Your ideas are interesting but until I've heard something that could actually be implemented, and that would work better, I'm going to stick to advocating limited-term copyright with vigorous protection for fair use.
It's easy to enforce a law preventing publishers from printing a book without permission from the author. It is much harder to enforce a law preventing me from sharing a music file with one billion of my closest friends.
A loophole which meant that royalties weren't payed out which differs exactly how from absence from copyright?
In the Tolkein example, the vast majority of new books were published under copyright, and there was a public understanding that copyright existed and that authors should, for a limited time, be paid royalties from the sale of their books. If you can't see a difference between that world and a world where copyright doesn't exist, I can't help you.
And that wouldn't be possible today why? Because people don't respect copyright as much? Would a war on piracy change that or even do any good at all?
When exactly did I propose a war on piracy, again?
We can't abolish copyright now because not enough people would want to We can't abolish copyright later when most people want to because then no-one would get payed. When exactly can we abolish copyright? And why should I trust you on your words without any empirical evidence?
Let me put it this way: it makes no sense to abolish copyright and then expect market forces to enforce that copyright for you. If it was the accepted order of things to write and publish books without copyright, there would be no public outcry for publishers to pay royalties to authors because that's exactly the system that would be abolished.
If you have a real, substantive proposal to replace copyright with some other mechanism that would do just as well at promoting book-writing, I'd be glad to hear it, and to compare it to the alternatives. Absent such a proposal, I prefer a system of time-limited copyrights with explicit fair use exceptions. This is most emphatically not the system we have today, although it was the system we had when Tolkein's works were first released in this country.
Yeah, because no one wrote books before the era of million-year copyright terms.
I'd be satisfied with a 20 year copyright term for books. Maybe 10.
The thing about books is, they're fucking hard to copy. With music or movies or photography, one can easily make a digital copy without damaging or destroying their original. This is not the case with books. To get a really good scan, you have to take it apart and run the pages through individually. Very few people are willing to do this with something they just spent $7 - $100 on.
You're like the tenth person not to figure this out. Hint: why was copyright invented, centuries before recorded music or photography, or scanners?
The dead-tree format is not easy to copy page by page so those incomes are guaranteed.
Copyright was created in the days when "dead-tree format" was all we had. Publishers still copied and sold books, even in the 18th century, without paying royalties. "It's too much effort to scan, clean up, and reprint a book" hasn't been an effective technical restriction since we replaced monks with printing presses!
While only very few can make writing books a full-time career, there are a whole lot of people who can write a book that's profitable to print. In 2005, 172,000 different titles were published in the United States. That's in a single year. The vast majority of them were probably written by people who have day jobs. These people were able to supplement their income by writing books--not replace, but supplement--and this is probably a major reason why so many books are written and published. I never said writers can do well at all, and most of them have to keep working full time in order to support themselves. But as long as it's limited to a reasonable term and restricted by liberal fair use allowances, copyright does serve to promote the arts and science, just as the Constitution intended it to.
So we've covered books that rich people want to read, and books that people with copious spare time want to write with no expectation of reward. Sorry, that's still limiting. And while hard-cover books can still be sold in a world without copyright, royalties wouldn't be paid.
The legal context of that story wasn't the absence of copyright, it was a loophole between British and American copyrights.
The buying population as a whole, according to that story, respected copyright in principle.
The buying population as a whole, according to that story, was attentive to justice when it came to the products they bought.
In contrast, we would only be able to abolish copyright if a significant part of the population no longer respected it, simply because that's how politics works. Nor are most American consumers attentive to justice--if they were, there would be lower demand for gem diamonds and more attention to labor practices in the developing world.
Furthermore, most authors already do have to work day jobs. Royalties are only a supplemental income for them, but often that supplemental income is the only thing that justifies their being able to write.
Books can be tracked unit by unit, and although you an copy them, it is non-trivial to copy a 600 page text. so selling a lot of boos is still good business
Dude, you almost hit the boat, but you missed it entirely. The historical purpose of copyright was so if you wrote a book, publishers couldn't print it without your permission, allowing for royalties. No copyright, no royalties. There might be an alternative to royalties and I'd like to see what it is, but handwaving about "civil purpose" doesn't solve the problem.
There are alternatives to the two choices of maintaining the status quo or abolishing copy rights entirely.,
Of course I agree with that. But abolishing copyright entirely is one of the options, and it merits discussion. That's what I was doing in that comment.
