And how, exactly, did you get your hands on Lrr's data?
You and your pathetic planet will be crushed for this! Just as soon as Single Female Lawyer is over! Besides, it's not like a thousand years ago somebody cut the transmission and-
The problem is that the scenario would be a bit closer to this:
Amazon: We want you to give us the lowest price on your e-book.
You: Okay, I can do that.
Amazon: Oh, and by the way, if you don't sign an agreement saying that we will always get the lowest price, we're not going to carry your e-book.
You: Um...
Amazon: And if you ever give somebody a lower discount than we're getting anytime in the future, you had better give us that discount too, or we'll de-list your e-book and nail you for breach of contract.
You: But...
Amazon: That's the price of doing business with us.
Now, I've exaggerated this a bit for dramatic effect, but this is the basic scenario. It's Amazon and Apple trying to force e-book publishers into contracts that not only dictate how they do business with Apple and Amazon, but with everybody else too.
Disclosure time - I'm 33 years old, and my family had a Colecovision. I remember the age of the video arcade, as I grew up in it. I remember Cosmic Avenger, Gorf, and Qbert. And emulation had NOTHING to do with securing "their spot in the memory of a digital society."
What secures their spot in history was that they WERE played and enjoyed in their day. Whether there's an emulator out there for them now is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that they were played in their day, and the people who grew up playing them remembered them fondly. Emulation today is nothing more than a footnote.
Aside from which, a lot of the companies that made the original games went out of business years ago. Remember, the video games market crashed around 1990 or so. Nintendo survived, but very few others did. The Atari of today is not the Atari of back then. So who is fighting to keep them from being spread?
Now, there are some game companies that are still around, and yes, you may have to wait a while for a re-release of Final Fantasy III or the Legend of Zelda. But, seeing as I know of at least one Xbox release of classic arcade games, conservation work of a sort is happening.
And as for the current generation of consoles, they're right now the king of the hill. Furthermore, they are able to operate without the extensive DRM that is seen in computer games - and because they have a single platform to support, they work now and they will always work when plugged into a compatible system, which is more than can be said for computer games. With few exceptions, the big games are all for the consoles right now. I don't think obscurity is likely at all at this point.
I noticed you have a Linux wiki. Does this make you a programmer, then?
Well, if it did, what would you think of a statement from me (not a programmer) about how easy programming an application is, and you really don't need anybody but one guy for something like a word processing suite. And even there, he could probably do everything himself.
You'd probably think I'm talking out of my ass, right? Of course, I am. I may not be a programmer, but I know one or two people who are, and I know it's not that simple.
So, there are absolutely no indications that you have any experience dealing with writing, editing, typesetting, or marketing books. As somebody who does have experience with all of those things, what do you figure I think about your comment about copyediting and marketing?
The simple fact is that the book industry isn't that simple. There are at least two editing passes that have to be made through a book before it is published - one for content, and the second for errors after the typeset. Both involve different skillsets, and both suffer if you go with "a very minimal middle-man." And I'm not even going to get started on the marketing - that's even harder.
I think it brings the cost per book down to about $1.00, but I'm afraid I can't say for sure. I've never had to get quotes for an offset print run, so I don't have any solid figures.
Right, I'm both an author who has worked with big publishers, and the owner and operator of a small publishing company. Let me explain what happened here.
Rather than deal with Random House's e-book terms, Wiley founded an e-book publishing company, which will be publishing the work of his clients. This is still a publisher - it's just a new one. The dispute is over electronic reprint rights, and that will depend on the wording of the contracts that Wiley's authors signed ("first English language publication rights" includes e-book rights - "first English language print publication rights" does not).
Now, subsidiary matters:
1. Any new book requires editing by somebody who is not the author (the author is too close to the book to be able to edit it properly), as well as typesetting (which is harder than it sounds - my first typeset job is an embarrassment to me now), as well as some form of marketing. These are what a publisher provides, and yes, they cost money. So, while an author can go it alone, and sometimes succeed, they're usually better off with an actual publisher.
2. Publishers make much less on books than you think. Let me provide the breakdown, based on any one of my publishing company's books with a $24.95 USD cover price:
55% goes to the wholesaler (who then sells it on to bookstores and Amazon at a 40% discount off the cover price). So, now we're down to $11.23.
Next we have the print cost - for a print on demand book like one of mine, we're talking anywhere from $4.00 to $8.00, depending on the page count. We'll take a middle number, so $6.00 is printing. Now we're down to $5.23. Then there's the royalties on top of that.
Now, for larger print runs (around 1500 copies and up), offset printing is used, which cuts down on the print cost considerably. But, the wholesaler still takes 55%.
This new publisher is going to specialize in e-books, and that makes the calculation much different. If you're just going through Amazon for distribution, then you don't have the wholesaler in the picture, and that means that rather than having a net profit (before royalties) on a $10 book being around $3.50 (very rough estimate), you can have it at around $7.00.
