"nothing after about 1930 has gone out of copyright"
You mean besides the collected works of Robert E. Howard (died 1936, work entered the public domain in 2006)? Or how about the original Night of the Living Dead, which never had its copyright term extended.
Got news for you - in places like Canada and Britain...places that had joined the Berne Convention rather than lagging behind like the United States...literary material is constantly entering the public domain. You're not seeing it in the United States because you had a short-term copyright until about the 1960s (if I remember my years right), when the term saw a massive extension to match up with the rest of the world. Naturally there's a gap because of that. But, right now the work of every author in the United States who died in or before 1938 is in the public domain. Next year it will be every author on or before 1939, and so on.
"If that were true, copyright infringement wouldn't be considered a significant problem because only a tiny minority of people would be doing it."
In what industry? In the majority of industries, piracy is NOT the norm, and it is only the minority who are doing it. The only industry where I've seen any respectable figures that measure piracy is the games industry, and they are quite alarming.
Also, you're projecting the human instinct to get free swag as a social statement - it's not. People will generally take anything they can for free, even if it's something they'd never use. And, the internet is a place you can get a lot of things for free. So, having pirated material easily accessible simply means that people have easy access to it, and are likely to use it, not that the law is broken.
Now, what can and can not be enforced is a different matter, and far more complicated.
"I think the RIAA's "interpretation" to be quite in line with both the general principles behind copyright (control over a work by its "creator") and the letter of the law (term extensions, DMCA, etc)."
Considering that your opinion is not shared by the courts, who have repeatedly hammered the RIAA on legal grounds, among others, I think your opinion is somewhat flawed. If the RIAA really did represent the letter or spirit of the law, they would have won more cases, and a class-action suit would not have been filed against them.
Tell me - have you ever actually read the law? Have you gone to the source itself?
"It would certainly be a major blow to the distribution industry, and several other hangers-on, but about the only creative industry I could see really suffering would be books (which are already in significant trouble due to several other factors)."
Sales may certainly be dropping, but the book industry is one that frequently does over a billion dollars of business per month in the United States alone. It's still pretty big.
Aside from which, you've made another leap of logic here - you're assuming that the distribution industry doesn't impact the creative end. You can have the most wonderful book, painting, song, or film in the world, and it doesn't mean squat if you can't get it out to people. Content distribution itself isn't necessarily cheap - trust me on this one, I have to do it. It certainly isn't often easy.
"I think people now have a much more accurate idea of what copyright does and why, and just how far away that is from the struggling inventor or artist that is offered up as a justification for it. Further, I think that is finally helping them realise that the extraordinary privileges (both in scope and generosity) society heaps upon "creative artists" is rarely provides a worthwhile ROI."
And I think you just proved my point about misinformation and the difficulties in making people understand what copyright really is and does.
Well, a lot of that argument depends on whether you feel that intellectual property can and should be left as a legacy for children and grandchildren. I'm of the opinion that it should, but then again, I also have a stake in that. Your mileage may vary, and certainly seems to.
However, I've noticed something in American copyright complaints that makes me suggest that up here in Canada we have something you're missing in the U.S., assuming that is where you're located. In Canada, if a copyrighted work is effectively orphaned, there is a mechanism to bring it into the public domain early. If that doesn't exist in the United States, I can see why so many Americans are concerned about the term resembling a perpetual term (although it really isn't, particularly in the United States where a number of works lost their copyright protection in the 20s and 30s during the short copyright terms).
Another thing I've noticed is that economics tends to be downplayed in copyright arguments, which is a serious issue if you know how the creative industry works. Whether a work survives the test of time has very little to do with copyright, and a lot to do with how well the work is selling. In fact, having the work in copyright longer can improve the work's chances of survival, as it increases the length of time that the work has a champion.
All in all, it is a pretty complicated issue. The RIAA has gone and shoved a lot of misinformation into it, and done everybody a disservice, I think.
"If copyright law were a more reasonable reflection of reality, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much copyright infringement going on."
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality. And as a creative artist and distributor myself, that's what annoyed me so much about the RIAA lawsuits - it made something that was realistic and reasonable look in the public eye like some sort of club for extorting money from dead grandmothers.
The area of copyright law that deals with the general public is the smallest tip of the iceberg. Most of copyright law has nothing to do with the general public, but everything to do with contract negotiations and relations between creative artists and distributors, and between different distributors. Most of it is an internal legal framework. And frankly, it works extremely well.
There is, however, a lot of piracy - the stuff artists and distributors generally have to worry about is people uploading material, as the downloaders are just getting free swag. And let's face it - people have always liked to get their hands on free swag...that's just part of human nature. But since the RIAA began their lawsuit campaign, they've taken their interpretation of copyright law, which was against both the letter and spirit of the law, and shoved it down the public's throat. This caused a massive backlash, and the free swag ideal has started to become an ideology at a grassroots level - and that is very, very dangerous in the long run.
Back around 17 years ago, when I was in my mid-teens, I was a fairly accomplished computer game pirate. But I always knew I was getting away with something whenever I pirated a game - I never felt as though I had the entitlement to do it. And, I grew out of it by the age of 17. These days, there is a strong sense that piracy is an entitlement, and that extends to campaigning to get rid of anything standing in the way of that entitlement.
Considering what most of copyright actually does, imagine what would happen to the creative arts if its legal framework suddenly disappeared. A creative artist trying to get his or her material to market would be caught trying to navigate a minefield, similar for anybody trying to be a distributor. Everybody would be having to protect their work however they could, which could translate into contracts being required before a submission even could be made, and for the end user, extremely restrictive DRM - after all, there would be nothing but DRM to protect a distributor's work from other distributors. It would be a crippling blow to the creative industry.
That's not an unjustified doom and gloom prediction - that's just a recognition that copyright is essentially the grease on the gears of the creative industry, a grease that just about nobody outside of the industry is ever aware of. Remove that grease, and things do not run smoothly.
The worst part of it is, to a degree, that the public has been made aware of copyright at all. This may sound odd, but considering what copyright is, the best place for it is some notice at the end of a TV show or on the copyright page of a book - some internal thing the public doesn't generally need to worry about. Now, the public is very aware of copyright, and they've got the wrong idea of what it is and what it does. Re-educating people is going to be a long road.
Yes, it does, but to defend a copyright in court or prosecute an infringement case, you generally have to be able to provide proof that the copyright is yours, and that you created the work first.
In other words, if person A sues person B on the grounds that B violated A's copyright, A has to be able to prove that his work predates B's work. The main legal proof is a copyright registration.
(And, for the record, a "poor man's copyright" is not legally valid in a court of law - it's too easy to fake. All you have to do to fake it is mail an empty envelope to yourself, and then seal it later with whatever you want.)
I've now written two books that were published by major New York publishers, co-written another book that was used to launch my publishing company, and published two additional books by somebody else under my publishing company. So, speaking from both sides of the fence, there are a few things that will be handy for you to know...
What you do in part will depend on if you have a publisher already, or if you are writing the book to try to sell to a publisher later. If you've got a publisher already, as has already been said on here, ask your publisher for guidance - they will provide everything you need, and if you have questions, your editor is there to answer them.
If you don't have a publisher, one of the most important things is to realize that you are writing a manuscript, not a typeset and formatted book. This is incredibly important - all-important, in fact. If you hand the publisher something that isn't formatted as a manuscript, when it comes to a lot of publishers, you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. Formatting the book is their job, not yours.
So, for a manuscript, what is usually going to happen is that an editor is going to read a printed copy, and make lots of notes on it. It must be double-spaced (so that notes can be made between the lines), in an easy-to-read 12-point font. Courier is preferable, but Times New Roman is acceptable too. Page numbers will be on the top right, and your header will be on the top left, with an extra space in the header to make the manuscript easier to read. Each chapter should also begin around the middle of the page.
When it comes to word processing programs, flexibility is key after a certain point, so that you can provide whatever file format is requested. But, when it comes to the writing itself, use something that you enjoy working in, and that you find easy to use. In my case, I use WordPerfect, in large part because once you start typing, it feels like a typewriter, and can also save in just about any format I need.
(It is also extremely powerful, and I use it for typesetting and indexing, but that is beside the point for this discussion.)
One thing that is handy to know regarding images - for an image to print properly, the image must be 600 dpi (dots per inch) - the best type is a high-resolution TIF file.