I would appreciate if you refrained from making ignorant assumptions about my political beliefs as a whole, simply based upon my observations that copyright still serves its original purpose to protect authors' royalties. I'm under no illusions about writing being a sustainable occupation for most people. Authors' royalties may not be a king's ransom, but they're a nice supplemental income if you can get them. If you can actually propose a different way of paying writers that would work at least as well as royalties, I'd be interested to hear it. What I'm not interested in is sacrificing the future of literature in the name of abolishing copyright for the sake of abolishing copyright.
Incidentally, unlike musicians, authors actually retain the copyright to their books in most cases. This is because, unlike recording music, writing books doesn't require much capital investment. Also, publishers are less of an oligopoly than the music labels are, so there's more competition. The main reason writing isn't very lucrative is because not many Americans read books, and because easily 1 out of every 100 people is capable of writing a decent book. That's basic economics, not publishers screwing people over.
If you can find a replacement for copyright that delivers all the benefits of copyright with fewer side effects, go for it. My purpose in this discussion is to outline the problems involved, not to discount any solutions to them.
I pretty much agree with you. The point of my argument was to establish why, because as we both know, there are 12-year-olds and complete hippie loons on Slashdot and a lot of them get into copyright arguments. And since I wasn't arguing with you, and since furthermore I'm explicitly arguing against abolishing copyright, there was no straw man fallacy, just an error on your part in understanding the context of the discussion.
Books aren't worth copying if you're just one guy who wants to share his stuff over the internet, but if you're a commercial publisher and you want to undercut the publisher that's paying royalties to the author, it's very profitable to copy and reprint books. This is the original reason copyright was invented.
I know you're trying to make a funny, but it's more accurate to say that the President lives in a house with an attached office building than to say he works from home. As for Crawford, the government spends millions not only making it usable as a "Western White House", but also making sure the President isn't assassinated whenever he goes there.
Then again, Jefferson did more work in Monticello than he did in the White House. He was perhaps the original telecommuter, not to mention the inventor of the swivel chair and the man primarily responsible for eliminating the stigma of tomatoes in America.
Here's the hole in your argument: if we abolish copyright, the publisher that pays royalties to the author is going to be displaced by the publisher that doesn't pay royalties and undercuts the price. At best the author will be able to sell their manuscript to one publisher, and the only reason that publisher will even pay much for the manuscript will be so they have 1 week of lead time over the other publishers in selling the same book. If the book was popular enough the lead time would drop to days or hours. For the average author the market value of his manuscript would drop to peanuts. Royalties are no king's ransom but they're a hell of a lot more than authors would get paid if we just abolished copyright.
Honestly, if you want to get rid of copyright, the first thing that's gonna go down the tubes is books. Bands can perform live, photography and art can be commissioned, but when it comes to books we have a vast number of them only because it's possible for most authors to make a decent supplemental income from royalties. I'm not yet an author but as one of the few readers of books left in the world that sucks.
I never made any judgments (good or bad) about what that market would be like, just that recorded music wouldn't be a commercial product anymore. I think it's an open question whether that's good or bad.
Think it as: Can You live on a revenue from works you performed earlier? Should they?
It's entirely possible that I could, if I wrote a book. (Not likely but possible.) Not that anyone reads books anymore, but it's still possible for successful authors to live off of book royalties. I don't know about you, but I like books and I think authors should get paid for writing them. I'd rather have that somehow tied to how popular the book is in the market, than have that based entirely upon what some rich financier wants to commission, since at least the market would allow for a greater diversity of books and make it more likely that something I would want to read would get published.
Now, you might say (in analogy to live concerts) that authors should support themselves through public book readings. That's stupid because no one goes to public book readings anymore. Plus, a lot of people who are very good at expressing themselves in the written word are interminably boring in person (in particular, myself.)
If we want to reverse the analogy, I think we can agree there's some recorded music that, for whatever reason, the bands can't perform live. Maybe the band is pretty awful on stage even though they can record something decent. Maybe the music is too sophisticated for a band to perform live if it's recorded with, for instance, two simultaneous guitar parts recorded by a single guitarist, or multiple layers of vocals. Maybe it's electronic music which wasn't made with instruments at all, so the only point of performing it "live" would be to run the same synthesizer-and-sequencer program over bigger speakers. Maybe some of this music would still exist, maybe it wouldn't, and I don't know how to judge whether it would be a big enough loss to worry about. But it merits greater consideration and more serious discourse than all-capital letters, repeated punctuation marks, and knee-jerk reactions are suited for.