But these are the factors in play. It's far more complicated than you described it, and this is certainly not a case of authors going out on their own and leaving the publishing system behind.
Frankly, I can see why they're angry. This business model reduces their profession to amateur hour - and it can only hurt it in the long run.
I've worked in both the public and private sector. There is a reputable way to select somebody for a contract in a competitive setting. It's called a request for a quote, or RFQ (or request for a proposal, RFP). A general call goes out to businesses and people in the required industry. Proposals are collected, with projected timelines, pricings, and samples. Then, a decision is made, and the winner gets the contract. The losers go on to bid on other contracts.
The point, though, is that the time spent producing the final product is spent only by the winner. Everybody else moves on.
Now, that's the right way to do it. What's described in the article is the wrong way to do it. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a web site designer (I know the article is about graphic designers, but bear with me here). How would you feel if instead of preparing a proposal for a part of a website, you had to prepare the entire finished product - and then, after those hours of work (that could have been spent on working for a paying client, or in finding a paying client), you find out that somebody else got the contract, and therefore you get nothing?
Somehow, I think you'd be pretty pissed off too.
Now, this may be fine if you're just starting out, but it's not going to sit well once you've got a few years of experience under your belt. The really good people are going to get sick of it and do one of two things - they'll either leave that model and just work for the people who will treat them like professionals, or they'll leave the field itself.
Will amateur hour be cheaper than dealing with professionals? Absolutely. But, in the long run, it will drive the real talent out, and that will just make the field poorer.
Well, I've got to concede the movie stuff to you - frankly, the studio system is insane.
I'm afraid you're wrong about the publishing, though. The price of distribution isn't actually that high - generally, it's placed in the hands of a wholesaler such as Ingram (that's how I get the distribution for the books my company publishes). And, particularly when you're dealing with large print runs, the printing cost per book is pretty low.
(For that matter, in a lot of cases, most of the costs of the book occur before the book goes to the printer, as far as I can tell.)
As far as internal advocates go, that's not really the way it works either. In the publishing companies I've worked with (Osborne/McGraw-Hill and Pocket Books), there is an acquisitions editor who is basically a gatekeeper, making sure that only the best possible books get in (in theory). Then, those books the gatekeeper lets past are reviewed by an editor, or sometimes a committee, to see if they're a good investment. Having a contact on the inside can be helpful at times, but the actual system in general tends to judge somebody based on their writing skill more than their contacts.
(Although, for the life of me, I cannot explain how Terry Goodkind got through. I wish I could, but I can't.)
It disturbs me just how easily you talk about taking somebody's rights away. And frankly, that "intangible property" doesn't seem so intangible when you've spent months working on it.
How about this - take the time and effort to write a book of your own. Spend some time dealing with publishers, get it published. And THEN see what you think about how intangible it is.
"Making it illegal to keep and exchange them is really causing these things to disappear."
Considering that a small print run can be as little as 400 copies, sorry, that's not true. What causes them to disappear is lack of interest by readers. Disenfranchising creators and their families won't change that one bit, and a forgotten book in the public domain is just as gone as one in copyright.
It's called the test of time. Some books make it, some don't.
"But, the system, if not the authors, does not support the making available of books once the initial rush has died down - as you say, it is a matter of economics as to what gets published. However, if it is no longer economic to publish, then the author no longer makes any money from sales (since the books are not available to buy new, once stocks are depleted), and so it strikes me that there is very little reason to maintain a restriction over the book."
So, let me get this straight - you're actually saying that once the sales for a book die down, you'd strip the author of the right to try to get it started up again?
Now, I imagine you're about to say that I'm putting words in your mouth, but I'm really not. You are talking about dropping a book into the public domain once the sales are no longer enough to keep it in print, and in order to do that, you have to strip all rights the author has to their own book away. So, if the author wants to try again, they can't - the book is in the public domain, and they no longer have any say in the matter.
And, by the way, most book contracts have the author retaining the copyright - the author is free to seek another publisher once the contract has terminated, and can publish on their own terms, as you put it. The opposition to Google Books had far more to do with them failing to ask anybody for permission first, and then trying to set themselves up as a bookstore in their own right, which broke just about every publication contract any of the publishers and authors had signed.
Excuse me, but most of your complaint has to do with cultural attrition, not copyright. Shortening copyright would have no impact on whether those books are available at all. Why? Because the demand for them died and never returned. That is what happens to most books. The books that survive the test of time are the minority, and that is how it has ALWAYS been, even before longer copyright terms.
And, might I remind you, authors are not evil geniuses cackling as they put their works into vaults so that nobody can ever read them - they're generally their own work's best champions.
Seriously, where the hell do people get this idea of creative artists sitting on their work like evil geniuses, expressly to prevent somebody else from using it? That's not the way it works. Hell, I challenge you to name one author who has done it, just one.
