9 ms·

How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish

125 points by devx 13y ago

polarix 13y ago
Copyright, the blight of thought.
- beat 13y ago
  It's not copyright itself that is the blight... it's the seemingly endless extension of it. Copyright will always be extended far enough to keep Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse cartoon) copyrighted, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out.
  - rustynails77 13y ago
    The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.ht... Good thing about karma. I've brought my kids up telling them the evils of Disney and their harm to society. Suck it Walt!
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      No ABC, ESPN, Pixar or Disney Channel? Or Star Wars? I'll be impressed if you can keep that up!
      - EyeballKid 13y ago
        Don't forget about The Muppets!
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        Disney buying something is not the same as Disney creating something. And where did you get the word 'no'? Talking about the bad things a company has done is not an automatic boycott.
  - baddox 13y ago
    It seems to me that endless copyrights, or perhaps copyrights that last until the death of the creator, are the only logical extensions of having any copyrights at all. If "artists deserve to be paid for their work," and "copyrights are the only way to make sure artists get paid for their work," then why should the artist stop deserving to get paid after some arbitrary number of years?
    - hsitz 13y ago
      Maybe because most works generate revenue, if at all, in the few years immediately following first publication, so a period based off that is all that's necessary to encourage creation? Maybe because if a copyright holder has a family and dies 6 months after creation of the work it seems wrong to prevent the family from profiting off the work? Maybe because when limits on periods are required in the law there is often no absolute reason to prefer one of several good candidate periods over another, so the ultimate decision is always in some sense arbitrary? Note that in the U.S. patents are generally granted for a period of 20 years. Why do copyrightable works require or justify more?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
codex 13y ago
Note that the graph in this article is confusingly titled. From the paper itself, it is clear that "New Editions from Amazon by Decade" should read "Randomly Selected Editions of Books Available in New Condition from Amazon by Decade." In other words, they didn't simply look at newly-released prints. From the paper: "The 2317 random editions of new books available on Amazon during the fall of 2012 are charted in Figure 1 below by the decade of the original publication date of the corresponding title. Both fiction and non-fiction editions are included. Editions of books now in the public domain (those published prior to 1923) constitute 72% of the total (1665/2317), while editions of titles still under copyright constitute 28% (652/2317). The high percentage of public domain editions is probably driven by two factors. First, public domain books typically have more publishers and more editions per title, since there is no copyright owner to restrain exploitation. Second, Amazon offers as “in stock” multiple new editions of public domain books sold by a growing group of print-on-demand publishers that take advantage of the recent digitization of many old titles."
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  Read past the first screen, and you'll see they acknowledge that and try to account for it in a series of additional normalized graphs later on.
  - codex 13y ago
    In the paper it is acknowledged, but not in the article; even the author of the article is confused, for they write: "The graph above shows the simplest interpretation of the data. It reveals, shockingly, that there are substantially more new editions available of books from the 1910s than from the 2000s." This summary is incorrect. Were it correct, the entire paper would be silly, because of course you're going to have more new editions of older books than new editions of newer books: the newer books need fewer reprints or reasons to have new editions.
    - jrochkind1 13y ago
      I don't understand why you say the article did not acknowledge it. From the article that's linked here: > But this isn't a totally honest portrait of how many different books are available, because for books that are in the public domain, often many different editions exist, and the random sample is likely to overrepresent them. "After all," Heald explains, "if one feeds a random ISBN number [into] Amazon, one is more likely to retrieve Milton's Paradise Lost (with 401 editions and 401 ISBN numbers) than Lorimer's A Wife out of Egypt (1 edition and 1 ISBN)." He found that on average the public domain titles had a median of four editions per title. (The mean was 16, but highly distorted by the presence of a small number of books with hundreds of editions. For this reason, statisticians whom Heald consulted recommended using the median.) Heald divided the number of public-domain editions by four, providing a graph that compares the number of titles available. Then, yet another chart, that tries to normalize by percentage of books published in that decade still available.... > But even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade...Heald and his assistants were able to arrive at a pretty good approximation by relying on the number of titles available for each year in WorldCat, a library catalog that contains the complete listings of 72,000 libraries around the world. He then normalized his graph to the decade of the 1990s, which saw the greatest number of titles published.
ctdonath 13y ago
tl;dr - When there is no incentive to make available what is owned, it is not made available. Copyright extensions have made most mid-20th Century content owned, but with little incentive to make it available. As ownership is revoked by expired copyright, others may own (non-exclusive) that content and thus have incentive to make it available in new production.