Indexing is not your problem, but you can make it easier for the publisher. The way you do that is to make a list as you write of important key words, and give that list to your editor for the indexer. That way, whoever indexes the book has a cheat sheet of sorts, and can do most of the index using a find function. Considering that indexing has to be the single most grueling, boring, and tedious job in all of publishing, the indexer will be very thankful for it.
As far as keeping organized goes, not much to say there - keep organized. You're going to be handing a long document over to your editor to be worked on, and your editor should be spending his or her time working with your words, not fighting with the document itself. Take note of where each figure is supposed to go, and be prepared to provide that information.
And I think that covers the tips I'd want to pass on...
That's not exactly uncommon, and it happens in just about every field where somebody can have an opinion. On here, the place where it tends to stand out for me is in the copyright debate - but then again, I've been a professional writer for around ten years, and a small press publisher now for two - I know most copyright issues like the back of my hand as an insider.
There are people who don't like having their preconceptions challenged, even when there's ample evidence against them. One of my favorite moments on here was a discussion with this one fellow who was absolutely convinced that an ISBN number was a copyright, or close enough to it to be the same thing. He was still maintaining it after a deluge of information to the contrary, including Wikipedia articles, links to copyright offices, and links to the authorities that issue ISBNs.
My theory is that once somebody becomes set in an ideology, evidence to the contrary challenges them on too deep a level. If it's an ideology that can actually cause harm to somebody else, proof that they're wrong also carries with it the burden of guilt for causing harm, which makes it even harder for them to come to grips with it.
I don't have time to read much more than that - my own work and the grad student shuffle have demands on my time I can't ignore - but I do have some comments on the first chapter of the book.
First of all, having tried to read Lessig's Free Culture at least twice, and having been stopped by some massive and often bizarre leaps of logic, I was very happy to see no such thing so far in this book. Boyle manages to make his argument without any strange leaps of logic, and he backs up what he says. I think he doesn't give enough weight to certain things, but he may cover that later in the book anyway.
There are some things in his introductory chapter that I wish he had gone into greater detail on, or that he missed outright. Like Lessig, he treats American copyright so far as though it exists in a vacuum, which isn't true. The international dimension is an important one, and has a tremendous impact. To give an example, copyright in the United States would have stayed at lifetime + 50 years if Europe hadn't moved to lifetime +70, and declared that it would use the laws of the country of origin to determine when a work goes into the public domain - so there is a strong foreign policy component of what actually goes onto the law books.
(As a further example, would the DMCA have ever been written if it wasn't for the WIPO agreements?)
I also hope that the economy of supply and demand is gone into in greater depth, as well as the interaction between it and copyright. In the first chapter, Boyle touches on it, but the economics of whether people are buying a product has more impact on whether that product survives the test of time than any copyright law. That's something worth a great deal of examination, and I hope Boyle does that in later chapters.
On a final note, I hope Boyle discusses means of dealing with "orphaned works" - I know that Canada has a mechanism for moving an orphaned work into the public domain if the copyright holder can't be tracked down, but is there such a mechanism in the United States? What about Great Britain or Europe?
One thing that I hope Boyle will avoid is confusing plagiarism with creativity - they are not the same thing, and it's a mistake that Lessig fell into (to the point that one reviewer argued that Lessig was trying to fight for the right to plagiarize instead of the right to create). If Boyle is as good as he seems to be, he'll explore the difference, and what it means to copyright law.
So, this book is off to a vastly superior start to Lessig's Free Culture, and I hope that it proves to keep that quality when I finally have time to read the rest of it.
Reading this discussion is sad for me...most of the comments here are from people who have absolutely no idea of how the world of publishing actually works. So, time for a reality check.
(By the way, I've been dealing with the world of publishing since 1998, and since 2007 I've owned a small publishing company of my own - and I just put out a second book under its name, this one an amazing Star Wars book by Michael Kaminski.)
1. Book availability vs. copyright length. Contrary to belief here, one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. In fact, the thing that has the most power when it comes to determining if a book will be available is the free market.
Book availability works like this: when it comes to major publishers, the publisher figures out how many books the author is likely to sell, and prints that many. Then the publisher watches the sales figures. If the printing sells out, the book is printed again for a second printing. If that printing sells out, there's a third printing, and so on. But if the first printing doesn't sell out, and just peters out after a year or two, the publisher knows the market isn't there, and pulls the book out of print.
The one technology that is changing this a bit is print on demand technology, which is allowing books with very low sales demand to be kept in print. Interestingly enough, it's not e-books that have had this impact - e-books have a very small market, compared to print books. They're an interesting complement to the printed book, particularly useful for travellers, but they don't tend to be worth a lot economically.
2. Copyright and greedy authors limiting books published. How many copies of a book get published is not up to the author, it's up to the publisher. The author has very little say in the matter. For that matter, it's every author's dream for a copy of their book to be in every household in the world - there isn't an author in the world who has ever stated that this new novel should have only 2,000 copies published, and that's it. There are, however, publishers who have done that, but that's with a special edition, and if the special edition sells well, you can bet there's a regular edition following.
3. Copyright and books. Copyright is not the right to profit, although it does give an author the right to try. It is barely the right to control. It is, however, a very important legal framework that governs the relationship between the author and the publisher. What the public sees is the barest tip of the iceberg when it comes to copyright - they see the author being able to dictate how a book is distributed in a very broad sense. What they don't see is the protection given to the book from the publisher in the submission phase, the protection given to the publisher from the author after the contract is signed, the contract negotiations themselves, etc. It's hardly surprising that most people wouldn't recognize what copyright actually is and does if it came up and bit them - almost all of the important functions of copyright take place behind closed doors, and the public never sees it.
4. Publisher business models. While the RIAA may be dying a long-overdue death, publishing is very realistic field, with business models based in reality. It is also a field that has no difficulties trying out new business models - the people who might call publishers Neanderthals for not giving e-books massive support right now are forgetting that the reason that support is lacking is because back around 2000-2002 the big publishing companies tried to make the e-book work, and failed miserably. Even Stephen King couldn't make it work, and he tried hard to do it. The first e-book revolution fell flat on its face. I know - I was there, with one of those e-books that "couldn't fail." Turns out that it could fail quite nicely, along with the rest of the e-book market.
(I've also kept my eyes on e-books, just as a matter of course. A recent discussion with my agent had her commenting that e-books "just
Well, it's an interesting letter, but there are some questions I'd want the answers to before moving forward in any capacity:
1. What copyrights exactly are they claiming have been infringed?
2. Who are they saying has infringed them?
3. What exactly do they want you to do about it?
I'd also repeat what has been mentioned here by more than one person - consult a lawyer about this, and find out what your liability is, and the best way to proceed. One thing you have to consider is that they could have come across something that is indeed a copyright infringement, and in a case like that, it is better to work with them than against them.
It is also quite possible that they got caught by a rotating IP address, and while there may have been something questionable going on at that IP address, that IP address now belongs to somebody completely different. In that case, you want your lawyer to write them a polite but firm letter explaining all of this, and that should, in theory, make them go away.
The only way you're going to figure out what to do, though, is get answers to those questions.
"Try to think like a large business for a sec,okay? You are the head of a large film business. You have vaults full of movies you think are "old crap" because they didn't make a profit when first released and don't have a gimmick to sell it with, like "It's a Wonderful Life" which you can repackage every holiday season. Now why on earth would you waste all that money to preserve things which you couldn't figure out how to make a profit on when it was new? The correct answer is you wouldn't. Because the shareholders only care about history as far as the quarterly earnings report and it will be very hard to justify such a capital expense when you don't know how to profitize it. So you let it set for the next CEO, who lets it set for the next guy,etc. Only problem is one day somebody opens the can and all you have is dust. Bye Bye movie."
This is my last reply on this subject, as I don't think you're likely to be swayed by any actual facts.
I do own a business. And I come from a family of business owners. We may not be a mega-corporation, but many of the principles are the same. My terminology might be different, but the concepts are essentially right here.
You have two major kinds of revenue streams. You have your primary revenue streams, and your secondary revenue streams. To take a big business publishing example:
Primary revenue stream - Stephen King novels Secondary revenue streams - midlist novels and older reprints
The primary revenue stream is the "sugar daddy" - the revenue stream that essentially pays for most of the company. But that's not the only revenue - what happens if the primary falters? So you have the secondary as well, which is more of a shotgun approach. You can afford to have the secondaries do less than stellar sales, because of the primary. And, the secondary provides the safety net you need if the primary goes down.