As far as availability goes, that has to do with economics of demand. So long as the demand is present, the book is available - it does the publisher and its author no good if it's sitting in a vault. Once the demand goes away, the book goes out of circulation. Most books do not stand the test of time, but that's cultural attrition, not copyright. Even if copyright was only for twenty years, most books would still go out of print and stay there. At least while a book is in copyright, it has somebody to champion it and try to keep it in print.
And, just because Disney does this with their DVD releases of movies, it doesn't make it the general rule.
I can tell you don't work in the creative industries - in general, it's not copyright that determines longevity of a work, but economics of demand.
Basically, it works like this - so long as a work is a steady seller, the distributor keeps it in print. Once the demand drops to the point that it's no longer worthwhile, the work goes out of circulation. Copyright actually serves to help give the work a fighting chance, as the rights owner gains nothing by having the work out of circulation, and has good reason to champion it - once it's in the public domain, unless it has stood the test of time, it has no champion and truly is lost.
Some works do very well - for example, I don't think the Sherlock Holmes stories have ever been out of print. But, most works tend to last less than twenty years. There are some works that regain some popularity due to being discovered after the creator's death (such as the poetry of William Blake), and there are even some works that honesty do get rescued once they're in the public domain (although I can't actually think of any off the top of my head), but those are by far the exceptions.
So, I'm sorry, but it isn't copyright laws causing material to be lost, but just plain old cultural attrition. Our culture keeps the stuff it likes, and gets rid of the rest over time. That's just the way it works.
And by the way, culture is NOT dying. The health of a culture is based on what is being created in the present, not what was created in the past, and Hollywood's unoriginality notwithstanding, we're actually in a cultural boom right now.
I'm sorry, but I actually work in the publishing industry, and I own a publishing company, and I think you're talking through your ass. So, I'm calling bullshit on these claims.
Aside from which, not only are most books edited (that's a key part of the publishing process), but whether they're edited has no bearing whatsoever on whether you can copy them. That's faulty logic on the level of South Park's Chewbacca defense.
So, provide your sources, or stop making the claims.
What you've said is more or less accurate - it's the type of insult that was important.
So, for example, mentioning in casual conversation that you didn't think Athena or Poseidon really existed, while still fulfilling all of your sacred duties (attending sacrifices and festivals, etc.) wasn't really impiety, as far as I know.
On the other hand, urinating on the altar of Athena constituted a pretty big insult, and was definitely impiety. I THINK accosting people in the Agora and trying to debate the existence of the gods with them when they just wanted to go home was the same thing. It was all about the action, though.
Oh, the things that are wrong with these sentences:
"Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher [Aristotle] had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death."
Okay, I spent most of May and June TAing a course on Greek and Roman Myth and religion - and this really misrepresents how Greek religion worked in the first place. There was no such thing as heresy in the Olympian religion, because there was no dogma in the first place. For that matter, there was no concept of religion as we think of it.
Religion in ancient Greece was about action rather than belief. The closest thing we have to a phrase meaning religion is "sacre facere," which means "to do the sacred things," ie. sacrifice something and partake in the communal feast. This included matters such as religious festivals. What somebody believed was complete unimportant in ancient Athens - it was what they did that mattered.
Furthermore, there was no dogma - religious practices varied from cult to cult, and even the priesthood wasn't really organized. An ancient Greek priest was the guy who performed the sacrifice, and was a volunteer from the community. It wasn't his day job, there was no formal training, just a loose tradition that could be changed as circumstances required. The exception was the Elysian mysteries, of which even now little is known.
The actual impiety charge against Socrates was that he was "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state and introducing other, new divinities." Now, the second one is interesting, as apparently, Socrates would talk to a "god" on his shoulder - hence, introducing a new divinity to the city. But refusing to recognize the gods was not a matter of him being persecuted for his beliefs (as noted, the ancient Greeks didn't care what somebody believed, only what they did), but for him forcing those beliefs on others in the Agora by accosting them and playing devil's advocate.
In fact, when you look at it (and the Apology by Plato), it seems that for the most part the impiety charge was part of Socrates having the book thrown at him for being a general nuisance that half of Athens wanted to get rid of.
I'm afraid you've twisted my argument into a pretzel, and I'm not inclined to debate it with you if you can't even get my own points right in refuting them. For example:
"When you say "it's entertainment, not a cure for cancer," it looks like you're trying to minimize the importance of copyright and from that angle attack those who violate it."
The problem is that it's pretty clear that ISN'T what I'm doing in that sentence - so if you intend to put words in my mouth and turn me into a straw man, I have nothing more to say to you.
You've hit on an important point, but at the same time, I am left wondering if you understand copyright law yourself. And if you think you do, where did you get that understanding from (that's a general question for everybody reading)? Did you read the Berne Convention, or have you had to work with it on a professional level? Or have you been reading RIAA news articles?