jrochkind1 13y ago
In-copyright but out-of-print books from the 20th century aren't completely unavailable or lost to us; you can borrow many of them from public or university libraries. However, with ebooks replacing print books, libraries will increasingly be unavailable to fill that role. There are both legal and technical (but mainly legal) reasons that libraries can't hold on to ebooks and lend them out, lacking explicit permission from publishers, like they can with print books. On the other hand, maybe ebooks won't go "out of print", due to significantly lower marginal costs of production? I am definitely not confident of that though; as any software developer knows, there certainly are costs associated with maintaining a software product working 'forever'. Ebooks won't be immune from this, and I have no doubt that some will go 'out of print' when publishers do platform migrations, or when the consumer environment changes and new formats and packaging methods are needed, etc.
- mjn 13y ago
  You can get them from libraries, but it really depends on location. If you're a resident of NYC, there is a great public library system with huge holdings. If you're somewhere rural, not as great. University libraries cover a fairly different subset that can also be useful (skewed towards nonfiction and literary-landmark fiction), but vary significantly in their policies on access by the general public. Some allow general access, others require some kind of ID to even enter; most won't lend to the general public. Libraries also tend to have worse coverage of books from abroad. American library holdings of books only published in the UK are much worse than of those published in the US, and vice-versa. And only a few specialist libraries have significant holdings of out-of-print non-English books, even the most important ones. I've been particularly noticing this in the past few years, as an American working at a university in Denmark. The holdings here are quite good: they include just about every book ever published in Denmark, plus a huge number of foreign books. And they're integrated into a central catalog containing the holdings of all public and university libraries nationwide. But there are still many books I run across, especially American books published in, say, the 1930s-70s, where no library in the country has a copy. It's not even that uncommon for a worldcat.org search to turn up that no library in Europe has a copy. So then my next move is to start looking for a PDF. Sometimes I just give up and decide the book might as well not have existed. Something that would be quite cool, if the data is available, is some kind of access map quantifying that. If I am at [lat,lon], what % of books published in the U.S. in the 1950s do I have available within 100mi?
derefr 13y ago
Whenever someone cites some amazing-but-unpopular book they read -- and I then find out that it was published in the 1950s-80s -- I throw my hands up and try to forget the book existed. No e-book version exists, so I can't start reading it right then; and my local library would, at best, have to order it in (since it wasn't very popular in its time) so I likely can't start reading it for a few days. I might be able to order it from Amazon/eBay, but that's a high toll for something that I'm not sure has any value at all yet (this is the same reason iOS apps are legitimately "valued" at $0.99 -- value illegibility between "this is awesome" and "this is worthless", with no try-before-you-buy.) I sometimes dream of starting a company that does something similar to Google Books -- scanning+OCRing books to put them online -- but for in-copyright works: creating beautiful eBooks from them, and then, instead of posting them publicly, offering the book's original copyright-holder a deal to become their digital sublicencee, with no additional work or cost on their part. This company would then offer free TOC + chapter samples, an area where the original author could submit errata, an option of subscription-pricing rather than by-book pricing, all that other good stuff.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  And yet, it is in the Google books database. And in some weird and twisted way, Googe is not allowed to give you access to it. So we have exactly the situation where the rights holder chooses 'no' revenue over 'some' revenue which is incredibly counter intuitive to me.
  - loup-vaillant 13y ago
    I bet the prospect of losing control screens off any prospect of money making.
  - noonespecial 13y ago
    It probably works the same way as in Hollywood. It takes enormous personal risk and responsibility to the "that guy" who decides how much to sell something for. It takes none at all to simply say no and "protect" the rights. I suspect that in many organizations, it is quite literally impossible for anyone to authorize the assignment of limited rights for a cost because that much responsibility does not concentrate on any single individual. Even if it did, that person would be loath to take the risk of being "that guy who gave the rights away for pittance", when he could safely make no choice at all and "protect" the rights.
Glyptodon 13y ago
Graphs seem to strongly suggest that copyright shouldn't last more than 20 years at best.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  Arguing what arbitrary period of time is "fair" is an exercise in futility, it just sets a precedent. If it's something that could be argued in the first place, it can be argued in the future, and be extended forever. PS: I'm afraid copyright law is an aberration born from the need to enforce scarcity onto intellectual work so it's producers could fit inside a capitalistic society. Because of this inherent asymmetry, it's effectively binary, making any attempt to reach a "fair" compromise fail.
  - icambron 13y ago
