material can exchange it more freely and easily and can communicate with copyright owners and... what? I'm really missing some point here. It looks like gobbledygook generated by a random thesis generator to me.
Why do Americans keep writing "an" instead of "a"? HOW did you manage to type "an" before "proportionally", apart from 'Because I'm a stupid American'?
On the other hand, keeping works that are an author's old shame under wraps might help keep those works from tarnishing the reputation of the same author's newer works. Case in point: Disney's Song of the South.
I really wish we had a "Use it or Lose it" clause in our copyright laws. After X number of years of the product not being marketed, it falls into public domain. Software for even shorter periods.
From the article:
"Creative works need owners who will assure their
availability and adequate distribution. Although Congress in 1998 relied on this argument in
extending the term of protection in the U.S. by 20 years, empirical studies have thus far failed
to support this key assertion made by copyright lobbyists."
In other words, the argument for Mickey's law was made in 1998, just as the Internet was making it nuts.
Next time around, he'll need a new argument..
Too bad congress won't go back and fix the now broken logic.
Once a market is semi-saturated with a specific copyrighted work, further copies for that work are discontinued so that new works can semi-saturate a market until a new generation (the copyright holders hoping that the media has changed or deteriorated since then).
The data show two separate trends. For in-copyright books, the publisher's initial printing sells out and when sales drop off (for paper editions) the publisher stops printing more copies. Readers buy used copies, easily available from Amazon, Alibris, etc., which have taken over the market for older books, so eventually no new copies are available. If lots of copies were printed, the volume of used books is large and copies are cheap. If few were printed and more people want them, used copies are hard to find or expensive. Readers may have a problem, but it's not as bad as it looks. Authors and publishers have more problems because it's harder to make money selling new reprints. The large volume of new copies of out-of-copyright books probably comes from the ease of print-on-demand publishing. A simple recipe for do-it-yourself publishing is to set up a book template, skim the texts of public-domain books from Project Gutenberg or a similar source, and put the books into the system, without investing a penny in paper or ink until someone buys a copy on-line. Look up a public classic, like The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper, and you'll get dozens of different new editions on Amazon. Go a little ways down the list and you'll start finding publishers you've never heard of. They (probably) are POD editions that can be cheaply produced. Because the investment is so low (compared to actually printing copies and distributing copies the old-fashioned way), there are many more editions of these old books available than newer ones -- but you'll never find most of them in a bricks and mortar bookstore.
Missing from Amazon and unavailable are two very different things.
It is good to see this issue getting some some credible coverage. I have run into this problem repeatedly trying to find good books on ancient history. A good example is David Magie's excellent 2 volume set _Roman Rule in Asia Minor_. It is one of a relatively small number of books written about the history of Anatolia in the Roman period. It was published in 1950, so it is old enough to have gone out of regular publication. And as a specialty interest book there were probably never a lot of them printed. If you look on Amazon at the moment, you will find two copies availabe from third party sellers, one at $475 and one at $600. ABE books is a little better, showing one copy from a Japanese seller for ~$150 and the next cheapest available in the US beginning at $275 and running to $600. In total, there appear to be roughly six copies available worldwide (perhaps a slight exageration, but not a great one). Compare this now to an older, but still excellent, book by Ramsey in 1897, _The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia_ (Phrygia is in Anatolia). Because this is out of copyright, it is available electronicly at archive.org. It is also readily available in print at Amazon (and I am sure others) for $28. Being an old guy (tm), I wanted a paper copy and happily allowed someone to make money on this out-of-copyright work printing and sending me one.
Finally, consider Colin Hemer's updating of Ramsey in _The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting_, published in 2000. This is readily available for ~$22, though his related _Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History_ published in 1990 is already beginning to be more difficult to obtain and demands escalating prices.
You could build an example like this in any field of scholarship with which I am acquainted. There is a virtual black hole developing between 1930 and 1990 for important contributions to our knowledge and culture. Many of both scholarly and creative works that are disappearing are uniquely valuable and do not have simple modern equivalents. This is particularly frustrating at a time when technology, apart from greed, is gaining the ability to make such things more available than ever before.
