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The fact that this set off an angry debate about where to draw the line with copyright just shows how off the rails that debate has been for decades. Of course

The fact that this set off an angry debate about where to draw the line with copyright just shows how off the rails that debate has been for decades. Of course the National Emergency Library is a good thing. We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book. We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free. File sharing sites on the Internet serve exactly the same purpose to society as free public libraries. They allow people to consume as much culture as they want for free. It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. Commercial copyright infringement should remain illegal. Nobody should have the right to profit from your work but you. But demanding a toll be paid every time a file is copied is an unrealistic fantasy that is widely ignored in the real world by public and private file sharing venues. I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years. But instead of cheering on the Author's Guild's dinosaur argument and going down with the sinking ship right along with them, authors should be thinking hard about new business models that can adapt to the reality where consumer payments are—in the real world—optional. I don't have an answer to the business models question. I have a few ideas I think are worth experimenting with, mostly involving freemium. All I know for sure is the artificial scarcity model is not the answer and the longer authors try to cling to it, the longer it will prolong their pain.

miki123211 7y ago
When I see comments like this, I just wish HN had the exact opposite of "flag". Something like upvote, but carrying much more power, perhaps at the cost of a few Karma points.
danielrpa 7y ago
This - and on top of that, the question of copyright duration. It's not only "pay a toll", but "pay a toll for the next 75, 90 years" - the arbitrary period is another element that hasn't evolved for the 21st century. We could at least consider a compromise where slightly older works, let's say 10+ years, or even 25+ years (same duration as patents) would be the ones included in the noncommercial infringement proposal.
- kethinov 7y ago
  I've long considered the copyright duration question to be a red herring. If we legalize noncommercial infringement, who cares how long copyright terms are? They could be infinite for all I care and I don't see any harm to society so long as noncommercial sharing is legal.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    "Noncommercial use" can be very hard to pin down in many cases. Of course it would be good to legalize noncommercial infringement especially for "orphan" works, but this is not enough. At some point, rights should expire wrt. all uses of the work.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      Even well defined, non-commercial use exemptions would only lead to the same systematic abuses that so called non-profits (or not-for-profits) exploit today for tax purposes. I'm not sure what the right answer is for copyright, but I think going back to a 10,12, or even 20 year time frame for protection is a better starting point. Let's get the definition of "limited (time) period" fixed before subjecting another term to misuse.
  - krapp 7y ago
    It's not a red herring, so much as a different philosophical question. Why should a copyright owner have exclusive, perpetual ownership over an intellectual property?
    - kethinov 7y ago
      Why shouldn't they? What gives someone a moral right to produce a derivative work of something I create and make money doing it? (I think people seem to forget that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works.)
      - 7y ago
somewhereoutth 7y ago
Agreed. I think a way through this may be to emphasize the notion of 'performance rights' over 'copyrights'. So distributing a work digitally, for consumption on a personal device, would be free of encumbrances. But performing the work, which would include physical embodiment, e.g. turning into an actual book, or entertaining an audience, would be something that could be controlled and monetized by the author.
pabs3 7y ago
I wonder what effect your proposal would have on open source software.
- Chris2048 7y ago
  I think F(L)OSS is need of reform too. Authors often get a raw deal.
- krapp 7y ago
  None. By definition no one owns free/open source software (at least not the code itself, the same can't be said for trademarks like logos and names) so it's impossible to "infringe" upon.
  - emddudley 7y ago
    Authors own the copyright to FOSS code they write. If they are contributing to a project, they (usually) allow the project to use the code using the same license as the project. In certain cases contributors may sign copyright assignment agreements, but the copyright doesn't go away. If the authors didn't retain copyright ownership, how would they enforce the terms of the license? The GPL would be unenforceable.
krapp 7y ago
>It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. This seems to work fine in Japan, and it's not even technically legal. Comic and game publishers tolerate (often pornographic) infringing works created with their properties as long as they're non-commercial, because they raise awareness for the licensed version. In the US, we can't even have that because license-holders are legally required to aggressively defend against all forms of infringement, however harmless, which leads us to situations like Disney suing a daycare for painting Mickey Mouse on a mural.
Zonulet 7y ago
>I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years. I am an author in the UK. Revenue from digital book sales – i.e. what you would call "paying a toll for copying a file" and what I would call people buying books they want to read – went up 3% between 2018 and 2019. I'm not sure sales increasing is very good evidence for a business model having been "obsolete for years". Sure, there a lot of serious problems with the publishing industry, but if this is the "pain" I'm "prolonging" then I think I can endure it for a little bit longer.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Did your royalties, as an author, go up accordingly? Or was that money absorbed by the publishers? Publishers getting richer is not a sign that the system is working as intended.
  - Zonulet 7y ago
    Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.
- kethinov 7y ago
  I'm glad the system is working for you, but it's not working for a whole lot of other authors. There are a lot of authors who are always complaining about "piracy ruining" their businesses and so forth while consumers meanwhile constantly complain about prices, DRM, etc. Clearly this is a problem that needs to be solved in a way that makes everybody feel like the interests of both sides are balanced.
  - Zonulet 7y ago
    Every author who's published by a traditional publisher will agree with you that the system has problems, but I guarantee you won't find many who think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and turned into Spotify or OnlyFans or whatever you think the new model is going to look like. Otherwise you would already see a lot more established authors defecting! The truth is the current system, for all its faults, supports the production of a lot of wonderful work, and generally people want to get into it, not out of it.
mikro2nd 7y ago
I believe that many authors would agree with you that the current system is not ideal and ripe for something better. But right now it's all that writers have as a way to pay the rent and eat. You admit to having no replacement that gets writers paid, but you want to take their livelihood from them with no replacement. No wonder they "cling to it". It's all they have. Note that the overwhelming majority of writers -- the mid-list majority -- make relatively little money from their writing, even under this "pay per toll" arrangement and have to subsidise their art by keeping their full-time jobs and writing for a few hours at night to keep the art flowing.
- falcolas 7y ago
  I disagree, it’s not all they have. And to back that up, I give you Patreon. One author I follow has over 1,500 patrons, most giving upwards of $3 a month. Is this viable for all authors? Perhaps not, but between the new self-publishing market, Patreon, and pay-by-what’s-read models like KU, there’s more options than the shitty ebook racket that the publishers have created.
  - Zonulet 7y ago
    Business models like self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited have worked really well for romance and fantasy novelists who can publish six books a year and have fans who plough through two books a week. They absolutely have not worked for literary novelists, let alone historians, biographers etc. If the "sell copies of books to readers" model dies, it will change the kinds of books that get written. For people who see books as a fungible commodity – any book is about as good as any other – that's fine. For the rest of us, it isn't.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      You make an assumption that people aren’t willing to pay to support the creation of non-fiction books. I think this is bunk. An extremely relevant example: Veritasium. He creates well researched and scientific videos on YouTube (at a rate of maybe 3-4 a year), and has almost 5,000 patrons. Again, can every author survive this way? No, but there are other options; please don’t get hung up on the familiar and call it the only way.
bluntfang 7y ago
>We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own nit: we created copyright to ensure the content creators receive compensation. What you said is technically correct, but let's be clear that authors are creating something and they deserve to be compensated.
- kethinov 7y ago
  No, that's wrong. Copyright was not created to guarantee you compensation. It was created to guarantee whatever money your work makes goes to you and nobody else. If your work makes no money because everyone chose to consume it for free at a library instead, then you need a better business model.
tzs 7y ago
> It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. What is "noncommercial"? For instance, if I post the complete text of a someone else's book on Facebook or Reddit or in a blog at Wordpress.com, is that noncommercial because I am doing this on my personal account and get no money from doing so? Or is it commercial because those are commercial sites that monetize visits to their sites by showing ads?
Mindwipe 7y ago
> We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free. Virtually every country in the world except for the USA pays authors for library lending.