And, for that matter, what branch of media are you dealing with? They're not all the same - the music industry is known for abusing creative artists and short circuiting the daylights out of the letter and spirit of copyright law. The book industry, on the other hand, is far better behaved.
I'm a published and agented author, as well as the owner and operator of a publishing company. I've worked with big New York publishers, and I've worked with both new and experienced authors. In most of the discussions here, I see a lot of people making impassioned arguments about copyright that have little or no basis in reality. Sometimes they're actually talking about patent law (which, in the U.S., at least, is badly broken in a lot of ways), or trademark law. Sometimes they're attributing an abuse of the law - or even somebody breaking it - to the law itself. For that matter, copyright law is often made out to be far more powerful and totalitarian than it actually is.
(Lawrence Lessig gets quoted a lot, and I really wish that his "Free Culture" book would just vanish. I've tried to read it at least three times, and every single time I've been stopped cold by massive leaps of logic that make little or no sense, and an apparent lack of understanding of the differences between derivative works and plagiarism. Copyright has complicated issues that are best understood for discussion, but I think his book is like trying to understand ancient culture by reading "Chariots of the Gods." And, as far as I can tell, he's the main source for most of the misunderstandings around the American CTEA, which had far more to do with what Europe was doing - and planning to do - than it did with Mickey Mouse.)
Now, taking what isn't yours to take is wrong, no matter what form it takes. Free swag is nice, but it's a bonus, not a right, and certainly not an entitlement. If you're getting away with piracy, then you've got a bonus - but there's no way piracy of a movie, song, game, or book, puts you into the right. It's entertainment, not a cure for cancer. And piracy isn't a protest - writing letters, organizing sit-ins, THOSE are protests.
So, you're right that for the most part pirates aren't evil (with some notable exceptions) - but they are freeloaders, and that's all they are...and it is important to understand that.
But how do we know that this is an abuse of copyright and the court system?
This is one of the problems - there's a knee-jerk reaction on Slashdot (in part because there are a lot of pirates here who don't like anything getting in the way of their free swag, and in part because the RIAA spent years abusing the letter and spirit of copyright law) anytime somebody mentions a copyright lawsuit of this nature. But, this is a new organization, and these are brand-new lawsuits. We honestly don't know who has been sued yet, what the level of diligence was on IDing them, how many are false positives, and how those false positives will be treated.
Until we have that information - and it will be some time before we have it - we have no way of knowing if this is just honest and warranted protection of IP rights, or an RIAA-style extortion campaign.
This isn't the RIAA - this is a different group. They have no track record yet - we don't actually know if they accidentally fingered a bunch of innocent people, or if they were properly diligent and only sued people who were actually pirating the movies.
You mean besides my posting less than an hour ago? Aside from which, I can't recall where I said that it worked perfectly. Perhaps you'd like to quote that bit?
For that matter, do you have ANYTHING to add to this discussion besides ill-placed sarcasm that requires you to put words in my mouth? Any points on the subtleties of copyright law? On economic theory?
I don't see you modded up right now either, by the way. I wonder if that will change.
"Anyway, if copyright laws didn't exist for software? Well, you'd see companies like Microsoft fall apart and companies like Red Hat thrive. Because the business model would shift from protecting your source code through litigation to making it available for free since that would be the only way to effectively combat piracy."
You really don't understand what copyright is, do you? Copyright is a legal framework that defines how creators and distributors interact with one another. All that stuff about file sharing, that's maybe 5% of what copyright does. Copyright allows creators to set reasonable terms of how their creations are used, and have them enforced.
So, guess what? Open source exists and continues to exist because it is protected under copyright. It's copyright that allows open source creators to say "this must be used under an open source license," and have it stick. The public domain is defined by copyright - it's the flip side of it. If you remove copyright, you don't just have everything fall into the public domain - the public domain ceases to exist. What you get instead is a free-for-all where you keep what you can protect. You think DRM is bad now? Imagine what would happen if there were no legal limitations to it, because that's what you'd get without copyright. You think the open source model would become the standard business model for software? Sorry, but it would disappear - it's a lot more profitable to copy somebody's code, make it your own, and slap a bunch of protection on it to prevent somebody else using it than it is to share it - and without copyright, there's nothing to stop anybody from doing that.
So, I think you need to do a lot of research - and among other things, you need to learn the difference between patent law and copyright law, and understand the difference between theory and implementation (the latter of which is not always perfect, and sometimes quite bad, such as the DMCA).
Slashdot Mirror
And how, exactly, did you get your hands on Lrr's data?
You and your pathetic planet will be crushed for this! Just as soon as Single Female Lawyer is over! Besides, it's not like a thousand years ago somebody cut the transmission and-
No! Now we will never know how it ends!
THERE WILL BE VENGEANCE!
