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.'"

Comments

Infringer?

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Re:Infringer?

[eksith]

But that's exactly how I've discovered so many artists (many of whom have been playing for years) that I enjoy to this day. Yes, it's just a stupid screensaver, for all intents and purposes, but it exposed me to something I can enjoy. I went out and searched for it. Bought the thing. Play it at home and at work. All thanks to a screensaver.

This really boils down to what exactly "holding" means in the digital age of intangible property. Music (and text, by and large) is as intangible as the emotions they illicit. So what does "holding" mean? And how does this death-grip affect future triggers of emotion?

Re:Infringer?

[jellomizer]

Like many things their needs to be the correct balance.
We need Patients and Copyrights however they need to be sure that they they are fare enough for the content creators to get their due for their work, but not so restrictive that it restricts innovation and free speech.

Re:Infringer?

[angel'o'sphere]

I don't upload.
Don't see a reason why I should.
The only stuff that is uploaded is movies about myself doing Aikido ... uploaded by my students with my permission.
That has nothing tomdo with copyright but might be a cultural thing. I'm rather old and don't see a point in sitting at my computer transforming a CD rip into a "video" and putting that on youtube.
If you are interested in music try mixter (google, not sure how it is spelled) ... lots of actually new music, often under cc license or completely free. My friends publish their stuff there.

Alternatively.....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Alternatively.....

[houstonbofh]

But the shitty copies only push to the top if better copies are not available. Look on IMDB at the people wanting a DVD of "Spenser for Hire." Some have paid over $100 for a crappy rip of an old VHS. No one would do that if there was a good copy available.

Re:Alternatively.....

[jfengel]

Baffling, ain't it? It's free money. Somebody puts in an afternoon's worth of work, presses copies for next to nothing, and millions of dollars will come rolling in.

Usually when they're not doing that it's because one of the contracts wasn't clear. They didn't anticipate release of it when they negotiated the contracts, and they don't want to get sued. Unlike banging out a copy, negotiating a contract is work. Lawyer work, at multiple hundreds of dollar per hour.

A good case in point is WKRP in Cincinnati, which uses a lot of music. Rights to the music were negotiated at the time, but expired. In a lot of cases they had to rerecord the music with cover bands, and the licensing was still a pain.

They went through it (and are still working on it) because the show was very popular. "Spenser for Hire"... well... I assume they'll get around to it one of these days.

Re:Alternatively.....

[icebike]

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.

There was always shitty music and shitty books. You find the latter in every honkytonk in north america, and every pub in europe. The books, well you never really saw any of that stuff.

We had gate keepers you see. The publishers and recording industry were filtering what we were allowed to hear and read.
Somewhere along the way their tastes were separated from ours. Their aim became simply to make money, and artistry and talent be damned.

We don't need that any more. We have better tools.

But if their filters still suit you, you can still use them. Just keep reading and listening to the best seller lists and you will have the same benefit of filtration working for you. But don't complain when all there is to read is yet another vapid Vampire story and the only instruments you ever hear are guitars and drums.

IP Law and Vanishing Works

[SerenelyHotPest]

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.

Re:IP Law and Vanishing Works

[jc42]

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. ... What this effectively means is that only the most popular (or most lucrative) works make the format transition for any new format.

Except that this isn't really true for the last such transition, to online MP3s. Those can be created very easily by the musicians themselves (or by a techie friend). I've been involved in a lot of those, which are typically handed out free, just hoping for listeners.

What often happens then is that various listeners post comments on the recordings, saying what they liked and didn't like. After a while, a group has collected many such comments, and decides to get together and re-record some of them, incorporating some of the critics' suggestions (but never all of them ;-). They typically make a somewhat higher-quality recording the second time. Then they put it online and wait for the comments to trickle in.

In several cases, they start getting questions of the form "Where/When can we buy your album?" After a while, they take this seriously, and sit down with their recording techies to create the tracks -- which they also post online.

This stage generally gets replies, which lead to re-recording a few of the tracks, but usually not all of them. Then they announce their first "album" to their collection of fans.

As various people suggested back in the 1990s when this approach started to develop, this tends to lead to fewer albums than before, but the ones produced are much higher quality. And since listener feedback was incorporated for all but the first recordings, the results tend to be tracks that appeal to all listeners (who like that sort of music).

The exclusion of the big distribution corporations is just one of the benefits of this scheme. Of course, eventually we may have distributors who cooperate with this approach. But it's unlikely that the current distribution corporations will be part of the resulting system, since their business plan is based on controlling what is distributed and claiming the lion's share of the income.

Anyway, it's all very interesting, but we'll have to stick around a few more decades and see how it works out. The Big Guys are starting to wise up, and they have the legislative clout to buy laws that outlaw such "independent" distribution. We can all hope they fail, but history says that such failure isn't guaranteed, and it's always possible that they'll find ways to claim the income from the independent "content producers", even for things that they'd never have approved on their own.

but of course

[Laxori666]

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).

Re:but of course

[i kan reed]

It's the duration that's problematic here. Things from the 1950s are, by and large, no longer valuable enough to exploit copyright for, but more recent things are, and continue to be published. We should target copyright dates so that things enter the public domain when approximately 75% of a given medium are no longer on the marketplace. For movies, that's probably about 30ish years.

What is this saying?

[BlueMonk]

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.

Re:What is this saying?

[b4dc0d3r]

It's saying that because out-of-copyright materials are not protected by copyright, they can be re-printed for a lot less. When Amazon adds mark-ups, they can add more to out-of-copyright products and still undercut copyright protected works, making them more valuable even if there is a limited market.

So this is what the study shows: Amazon prefers to sell non-copyright works. Also, Amazon is a good indicator of availability of all works. Also, Paul J. Heald seems to have a lot more talent for weasel words like "seem to" than critical thinking.

There are piles of better ways to show the problems with copyright - this is not one of them.

Use it or lose it

[neghvar1]

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.

Re:Mickey Mouse needs a new argument

[neghvar1]

Just wait till 2017 and 2018. Disney will be dumping millions of dollars into congress for another perpetual extension of copyright terms.

Re:Maintaining the author's brand

[sjames]

Or The Nutcracker Suite.

Or for that matter, the version of ET featuring goons with guns or the Star Wars where Han shot first.

Copyright is supposed to increase the availability of a work. The "Disney Vault" should never be supported by copyright.

Having this would be extremely useful

[tlambert]

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.

I've been trying to get permission for 10 years..

[dpbsmith]

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.

Works against music, too

[cardpuncher]

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.