miki123211 7y ago

When I see comments like this, I just wish HN had the exact opposite of "flag". Something like upvote, but carrying much more power, perhaps at the cost of a few Karma points.

danielrpa 7y ago

This - and on top of that, the question of copyright duration. It's not only "pay a toll", but "pay a toll for the next 75, 90 years" - the arbitrary period is another element that hasn't evolved for the 21st century. We could at least consider a compromise where slightly older works, let's say 10+ years, or even 25+ years (same duration as patents) would be the ones included in the noncommercial infringement proposal.

kethinov 7y ago
I've long considered the copyright duration question to be a red herring. If we legalize noncommercial infringement, who cares how long copyright terms are? They could be infinite for all I care and I don't see any harm to society so long as noncommercial sharing is legal.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  "Noncommercial use" can be very hard to pin down in many cases. Of course it would be good to legalize noncommercial infringement especially for "orphan" works, but this is not enough. At some point, rights should expire wrt. all uses of the work.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    Even well defined, non-commercial use exemptions would only lead to the same systematic abuses that so called non-profits (or not-for-profits) exploit today for tax purposes. I'm not sure what the right answer is for copyright, but I think going back to a 10,12, or even 20 year time frame for protection is a better starting point. Let's get the definition of "limited (time) period" fixed before subjecting another term to misuse.
- krapp 7y ago
  It's not a red herring, so much as a different philosophical question. Why should a copyright owner have exclusive, perpetual ownership over an intellectual property?
  - kethinov 7y ago
    Why shouldn't they? What gives someone a moral right to produce a derivative work of something I create and make money doing it? (I think people seem to forget that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works.)
    - 7y ago

somewhereoutth 7y ago

Agreed. I think a way through this may be to emphasize the notion of 'performance rights' over 'copyrights'. So distributing a work digitally, for consumption on a personal device, would be free of encumbrances. But performing the work, which would include physical embodiment, e.g. turning into an actual book, or entertaining an audience, would be something that could be controlled and monetized by the author.

pabs3 7y ago

I wonder what effect your proposal would have on open source software.