The problem is that the scenario would be a bit closer to this:
Amazon: We want you to give us the lowest price on your e-book.
You: Okay, I can do that.
Amazon: Oh, and by the way, if you don't sign an agreement saying that we will always get the lowest price, we're not going to carry your e-book.
You: Um...
Amazon: And if you ever give somebody a lower discount than we're getting anytime in the future, you had better give us that discount too, or we'll de-list your e-book and nail you for breach of contract.
You: But...
Amazon: That's the price of doing business with us.
Now, I've exaggerated this a bit for dramatic effect, but this is the basic scenario. It's Amazon and Apple trying to force e-book publishers into contracts that not only dictate how they do business with Apple and Amazon, but with everybody else too.
Hey, you should have seen Smurf Rescue! That had killer small fences, gentle rises, and tufts of grass...
I'm sorry, but what a load of crap.
Disclosure time - I'm 33 years old, and my family had a Colecovision. I remember the age of the video arcade, as I grew up in it. I remember Cosmic Avenger, Gorf, and Qbert. And emulation had NOTHING to do with securing "their spot in the memory of a digital society."
What secures their spot in history was that they WERE played and enjoyed in their day. Whether there's an emulator out there for them now is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that they were played in their day, and the people who grew up playing them remembered them fondly. Emulation today is nothing more than a footnote.
Aside from which, a lot of the companies that made the original games went out of business years ago. Remember, the video games market crashed around 1990 or so. Nintendo survived, but very few others did. The Atari of today is not the Atari of back then. So who is fighting to keep them from being spread?
Now, there are some game companies that are still around, and yes, you may have to wait a while for a re-release of Final Fantasy III or the Legend of Zelda. But, seeing as I know of at least one Xbox release of classic arcade games, conservation work of a sort is happening.
And as for the current generation of consoles, they're right now the king of the hill. Furthermore, they are able to operate without the extensive DRM that is seen in computer games - and because they have a single platform to support, they work now and they will always work when plugged into a compatible system, which is more than can be said for computer games. With few exceptions, the big games are all for the consoles right now. I don't think obscurity is likely at all at this point.
It's not as easy as that.
I noticed you have a Linux wiki. Does this make you a programmer, then?
Well, if it did, what would you think of a statement from me (not a programmer) about how easy programming an application is, and you really don't need anybody but one guy for something like a word processing suite. And even there, he could probably do everything himself.
You'd probably think I'm talking out of my ass, right? Of course, I am. I may not be a programmer, but I know one or two people who are, and I know it's not that simple.
So, there are absolutely no indications that you have any experience dealing with writing, editing, typesetting, or marketing books. As somebody who does have experience with all of those things, what do you figure I think about your comment about copyediting and marketing?
The simple fact is that the book industry isn't that simple. There are at least two editing passes that have to be made through a book before it is published - one for content, and the second for errors after the typeset. Both involve different skillsets, and both suffer if you go with "a very minimal middle-man." And I'm not even going to get started on the marketing - that's even harder.
I think it brings the cost per book down to about $1.00, but I'm afraid I can't say for sure. I've never had to get quotes for an offset print run, so I don't have any solid figures.
Sorry.
Oh, good grief...
THIS got marked "informative"?
Right, I'm both an author who has worked with big publishers, and the owner and operator of a small publishing company. Let me explain what happened here.
Rather than deal with Random House's e-book terms, Wiley founded an e-book publishing company, which will be publishing the work of his clients. This is still a publisher - it's just a new one. The dispute is over electronic reprint rights, and that will depend on the wording of the contracts that Wiley's authors signed ("first English language publication rights" includes e-book rights - "first English language print publication rights" does not).
Now, subsidiary matters:
1. Any new book requires editing by somebody who is not the author (the author is too close to the book to be able to edit it properly), as well as typesetting (which is harder than it sounds - my first typeset job is an embarrassment to me now), as well as some form of marketing. These are what a publisher provides, and yes, they cost money. So, while an author can go it alone, and sometimes succeed, they're usually better off with an actual publisher.
2. Publishers make much less on books than you think. Let me provide the breakdown, based on any one of my publishing company's books with a $24.95 USD cover price:
55% goes to the wholesaler (who then sells it on to bookstores and Amazon at a 40% discount off the cover price). So, now we're down to $11.23.
Next we have the print cost - for a print on demand book like one of mine, we're talking anywhere from $4.00 to $8.00, depending on the page count. We'll take a middle number, so $6.00 is printing. Now we're down to $5.23. Then there's the royalties on top of that.
Now, for larger print runs (around 1500 copies and up), offset printing is used, which cuts down on the print cost considerably. But, the wholesaler still takes 55%.
This new publisher is going to specialize in e-books, and that makes the calculation much different. If you're just going through Amazon for distribution, then you don't have the wholesaler in the picture, and that means that rather than having a net profit (before royalties) on a $10 book being around $3.50 (very rough estimate), you can have it at around $7.00.
