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Why does Amazon have more books from the 1880s than the 1980s? Blame copyright
- Simple1234 13y agoThe thing that is not talked about enough, and not mentioned in the article, is the underlying reason. That reason, of course, is Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain the Disney lobby has congress extend the copyright expiration.
- rtfeldman 13y agoIndeed. Wikipedia has an interesting chart of the various extensions over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#Background http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#Ba...
- shawabawa3 13y agoI added a line showing the age of Mickey Mouse on that. Only the last 2 extensions can be blamed on him, but it looks like we can expect another one in about 5 years http://i.imgur.com/jlDU2jE.png http://i.imgur.com/jlDU2jE.png
- runn1ng 13y agoI don't think Mickey Mouse itself is the main reason for Disney to lobby on prolongation of copyright. If it was just Mickey, Disney would survive that somehow, but well, Hollywood started to be relevant in about 1920's, and Mickey was created in 1928, so it coincides very well.
- benologist 13y agoSonny Bono also played a part. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act "also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act"
- jasonwocky 13y agoI swear, I would be willing to put up with continual copyright extensions solely for Mickey Mouse if it meant we could have the rest of our stuff.
- erikpukinskis 13y agoThe thing is, Mickey Mouse is also a trademark, which doesn't expire. My understanding is that if Steamboat Willie passes out of copyright, people still won't be able to distribute it, or use Mickey in their own films, because it would violate trademark law.
- walshemj 13y agoWell authors from the 80's are mostly still alive and would like to be able to feed themselves, their partner and cats
- _delirium 13y agoI think the '80s are a bad example, for that reason, as a relatively recent decade. The '30s are much more problematic: the material is mostly still in copyright, but the original authors are rarely alive, and in many cases even close heirs (like their children) are no longer alive. It's common for works from that era end up being either orphan works with the copyright holder unfindable, or else owned by someone very distantly related to the person who wrote the book. The 1980s example is mostly interesting for seeing just how quickly almost everything drops out of print.
- vidarh 13y agoThe vast majority of them are not receiving royalties even remotely sufficient for them to feed even their cat. If the goal is that the top 1% (or less) of authors that can still live off 30 year old works are to be able to keep feeding their families from those works, then it'd be vastly more beneficial for society to simply pay them a stipend.
- AndrewDucker 13y agoWell, they aren't feeding themselves if their books aren't in print.
- potatolicious 13y agoAt what point do we, as a society, say you should probably create new works in order to feed yourself, your partner, and your cats? Copyright, like patents, is an economic policy. By guaranteeing a limited-term exclusivity you encourage the creation of new works. This cuts both ways: if the term is too short creators are disincentivized, as anything they create will shortly be copied before they can make substantial money from it; if the term is too long you can just coast forever without creating more work. There's a balancing point here. I don't think there's anything intrinsically justifying that you should be able to make a living off a work you wrote 30+ years ago.
- pessimizer 13y agoIt's also important to note how awesome books from the late-19th early-20th century are. Lots of good Weird Fiction that is still secretly influential; read more Arthur Machen http://books.google.com/books?id=Re4MAAAAYAAJ&dq=the%20great%20god%20pan&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=the%20great%20god%20pan&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=Re4MAAAAYAAJ&dq=the%20great...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- res0nat0r 13y ago> In contrast, works published since 1923 may still be under copyright protection, so publishers have to do legal research to find the copyright owner (if any) and negotiate a license. That’s a hassle, so works published after 1923 are much less likely to be republished once they’ve gone out of print. This is about the weakest hand waving excuse for an argument relating to why copyright is bad that I've seen in a while.
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoWhat do you mean? The cost of legal uncertainty is one of the reasons software patents are a worse kind of monopoly than patents on chemical compounds. Even if it's a terrible chemical patent, you can tell whether it affects you or not, not so much with software patents. So I can easily see how similar uncertainty and the associated costs could cause certain public domain works to remain unexploited.
- fader 13y agoExcept that the whole point of copyright is to enrich the public domain, not keep works out of it. It grants creators a limited monopoly on the work, after which it becomes part of our shared culture. Perpetual copyright and placing the burden of researching and protecting it on those who want to use a piece of culture has a chilling effect on future modification and creation. Copyright was never intended to be perpetual or to enable large companies to lock down culture so that only they are allowed to create and distribute it.
- res0nat0r 13y agoCopyright isn't perpetual. I'm stating the above argument is weak and hand waving because it is assuming these works are not available strictly because of copyright. It isn't that black and white. How many of these works wouldn't have ever been created if the author had no way to recoup his investment due to copyright?
