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).
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.
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.
Because he's an stupid American.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Just wait till 2017 and 2018. Disney will be dumping millions of dollars into congress for another perpetual extension of copyright terms.
It's because of the No-Child-Left-Behind policy.
You show up for class, you pass (barely with 50%)
No need to actually pass a test or turn in homework (That's too stressful for kids.)
So if you hire an American, a HS diploma is a attendance record.
Not a proof of competency or education.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
So if you hire an American, a HS diploma is a attendance record. Not a proof of competency or education.
I've never heard of any diploma that was proof of competency or education.
Missing from Amazon and unavailable are two very different things.
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?
All while gutting the public domain for a story for their next blockbuster...
Disney actually had "The Jungle Book" competed early, but were just waiting for it to enter public domain before announcing its release
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.
Good examples even if obscure or of limited interest to many. You're right, it's not just that many works, scholarly and otherwise are becoming less available, it's worse because the owners of copyright are creating a cultural black hole. A student of cultural history will be going along, following media production from ancient to modern times, then suddenly find a decades-long blank spot. Seems to me that Congress allowing greed to trump public interest is malfeasance on their part.
That a publisher can command such high prices as you describe is also bad. Publish the works electronically, have those interested in obtaining copies do the proof reading gratis, sell the e-books at five or ten bucks a crack, and everyone wins. (If the author is still alive, split the price with him.)
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.
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 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."