    I don't think anyone's arguing about fairness. The idea of copyright is that it's suppose to allow us to enjoy more artistic works by incentivising artists. The degree to which it's successful in doing that compared to the degree to which it actually hampers the availability and diversity of content is measurable. And once we measure it, we can set the period non-arbitrarily. That the original purpose of copyright has been largely subverted doesn't mean we can't reestablish it in a principled way.
    - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
      > The degree to which it's successful in doing that compared to the degree to which it actually hampers the availability and diversity of content is measurable. And once we measure it, we can set the period non-arbitrarily. I've seen many claim this ("we can measure if the law is producing a net positive") everytime copyright law, or any controversial law, is discussed. Can you back this up, or is just blind positivism?
      - icambron 13y ago
        Sure. We do measure that, and there are a great many studies that do just that. The results so far, as I understand them, are "no, the current law does not produce a net positive", but there's nothing to suggest that such measurements would stop working if the laws were changed such that they did produce a net positive. Some examples: - http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf - http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/0118404830/0118404830.asp http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/01184048... - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf - http://www.booz.com/media/file/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Copyright-Regulations-Early-Stage-Investment.pdf http://www.booz.com/media/file/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Cop... I can't vouch for the strength of those particular reports or studies, but clearly people are putting a lot of energy into measuring this stuff. Why the nihilism?
betterunix 13y ago
The goal of copyright has always been to promote business interests. Once upon a time people thought it was worthwhile to balance those business interests with the interests of society at large, but these days the only thing politicians care about are business interests so this is what we get.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  You forgot to mention all of the authors/musicians/film makers/artists who also are still willingly releasing things under copyright.
  - thuuuomas 13y ago
    In pursuit of their business interests, not out of constraints inherent to writing/music/film/art.
    - res0nat0r 13y ago
      I'll wager that their business interests are directly inherent to their writing/music/film/art. The meme that artists somehow shouldn't expect to be paid for their work needs to be stopped. Many wouldn't have the ability to continue creating their product if they weren't being paid for the time and effort it takes to produce it.
      - baddox 13y ago
        > The meme that artists somehow shouldn't expect to be paid for their work needs to be stopped. Who has said that? I think there should be zero IP protection laws, but I believe that artists should expect to be paid for their work, and indeed would be paid for their work.
        res0nat0r 13y ago
        Most comments here when it comes to piracy are along the lines of: Welllll it's easy for me to take your product for free thanks to fast bandwidth and the Internet, so you shouldn't expect to be paid for your work since I can easily obtain it now without consequence. That's nonsense.
bane 13y ago
Imagine the tidal wave of books we'd have to wade through if copyright was fixed. It'd be a great problem to have.
AsymetricCom 13y ago
Here's an article with similar data that does into the source of the data. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-mi... It was posted here a few months ago.
r721 13y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133932
noonespecial 13y ago
The problem we're having with copyright right now is that its both (functionally) indefinite, and free. I don't believe the original intent was for this to happen. Making the terms limited OR making the cost to maintain copyright past a certain short time period non-free would fix most everything almost immediately. As it stands now, a perverse incentive has formed to lock away works that can't be executed on a very large commercial scale forever.
jleyank 13y ago
Think used books, check abebooks.com. The unbrella site of the used and rare book (antiquarian) biz.
chrismcb 13y ago
These seems to imply that copyright lengths should be about 25 years.
WalterBright 13y ago
One reasonable approach is that after 20 years, the copyright holder must submit an annual fee to the copyright office or it goes into the public domain. That way Disney can have their copyrights, and abandoned works go into the public domain.
- Glyptodon 13y ago
  I actually think that starting the fee after five years and doubling it every time it was up for renewal (maybe every one, two or three years?) wouldn't be a half bad way to go about it.
- rpicard 13y ago
  That's an interesting idea, and I think that it reveals an important aspect of the copyright system. If they had to submit an annual fee for each work, it would be a massive number of things to pay a fee for. For example, if Disney wanted to submit their fee for Cars, would they also need to submit a fee for the likeness of each character, i.e. Lightning McQueen, Mater, Doc, Sally, etc. What about the artwork associated with each of the settings? It's interesting to think that each of these elements is individually protected under copyright laws.
nileshtrivedi 13y ago
IMO, Copyright should work like this: Automatic full copyright for 14 years from the date of publication. After 14 years, it can be renewed for next 14 years (and so on) for a low price of 1$/year. If not renewed, the work becomes automatically available to the public under CC (BY-NC-SA) license. After author's death + 10 years, the work becomes public domain. Those numbers can be debated but the key aspect is that automatic copyright term is limited and explicit renewal is required.