Slashdot Mirror
Your ideas are interesting but until I've heard something that could actually be implemented, and that would work better, I'm going to stick to advocating limited-term copyright with vigorous protection for fair use.
Thanks. You described the exact policy I want.
In the Tolkein example, the vast majority of new books were published under copyright, and there was a public understanding that copyright existed and that authors should, for a limited time, be paid royalties from the sale of their books. If you can't see a difference between that world and a world where copyright doesn't exist, I can't help you.
And that wouldn't be possible today why? Because people don't respect copyright as much? Would a war on piracy change that or even do any good at all?When exactly did I propose a war on piracy, again?
We can't abolish copyright now because not enough people would want to We can't abolish copyright later when most people want to because then no-one would get payed. When exactly can we abolish copyright? And why should I trust you on your words without any empirical evidence?Let me put it this way: it makes no sense to abolish copyright and then expect market forces to enforce that copyright for you. If it was the accepted order of things to write and publish books without copyright, there would be no public outcry for publishers to pay royalties to authors because that's exactly the system that would be abolished.
If you have a real, substantive proposal to replace copyright with some other mechanism that would do just as well at promoting book-writing, I'd be glad to hear it, and to compare it to the alternatives. Absent such a proposal, I prefer a system of time-limited copyrights with explicit fair use exceptions. This is most emphatically not the system we have today, although it was the system we had when Tolkein's works were first released in this country.
I'd be satisfied with a 20 year copyright term for books. Maybe 10.
The thing about books is, they're fucking hard to copy. With music or movies or photography, one can easily make a digital copy without damaging or destroying their original. This is not the case with books. To get a really good scan, you have to take it apart and run the pages through individually. Very few people are willing to do this with something they just spent $7 - $100 on.You're like the tenth person not to figure this out. Hint: why was copyright invented, centuries before recorded music or photography, or scanners?
Jesus has moved to DateJesus.com.
Copyright was created in the days when "dead-tree format" was all we had. Publishers still copied and sold books, even in the 18th century, without paying royalties. "It's too much effort to scan, clean up, and reprint a book" hasn't been an effective technical restriction since we replaced monks with printing presses!
Read through this thread. There are plenty of those extremists here.
While only very few can make writing books a full-time career, there are a whole lot of people who can write a book that's profitable to print. In 2005, 172,000 different titles were published in the United States. That's in a single year. The vast majority of them were probably written by people who have day jobs. These people were able to supplement their income by writing books--not replace, but supplement--and this is probably a major reason why so many books are written and published. I never said writers can do well at all, and most of them have to keep working full time in order to support themselves. But as long as it's limited to a reasonable term and restricted by liberal fair use allowances, copyright does serve to promote the arts and science, just as the Constitution intended it to.
So we've covered books that rich people want to read, and books that people with copious spare time want to write with no expectation of reward. Sorry, that's still limiting. And while hard-cover books can still be sold in a world without copyright, royalties wouldn't be paid.
Your story just as well proves my point:
In contrast, we would only be able to abolish copyright if a significant part of the population no longer respected it, simply because that's how politics works. Nor are most American consumers attentive to justice--if they were, there would be lower demand for gem diamonds and more attention to labor practices in the developing world.
Furthermore, most authors already do have to work day jobs. Royalties are only a supplemental income for them, but often that supplemental income is the only thing that justifies their being able to write.
Dude, you almost hit the boat, but you missed it entirely. The historical purpose of copyright was so if you wrote a book, publishers couldn't print it without your permission, allowing for royalties. No copyright, no royalties. There might be an alternative to royalties and I'd like to see what it is, but handwaving about "civil purpose" doesn't solve the problem.
I'd rather have everyone's tastes be covered than simply leave it to what rich people want, but that's just me.
Of course I agree with that. But abolishing copyright entirely is one of the options, and it merits discussion. That's what I was doing in that comment.
I completely agree with you.
I would appreciate if you refrained from making ignorant assumptions about my political beliefs as a whole, simply based upon my observations that copyright still serves its original purpose to protect authors' royalties. I'm under no illusions about writing being a sustainable occupation for most people. Authors' royalties may not be a king's ransom, but they're a nice supplemental income if you can get them. If you can actually propose a different way of paying writers that would work at least as well as royalties, I'd be interested to hear it. What I'm not interested in is sacrificing the future of literature in the name of abolishing copyright for the sake of abolishing copyright.