Applying that to companies like Universal and Paramount:
Primary revenue streams - current blockbusters Secondary revenue streams - DVDs and older films
Now, you're talking as though the older films are simply deemed unprofitable and let to die. But that's not true - there's an active restoration effort in place across the board because there's a very large market for these older films. Film restoration is very lucrative work right now.
Now, I have to wonder a few things about this film preservation society's "statistics" - what was their source? When were they gathered? Was it before the restoration effort began or after? And to what degree is it propaganda? After all, it's a lot easier to get donations when people are afraid of losing their film history, rather than pointing out that film studios are working their asses off to preserve their libraries.
In this entire conversation, you have been functioning in half-truths, pointing to something vaguely alarming and declaring that a business model is dead, or that evil corporations are behind it, without bothering to look at the entire picture. Even in this most recent post, you've tried to hold up the fact that it costs $40,000 to fill up an iPod as some great alarming truth...but it's $40,000 at $.99 per song. What it actually means is that an iPod can hold a huge amount of music, not that the price per song is unreasonable.
Try this one on for size. Try reading the Berne Convention. Try reading up on Eldred vs. Ashcroft, and WHY the case got demolished on every
The point is that it doesn't matter if the work enters the public domain sooner or later. If the work has gone out of print, it still does a vanishing act. At least if it is in copyright for longer, somebody is there to champion it and try to keep it alive.
Right now, you're sounding like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. You're taking a possible scenario, and depicting it as an absolute scenario.
And you are very, very wrong.
"Let us not forget one of the more sinister side effects of this: the complete destruction of large parts of our history. In all likelihood 99% of the film and audio ever shot is on rapidly decaying mediums, yet we the public have no rights to preserve it. So if the IP holders let it rot it is just gone."
A big assumption here - you're saying that in all likelihood copyright holders are letting 99% of their work simply rot, rather than championing them. This falls under the "copyright conspiracy to deprive the world of culture" idea, and there's so much wrong with that statement it's hard to figure out where to begin.
First off, in order for a piece of property in copyright to be of any use to the copyright holder, it has to be available to the public. That means that the copyright holder has to preserve it, make certain that it can be archived properly, etc.
Second, while the first point is true, it is also true that the majority of books (I use that as the example, because that's what I know best, but also because frankly there are a lot more writers than musicians or filmmakers) have an active lifespan of around 10 years or less. So, why is that? Put simply, it's because in that time, the public stops caring about the work, making it no longer economical for the publisher to keep publishing it.
Think about that. The public stops caring. The work effectively disappears at that point.
The argument that you're making is that if the copyright term is shortened, then preservation societies and whatnot will be free to take all of these works and reprint them. But that makes the assumption that those works will even cross their radar in the first place. In fact, since there wasn't enough interest to keep those works circulating to begin with, they're NOT going to be saved, with the rare exception of some gem that gets discovered in a vault somewhere.
Here's the reality - the longer a work is in copyright, the longer it has an actual champion who cares whether it survives or not. That raises the odds of survival, not lowers them. If you have a 25 year copyright while the average lifespan of a work is less than 10 years, then the majority of works will still vanish into the ether when they hit the public domain. As I just wrote in another post in this thread, for every book that got saved onto Project Gutenberg, there are dozens that didn't, and that we'll never see again.
"This is about greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations that are holding our entire culture hostage, nothing more."
That's the typical rant right there - the greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations holding culture hostage. Well, they're also keeping that culture available and in distribution...and making sure that those old films get preserved and remastered for their DVD releases.
Try this on for size - rather than foaming at the mouth about the evil corporations and how copyright is taking away our culture, why don't you actually learn a bit about the law, how it works, and what the impact is. Start with this: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-original1.pdf - it's an examination in a peer-reviewed law journal of how the public domain actually works.
"This is about greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations that are holding our entire culture hostage, nothing more."
No, it's not. It's about the law, and understanding it. You might want to keep that in mind in the future.
"This, you write as part of an argument in favour of 150+ year copyrights?"
Actually, it does work as part of the argument in favour of lifetime plus 50/70 year copyrights, and here's why:
There's one very important thing that happens when a work is under copyright - that work now has at least one person with an interest in keeping it available - a champion, if you will. So long as it has a champion, it is less likely to fall prey to being forgotten, and more likely to be preserved somehow.
You see, here's the thing about the public domain - a lot of reformers treat it as this wonderful place where the cultural work is now free to be enjoyed by everybody...and that's not actually true. Most creative work, upon hitting the public domain, has already been out of print for decades. It doesn't get reprinted - it just disappears. The material that survives once it enters the public domain is generally material that stood the test of time, and so other people pick it up and champion it, keeping it available.
Most material is not that lucky. For every book you can find on Project Gutenberg, there are dozens of books that just vanished into the ether, never to be seen again.
It's sad, but the majority of our cultural works that we lose are from our own disinterest, not from long copyright.
"So if a person lives to be 90, which is quite doable with today's tech, we are talking 90+50 for Canada, or 90+70 for the US. And a century and a half+ is actually fair to you? I'm sorry, but are you high? And as for the "children and grandchildren" I have a concept for them: It is called WORK! I know,it is amazing, what a concept! Give me a break!"
Boy, this is so close to a Morbo moment...oh, screw it. Morbo?
"THE ECONOMICS OF CREATIVE ARTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!"
Thank you Morbo.
Let me lay on a few facts here:
1. Very few creative artists EVER get to give up their day job. In fact, most creative artists live pretty far below the poverty line. Stephen King is the very rare exception. Their children and grandchildren don't get to live in luxury because they were creative artists - they get a bare trickle of money, if they're lucky.
2. The lifespan of a work of creative art is frequently under ten years. Most creative artists don't get to profit from their work for their entire lifetimes - they get to see it fade into obscurity.
3. This may come as a shock to you, but most of the creative artists out there are NOT in the film and music industries. In fact, there are also photographers, painters, sculptors, and writers. And guess what - they do get to keep most of their work. For that matter, what do you think happens to the copyrights of all the original work that goes onto Youtube, Daily Motion, etc., from gifted amateurs?
"And in case you didn't know we already have a way to pass that legacy on to your children and grandchildren: It is called inheritance!"
Yep - and copyright allows creative artists to pass their own work and legacy on to their heirs. Now, you might think that is terribly unfair, but as somebody who actually has stuff he wants to pass on when the time comes, my opinion on this is that you can go and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
"And if the public refuses to play your little copyright game then it kind of becomes moot, doesn't it?"
And if you'd been paying attention to one of the most important parts of my post, you'd have noticed that the most important parts of copyright have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the public. It has to do with contract negotiations. In fact, most of the action of copyright takes place before the work is ever seen by any member of the public.
You talk about the abuse of the law, but you're talking about abuse of the smallest part of copyright law. The minute an author comes to me with a book proposal, copyright law kicks in. It keeps the negotiations on even ground, it ensures that I don't screw over the author by taking his work and just publishing it with somebody else's name on it, and it keeps them from screwing me over by handing first publication rights to somebody after they've just signed a contract giving them to me.
For that matter, ALL of the interaction between the author and the publisher is governed by copyright law, from the editing to the marketing of the book. The public sees the end product - they don't see all the steps that got the book there. Copyright was the framework for every single one of those steps.
So, whether the public decides to "play my little copyright game" or not is completely irrelevant for almost the entire process. The public simply isn't involved.
And oh yes...one last point:
"A good 90+% of the artists don't have the rights to their works, because the cartels make you sign those away if you want access to their media outlet monopoly."
Have you been paying attention to the news lately? Those media cartels in the recording industry are scrambling because they're in the process of losing their monopolies. Whether an artist signs his/her rights away to his/her work is a choice, and always has been. It's just taken this long for musicians to start seeing past the record label snow job.
"Many years ago? Steamboat Willie is still under copyright! The man has been dead for half a century, yet his first work, written when cars needed to be started by hand and antibiotics were even a dream in a doctor's eye, is STILL under copyright! Is there ANYONE here that can stand up and with a straight face say that is fair?"
I'll take that action. Here in Canada it's life plus 50 years - that's long enough for the children and grandchildren - in short, the family members who knew the creator in life - to enjoy the legacy. Then it is turned over to the public domain. And it is fair for your children and grandchildren to enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In the United States, it's life plus 70 years, if I remember correctly (it could be life plus 75). That was put into place to account for the increased lifespan...well, not quite true. It was put in place in Europe to account for the increased lifespan. It was put in place in the United States because European legislation stated that length of copyright would be determined by country of origin, and that meant that any American intellectual property would go out of copyright sooner, and make it harder for Europeans to invest into American IP (such as a movie, etc.).