- fader 13y agoI haven't seen much serious talk here of abolishing copyright. I think the more relevant question is "How many of these works wouldn't have been created if copyright were limited to a shorter period as it was originally conceived and not extended to be perpetual in practical terms?" The answer is "basically none", as referenced elsewhere in the discussion: http://rufuspollock.org/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf http://rufuspollock.org/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
- Shivetya 13y agoOne thing I love about Amazon, is many of these old classics are free on the kindle. I have read so many books and that many more to go and all are free. Yeah, if I wanted to I might be able to snag one at the library, but this is just too easy. Dickens, Doyle, and Wells, are the most obvious, but just searching for free netted me people I never heard of. So yes, while copyright does present issues that can be very troubling, there is such a wealth of stuff available unburdened by it. The difficulty is finding it.
- falk 13y agoYou might be interested in Project Gutenberg. They offer over 42,000 free ebooks. Legally. http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/
- colomon 13y agoAnd it's pretty easy to move any of them over to the Kindle. (Or whatever eBook platform you use, I assume -- the Kindle is just the one I have experience with.)
- Samuel_Michon 13y agoThat’s not unique to Amazon. You can find those books for free in the iBookstore as well or download them from the web.
- 300bps 13y agoArticle 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution spells out the Enumerated Powers of Congress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerated_powers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerated_powers Therein lies the Copyright Clause: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause Which states: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. The key phrase here is "securing for limited Times". Limited. For all intents and purposes, we have made copyright unlimited. If you disagree, ask yourself... when Mickey Mouse is up for the public domain again in 6 years do you really believe it won't be extended again? As the article states, the original copyright term was 14 years in the Copyright Act of 1790 unless the copyright holder was still alive after 14 years in which case they could renew for another 14 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1790 As it stands now, it's until the life of the author + 70 years. Although it's hard to say that with a straight face since anytime Mickey Mouse has been up for public domain it has gotten extended and will likely continue to be extended. Biggest irony? Many of Disney's biggest works are based on public domain works. Some of them would not have been in the public domain had copyright been as long as Disney has made it to protect their own characters from going into the public domain.
- Afforess 13y agoI disagree. The real key phrase is To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts Copyrights don't exist for the benefit of the owner, they exist to benefit society. Today's laws are a perverse misinterpretation of copyright's original intent.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- austenallred 13y agoYes, the goal is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." But the means to that end is to incentivize creators by granting them exclusive rights to the things that they create for a certain period of time.
- noonespecial 13y agoWhy will more books from the 1880s survive to be read 1000 years from now than books from the 1980's? You know the chorus, everybody sing along, ok!
- warfangle 13y agoBecause it was required that a copy be registered with the Library of Congress back then, if you wanted to copyright something. edit: not sure why the downvote. I'll expand a bit. The Copyright Act of 1870 required two copies of a work to be deposited with the Library of Congress in order to register the copyright -- creative works were not automatically under copyright. Once that work passed into the public domain, anyone could request a copy of it from the Library of Congress (and then, if they wanted to, copy and distribute themselves). This is pretty important, because it pretty much guaranteed that people would have access to a work even after its copyright expired and was no longer actively being printed by the publisher or author.
- gergles 13y agoYou're probably getting downvotes because you're still required to do that to register copyrights, which any remotely commercially-significant work will do. (You can only sue for damages in copyright infringement cases if the copyright is registered.)
- otterley 13y agoThe title and the premise of the article are misleading. There were not more works created in the 1880s than the 1980s that Amazon can sell -- that would suggest that human productivity per capita was significantly larger than it is today thanks to different copyright laws, especially since the literary population was much smaller than it is today. In fact, the article is referring to the number of works multiplied by the number of releases. IOW, the same work is being counted multiple (or even hundreds of) times.
- mumbi 13y agoAt least we can take solace in the fact that Amazon sells more quality content than not.
- mapgrep 13y agoLook, I'm all for limiting copyright but let's think about exactly what you're looking at vs what's in the original study (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2295085_code227781.pdf?abstractid=2290181&mirid=2 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2295085_code...). The WaPo chart is for editions, not titles. If you list by decade for titles -- actual original works of creativity -- the 2000s utterly demolish each prior decade within this sample, and the 1990s surpass most, by the study author's own estimate (rather than manually identify duplicate titles, the author seems to havbe looked at some subsample and divided the whole public domain batch by 4). See Figure 2 in the study. It makes sense that public domain books have way more editions than titles; it is a market of duplication and redundancy, where you differentiate yourself using packaging and SEO type tactics. A spammy market, in other words. Printing a public domain book mainly involves some scanning, layout work using widely available software, and sending it off to the printer ("These tasks can be performed in less than a day," says the study). Oh, except you don't even need to scan anything for one of the many works already online, and you don't need to print anything if you use a print-on-demand service. So a lot of the "editions" in the WaPo chart are simply crap duplication garbage angling for a few pennies profit. Now you can still make a case against lengthy copyright with this data, but it's trickier (because it's more honest). You can point out the population has grown tremendously and also as the study states: "In a world without copyright, one would expect a fairly smoothly downward sloping curve from the decade 2000-2010 to the decade of 1800-1810... Instead, the curve declines sharply and quickly, and then rebounds significantly for books currently in the public domain initially published before 1923." The WaPo includes a paragraph summarizing this but the chart used is not the more honest Figure 2 but the misleading Figure 1. Another issue? All the book figures in the study are based on an undisclosed set of subcategories of Amazon's "Literature and Fiction" category, a total of 7000 or so results later whittled down to 2317 based on a cross check with library of congress. What happens when all categories, the full range of textual creative expression, are included? We don't know. If you want to make a convincing case that copyright terms are too long, use convincing data. "Look, public domain means more heavily duplicated garbage editions on Amazon!" is not particularly convincing.