Incidentally, unlike musicians, authors actually retain the copyright to their books in most cases. This is because, unlike recording music, writing books doesn't require much capital investment. Also, publishers are less of an oligopoly than the music labels are, so there's more competition. The main reason writing isn't very lucrative is because not many Americans read books, and because easily 1 out of every 100 people is capable of writing a decent book. That's basic economics, not publishers screwing people over.
If you can find a replacement for copyright that delivers all the benefits of copyright with fewer side effects, go for it. My purpose in this discussion is to outline the problems involved, not to discount any solutions to them.
I pretty much agree with you. The point of my argument was to establish why, because as we both know, there are 12-year-olds and complete hippie loons on Slashdot and a lot of them get into copyright arguments. And since I wasn't arguing with you, and since furthermore I'm explicitly arguing against abolishing copyright, there was no straw man fallacy, just an error on your part in understanding the context of the discussion.
Books aren't worth copying if you're just one guy who wants to share his stuff over the internet, but if you're a commercial publisher and you want to undercut the publisher that's paying royalties to the author, it's very profitable to copy and reprint books. This is the original reason copyright was invented.
Sure, I listen to some artists like that, but a lot of them also have day jobs. Coulton is an exception. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily.
I'm pro-telecommuting but not if it makes the government more efficient. The ATF especially.
I know you're trying to make a funny, but it's more accurate to say that the President lives in a house with an attached office building than to say he works from home. As for Crawford, the government spends millions not only making it usable as a "Western White House", but also making sure the President isn't assassinated whenever he goes there.
Then again, Jefferson did more work in Monticello than he did in the White House. He was perhaps the original telecommuter, not to mention the inventor of the swivel chair and the man primarily responsible for eliminating the stigma of tomatoes in America.
Here's the hole in your argument: if we abolish copyright, the publisher that pays royalties to the author is going to be displaced by the publisher that doesn't pay royalties and undercuts the price. At best the author will be able to sell their manuscript to one publisher, and the only reason that publisher will even pay much for the manuscript will be so they have 1 week of lead time over the other publishers in selling the same book. If the book was popular enough the lead time would drop to days or hours. For the average author the market value of his manuscript would drop to peanuts. Royalties are no king's ransom but they're a hell of a lot more than authors would get paid if we just abolished copyright.
Yeah, I pretty much botched that analogy. But the point stands--propping up failed companies is a bad deal.
Honestly, if you want to get rid of copyright, the first thing that's gonna go down the tubes is books. Bands can perform live, photography and art can be commissioned, but when it comes to books we have a vast number of them only because it's possible for most authors to make a decent supplemental income from royalties. I'm not yet an author but as one of the few readers of books left in the world that sucks.
I never made any judgments (good or bad) about what that market would be like, just that recorded music wouldn't be a commercial product anymore. I think it's an open question whether that's good or bad.
Think it as: Can You live on a revenue from works you performed earlier? Should they?It's entirely possible that I could, if I wrote a book. (Not likely but possible.) Not that anyone reads books anymore, but it's still possible for successful authors to live off of book royalties. I don't know about you, but I like books and I think authors should get paid for writing them. I'd rather have that somehow tied to how popular the book is in the market, than have that based entirely upon what some rich financier wants to commission, since at least the market would allow for a greater diversity of books and make it more likely that something I would want to read would get published.
Now, you might say (in analogy to live concerts) that authors should support themselves through public book readings. That's stupid because no one goes to public book readings anymore. Plus, a lot of people who are very good at expressing themselves in the written word are interminably boring in person (in particular, myself.)
If we want to reverse the analogy, I think we can agree there's some recorded music that, for whatever reason, the bands can't perform live. Maybe the band is pretty awful on stage even though they can record something decent. Maybe the music is too sophisticated for a band to perform live if it's recorded with, for instance, two simultaneous guitar parts recorded by a single guitarist, or multiple layers of vocals. Maybe it's electronic music which wasn't made with instruments at all, so the only point of performing it "live" would be to run the same synthesizer-and-sequencer program over bigger speakers. Maybe some of this music would still exist, maybe it wouldn't, and I don't know how to judge whether it would be a big enough loss to worry about. But it merits greater consideration and more serious discourse than all-capital letters, repeated punctuation marks, and knee-jerk reactions are suited for.