"But thanks to the outright bribery of politicians all over the globe it has long since quit being a contract and has become instead a way for evil multinational corporations to print money for all eternity."
You've fallen into a common trap here - you're mistaking abuse of a law for the law itself. They are not the same thing. You're also misunderstanding the importance of copyright. So, I'll explain it here.
Copyright is a set of laws that provide a legal framework that allow creative artists to negotiate with those who would distribute their work, providing protection to both sides to prevent one from screwing over the other before a contract is signed. However, if a creative artist signs all of their rights away, they lose that protection. Hence the ability for abuse by the RIAA, etc. It's a horrifying situation, I agree, but it is not endemic to copyright. It is far more endemic to sociopathic corporations, and copyright is only one of many laws that get abused.
"When copyrights exist for longer than most humans lifetimes they cease to be anything more than a complete stranglehold over our entire culture."
Very wrong, particularly when looking at the Internet, of all places. We are drowning in content. And once something is under copyright, such as a book, or play, painting, song, etc., it is always in the best interests of the copyright holder to keep that work available as long as possible. A book that is out of print cannot generate any revenue.
What determines the availability of a book, song, film, etc., is nothing more than simple economics. It costs money to produce and publish a book (I know - I own a small publishing company). So long as the sales of the book will make money, the book will stay in print. Once the book stops making money, it comes out of print. In fact, if you go to your local bookstore and look at all of those new books, most of them will have an in-print lifespan of less than ten years.
In fact, the technology that has done more than anything else to maintain culture in the literary world and keep books available is print-on-demand technology, which means that a book can be kept available for sale without requiring warehouse space. That revolutionized the book industry. And it had very little to do with either copyright or the Internet.
To misquote Serenity, when it comes to the alarmist views of the copyright debate, nothing is as it seems. Copyright is not the grand arena, the pirates are not scrappy heroes against terrible odds, and our culture, far from being under a stranglehold, is bursting at the seams. We are drowning in content, and never has it been so easy to create. The copyright abolitionists and reformers keep referring to some mythical golden
"I think you're right, and the idea of "copyright" in general is headed towards some kind of reform over the long term. Eventually we'll find ourselves in a world where it's not sufficient to have done some valuable work at some point, and then sit around and collect money for the rest of your life."
That's not how copyright works. On the other hand, it is how a pension works. And copyright is not a pension.
Owning a copyright means that you have the right to try to make money off the work you did for the rest of your life. But people have to actually want to buy it. So, if nobody wants the creative work you're trying to sell, no money.
To put that into perspective, most books are out of print within ten years of publication. Odds are that the author doesn't get to make a penny more off that book once it is taken off the shelves.
I'm not in software, but I am operating a small publishing company, and I'm about to undertake a project that leads into similar issues to what you're facing.
In order to increase my revenue streams, I'm about to start a line of public domain reprints of mostly-out of print books. Now, this leads to a similar question to what you're looking at - if this book is available on Project Gutenberg (P.G.) for free (and it is - that's my source for the texts), then why should any customer in his/her right mind drop down $20-30 for my product?
And that's where added value comes in.
If you just do the basics, then yes, it is a "race to zero." If all I do is reproduce the text from P.G., then a customer has no reason whatsoever to choose my version over the P.G. version.
However, I do things that add value. I commission a new introduction to the book, for example. I redo the typesetting so that it looks really nice, I give it a nice cover. That way, when the customer is making up his/her mind, they're not just getting the text for their $20-30 - they're getting a nice, easy-to-read volume for their library with extra stuff that you can't get online.
It seems to me that the same solution applies to just about any product in any business where there is competition...do something with your product that adds value that a competitor doesn't offer.
"Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing"
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Let me preface my comments with this: first, I own a small publishing company that among other things, publishes a textbook (at $32.95 US). Second, there are a lot of academic books that are overpriced, and in some cases absolute rip-offs. There is even a company that will remain nameless whose prices have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and which has absolutely no issues whatsoever with charging $100 for a book that shouldn't be reselling for more than $60.
That being said, modernizing the textbook industry probably wouldn't work at this point in time. And that has nothing to do with the companies - it has to do with the students. They generally prefer a printed book.
I know this because the textbook in question was one I helped write, and we tested it as a free e-book in the class it was written for. At the end of the class, we asked for feedback on the textbook so that we could do some fine-tuning. The comment we got more often than all of the others combined was a complaint that it wasn't a printed book. Keep in mind that these were university students, and we GAVE them the e-book. Not so much as a cent changed hands.
For all the strengths of the e-book, people have to first want to buy it. And when you're looking for something that you can write notes in, an e-book generally won't fit the bill. For that matter, it's a lot easier to deal with a book printed on actual paper than an electronic copy, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. So long as the e-book adds barriers to entry rather than taking them away - and since an e-book requires a reader, electricity, and has to deal with file formats, those barriers aren't going away - the printed book will remain the standard.
Actually, no, copyright forms are very far from bullshit.
As I just wrote in a previous comment, they're used for legal proof of ownership, and they are the only proof of ownership accepted in a court of law. Any other "proof," such as a "poor man's copyright," is too easy to fake.
Canada has copyright registration forms too, and its copyright law is based on the Berne Convention. For that matter, pretty much every country has a copyright office, and needs one.
The Berne Convention can only go so far, and here is why - let's say I write a story, and you decide that you're going to copy it, take my name off, and put yours on. I catch you, and I take you to court. The judge now has to decide who is the one who originally wrote the story.
And that's where it gets tricky, because without a copyright office, it's your word against mine. You could use a "poor man's copyright," but that's very easy to fake - all you need to do is mail an unsealed envelope to yourself, and then put something in it and seal it later. With a copyright office, assuming that I've been smart enough to register the copyright, I can pull out the copyright registration, point out that you don't have one, or that mine predates yours, and win the case.
So, even with the Berne Convention in place, a copyright office is necessary to settle the legal burden of proof.
I can't say I'm happy about this - among other things, I had to reset my profile with absolutely no notice whatsoever, and all of my online friends are going to have to do the same. But, I'm not paying any money for this service - I don't even use the official Yahoo client (I use Trillian instead) - so it is theirs to do, no matter how annoying it is.
However, I want to know something. When you look at the profile screen, an important word stands out in one of the corners - "BETA." "Beta" means that the service is still being tested, and isn't ready for full release. So, what I want to know is why the entire user base of Yahoo was put onto a profile system that hasn't moved out of beta testing yet. There is no way that is good practice.
In all seriousness, this should have been finished and declared done before a change like this was made.
I've tried to read Free Culture a couple of times, and frankly, I have trouble with it. Lessig has a perfectly good style, and it is amazing just how odd people can get with property rights, but he makes a few very unjustified leaps of logic.
It's been a while since I last tried to read Lessig, but the one that really stands out in my mind was the declaration that enforcing the copyright expiry in the Act of Queen Anne (I think it was that act, anyway) in the 18th century made for a big change, because culture itself was now free. Um...it certainly was a big change, but it wasn't that culture was no longer enslaved. You still needed publishers, you still needed wealthy patrons for the writers, and the end reader still needed to pay for their books. The publishers could no longer pull some of the dirty tricks they used to, but that was very far from the sort of universal freedom of culture that Lessig takes it for.
I've come to the conclusion that Lessig really doesn't understand that creativity is not plagiarism. Just because nothing is created in an intellectual vacuum doesn't mean that creativity is simply repetition - but, he treats it as though it is. From what I did read, it was clear that he believed that the ability to reprint older work freed artists to create, which isn't true. They were creating anyway - the ability to reprint old books without dealing with monopolies had little to no impact on the creation of new cultural works. The implementation of a copyright system wherein the creative artist could demand payment on a market level had far more to do with freeing creative artists to create, as they no longer had to find wealthy patrons for basic survival. And that only really starts to kick in on a serious level around 1850 and later.
All this is an aside, but there are some serious problems with the groundwork of Lessig's theories.
Slashdot Mirror
"nothing after about 1930 has gone out of copyright"
You mean besides the collected works of Robert E. Howard (died 1936, work entered the public domain in 2006)? Or how about the original Night of the Living Dead, which never had its copyright term extended.