And yes, I think Anatolian history is cool. I own all of the above in good old dinosaur paper.
On the other hand, keeping works that are an author's old shame under wraps might help keep those works from tarnishing the reputation of the same author's newer works. Case in point: Disney's Song of the South.
Having this would be extremely useful to teach courses on cultural history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_history
Similarly, it would be useful to have access to the Popeye cartoons referring to "Alice the Jeep", as well as the various Bugs Bunny cartoons of the WWII era, which have been censored in the name of political correctness.
In fact I would say that having this information available is critical to future cultural historians undestanding of our current era, and the whole "Political Correctness" phenomenon.
Sound recordings made before the 1970's are not protected by federal copyright law.
It's been definitively established that the right to first publication trumps the right of the public to the availability of a work.
First publication, yes. But the work I'm talking about was first published over half a century ago.
Tell me about it. I have been trying fruitlessly for over ten years to find someone capable of giving me permission to post a chapter of a 1955 novel, The Gadget Maker, by one Maxwell Griffith. It has not been reprinted since a 1956 paperback. It very obviously has no commercial value left in it. But if you happen to be an MIT alumnus, you would be fascinated to read the chapter describing the protagonist's years at MIT during the 1940s. It's a wonderful picture of a milieu--and it's not as if there were all that many novels set on the MIT campus! (The protagonist applies for admission to the aeronautical engineering program, interviews with the department head, expecting to be asked why he loves aeronautics--and finds that the department head's only real concern is to make sure that he isn't Jewish).
It's under copyright. The copyright was properly renewed in 1982. It has been a long, difficult journey--publishers basically do not take any responsibility for anything about old books, and the novel was published by Lippincott, which was taken over by medical-book publisher William & Wilkins, which acquired all Lippincott's medical books claims to have no records of Lippincott's fiction. No record at the Author's Guild, no leads through the MIT Alumni Association. Where the story stands at the moment is that I put up a sort of shout-out on my website, and Maxwell Griffith's son contacted me--and said he thought it was OK but that he needed to check with his two sisters. That was over a year ago and I've heard nothing... I've just emailed him again and perhaps there will finally be a resolution.
It's a perfect example of a cultural loss. There are thousands of books out there that are of intense interest to a few hundred people, or more, that under the old copyright laws would have been long out of copyright, but now are locked up--and you cannot find the person with the key. Thousands of books of cultural but no commercial value are being sacrificed in order to protect a tiny handful that are still worth big money.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The book that has been in print for 150 years will likely remain in print for the next 150 years:
Literary classics. Historical documents.
Foundational texts in the law, sciences, engineering and so on. In medicine, for example, you have the first publication of Gray's Anatomy.
The Compromise of 1850 begins this era in the US, the firing of Fort Sumter ends it.
There are certainly big, big issues around copyright. But this study tells us nothing useful about them.
Firstly the sample size is ridiculously small, and far too small to generalise from.
Secondly anyone who works in publishing knows that books have a short shelf life. This is not a copyright issue, this is a side-effect of print and distribution. Basically it costs a ton of money to print a book and a not much smaller ton of money to warehouse it. So for paper print, the industry has evolved - or possibly devolved - towards quick-hit sale and return campaigns.
Same with any physical carrier of content, including CDs, LPs, tapes, and such. The initial distribution cost is a big up-front chunk of money. Physical reprints *only happen for content with a proven market.*
This totally sucks for content creators. But not a few are discovering that ebooks and print-on-demand are making it possible to reissue old work without going through a publisher.
Is it still under copyright? Oh yes. The difference is the author/creator is the copyright holder, and is making a decision to by-pass the publisher bottleneck and get the content out there.
*A lot of that old content sells well.* It's selling so well that some authors are making a real living from their backlists, for the first time ever.
So the issue isn't copyright, it's physical distribution. Once the limitations of that disappear, the business model changes and the content doesn't get stuck in a short-time tar pit.