But these are the factors in play. It's far more complicated than you described it, and this is certainly not a case of authors going out on their own and leaving the publishing system behind.
Frankly, I can see why they're angry. This business model reduces their profession to amateur hour - and it can only hurt it in the long run.
I've worked in both the public and private sector. There is a reputable way to select somebody for a contract in a competitive setting. It's called a request for a quote, or RFQ (or request for a proposal, RFP). A general call goes out to businesses and people in the required industry. Proposals are collected, with projected timelines, pricings, and samples. Then, a decision is made, and the winner gets the contract. The losers go on to bid on other contracts.
The point, though, is that the time spent producing the final product is spent only by the winner. Everybody else moves on.
Now, that's the right way to do it. What's described in the article is the wrong way to do it. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a web site designer (I know the article is about graphic designers, but bear with me here). How would you feel if instead of preparing a proposal for a part of a website, you had to prepare the entire finished product - and then, after those hours of work (that could have been spent on working for a paying client, or in finding a paying client), you find out that somebody else got the contract, and therefore you get nothing?
Somehow, I think you'd be pretty pissed off too.
Now, this may be fine if you're just starting out, but it's not going to sit well once you've got a few years of experience under your belt. The really good people are going to get sick of it and do one of two things - they'll either leave that model and just work for the people who will treat them like professionals, or they'll leave the field itself.
Will amateur hour be cheaper than dealing with professionals? Absolutely. But, in the long run, it will drive the real talent out, and that will just make the field poorer.
Well, I've got to concede the movie stuff to you - frankly, the studio system is insane.
I'm afraid you're wrong about the publishing, though. The price of distribution isn't actually that high - generally, it's placed in the hands of a wholesaler such as Ingram (that's how I get the distribution for the books my company publishes). And, particularly when you're dealing with large print runs, the printing cost per book is pretty low.
(For that matter, in a lot of cases, most of the costs of the book occur before the book goes to the printer, as far as I can tell.)
As far as internal advocates go, that's not really the way it works either. In the publishing companies I've worked with (Osborne/McGraw-Hill and Pocket Books), there is an acquisitions editor who is basically a gatekeeper, making sure that only the best possible books get in (in theory). Then, those books the gatekeeper lets past are reviewed by an editor, or sometimes a committee, to see if they're a good investment. Having a contact on the inside can be helpful at times, but the actual system in general tends to judge somebody based on their writing skill more than their contacts.
(Although, for the life of me, I cannot explain how Terry Goodkind got through. I wish I could, but I can't.)
It disturbs me just how easily you talk about taking somebody's rights away. And frankly, that "intangible property" doesn't seem so intangible when you've spent months working on it.
How about this - take the time and effort to write a book of your own. Spend some time dealing with publishers, get it published. And THEN see what you think about how intangible it is.
"Making it illegal to keep and exchange them is really causing these things to disappear."
Considering that a small print run can be as little as 400 copies, sorry, that's not true. What causes them to disappear is lack of interest by readers. Disenfranchising creators and their families won't change that one bit, and a forgotten book in the public domain is just as gone as one in copyright.
It's called the test of time. Some books make it, some don't.
They're called sales figures. There is no "chicken and egg" about it.
"But, the system, if not the authors, does not support the making available of books once the initial rush has died down - as you say, it is a matter of economics as to what gets published. However, if it is no longer economic to publish, then the author no longer makes any money from sales (since the books are not available to buy new, once stocks are depleted), and so it strikes me that there is very little reason to maintain a restriction over the book."
So, let me get this straight - you're actually saying that once the sales for a book die down, you'd strip the author of the right to try to get it started up again?
Now, I imagine you're about to say that I'm putting words in your mouth, but I'm really not. You are talking about dropping a book into the public domain once the sales are no longer enough to keep it in print, and in order to do that, you have to strip all rights the author has to their own book away. So, if the author wants to try again, they can't - the book is in the public domain, and they no longer have any say in the matter.
And, by the way, most book contracts have the author retaining the copyright - the author is free to seek another publisher once the contract has terminated, and can publish on their own terms, as you put it. The opposition to Google Books had far more to do with them failing to ask anybody for permission first, and then trying to set themselves up as a bookstore in their own right, which broke just about every publication contract any of the publishers and authors had signed.
Excuse me, but most of your complaint has to do with cultural attrition, not copyright. Shortening copyright would have no impact on whether those books are available at all. Why? Because the demand for them died and never returned. That is what happens to most books. The books that survive the test of time are the minority, and that is how it has ALWAYS been, even before longer copyright terms.
And, might I remind you, authors are not evil geniuses cackling as they put their works into vaults so that nobody can ever read them - they're generally their own work's best champions.
