6 ms·

> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks

> Basically, physical books wear out with use, ebooks don't, so there's a built-in mechanism for revenue recurrence that happens with print books but not ebooks. As someone who understands the ruling and why IA lost completely, I still hate this argument, because it gets the history backwards. When first sale was put into (case)law, ebooks didn't exist. First sale doesn't exist because "oh, well, the book wears out eventually". It exists because you have an ownership interest in that copy of the book and copyright law has to respect your physical ownership of that property. Once you have sold a copy, your rights as a copyright owner are exhausted. With digital distribution, the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever. And this is mainly because the technology was made after the law was horrifically unbalanced (or re-balanced) in favor of large publishers. CDL absolutely has no leg to stand on in the courts, but it is the sort of thing that would make sense as the legal basis for a new rights exhaustion regime that was properly legislated in Congress. > As an aside, when I see authors speaking for themselves on these sorts of issues they will typically point out that editors and typesetters and cover artists and all the other folks who work on a book also deserve to get paid. It seems to only be people who are tokenizing authors for rhetorical purposes who want fixate on authors specifically and erase the value-adding contributions of "the publishers". I've talked about the habit of copyright reformists / abolitionists ignoring the "creative working class" in the past. The headline artist on a work is most likely to be able to survive off non-royalty income because they have social capital that the creative working class does not. On the other hand, publishing firms don't give a shit about the creative working class either! A lot of media companies are run by people who think generative AI is going to let them eliminate entire classes of creative labor and replace it with ChatGPT prompts. I'm not entirely sure referencing the opinions of headline artists helps either. In contrast to (but not negating) what you've said, I've heard authors complain endlessly about publishers, too. Things like, oh, we don't want to fund the third book in your trilogy, but we also aren't going to let you trip the rights reversion clause in your contract, so you just can't finish the story. Shit like that. Publishers' valuations are based at least in part on their total IP catalog, so a work they don't want to touch anymore is worth more to them dead than alive.

hilbert42 2y ago
"the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever" Ultimately, the law will either have to change to be fairer and recognize the buyer's investment or digital copying (piracy) will overwhelm it. It's not if but when (technology almost makes that axiomatic). This will not happen immediately but as US influence in the world declines other fairer paradigms will emerge. As we've seen already, probably about one third of the planet's population pays little heed of copyright law, or it does so in name only—and that number will only increase with time (and as copying tech improves even further). The US and Western countries have a choice, be fairer and less greedy or suffer the consequences.
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  This whole thing is backwards. Selling books began in a time when there was inherent value in distributing books, meaning there was no other way to read a book than to purchase or borrow a physical copy. The money followed the value. The value of distribution is no longer there. We are trying to push yarn up a chimney. I like living in a world where authors make a living by writing books, but if the inherent value isn't there then it's all fake, fake fake. This is the same predicament we've been in for years with other forms of media, but those with big corp backing have managed to synthesize value through various forms of sabotage like DRM or linking their software to a remote server somehow. We've come to accept it because there's value in dodging all of the nonsense. Consumers will always be the barometer for fairness; if they perceive value, they will pay for it. But all the controversy is about fairness for the authors and publishers. If authors can figure out some money-making scheme then great, but let's not concern ourselves with "fairness" for the author because that went out the window a long time ago. This is all just a big money grabbing game at this point. (And what they really mean is fairness for popular authors anyway.) Maybe the future will look different. We need authors, we need editors, but do we need publishers? Probably not. Maybe a trend will form where groups or individuals commission a work from an author, taking the place of the publisher on a more ad hoc basis. Or maybe concepts like Patreon will evolve to better compensate authors. I don't know exactly what it will look like, but I do know that targeting groups like the Internet Archive is nothing more than a delay tactic.

hilbert42 2y ago

"the law decided that, no, there is no rights exhaustion whatsoever" Ultimately, the law will either have to change to be fairer and recognize the buyer's investment or digital copying (piracy) will overwhelm it. It's not if but when (technology almost makes that axiomatic). This will not happen immediately but as US influence in the world declines other fairer paradigms will emerge. As we've seen already, probably about one third of the planet's population pays little heed of copyright law, or it does so in name only—and that number will only increase with time (and as copying tech improves even further). The US and Western countries have a choice, be fairer and less greedy or suffer the consequences.

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
This whole thing is backwards. Selling books began in a time when there was inherent value in distributing books, meaning there was no other way to read a book than to purchase or borrow a physical copy. The money followed the value. The value of distribution is no longer there. We are trying to push yarn up a chimney. I like living in a world where authors make a living by writing books, but if the inherent value isn't there then it's all fake, fake fake. This is the same predicament we've been in for years with other forms of media, but those with big corp backing have managed to synthesize value through various forms of sabotage like DRM or linking their software to a remote server somehow. We've come to accept it because there's value in dodging all of the nonsense. Consumers will always be the barometer for fairness; if they perceive value, they will pay for it. But all the controversy is about fairness for the authors and publishers. If authors can figure out some money-making scheme then great, but let's not concern ourselves with "fairness" for the author because that went out the window a long time ago. This is all just a big money grabbing game at this point. (And what they really mean is fairness for popular authors anyway.) Maybe the future will look different. We need authors, we need editors, but do we need publishers? Probably not. Maybe a trend will form where groups or individuals commission a work from an author, taking the place of the publisher on a more ad hoc basis. Or maybe concepts like Patreon will evolve to better compensate authors. I don't know exactly what it will look like, but I do know that targeting groups like the Internet Archive is nothing more than a delay tactic.