Got news for you - in places like Canada and Britain...places that had joined the Berne Convention rather than lagging behind like the United States...literary material is constantly entering the public domain. You're not seeing it in the United States because you had a short-term copyright until about the 1960s (if I remember my years right), when the term saw a massive extension to match up with the rest of the world. Naturally there's a gap because of that. But, right now the work of every author in the United States who died in or before 1938 is in the public domain. Next year it will be every author on or before 1939, and so on.
"It is perpetual, every 10 years Congress extends the life of all currently copyright works for 10 years."
If that's the case, then where's this decade's extension?
There's a lot of faulty logic here.
"If that were true, copyright infringement wouldn't be considered a significant problem because only a tiny minority of people would be doing it."
In what industry? In the majority of industries, piracy is NOT the norm, and it is only the minority who are doing it. The only industry where I've seen any respectable figures that measure piracy is the games industry, and they are quite alarming.
Also, you're projecting the human instinct to get free swag as a social statement - it's not. People will generally take anything they can for free, even if it's something they'd never use. And, the internet is a place you can get a lot of things for free. So, having pirated material easily accessible simply means that people have easy access to it, and are likely to use it, not that the law is broken.
Now, what can and can not be enforced is a different matter, and far more complicated.
"I think the RIAA's "interpretation" to be quite in line with both the general principles behind copyright (control over a work by its "creator") and the letter of the law (term extensions, DMCA, etc)."
Considering that your opinion is not shared by the courts, who have repeatedly hammered the RIAA on legal grounds, among others, I think your opinion is somewhat flawed. If the RIAA really did represent the letter or spirit of the law, they would have won more cases, and a class-action suit would not have been filed against them.
Tell me - have you ever actually read the law? Have you gone to the source itself?
"It would certainly be a major blow to the distribution industry, and several other hangers-on, but about the only creative industry I could see really suffering would be books (which are already in significant trouble due to several other factors)."
Sales may certainly be dropping, but the book industry is one that frequently does over a billion dollars of business per month in the United States alone. It's still pretty big.
Aside from which, you've made another leap of logic here - you're assuming that the distribution industry doesn't impact the creative end. You can have the most wonderful book, painting, song, or film in the world, and it doesn't mean squat if you can't get it out to people. Content distribution itself isn't necessarily cheap - trust me on this one, I have to do it. It certainly isn't often easy.
"I think people now have a much more accurate idea of what copyright does and why, and just how far away that is from the struggling inventor or artist that is offered up as a justification for it. Further, I think that is finally helping them realise that the extraordinary privileges (both in scope and generosity) society heaps upon "creative artists" is rarely provides a worthwhile ROI."
And I think you just proved my point about misinformation and the difficulties in making people understand what copyright really is and does.
Well, a lot of that argument depends on whether you feel that intellectual property can and should be left as a legacy for children and grandchildren. I'm of the opinion that it should, but then again, I also have a stake in that. Your mileage may vary, and certainly seems to.
However, I've noticed something in American copyright complaints that makes me suggest that up here in Canada we have something you're missing in the U.S., assuming that is where you're located. In Canada, if a copyrighted work is effectively orphaned, there is a mechanism to bring it into the public domain early. If that doesn't exist in the United States, I can see why so many Americans are concerned about the term resembling a perpetual term (although it really isn't, particularly in the United States where a number of works lost their copyright protection in the 20s and 30s during the short copyright terms).
Another thing I've noticed is that economics tends to be downplayed in copyright arguments, which is a serious issue if you know how the creative industry works. Whether a work survives the test of time has very little to do with copyright, and a lot to do with how well the work is selling. In fact, having the work in copyright longer can improve the work's chances of survival, as it increases the length of time that the work has a champion.
All in all, it is a pretty complicated issue. The RIAA has gone and shoved a lot of misinformation into it, and done everybody a disservice, I think.
"If copyright law were a more reasonable reflection of reality, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much copyright infringement going on."
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality. And as a creative artist and distributor myself, that's what annoyed me so much about the RIAA lawsuits - it made something that was realistic and reasonable look in the public eye like some sort of club for extorting money from dead grandmothers.
The area of copyright law that deals with the general public is the smallest tip of the iceberg. Most of copyright law has nothing to do with the general public, but everything to do with contract negotiations and relations between creative artists and distributors, and between different distributors. Most of it is an internal legal framework. And frankly, it works extremely well.
There is, however, a lot of piracy - the stuff artists and distributors generally have to worry about is people uploading material, as the downloaders are just getting free swag. And let's face it - people have always liked to get their hands on free swag...that's just part of human nature. But since the RIAA began their lawsuit campaign, they've taken their interpretation of copyright law, which was against both the letter and spirit of the law, and shoved it down the public's throat. This caused a massive backlash, and the free swag ideal has started to become an ideology at a grassroots level - and that is very, very dangerous in the long run.
Back around 17 years ago, when I was in my mid-teens, I was a fairly accomplished computer game pirate. But I always knew I was getting away with something whenever I pirated a game - I never felt as though I had the entitlement to do it. And, I grew out of it by the age of 17. These days, there is a strong sense that piracy is an entitlement, and that extends to campaigning to get rid of anything standing in the way of that entitlement.
Considering what most of copyright actually does, imagine what would happen to the creative arts if its legal framework suddenly disappeared. A creative artist trying to get his or her material to market would be caught trying to navigate a minefield, similar for anybody trying to be a distributor. Everybody would be having to protect their work however they could, which could translate into contracts being required before a submission even could be made, and for the end user, extremely restrictive DRM - after all, there would be nothing but DRM to protect a distributor's work from other distributors. It would be a crippling blow to the creative industry.
That's not an unjustified doom and gloom prediction - that's just a recognition that copyright is essentially the grease on the gears of the creative industry, a grease that just about nobody outside of the industry is ever aware of. Remove that grease, and things do not run smoothly.
The worst part of it is, to a degree, that the public has been made aware of copyright at all. This may sound odd, but considering what copyright is, the best place for it is some notice at the end of a TV show or on the copyright page of a book - some internal thing the public doesn't generally need to worry about. Now, the public is very aware of copyright, and they've got the wrong idea of what it is and what it does. Re-educating people is going to be a long road.
Yes, it does, but to defend a copyright in court or prosecute an infringement case, you generally have to be able to provide proof that the copyright is yours, and that you created the work first.
In other words, if person A sues person B on the grounds that B violated A's copyright, A has to be able to prove that his work predates B's work. The main legal proof is a copyright registration.
(And, for the record, a "poor man's copyright" is not legally valid in a court of law - it's too easy to fake. All you have to do to fake it is mail an empty envelope to yourself, and then seal it later with whatever you want.)
I've now written two books that were published by major New York publishers, co-written another book that was used to launch my publishing company, and published two additional books by somebody else under my publishing company. So, speaking from both sides of the fence, there are a few things that will be handy for you to know...
What you do in part will depend on if you have a publisher already, or if you are writing the book to try to sell to a publisher later. If you've got a publisher already, as has already been said on here, ask your publisher for guidance - they will provide everything you need, and if you have questions, your editor is there to answer them.
If you don't have a publisher, one of the most important things is to realize that you are writing a manuscript, not a typeset and formatted book. This is incredibly important - all-important, in fact. If you hand the publisher something that isn't formatted as a manuscript, when it comes to a lot of publishers, you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. Formatting the book is their job, not yours.
So, for a manuscript, what is usually going to happen is that an editor is going to read a printed copy, and make lots of notes on it. It must be double-spaced (so that notes can be made between the lines), in an easy-to-read 12-point font. Courier is preferable, but Times New Roman is acceptable too. Page numbers will be on the top right, and your header will be on the top left, with an extra space in the header to make the manuscript easier to read. Each chapter should also begin around the middle of the page.
When it comes to word processing programs, flexibility is key after a certain point, so that you can provide whatever file format is requested. But, when it comes to the writing itself, use something that you enjoy working in, and that you find easy to use. In my case, I use WordPerfect, in large part because once you start typing, it feels like a typewriter, and can also save in just about any format I need.
(It is also extremely powerful, and I use it for typesetting and indexing, but that is beside the point for this discussion.)
One thing that is handy to know regarding images - for an image to print properly, the image must be 600 dpi (dots per inch) - the best type is a high-resolution TIF file.
Indexing is not your problem, but you can make it easier for the publisher. The way you do that is to make a list as you write of important key words, and give that list to your editor for the indexer. That way, whoever indexes the book has a cheat sheet of sorts, and can do most of the index using a find function. Considering that indexing has to be the single most grueling, boring, and tedious job in all of publishing, the indexer will be very thankful for it.