- hammock 13y agoThere are still more titles in 1880 than 1980 in Figure 2. http://i.imgur.com/SzUjfj0.gif http://i.imgur.com/SzUjfj0.gif
- ucha 13y agoCopyrights are a deal passed between society and authors to encourage creative production. If they create something new, they can live off it for sometime until their copyright expires. Extending copyrights years after the author's death may serve a corporation or their children that can live on that rent but fails at establishing an incentive for creation. This video by CGP Grey summaries the problem pretty well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4)
- Tycho 13y agoHow do you know it fails?
- chris_mahan 13y agoBecause books from the 1980s sucked?
- jjindev 13y agoI love old books, and was amusing myself by reading a geology text from around 1880. It was my first exposure to that science. It amused as I started that I might end up with a good education, a hundred years out of date. As I continued I came to suspect that geology hasn't really changed all that much. As much as I'd like ~50 year copyright on all classes of works, the good news is that those 1880s texts really are very good. (See also the telegraphy love story that just came across HN.)
- Ologn 13y agoSome people here are supporting keeping works from 1923 on in copyright. Before 2019, Congress will surely take up legislation to prevent works from 1923 from entering the public domain, and this legislation will surely pass. The argument made in support of this is false though. I am politically realistic about this, and from a perspective of political realism have no problem with with Disney pushing the 1923 goalposts for its works out to 2039. Or for the publishers of the Great Gatsby to push their copyright from 2021 to 2041. And so on. I realize this is political reality, as do most in this fight. However, there are many works from 1923 sitting on library shelves where absolutely no one would re-register its copyright. They are orphaned, gathering dust, the paper deteriorating. It would be nice if orphaned, forgotten works no one will ever bother to re-register would enter the public domain as the laws currently allows. Project Gutenberg can digitize them, private publishers could even start reprinting them. This is what the Public Domain Enhancement Act would have allowed for. Hollywood and the MPAA fought it and killed it. History tells us that many works of Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras etc. have been lost. The same thing is happening now. Old books are sitting on library shelves, deteriorating. These orphaned works will no one will ever re-register will not be scanned, OCR'd and proofread by Project Gutenberg, will not be distributed by print or electronically by independent publishers. This is where the argument lies. Some proponents of the extension here are talking about Disney and author compensation and so forth (although the youngest author I can conceive of would be an 18-year-old publishing in the last year, 1923 - and thus would be 114 when copyright goes out in 2019 - and that would be the absolute youngest author. I should note only four people currently living are verified to be 114 or over). All of us know with 100% certainty that Congress will pass a law by 2019 keeping Disney works, The Great Gatsby etc. in copyright. This is political reality, and is impossible to stop. What we want is for orphaned works which no one would ever re-register to become public domain - as they are currently supposed to. At this point all talk of author compensation etc. disappears. Hollywood will keep making money on licensing The Great Gatsby, we will prevent orphaned works from becoming the lost Aristotle works, the lost Euclid works of the future. Hollywood is fighting this, and will probably win, although if there was a mass movement against it, we could win orphaned works. Because at the end of the day Hollywood is not making licensing orphaned works. But it shows how many of the arguments made here in support of extension are bogus. Because the fight is over orphaned works. We know the Mickey Mouse and Great Gatsby works will be kept by Hollywood. We just want abandoned, orphaned works. And if we organize and fight to get those, we just might get them into the public domain and preserve them.
- dakimov 13y agoOkay.
- teeja 13y agoOld books and old movies don't sell at new media prices. They would cut into potential profits for new works. That might seem like a good thing for new authors, but old work is predictable, whereas modern authors are -supposed- to be innovative ... a very important part of the idea of copyright. I'm afraid that Sonny Bono was not a good person to decide the future of US copyright law or creative people. The limits on copyright tenure need to be restored.