As for old titles - there's no information about what format the content is in. Project Gutenberg has done a great job of digitising old content and making it freely available. It takes no effort and almost no money to grab a Gutenberg file and put it up as an ebook.
Here's the bottom line: are publishers really likely to hunt down titles from the 1910s and 20s and put them into print just because they're out of copyright?
How many titles from the 1910s and 1920s have you bought recently? How about the 1870s? How many people do you know who buy those kinds of books regularly - as opposed to buyers of recent work?
If the content is already digitised, there's no reason not to ebook it. But it's still not going to be printed, except as a very small print run by a tiny specialist press with a guaranteed audience (like Persephone Press, who do exactly this.)
So what does 'available' actually mean? Is it in print as a new copy? Is it an ebook? Is it a second-hand title?
If there's a huge market for freshly printed vintage fiction, the paper may have a point.
But there isn't. There's a solid market for a few classics, but I'm going to take a lot of persuading that publishers are stampeding to print vintage titles no one has heard of just because their copyright has lapsed - not when they could be screwing over contemporary authors instead.
If they were, B&N would be full of this stuff, and you'd see it everywhere - airports, Walmart, the rest.
I'm not seeing that. Are you? And Amazon is still a long way from being the only source of printed books.
Last word - not only does correlation not imply causation (assuming there is correlation here, which is debatable) but evangelism isn't a substitute for critical analysis.
A bit more thought would have made this paper a good one. As it is, if I had to look this over for peer review, I'd send it back for more work.
A great example of this problem.
Book was written by Sun Tzu in the second century BC and according to wikipedia translated to french in 1772.
Take a quick look at Amazon and see how many copies are for sale. All are "translated by" but what is the copywrite on a translation of something clearly in the public domain?
Is this a public domain -> copywrite thing at work?
You may not see the merit in the "simple screensaver" music videos, but the ones with lyrics overlaid are actually very useful, especially for karaoke practice. Yes there are other ways to get the lyrics, I know. But it is hella convenient to watch and read on YouTube. And seeing the related videos has helped me find new music and versions of songs I might not have known about otherwise. Stations like Pandora don't have some of the quirky versions you might find on YouTube. Same for live music... Especially for live music! I'm a deadhead, and love finding sweet live gems on youtube. Besides that, there are far "stupider" things on YT vids than rudiementary music videos. "Leave Brittney Alone!" Need I say more?
stupidity & embarassingly bad /. mods
I've seen the same process used to shut down distribution of various programming outside its home market. Copyright is more or less used to region-lock content for whatever reason.
I follow a few animes, and it seems that once shows which aren't officially distributed outdide of Japan start to become popular outside of the country - the companies will do their damnest to shut it down. Its disappointing because all the good quality video and subs tend to go away from streaming and aggregator sites where they're most easily watched. Then you get left with fuzzy video and poor subs, which may be discouraging to any potential new fans. (At least there are still torrents, but not everybody is arsed to download so much content unless deemed worth it in the first place. Availability is still there to some extent, but discovery and convenience is being taken away.)
The irony is that they could be making money on this stuff by approving distribution elsewhere, but you simply don't find a lot of the funnier or more esoteric shows anywhere in the western markets. They just don't get approved or allowed to ship out. You can only find those programs by following the fansub community.
I've also heard the same goes on with western programming everywhere else, but I'm not sure if enforcement is at the same level in terms of shutting it all down.
If it's not there already then there needs to be a 'reasonable endeavour' clause. If you can show that you've gone out of your way to track down a copyright owner without success - and it certainly sounds as if you have - then you should be allowed to publish and have a defence against any action should the copyright holder suddenly appear. I suppose the only difficulty would be defining what constitutes reasonable endeavour.
On copyrights, patents and copyright infringement.
First of all, lets all realize that calling copyright infringement piracy is an attempt by the RIAA/MPAA and others to make copyright infringement sound like a far worse crime than it really is. While copyright infringement is not right, it is in no way as heinous as the acts of the real past or present day pirates of the high seas. Penalties for copyright infringement need to be limited to the actual retail price of the media involved, not the totally bogus figures seen today.