Seriously, where the hell do people get this idea of creative artists sitting on their work like evil geniuses, expressly to prevent somebody else from using it? That's not the way it works. Hell, I challenge you to name one author who has done it, just one.
As far as availability goes, that has to do with economics of demand. So long as the demand is present, the book is available - it does the publisher and its author no good if it's sitting in a vault. Once the demand goes away, the book goes out of circulation. Most books do not stand the test of time, but that's cultural attrition, not copyright. Even if copyright was only for twenty years, most books would still go out of print and stay there. At least while a book is in copyright, it has somebody to champion it and try to keep it in print.
And, just because Disney does this with their DVD releases of movies, it doesn't make it the general rule.
I can tell you don't work in the creative industries - in general, it's not copyright that determines longevity of a work, but economics of demand.
Basically, it works like this - so long as a work is a steady seller, the distributor keeps it in print. Once the demand drops to the point that it's no longer worthwhile, the work goes out of circulation. Copyright actually serves to help give the work a fighting chance, as the rights owner gains nothing by having the work out of circulation, and has good reason to champion it - once it's in the public domain, unless it has stood the test of time, it has no champion and truly is lost.
Some works do very well - for example, I don't think the Sherlock Holmes stories have ever been out of print. But, most works tend to last less than twenty years. There are some works that regain some popularity due to being discovered after the creator's death (such as the poetry of William Blake), and there are even some works that honesty do get rescued once they're in the public domain (although I can't actually think of any off the top of my head), but those are by far the exceptions.
So, I'm sorry, but it isn't copyright laws causing material to be lost, but just plain old cultural attrition. Our culture keeps the stuff it likes, and gets rid of the rest over time. That's just the way it works.
And by the way, culture is NOT dying. The health of a culture is based on what is being created in the present, not what was created in the past, and Hollywood's unoriginality notwithstanding, we're actually in a cultural boom right now.
That tears it - I want to see your sources.
I'm sorry, but I actually work in the publishing industry, and I own a publishing company, and I think you're talking through your ass. So, I'm calling bullshit on these claims.
Aside from which, not only are most books edited (that's a key part of the publishing process), but whether they're edited has no bearing whatsoever on whether you can copy them. That's faulty logic on the level of South Park's Chewbacca defense.
So, provide your sources, or stop making the claims.
What you've said is more or less accurate - it's the type of insult that was important.
So, for example, mentioning in casual conversation that you didn't think Athena or Poseidon really existed, while still fulfilling all of your sacred duties (attending sacrifices and festivals, etc.) wasn't really impiety, as far as I know.
On the other hand, urinating on the altar of Athena constituted a pretty big insult, and was definitely impiety. I THINK accosting people in the Agora and trying to debate the existence of the gods with them when they just wanted to go home was the same thing. It was all about the action, though.
I hope that makes sense.
Oh, the things that are wrong with these sentences:
"Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher [Aristotle] had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death."
Okay, I spent most of May and June TAing a course on Greek and Roman Myth and religion - and this really misrepresents how Greek religion worked in the first place. There was no such thing as heresy in the Olympian religion, because there was no dogma in the first place. For that matter, there was no concept of religion as we think of it.
Religion in ancient Greece was about action rather than belief. The closest thing we have to a phrase meaning religion is "sacre facere," which means "to do the sacred things," ie. sacrifice something and partake in the communal feast. This included matters such as religious festivals. What somebody believed was complete unimportant in ancient Athens - it was what they did that mattered.
Furthermore, there was no dogma - religious practices varied from cult to cult, and even the priesthood wasn't really organized. An ancient Greek priest was the guy who performed the sacrifice, and was a volunteer from the community. It wasn't his day job, there was no formal training, just a loose tradition that could be changed as circumstances required. The exception was the Elysian mysteries, of which even now little is known.
The actual impiety charge against Socrates was that he was "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state and introducing other, new divinities." Now, the second one is interesting, as apparently, Socrates would talk to a "god" on his shoulder - hence, introducing a new divinity to the city. But refusing to recognize the gods was not a matter of him being persecuted for his beliefs (as noted, the ancient Greeks didn't care what somebody believed, only what they did), but for him forcing those beliefs on others in the Agora by accosting them and playing devil's advocate.
In fact, when you look at it (and the Apology by Plato), it seems that for the most part the impiety charge was part of Socrates having the book thrown at him for being a general nuisance that half of Athens wanted to get rid of.
If you want to know how ancient Greek religion actually worked, there's a very good book you can get here: http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greek-Religion-Desktop-Editions/dp/140518177X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277777750&sr=1-1
I'm afraid you've twisted my argument into a pretzel, and I'm not inclined to debate it with you if you can't even get my own points right in refuting them. For example:
"When you say "it's entertainment, not a cure for cancer," it looks like you're trying to minimize the importance of copyright and from that angle attack those who violate it."