As far as keeping organized goes, not much to say there - keep organized. You're going to be handing a long document over to your editor to be worked on, and your editor should be spending his or her time working with your words, not fighting with the document itself. Take note of where each figure is supposed to go, and be prepared to provide that information.
And I think that covers the tips I'd want to pass on...
That's not exactly uncommon, and it happens in just about every field where somebody can have an opinion. On here, the place where it tends to stand out for me is in the copyright debate - but then again, I've been a professional writer for around ten years, and a small press publisher now for two - I know most copyright issues like the back of my hand as an insider.
There are people who don't like having their preconceptions challenged, even when there's ample evidence against them. One of my favorite moments on here was a discussion with this one fellow who was absolutely convinced that an ISBN number was a copyright, or close enough to it to be the same thing. He was still maintaining it after a deluge of information to the contrary, including Wikipedia articles, links to copyright offices, and links to the authorities that issue ISBNs.
My theory is that once somebody becomes set in an ideology, evidence to the contrary challenges them on too deep a level. If it's an ideology that can actually cause harm to somebody else, proof that they're wrong also carries with it the burden of guilt for causing harm, which makes it even harder for them to come to grips with it.
That's my theory, anyway, for what it's worth.
I don't have time to read much more than that - my own work and the grad student shuffle have demands on my time I can't ignore - but I do have some comments on the first chapter of the book.
First of all, having tried to read Lessig's Free Culture at least twice, and having been stopped by some massive and often bizarre leaps of logic, I was very happy to see no such thing so far in this book. Boyle manages to make his argument without any strange leaps of logic, and he backs up what he says. I think he doesn't give enough weight to certain things, but he may cover that later in the book anyway.
There are some things in his introductory chapter that I wish he had gone into greater detail on, or that he missed outright. Like Lessig, he treats American copyright so far as though it exists in a vacuum, which isn't true. The international dimension is an important one, and has a tremendous impact. To give an example, copyright in the United States would have stayed at lifetime + 50 years if Europe hadn't moved to lifetime +70, and declared that it would use the laws of the country of origin to determine when a work goes into the public domain - so there is a strong foreign policy component of what actually goes onto the law books.
(As a further example, would the DMCA have ever been written if it wasn't for the WIPO agreements?)
I also hope that the economy of supply and demand is gone into in greater depth, as well as the interaction between it and copyright. In the first chapter, Boyle touches on it, but the economics of whether people are buying a product has more impact on whether that product survives the test of time than any copyright law. That's something worth a great deal of examination, and I hope Boyle does that in later chapters.
On a final note, I hope Boyle discusses means of dealing with "orphaned works" - I know that Canada has a mechanism for moving an orphaned work into the public domain if the copyright holder can't be tracked down, but is there such a mechanism in the United States? What about Great Britain or Europe?
One thing that I hope Boyle will avoid is confusing plagiarism with creativity - they are not the same thing, and it's a mistake that Lessig fell into (to the point that one reviewer argued that Lessig was trying to fight for the right to plagiarize instead of the right to create). If Boyle is as good as he seems to be, he'll explore the difference, and what it means to copyright law.
So, this book is off to a vastly superior start to Lessig's Free Culture, and I hope that it proves to keep that quality when I finally have time to read the rest of it.
Reading this discussion is sad for me...most of the comments here are from people who have absolutely no idea of how the world of publishing actually works. So, time for a reality check.
(By the way, I've been dealing with the world of publishing since 1998, and since 2007 I've owned a small publishing company of my own - and I just put out a second book under its name, this one an amazing Star Wars book by Michael Kaminski.)
1. Book availability vs. copyright length. Contrary to belief here, one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. In fact, the thing that has the most power when it comes to determining if a book will be available is the free market.
Book availability works like this: when it comes to major publishers, the publisher figures out how many books the author is likely to sell, and prints that many. Then the publisher watches the sales figures. If the printing sells out, the book is printed again for a second printing. If that printing sells out, there's a third printing, and so on. But if the first printing doesn't sell out, and just peters out after a year or two, the publisher knows the market isn't there, and pulls the book out of print.
The one technology that is changing this a bit is print on demand technology, which is allowing books with very low sales demand to be kept in print. Interestingly enough, it's not e-books that have had this impact - e-books have a very small market, compared to print books. They're an interesting complement to the printed book, particularly useful for travellers, but they don't tend to be worth a lot economically.
2. Copyright and greedy authors limiting books published. How many copies of a book get published is not up to the author, it's up to the publisher. The author has very little say in the matter. For that matter, it's every author's dream for a copy of their book to be in every household in the world - there isn't an author in the world who has ever stated that this new novel should have only 2,000 copies published, and that's it. There are, however, publishers who have done that, but that's with a special edition, and if the special edition sells well, you can bet there's a regular edition following.
3. Copyright and books. Copyright is not the right to profit, although it does give an author the right to try. It is barely the right to control. It is, however, a very important legal framework that governs the relationship between the author and the publisher. What the public sees is the barest tip of the iceberg when it comes to copyright - they see the author being able to dictate how a book is distributed in a very broad sense. What they don't see is the protection given to the book from the publisher in the submission phase, the protection given to the publisher from the author after the contract is signed, the contract negotiations themselves, etc. It's hardly surprising that most people wouldn't recognize what copyright actually is and does if it came up and bit them - almost all of the important functions of copyright take place behind closed doors, and the public never sees it.
4. Publisher business models. While the RIAA may be dying a long-overdue death, publishing is very realistic field, with business models based in reality. It is also a field that has no difficulties trying out new business models - the people who might call publishers Neanderthals for not giving e-books massive support right now are forgetting that the reason that support is lacking is because back around 2000-2002 the big publishing companies tried to make the e-book work, and failed miserably. Even Stephen King couldn't make it work, and he tried hard to do it. The first e-book revolution fell flat on its face. I know - I was there, with one of those e-books that "couldn't fail." Turns out that it could fail quite nicely, along with the rest of the e-book market.
(I've also kept my eyes on e-books, just as a matter of course. A recent discussion with my agent had her commenting that e-books "just
"2. this is corporate takeover of our culture. its our culture. not their ip. we need to hammer this point home"
Excuse me...WHOSE culture?
It's part of JAPAN'S culture - we just enjoy it as a guilty pleasure. It doesn't speak to us the way it speaks to the Japanese.
Well, it's an interesting letter, but there are some questions I'd want the answers to before moving forward in any capacity:
1. What copyrights exactly are they claiming have been infringed?
2. Who are they saying has infringed them?
3. What exactly do they want you to do about it?
I'd also repeat what has been mentioned here by more than one person - consult a lawyer about this, and find out what your liability is, and the best way to proceed. One thing you have to consider is that they could have come across something that is indeed a copyright infringement, and in a case like that, it is better to work with them than against them.
It is also quite possible that they got caught by a rotating IP address, and while there may have been something questionable going on at that IP address, that IP address now belongs to somebody completely different. In that case, you want your lawyer to write them a polite but firm letter explaining all of this, and that should, in theory, make them go away.
The only way you're going to figure out what to do, though, is get answers to those questions.
"Try to think like a large business for a sec,okay? You are the head of a large film business. You have vaults full of movies you think are "old crap" because they didn't make a profit when first released and don't have a gimmick to sell it with, like "It's a Wonderful Life" which you can repackage every holiday season. Now why on earth would you waste all that money to preserve things which you couldn't figure out how to make a profit on when it was new? The correct answer is you wouldn't. Because the shareholders only care about history as far as the quarterly earnings report and it will be very hard to justify such a capital expense when you don't know how to profitize it. So you let it set for the next CEO, who lets it set for the next guy,etc. Only problem is one day somebody opens the can and all you have is dust. Bye Bye movie."
This is my last reply on this subject, as I don't think you're likely to be swayed by any actual facts.
I do own a business. And I come from a family of business owners. We may not be a mega-corporation, but many of the principles are the same. My terminology might be different, but the concepts are essentially right here.
You have two major kinds of revenue streams. You have your primary revenue streams, and your secondary revenue streams. To take a big business publishing example:
Primary revenue stream - Stephen King novels
Secondary revenue streams - midlist novels and older reprints
The primary revenue stream is the "sugar daddy" - the revenue stream that essentially pays for most of the company. But that's not the only revenue - what happens if the primary falters? So you have the secondary as well, which is more of a shotgun approach. You can afford to have the secondaries do less than stellar sales, because of the primary. And, the secondary provides the safety net you need if the primary goes down.