125 points by devx 13y ago

polarix 13y ago

beat 13y ago
It's not copyright itself that is the blight... it's the seemingly endless extension of it. Copyright will always be extended far enough to keep Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse cartoon) copyrighted, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out.
- rustynails77 13y ago
  The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.ht... Good thing about karma. I've brought my kids up telling them the evils of Disney and their harm to society. Suck it Walt!
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    No ABC, ESPN, Pixar or Disney Channel? Or Star Wars? I'll be impressed if you can keep that up!
    - EyeballKid 13y ago
      Don't forget about The Muppets!
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Disney buying something is not the same as Disney creating something. And where did you get the word 'no'? Talking about the bad things a company has done is not an automatic boycott.
- baddox 13y ago
  It seems to me that endless copyrights, or perhaps copyrights that last until the death of the creator, are the only logical extensions of having any copyrights at all. If "artists deserve to be paid for their work," and "copyrights are the only way to make sure artists get paid for their work," then why should the artist stop deserving to get paid after some arbitrary number of years?
  - hsitz 13y ago
    Maybe because most works generate revenue, if at all, in the few years immediately following first publication, so a period based off that is all that's necessary to encourage creation? Maybe because if a copyright holder has a family and dies 6 months after creation of the work it seems wrong to prevent the family from profiting off the work? Maybe because when limits on periods are required in the law there is often no absolute reason to prefer one of several good candidate periods over another, so the ultimate decision is always in some sense arbitrary? Note that in the U.S. patents are generally granted for a period of 20 years. Why do copyrightable works require or justify more?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

codex 13y ago

Note that the graph in this article is confusingly titled. From the paper itself, it is clear that "New Editions from Amazon by Decade" should read "Randomly Selected Editions of Books Available in New Condition from Amazon by Decade." In other words, they didn't simply look at newly-released prints. From the paper: "The 2317 random editions of new books available on Amazon during the fall of 2012 are charted in Figure 1 below by the decade of the original publication date of the corresponding title. Both fiction and non-fiction editions are included. Editions of books now in the public domain (those published prior to 1923) constitute 72% of the total (1665/2317), while editions of titles still under copyright constitute 28% (652/2317). The high percentage of public domain editions is probably driven by two factors. First, public domain books typically have more publishers and more editions per title, since there is no copyright owner to restrain exploitation. Second, Amazon offers as “in stock” multiple new editions of public domain books sold by a growing group of print-on-demand publishers that take advantage of the recent digitization of many old titles."