Copyright has been extended far beyond all reason in recent years, delaying the entry into the public domain of many works that rightfully should have been there for many years, so that the overly greedy can continue to profit on these works to the great detriment of society as a whole. These vastly overextended copyrights are also used to stifle innovation and derivative works.
Copyright MUST be reduced to 5 years maximum, with no extensions allowed whatsoever for the original works. Further, purchase or transfer of copyright must not extend the original copyright period at all. Death of the original creator of the copyrighted content must automatically make that content public domain. And once a work is in the public domain, under no circumstances at all will it ever be copyrighted, or removed from the public domain. Further, anytime that copyrighted material becomes unavailable to the general public for more than 2 years, copyright must be terminated and the work becomes public domain. Any copyrighted material over 5 years old needs to automatically made public domain, no exceptions!
Patents must not be granted for âoebusiness methodsâ nor for computer software. And any such patents must be immediately invalidated. Further, far too many spurious and/or vaguely worded patents have been granted, which must be reviewed (at the expense of the holder) and invalidated. And the practice of patent trolling (entities buying patents only for the purpose of litigation to make a profit) needs to be illegal, with extremely heavy fines and long jail sentences. The penalties for wrongfully bullying a competitor (in any way) with invalid, vaguely worded patents or false patent claims need to even higher.
Patents need to be very very specifically worded, and not granted if there is the slightest bit of prior art. Entities seeking patents must prove beyond any doubt that there is no prior art at their own expense. Patents that are not being used to actively bring a product to market must become public domain after 3 years. All patents that are currently being sat on to stifle a product or innovation must fall under this 3 year term.
Copyright infringement will never completely go away. BUT here is how to drastically reduce it. The RIAA/MPAA/Publishers need to:
STOP going after the folks that download a few mp3s, movies, or ebooks. Go after the pirates who sell hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal copies!
STOP buying draconian legislation that only hurts legitimate customers and threatens the internet!
STOP treating your paying customers like criminals with DRM. DRM doesn't stop or even slightly slow down the big piracy operations, it only hurts legitimate paying customers!
STOP all the regional restrictions BS!
STOP screwing and ripping off the Artists/Authors/content creators!
START producing high quality, DRM-FREE content that people want. Price it reasonably, and make it easy to get over the internet.
START adapting to changing technology and the real world!
Copyright infringement cannot be legislated away, it cannot be sued out of existence. The only real solution is to give the customers what they want, when they want it, at a price they consider reasonable, with as little hassle as possible. I know that the above mentioned entities (and their clones around the world) don't want to hear this. If they don't start listening, eventually they will go away. They are already starting
Then surely there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO LOSS for anyone "pirating" the work, is there.
If they hadn't sold copies, they could reasonably claim they didn't want the copy of the work to be sold, since that would diminish the value of the original (e.g. statues, paintings, photographs, etc), but if they sold it and no longer wish to, why the hell should they continue to get copyright?
The copyright cartels keep claiming "Property" rights, but with property you get such things as abandonment laws, where if you leave the property to dilapidate enough, the property can be taken off you. Or squatters rights, where someone using the property long enough or improving the property at their own expense can gain right to the property that could otherwise have become abandoned.
Apparently the copyright "property" isn't property enough for those laws...
If it were to promote new works, it would expire immediately on the death or retirement of the author and would not be transferrable.
Great that Mr. Heald finished the paper. But he had the story in the news a year ago:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/
That is one sad story. Multiply by.... It shouldn't be a matter of that, though. All those works should simply be public domain.
I do a bit of small-time music arranging, for choirs and so forth. I can't legitimately make publicly available any of that work for others to use if the original subject is still under copyright, even if I don't get (or don't want) any personal compensation and even though any performance would still result in the original copyright holder getting any appropriate revenue via one of the collection bodies.