The problem is that it's pretty clear that ISN'T what I'm doing in that sentence - so if you intend to put words in my mouth and turn me into a straw man, I have nothing more to say to you.
You've hit on an important point, but at the same time, I am left wondering if you understand copyright law yourself. And if you think you do, where did you get that understanding from (that's a general question for everybody reading)? Did you read the Berne Convention, or have you had to work with it on a professional level? Or have you been reading RIAA news articles?
And, for that matter, what branch of media are you dealing with? They're not all the same - the music industry is known for abusing creative artists and short circuiting the daylights out of the letter and spirit of copyright law. The book industry, on the other hand, is far better behaved.
I'm a published and agented author, as well as the owner and operator of a publishing company. I've worked with big New York publishers, and I've worked with both new and experienced authors. In most of the discussions here, I see a lot of people making impassioned arguments about copyright that have little or no basis in reality. Sometimes they're actually talking about patent law (which, in the U.S., at least, is badly broken in a lot of ways), or trademark law. Sometimes they're attributing an abuse of the law - or even somebody breaking it - to the law itself. For that matter, copyright law is often made out to be far more powerful and totalitarian than it actually is.
(Lawrence Lessig gets quoted a lot, and I really wish that his "Free Culture" book would just vanish. I've tried to read it at least three times, and every single time I've been stopped cold by massive leaps of logic that make little or no sense, and an apparent lack of understanding of the differences between derivative works and plagiarism. Copyright has complicated issues that are best understood for discussion, but I think his book is like trying to understand ancient culture by reading "Chariots of the Gods." And, as far as I can tell, he's the main source for most of the misunderstandings around the American CTEA, which had far more to do with what Europe was doing - and planning to do - than it did with Mickey Mouse.)
Now, taking what isn't yours to take is wrong, no matter what form it takes. Free swag is nice, but it's a bonus, not a right, and certainly not an entitlement. If you're getting away with piracy, then you've got a bonus - but there's no way piracy of a movie, song, game, or book, puts you into the right. It's entertainment, not a cure for cancer. And piracy isn't a protest - writing letters, organizing sit-ins, THOSE are protests.
So, you're right that for the most part pirates aren't evil (with some notable exceptions) - but they are freeloaders, and that's all they are...and it is important to understand that.
But how do we know that this is an abuse of copyright and the court system?
This is one of the problems - there's a knee-jerk reaction on Slashdot (in part because there are a lot of pirates here who don't like anything getting in the way of their free swag, and in part because the RIAA spent years abusing the letter and spirit of copyright law) anytime somebody mentions a copyright lawsuit of this nature. But, this is a new organization, and these are brand-new lawsuits. We honestly don't know who has been sued yet, what the level of diligence was on IDing them, how many are false positives, and how those false positives will be treated.
Until we have that information - and it will be some time before we have it - we have no way of knowing if this is just honest and warranted protection of IP rights, or an RIAA-style extortion campaign.
Um, what well-known cases?
This isn't the RIAA - this is a different group. They have no track record yet - we don't actually know if they accidentally fingered a bunch of innocent people, or if they were properly diligent and only sued people who were actually pirating the movies.
You mean besides my posting less than an hour ago? Aside from which, I can't recall where I said that it worked perfectly. Perhaps you'd like to quote that bit?
For that matter, do you have ANYTHING to add to this discussion besides ill-placed sarcasm that requires you to put words in my mouth? Any points on the subtleties of copyright law? On economic theory?
I don't see you modded up right now either, by the way. I wonder if that will change.
"Anyway, if copyright laws didn't exist for software? Well, you'd see companies like Microsoft fall apart and companies like Red Hat thrive. Because the business model would shift from protecting your source code through litigation to making it available for free since that would be the only way to effectively combat piracy."
You really don't understand what copyright is, do you? Copyright is a legal framework that defines how creators and distributors interact with one another. All that stuff about file sharing, that's maybe 5% of what copyright does. Copyright allows creators to set reasonable terms of how their creations are used, and have them enforced.
So, guess what? Open source exists and continues to exist because it is protected under copyright. It's copyright that allows open source creators to say "this must be used under an open source license," and have it stick. The public domain is defined by copyright - it's the flip side of it. If you remove copyright, you don't just have everything fall into the public domain - the public domain ceases to exist. What you get instead is a free-for-all where you keep what you can protect. You think DRM is bad now? Imagine what would happen if there were no legal limitations to it, because that's what you'd get without copyright. You think the open source model would become the standard business model for software? Sorry, but it would disappear - it's a lot more profitable to copy somebody's code, make it your own, and slap a bunch of protection on it to prevent somebody else using it than it is to share it - and without copyright, there's nothing to stop anybody from doing that.
So, I think you need to do a lot of research - and among other things, you need to learn the difference between patent law and copyright law, and understand the difference between theory and implementation (the latter of which is not always perfect, and sometimes quite bad, such as the DMCA).