Applying that to companies like Universal and Paramount:
Primary revenue streams - current blockbusters
Secondary revenue streams - DVDs and older films
Now, you're talking as though the older films are simply deemed unprofitable and let to die. But that's not true - there's an active restoration effort in place across the board because there's a very large market for these older films. Film restoration is very lucrative work right now.
Here's an article on it from the Hollywood Reporter: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=2053173
Here's a more recent article by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/7525143.stm
And here's a Wikipedia entry on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation
Now, I have to wonder a few things about this film preservation society's "statistics" - what was their source? When were they gathered? Was it before the restoration effort began or after? And to what degree is it propaganda? After all, it's a lot easier to get donations when people are afraid of losing their film history, rather than pointing out that film studios are working their asses off to preserve their libraries.
In this entire conversation, you have been functioning in half-truths, pointing to something vaguely alarming and declaring that a business model is dead, or that evil corporations are behind it, without bothering to look at the entire picture. Even in this most recent post, you've tried to hold up the fact that it costs $40,000 to fill up an iPod as some great alarming truth...but it's $40,000 at $.99 per song. What it actually means is that an iPod can hold a huge amount of music, not that the price per song is unreasonable.
Try this one on for size. Try reading the Berne Convention. Try reading up on Eldred vs. Ashcroft, and WHY the case got demolished on every
The point is that it doesn't matter if the work enters the public domain sooner or later. If the work has gone out of print, it still does a vanishing act. At least if it is in copyright for longer, somebody is there to champion it and try to keep it alive.
That is the point.
Right now, you're sounding like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. You're taking a possible scenario, and depicting it as an absolute scenario.
And you are very, very wrong.
"Let us not forget one of the more sinister side effects of this: the complete destruction of large parts of our history. In all likelihood 99% of the film and audio ever shot is on rapidly decaying mediums, yet we the public have no rights to preserve it. So if the IP holders let it rot it is just gone."
A big assumption here - you're saying that in all likelihood copyright holders are letting 99% of their work simply rot, rather than championing them. This falls under the "copyright conspiracy to deprive the world of culture" idea, and there's so much wrong with that statement it's hard to figure out where to begin.
First off, in order for a piece of property in copyright to be of any use to the copyright holder, it has to be available to the public. That means that the copyright holder has to preserve it, make certain that it can be archived properly, etc.
Second, while the first point is true, it is also true that the majority of books (I use that as the example, because that's what I know best, but also because frankly there are a lot more writers than musicians or filmmakers) have an active lifespan of around 10 years or less. So, why is that? Put simply, it's because in that time, the public stops caring about the work, making it no longer economical for the publisher to keep publishing it.
Think about that. The public stops caring. The work effectively disappears at that point.
The argument that you're making is that if the copyright term is shortened, then preservation societies and whatnot will be free to take all of these works and reprint them. But that makes the assumption that those works will even cross their radar in the first place. In fact, since there wasn't enough interest to keep those works circulating to begin with, they're NOT going to be saved, with the rare exception of some gem that gets discovered in a vault somewhere.
Here's the reality - the longer a work is in copyright, the longer it has an actual champion who cares whether it survives or not. That raises the odds of survival, not lowers them. If you have a 25 year copyright while the average lifespan of a work is less than 10 years, then the majority of works will still vanish into the ether when they hit the public domain. As I just wrote in another post in this thread, for every book that got saved onto Project Gutenberg, there are dozens that didn't, and that we'll never see again.
"This is about greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations that are holding our entire culture hostage, nothing more."
That's the typical rant right there - the greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations holding culture hostage. Well, they're also keeping that culture available and in distribution...and making sure that those old films get preserved and remastered for their DVD releases.
Try this on for size - rather than foaming at the mouth about the evil corporations and how copyright is taking away our culture, why don't you actually learn a bit about the law, how it works, and what the impact is. Start with this: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-original1.pdf - it's an examination in a peer-reviewed law journal of how the public domain actually works.
"This is about greedy, bloodsucking, multinational corporations that are holding our entire culture hostage, nothing more."
No, it's not. It's about the law, and understanding it. You might want to keep that in mind in the future.
"This, you write as part of an argument in favour of 150+ year copyrights?"
Actually, it does work as part of the argument in favour of lifetime plus 50/70 year copyrights, and here's why:
There's one very important thing that happens when a work is under copyright - that work now has at least one person with an interest in keeping it available - a champion, if you will. So long as it has a champion, it is less likely to fall prey to being forgotten, and more likely to be preserved somehow.
You see, here's the thing about the public domain - a lot of reformers treat it as this wonderful place where the cultural work is now free to be enjoyed by everybody...and that's not actually true. Most creative work, upon hitting the public domain, has already been out of print for decades. It doesn't get reprinted - it just disappears. The material that survives once it enters the public domain is generally material that stood the test of time, and so other people pick it up and champion it, keeping it available.
Most material is not that lucky. For every book you can find on Project Gutenberg, there are dozens of books that just vanished into the ether, never to be seen again.
It's sad, but the majority of our cultural works that we lose are from our own disinterest, not from long copyright.
"So if a person lives to be 90, which is quite doable with today's tech, we are talking 90+50 for Canada, or 90+70 for the US. And a century and a half+ is actually fair to you? I'm sorry, but are you high? And as for the "children and grandchildren" I have a concept for them: It is called WORK! I know,it is amazing, what a concept! Give me a break!"
Boy, this is so close to a Morbo moment...oh, screw it. Morbo?
"THE ECONOMICS OF CREATIVE ARTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!"
Thank you Morbo.
Let me lay on a few facts here:
1. Very few creative artists EVER get to give up their day job. In fact, most creative artists live pretty far below the poverty line. Stephen King is the very rare exception. Their children and grandchildren don't get to live in luxury because they were creative artists - they get a bare trickle of money, if they're lucky.
2. The lifespan of a work of creative art is frequently under ten years. Most creative artists don't get to profit from their work for their entire lifetimes - they get to see it fade into obscurity.
3. This may come as a shock to you, but most of the creative artists out there are NOT in the film and music industries. In fact, there are also photographers, painters, sculptors, and writers. And guess what - they do get to keep most of their work. For that matter, what do you think happens to the copyrights of all the original work that goes onto Youtube, Daily Motion, etc., from gifted amateurs?
"And in case you didn't know we already have a way to pass that legacy on to your children and grandchildren: It is called inheritance!"
Yep - and copyright allows creative artists to pass their own work and legacy on to their heirs. Now, you might think that is terribly unfair, but as somebody who actually has stuff he wants to pass on when the time comes, my opinion on this is that you can go and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
"And if the public refuses to play your little copyright game then it kind of becomes moot, doesn't it?"
And if you'd been paying attention to one of the most important parts of my post, you'd have noticed that the most important parts of copyright have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the public. It has to do with contract negotiations. In fact, most of the action of copyright takes place before the work is ever seen by any member of the public.
You talk about the abuse of the law, but you're talking about abuse of the smallest part of copyright law. The minute an author comes to me with a book proposal, copyright law kicks in. It keeps the negotiations on even ground, it ensures that I don't screw over the author by taking his work and just publishing it with somebody else's name on it, and it keeps them from screwing me over by handing first publication rights to somebody after they've just signed a contract giving them to me.
For that matter, ALL of the interaction between the author and the publisher is governed by copyright law, from the editing to the marketing of the book. The public sees the end product - they don't see all the steps that got the book there. Copyright was the framework for every single one of those steps.
So, whether the public decides to "play my little copyright game" or not is completely irrelevant for almost the entire process. The public simply isn't involved.
And oh yes...one last point:
"A good 90+% of the artists don't have the rights to their works, because the cartels make you sign those away if you want access to their media outlet monopoly."
Have you been paying attention to the news lately? Those media cartels in the recording industry are scrambling because they're in the process of losing their monopolies. Whether an artist signs his/her rights away to his/her work is a choice, and always has been. It's just taken this long for musicians to start seeing past the record label snow job.
A lot of half-truths here...
"Many years ago? Steamboat Willie is still under copyright! The man has been dead for half a century, yet his first work, written when cars needed to be started by hand and antibiotics were even a dream in a doctor's eye, is STILL under copyright! Is there ANYONE here that can stand up and with a straight face say that is fair?"
I'll take that action. Here in Canada it's life plus 50 years - that's long enough for the children and grandchildren - in short, the family members who knew the creator in life - to enjoy the legacy. Then it is turned over to the public domain. And it is fair for your children and grandchildren to enjoy the fruits of your labour.