If you look through the published music, other than classical music (and even there you really need to find old editions to be safe - there may be no copyright on Mozart but there sure is copyright on the "edited" notation), available to amateur music groups you'll find a lot of folk tunes and a relatively small selection of more modern standards that are sufficiently popular to justify the effort of licensing. There's a whole load of neglected older music that deserves a wider airing but isn't going to get it - it could become popular by being shared and consequently have value, but in the absence of sharing will be unheard and valueless.
I've said this for a long time. We've produced generations of Penguin Classic and Oxford World's Classic (and other) philosophy books and works of literature, carefully edited and meticulously researched, and what people buy are cheap 19th century editions. The English speaking world might as well have shut down publication of new editions after 1930, because the choice is between a ridiculously overpriced copyrighted edition, or an old 19th century edition.
The most insane example I can think of - Wittgenstein's Tractatus costs under $10 because it is out of copyright, but Philosophical Investigations is one of the most silly-overpriced paperbacks I've ever seen.
Just a quick thought, Do you not suppose that the difference on the books it's that Amazon can charge money for the non copywritten books which they are getting for free most likely (and should be free to the consumer) but have to pay someone to sell copywritten books? Isn't that pre-business 101?
i had to wait 50 years to watch (illegally) the t.a.m.i. show of 1964
Consider republishing the work by breaking up the paragraphs with your commentary on the paragraphs, before and after. This is now your book about a book or in this case, a chapter.
Set up a DMCA book uploading system a la YouTube for ebooks, win.
And I'll tell you, if you don't -- like very soon -- I will. Ka-ching.
I despise BMI and ASCAP because of how they funnel money to themselves and to already rich artists.
However, just yesterday while talking with a friend about the internet sales tax, I realized there is no other solution.
There are 6,000 different taxing districts in the USA with different taxes on different varieties of goods. Some tax food, some don't, some tax processed food, but not raw food, some classify foods differently. You cannot track all those categories of goods against all those different taxing districts.
For social efficiency, it doesn't make sense for each and every business on the web to make those billions of calculations. Oh, and the taxes can change at random on any day in any of the districts so you have to follow all the new laws all the time.
It would be a lot easier to have some org like BMI collect a set tax, say 5% for anything you sell, and have them distribute it back to the various government entities that keep society working.
I'm not against taxes, but I hate confusion and inefficiency. And since I hate illogical shit, too, I do not hate BMI and ASCAP as much as I used to. They provide a useful service, they just do a piss-poor job of it.
This is precisely why availability should be a qualifier to being protected. .iso and covers to print, but at a reasonable price, as you weren't going to sell it anyways.
There is no logical reason why anything, in this digital age, should ever go out of print.
Not proud of it (i.e. George Lucas and the Star Wars Holiday Special)? Tough shit. Wash your hands of it by releasing it into the public domain.
Don't think it's worth the cost of pressing the discs? Fine. Sell me the fucking
...
People practice for karaoke?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The purpose of the legal system is not to make things easy for you. Remember that most legislators are legal professionals, as are many of their staff members (in many cases, the staff members working for legislators are the folks who actually do the work of writing the text of the law, and in some cases the legislators don't even bother to read the laws they are voting on).
In writing the laws, these folks have a vested interest in making things hard enough for you that you'll be strongly tempted to hire a legal professional instead of doing it yourself.
In ethics terms, this is known as "conflict of interest". The US legal system is riddled with it. We have lots of unnecessary laws, obsolete laws, contradictory laws, and badly written laws. From there, things get worse, since you ALSO have to take into account the need to do complex paperwork (and do it right), to understand a myriad of precedents, and to comply with executive and judicial orders and policies of any relevant agencies, and so forth.
If there is any right that can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment, it is the right to ethical government and ethical practice of law. We have neither of these at present, although some individuals within the government and the legal profession manage to do the right thing from time to time in spite of the system.
Unfortunately, actually getting a government and legal system that even comes within shouting distance of compliance with this right is not likely anytime soon.
This, more than any other single factor, is the reason we have a broken copyright system, a broken patent system, abuse of tort law, and so many other problems with the US legal system.