jrochkind1 13y ago
Read past the first screen, and you'll see they acknowledge that and try to account for it in a series of additional normalized graphs later on.
- codex 13y ago
  In the paper it is acknowledged, but not in the article; even the author of the article is confused, for they write: "The graph above shows the simplest interpretation of the data. It reveals, shockingly, that there are substantially more new editions available of books from the 1910s than from the 2000s." This summary is incorrect. Were it correct, the entire paper would be silly, because of course you're going to have more new editions of older books than new editions of newer books: the newer books need fewer reprints or reasons to have new editions.
  - jrochkind1 13y ago
    I don't understand why you say the article did not acknowledge it. From the article that's linked here: > But this isn't a totally honest portrait of how many different books are available, because for books that are in the public domain, often many different editions exist, and the random sample is likely to overrepresent them. "After all," Heald explains, "if one feeds a random ISBN number [into] Amazon, one is more likely to retrieve Milton's Paradise Lost (with 401 editions and 401 ISBN numbers) than Lorimer's A Wife out of Egypt (1 edition and 1 ISBN)." He found that on average the public domain titles had a median of four editions per title. (The mean was 16, but highly distorted by the presence of a small number of books with hundreds of editions. For this reason, statisticians whom Heald consulted recommended using the median.) Heald divided the number of public-domain editions by four, providing a graph that compares the number of titles available. Then, yet another chart, that tries to normalize by percentage of books published in that decade still available.... > But even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade...Heald and his assistants were able to arrive at a pretty good approximation by relying on the number of titles available for each year in WorldCat, a library catalog that contains the complete listings of 72,000 libraries around the world. He then normalized his graph to the decade of the 1990s, which saw the greatest number of titles published.

ctdonath 13y ago

tl;dr - When there is no incentive to make available what is owned, it is not made available. Copyright extensions have made most mid-20th Century content owned, but with little incentive to make it available. As ownership is revoked by expired copyright, others may own (non-exclusive) that content and thus have incentive to make it available in new production.

jrochkind1 13y ago

In-copyright but out-of-print books from the 20th century aren't completely unavailable or lost to us; you can borrow many of them from public or university libraries. However, with ebooks replacing print books, libraries will increasingly be unavailable to fill that role. There are both legal and technical (but mainly legal) reasons that libraries can't hold on to ebooks and lend them out, lacking explicit permission from publishers, like they can with print books. On the other hand, maybe ebooks won't go "out of print", due to significantly lower marginal costs of production? I am definitely not confident of that though; as any software developer knows, there certainly are costs associated with maintaining a software product working 'forever'. Ebooks won't be immune from this, and I have no doubt that some will go 'out of print' when publishers do platform migrations, or when the consumer environment changes and new formats and packaging methods are needed, etc.