Chris2048 7y ago
I think F(L)OSS is need of reform too. Authors often get a raw deal.
krapp 7y ago
None. By definition no one owns free/open source software (at least not the code itself, the same can't be said for trademarks like logos and names) so it's impossible to "infringe" upon.
- emddudley 7y ago
  Authors own the copyright to FOSS code they write. If they are contributing to a project, they (usually) allow the project to use the code using the same license as the project. In certain cases contributors may sign copyright assignment agreements, but the copyright doesn't go away. If the authors didn't retain copyright ownership, how would they enforce the terms of the license? The GPL would be unenforceable.

krapp 7y ago

>It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. This seems to work fine in Japan, and it's not even technically legal. Comic and game publishers tolerate (often pornographic) infringing works created with their properties as long as they're non-commercial, because they raise awareness for the licensed version. In the US, we can't even have that because license-holders are legally required to aggressively defend against all forms of infringement, however harmless, which leads us to situations like Disney suing a daycare for painting Mickey Mouse on a mural.

Zonulet 7y ago

>I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years. I am an author in the UK. Revenue from digital book sales – i.e. what you would call "paying a toll for copying a file" and what I would call people buying books they want to read – went up 3% between 2018 and 2019. I'm not sure sales increasing is very good evidence for a business model having been "obsolete for years". Sure, there a lot of serious problems with the publishing industry, but if this is the "pain" I'm "prolonging" then I think I can endure it for a little bit longer.

falcolas 7y ago
Did your royalties, as an author, go up accordingly? Or was that money absorbed by the publishers? Publishers getting richer is not a sign that the system is working as intended.
- Zonulet 7y ago
  Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.
kethinov 7y ago
I'm glad the system is working for you, but it's not working for a whole lot of other authors. There are a lot of authors who are always complaining about "piracy ruining" their businesses and so forth while consumers meanwhile constantly complain about prices, DRM, etc. Clearly this is a problem that needs to be solved in a way that makes everybody feel like the interests of both sides are balanced.
- Zonulet 7y ago
  Every author who's published by a traditional publisher will agree with you that the system has problems, but I guarantee you won't find many who think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and turned into Spotify or OnlyFans or whatever you think the new model is going to look like. Otherwise you would already see a lot more established authors defecting! The truth is the current system, for all its faults, supports the production of a lot of wonderful work, and generally people want to get into it, not out of it.

mikro2nd 7y ago

I believe that many authors would agree with you that the current system is not ideal and ripe for something better. But right now it's all that writers have as a way to pay the rent and eat. You admit to having no replacement that gets writers paid, but you want to take their livelihood from them with no replacement. No wonder they "cling to it". It's all they have. Note that the overwhelming majority of writers -- the mid-list majority -- make relatively little money from their writing, even under this "pay per toll" arrangement and have to subsidise their art by keeping their full-time jobs and writing for a few hours at night to keep the art flowing.

falcolas 7y ago
I disagree, it’s not all they have. And to back that up, I give you Patreon. One author I follow has over 1,500 patrons, most giving upwards of $3 a month. Is this viable for all authors? Perhaps not, but between the new self-publishing market, Patreon, and pay-by-what’s-read models like KU, there’s more options than the shitty ebook racket that the publishers have created.
- Zonulet 7y ago
  Business models like self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited have worked really well for romance and fantasy novelists who can publish six books a year and have fans who plough through two books a week. They absolutely have not worked for literary novelists, let alone historians, biographers etc. If the "sell copies of books to readers" model dies, it will change the kinds of books that get written. For people who see books as a fungible commodity – any book is about as good as any other – that's fine. For the rest of us, it isn't.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    You make an assumption that people aren’t willing to pay to support the creation of non-fiction books. I think this is bunk. An extremely relevant example: Veritasium. He creates well researched and scientific videos on YouTube (at a rate of maybe 3-4 a year), and has almost 5,000 patrons. Again, can every author survive this way? No, but there are other options; please don’t get hung up on the familiar and call it the only way.

bluntfang 7y ago

>We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own nit: we created copyright to ensure the content creators receive compensation. What you said is technically correct, but let's be clear that authors are creating something and they deserve to be compensated.

kethinov 7y ago
No, that's wrong. Copyright was not created to guarantee you compensation. It was created to guarantee whatever money your work makes goes to you and nobody else. If your work makes no money because everyone chose to consume it for free at a library instead, then you need a better business model.

tzs 7y ago

> It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. What is "noncommercial"? For instance, if I post the complete text of a someone else's book on Facebook or Reddit or in a blog at Wordpress.com, is that noncommercial because I am doing this on my personal account and get no money from doing so? Or is it commercial because those are commercial sites that monetize visits to their sites by showing ads?

Mindwipe 7y ago

> We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free. Virtually every country in the world except for the USA pays authors for library lending.