In the United States, it's life plus 70 years, if I remember correctly (it could be life plus 75). That was put into place to account for the increased lifespan...well, not quite true. It was put in place in Europe to account for the increased lifespan. It was put in place in the United States because European legislation stated that length of copyright would be determined by country of origin, and that meant that any American intellectual property would go out of copyright sooner, and make it harder for Europeans to invest into American IP (such as a movie, etc.).
"But thanks to the outright bribery of politicians all over the globe it has long since quit being a contract and has become instead a way for evil multinational corporations to print money for all eternity."
You've fallen into a common trap here - you're mistaking abuse of a law for the law itself. They are not the same thing. You're also misunderstanding the importance of copyright. So, I'll explain it here.
Copyright is a set of laws that provide a legal framework that allow creative artists to negotiate with those who would distribute their work, providing protection to both sides to prevent one from screwing over the other before a contract is signed. However, if a creative artist signs all of their rights away, they lose that protection. Hence the ability for abuse by the RIAA, etc. It's a horrifying situation, I agree, but it is not endemic to copyright. It is far more endemic to sociopathic corporations, and copyright is only one of many laws that get abused.
"When copyrights exist for longer than most humans lifetimes they cease to be anything more than a complete stranglehold over our entire culture."
Very wrong, particularly when looking at the Internet, of all places. We are drowning in content. And once something is under copyright, such as a book, or play, painting, song, etc., it is always in the best interests of the copyright holder to keep that work available as long as possible. A book that is out of print cannot generate any revenue.
What determines the availability of a book, song, film, etc., is nothing more than simple economics. It costs money to produce and publish a book (I know - I own a small publishing company). So long as the sales of the book will make money, the book will stay in print. Once the book stops making money, it comes out of print. In fact, if you go to your local bookstore and look at all of those new books, most of them will have an in-print lifespan of less than ten years.
In fact, the technology that has done more than anything else to maintain culture in the literary world and keep books available is print-on-demand technology, which means that a book can be kept available for sale without requiring warehouse space. That revolutionized the book industry. And it had very little to do with either copyright or the Internet.
To misquote Serenity, when it comes to the alarmist views of the copyright debate, nothing is as it seems. Copyright is not the grand arena, the pirates are not scrappy heroes against terrible odds, and our culture, far from being under a stranglehold, is bursting at the seams. We are drowning in content, and never has it been so easy to create. The copyright abolitionists and reformers keep referring to some mythical golden
"I think you're right, and the idea of "copyright" in general is headed towards some kind of reform over the long term. Eventually we'll find ourselves in a world where it's not sufficient to have done some valuable work at some point, and then sit around and collect money for the rest of your life."
That's not how copyright works. On the other hand, it is how a pension works. And copyright is not a pension.
Owning a copyright means that you have the right to try to make money off the work you did for the rest of your life. But people have to actually want to buy it. So, if nobody wants the creative work you're trying to sell, no money.
To put that into perspective, most books are out of print within ten years of publication. Odds are that the author doesn't get to make a penny more off that book once it is taken off the shelves.
I'm not in software, but I am operating a small publishing company, and I'm about to undertake a project that leads into similar issues to what you're facing.
In order to increase my revenue streams, I'm about to start a line of public domain reprints of mostly-out of print books. Now, this leads to a similar question to what you're looking at - if this book is available on Project Gutenberg (P.G.) for free (and it is - that's my source for the texts), then why should any customer in his/her right mind drop down $20-30 for my product?
And that's where added value comes in.
If you just do the basics, then yes, it is a "race to zero." If all I do is reproduce the text from P.G., then a customer has no reason whatsoever to choose my version over the P.G. version.
However, I do things that add value. I commission a new introduction to the book, for example. I redo the typesetting so that it looks really nice, I give it a nice cover. That way, when the customer is making up his/her mind, they're not just getting the text for their $20-30 - they're getting a nice, easy-to-read volume for their library with extra stuff that you can't get online.
It seems to me that the same solution applies to just about any product in any business where there is competition...do something with your product that adds value that a competitor doesn't offer.
"Scratch that - education is too profitable an industry to risk modernizing"
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Let me preface my comments with this: first, I own a small publishing company that among other things, publishes a textbook (at $32.95 US). Second, there are a lot of academic books that are overpriced, and in some cases absolute rip-offs. There is even a company that will remain nameless whose prices have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and which has absolutely no issues whatsoever with charging $100 for a book that shouldn't be reselling for more than $60.
That being said, modernizing the textbook industry probably wouldn't work at this point in time. And that has nothing to do with the companies - it has to do with the students. They generally prefer a printed book.
I know this because the textbook in question was one I helped write, and we tested it as a free e-book in the class it was written for. At the end of the class, we asked for feedback on the textbook so that we could do some fine-tuning. The comment we got more often than all of the others combined was a complaint that it wasn't a printed book. Keep in mind that these were university students, and we GAVE them the e-book. Not so much as a cent changed hands.
For all the strengths of the e-book, people have to first want to buy it. And when you're looking for something that you can write notes in, an e-book generally won't fit the bill. For that matter, it's a lot easier to deal with a book printed on actual paper than an electronic copy, and that isn't likely to change any time soon. So long as the e-book adds barriers to entry rather than taking them away - and since an e-book requires a reader, electricity, and has to deal with file formats, those barriers aren't going away - the printed book will remain the standard.
Actually, no, copyright forms are very far from bullshit.
As I just wrote in a previous comment, they're used for legal proof of ownership, and they are the only proof of ownership accepted in a court of law. Any other "proof," such as a "poor man's copyright," is too easy to fake.
Canada has copyright registration forms too, and its copyright law is based on the Berne Convention. For that matter, pretty much every country has a copyright office, and needs one.
The Berne Convention can only go so far, and here is why - let's say I write a story, and you decide that you're going to copy it, take my name off, and put yours on. I catch you, and I take you to court. The judge now has to decide who is the one who originally wrote the story.
And that's where it gets tricky, because without a copyright office, it's your word against mine. You could use a "poor man's copyright," but that's very easy to fake - all you need to do is mail an unsealed envelope to yourself, and then put something in it and seal it later. With a copyright office, assuming that I've been smart enough to register the copyright, I can pull out the copyright registration, point out that you don't have one, or that mine predates yours, and win the case.
So, even with the Berne Convention in place, a copyright office is necessary to settle the legal burden of proof.
I can't say I'm happy about this - among other things, I had to reset my profile with absolutely no notice whatsoever, and all of my online friends are going to have to do the same. But, I'm not paying any money for this service - I don't even use the official Yahoo client (I use Trillian instead) - so it is theirs to do, no matter how annoying it is.
However, I want to know something. When you look at the profile screen, an important word stands out in one of the corners - "BETA." "Beta" means that the service is still being tested, and isn't ready for full release. So, what I want to know is why the entire user base of Yahoo was put onto a profile system that hasn't moved out of beta testing yet. There is no way that is good practice.
In all seriousness, this should have been finished and declared done before a change like this was made.
I've tried to read Free Culture a couple of times, and frankly, I have trouble with it. Lessig has a perfectly good style, and it is amazing just how odd people can get with property rights, but he makes a few very unjustified leaps of logic.
It's been a while since I last tried to read Lessig, but the one that really stands out in my mind was the declaration that enforcing the copyright expiry in the Act of Queen Anne (I think it was that act, anyway) in the 18th century made for a big change, because culture itself was now free. Um...it certainly was a big change, but it wasn't that culture was no longer enslaved. You still needed publishers, you still needed wealthy patrons for the writers, and the end reader still needed to pay for their books. The publishers could no longer pull some of the dirty tricks they used to, but that was very far from the sort of universal freedom of culture that Lessig takes it for.
I've come to the conclusion that Lessig really doesn't understand that creativity is not plagiarism. Just because nothing is created in an intellectual vacuum doesn't mean that creativity is simply repetition - but, he treats it as though it is. From what I did read, it was clear that he believed that the ability to reprint older work freed artists to create, which isn't true. They were creating anyway - the ability to reprint old books without dealing with monopolies had little to no impact on the creation of new cultural works. The implementation of a copyright system wherein the creative artist could demand payment on a market level had far more to do with freeing creative artists to create, as they no longer had to find wealthy patrons for basic survival. And that only really starts to kick in on a serious level around 1850 and later.
All this is an aside, but there are some serious problems with the groundwork of Lessig's theories.