mjn 13y ago
You can get them from libraries, but it really depends on location. If you're a resident of NYC, there is a great public library system with huge holdings. If you're somewhere rural, not as great. University libraries cover a fairly different subset that can also be useful (skewed towards nonfiction and literary-landmark fiction), but vary significantly in their policies on access by the general public. Some allow general access, others require some kind of ID to even enter; most won't lend to the general public. Libraries also tend to have worse coverage of books from abroad. American library holdings of books only published in the UK are much worse than of those published in the US, and vice-versa. And only a few specialist libraries have significant holdings of out-of-print non-English books, even the most important ones. I've been particularly noticing this in the past few years, as an American working at a university in Denmark. The holdings here are quite good: they include just about every book ever published in Denmark, plus a huge number of foreign books. And they're integrated into a central catalog containing the holdings of all public and university libraries nationwide. But there are still many books I run across, especially American books published in, say, the 1930s-70s, where no library in the country has a copy. It's not even that uncommon for a worldcat.org search to turn up that no library in Europe has a copy. So then my next move is to start looking for a PDF. Sometimes I just give up and decide the book might as well not have existed. Something that would be quite cool, if the data is available, is some kind of access map quantifying that. If I am at [lat,lon], what % of books published in the U.S. in the 1950s do I have available within 100mi?

derefr 13y ago

Whenever someone cites some amazing-but-unpopular book they read -- and I then find out that it was published in the 1950s-80s -- I throw my hands up and try to forget the book existed. No e-book version exists, so I can't start reading it right then; and my local library would, at best, have to order it in (since it wasn't very popular in its time) so I likely can't start reading it for a few days. I might be able to order it from Amazon/eBay, but that's a high toll for something that I'm not sure has any value at all yet (this is the same reason iOS apps are legitimately "valued" at $0.99 -- value illegibility between "this is awesome" and "this is worthless", with no try-before-you-buy.) I sometimes dream of starting a company that does something similar to Google Books -- scanning+OCRing books to put them online -- but for in-copyright works: creating beautiful eBooks from them, and then, instead of posting them publicly, offering the book's original copyright-holder a deal to become their digital sublicencee, with no additional work or cost on their part. This company would then offer free TOC + chapter samples, an area where the original author could submit errata, an option of subscription-pricing rather than by-book pricing, all that other good stuff.

ChuckMcM 13y ago
And yet, it is in the Google books database. And in some weird and twisted way, Googe is not allowed to give you access to it. So we have exactly the situation where the rights holder chooses 'no' revenue over 'some' revenue which is incredibly counter intuitive to me.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  I bet the prospect of losing control screens off any prospect of money making.
- noonespecial 13y ago
  It probably works the same way as in Hollywood. It takes enormous personal risk and responsibility to the "that guy" who decides how much to sell something for. It takes none at all to simply say no and "protect" the rights. I suspect that in many organizations, it is quite literally impossible for anyone to authorize the assignment of limited rights for a cost because that much responsibility does not concentrate on any single individual. Even if it did, that person would be loath to take the risk of being "that guy who gave the rights away for pittance", when he could safely make no choice at all and "protect" the rights.

Glyptodon 13y ago

Graphs seem to strongly suggest that copyright shouldn't last more than 20 years at best.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Arguing what arbitrary period of time is "fair" is an exercise in futility, it just sets a precedent. If it's something that could be argued in the first place, it can be argued in the future, and be extended forever. PS: I'm afraid copyright law is an aberration born from the need to enforce scarcity onto intellectual work so it's producers could fit inside a capitalistic society. Because of this inherent asymmetry, it's effectively binary, making any attempt to reach a "fair" compromise fail.
- icambron 13y ago
  I don't think anyone's arguing about fairness. The idea of copyright is that it's suppose to allow us to enjoy more artistic works by incentivising artists. The degree to which it's successful in doing that compared to the degree to which it actually hampers the availability and diversity of content is measurable. And once we measure it, we can set the period non-arbitrarily. That the original purpose of copyright has been largely subverted doesn't mean we can't reestablish it in a principled way.
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    > The degree to which it's successful in doing that compared to the degree to which it actually hampers the availability and diversity of content is measurable. And once we measure it, we can set the period non-arbitrarily. I've seen many claim this ("we can measure if the law is producing a net positive") everytime copyright law, or any controversial law, is discussed. Can you back this up, or is just blind positivism?
    - icambron 13y ago
      Sure. We do measure that, and there are a great many studies that do just that. The results so far, as I understand them, are "no, the current law does not produce a net positive", but there's nothing to suggest that such measurements would stop working if the laws were changed such that they did produce a net positive. Some examples: - http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf - http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/0118404830/0118404830.asp http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/other/01184048... - http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview-finalreport.pdf - http://www.booz.com/media/file/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Copyright-Regulations-Early-Stage-Investment.pdf http://www.booz.com/media/file/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Cop... I can't vouch for the strength of those particular reports or studies, but clearly people are putting a lot of energy into measuring this stuff. Why the nihilism?

betterunix 13y ago

The goal of copyright has always been to promote business interests. Once upon a time people thought it was worthwhile to balance those business interests with the interests of society at large, but these days the only thing politicians care about are business interests so this is what we get.

res0nat0r 13y ago
You forgot to mention all of the authors/musicians/film makers/artists who also are still willingly releasing things under copyright.
- thuuuomas 13y ago
  In pursuit of their business interests, not out of constraints inherent to writing/music/film/art.
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    I'll wager that their business interests are directly inherent to their writing/music/film/art. The meme that artists somehow shouldn't expect to be paid for their work needs to be stopped. Many wouldn't have the ability to continue creating their product if they weren't being paid for the time and effort it takes to produce it.
    - baddox 13y ago
      > The meme that artists somehow shouldn't expect to be paid for their work needs to be stopped. Who has said that? I think there should be zero IP protection laws, but I believe that artists should expect to be paid for their work, and indeed would be paid for their work.
      - res0nat0r 13y ago
        Most comments here when it comes to piracy are along the lines of: Welllll it's easy for me to take your product for free thanks to fast bandwidth and the Internet, so you shouldn't expect to be paid for your work since I can easily obtain it now without consequence. That's nonsense.

bane 13y ago

Imagine the tidal wave of books we'd have to wade through if copyright was fixed. It'd be a great problem to have.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

Here's an article with similar data that does into the source of the data. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-mi... It was posted here a few months ago.

r721 13y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6133932

noonespecial 13y ago

The problem we're having with copyright right now is that its both (functionally) indefinite, and free. I don't believe the original intent was for this to happen. Making the terms limited OR making the cost to maintain copyright past a certain short time period non-free would fix most everything almost immediately. As it stands now, a perverse incentive has formed to lock away works that can't be executed on a very large commercial scale forever.

jleyank 13y ago

Think used books, check abebooks.com. The unbrella site of the used and rare book (antiquarian) biz.

chrismcb 13y ago

These seems to imply that copyright lengths should be about 25 years.

WalterBright 13y ago

One reasonable approach is that after 20 years, the copyright holder must submit an annual fee to the copyright office or it goes into the public domain. That way Disney can have their copyrights, and abandoned works go into the public domain.

Glyptodon 13y ago
I actually think that starting the fee after five years and doubling it every time it was up for renewal (maybe every one, two or three years?) wouldn't be a half bad way to go about it.
rpicard 13y ago
That's an interesting idea, and I think that it reveals an important aspect of the copyright system. If they had to submit an annual fee for each work, it would be a massive number of things to pay a fee for. For example, if Disney wanted to submit their fee for Cars, would they also need to submit a fee for the likeness of each character, i.e. Lightning McQueen, Mater, Doc, Sally, etc. What about the artwork associated with each of the settings? It's interesting to think that each of these elements is individually protected under copyright laws.

nileshtrivedi 13y ago

IMO, Copyright should work like this: Automatic full copyright for 14 years from the date of publication. After 14 years, it can be renewed for next 14 years (and so on) for a low price of 1$/year. If not renewed, the work becomes automatically available to the public under CC (BY-NC-SA) license. After author's death + 10 years, the work becomes public domain. Those numbers can be debated but the key aspect is that automatic copyright term is limited and explicit renewal is required.