Re: Market Failure? The Case Of Copyright

>> [Even with the weakness of most pro-piracy arguments, I have yet to see

anything as garbled as this. Look first at his paragraph on copyright
history; it is not simplified, but totally incorrect. Let that prepare
you for logical inconsistency, poor interpretation of statistics and
incorrect assumptions.]

>> [For example, anyone who understands commercial imperatives will know
that there are always sellers if the product is free; the major part of
the reason pd works are most readily available [often in indecipherable
OCR editions] in a digital age is because sales require little effort.]

To which I reply, "So what?"  Isn't it far better for society to have a crappy OCR edition available for free than for a high-quality edition to be unavailable because the publisher has gone out of business, or just isn't interested in making it available?

Yes, it would be absolutely trivial to make available all the millions of works that publishers are no longer publishing.  Google showed that.  How does "requires little effort" translate into "therefore not valuable?"  





>> [There are examples of a wholly mechanised operations where single annual
sales of each title will produce a profit worth having. This does not
mean they have most impact - and there are no figures or research on
this, which is the real focus of 'readily available ideas'.]

I'm not even sure what you're saying here.  


>> [Please note also that a garbled presentation of a great pd work is of no 
value at all.]

Define "garbled."  If there is enough information there that I can mostly recover what the original author was saying, then there's a bit of value.  If it's still legible despite the occasional wromg letter or trasnposed letter pair or smooshedtogether word, to the point that I still draw some joy from reading it, then it's downright perverse to describe it as having "no value at all."


>> [For a second example. No one has any idea what proportion of those
titles that disappear into oblivion deserve to be there. In a sense book
publishing is a test bed for an idea clothed in words and graphics. The
idea that every one of those is a masterpiece is worthy of 'Make a
fortune while you sleep'.]

No public domain proponent would argue that every abandoned work is a masterpiece.  The... er... masterpiecitude of some 1937 gumshoe story is irrelevant if I just want to text mine old books to find early instances of the word "hoosegow," or to use it as part of a data set to feed to a program that tries to guess the genre of other books.  

Or maybe I just like reading crappy books, or have some other unique reason for wanting to read it.  If literally nobody but me wants to read a novel my grandfather wrote in 1928, and the publisher isn't manufacturing new copies, I'd be thrilled if somebody made a copy available online, regardless of crappy OCR or the copyright laws it may be infringing.

And no matter how crappy these "market failures" are, since when did the free market become the last word on what I should and shouldn't be allowed to read?  If the publishers aren't interested in providing X to anyone, should the government-granted monopoly we call "copyright" really be used to prevent us from accessing X?  How is that beneficial for society?  




>> [Thirdly, once ideas are published, or otherwise available, those ideas
are in the pd. They are not the thing copyrighted.]

So, if I stole your copy of The Hunger Games and replaced it with a twelve page summary of the plot, you wouldn't mind?  After all, it's not the words that matter, but the ideas (which are freely available).

Further, how am I supposed to make use of the ideas embodied in the work if I cannot obtain a copy of the work in question?

Last question:  Looking at the chart, can you really imagine that, of all the books publishers saw fit to print back in the 1950s, only the tiny sliver being published on Amazon still have any value to any modern reader?  Because that's what you'd have to argue to avoid the simple conclusion that publishers aren't harming the broader interests of society.  Even if I were a historian studying the life of 1950s housewives, reading the romance novels of the time wouldn't provide me any illumination.  Even if I've developed a love for trashy '50s space opera, I really wouldn't enjoy the ones that Amazon doesn't have copies of.

That makes no sense whatsoever.



>> [So read this at peril of having your brain rotted, but read it to
understand that there is clearly (from other recent pieces) a new
campaign building that is trying to look erudite. If they can't get the
history of international copyright correct to being with, it falls at
the first hurdle.]

So, one guy summarizing and commenting on someone else's study of book availability makes (unspecified) mistakes when describing copyright law, and therefore an entire branch of copyright thought is invalid?  I suppose we should further conclude that the only reasonable copyright system is one in which copyright lasts forever and ever.

You're ignoring the clear message of the chart: that beyond a certain point in time, for a vast swath of books, today's copyright laws are doing more to hinder access than to promote access.




>> [This is the paragraph that gets international copyright history wrong, wrong, wrong. Not to mention total ignorance of contracts.]
'...Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and terms were mostly  short in the early days of this regulation. In the course of the 20th century, regulations became ever more tight and the copyright terms ever longer, so much so that today, the words you sign away to a conventional publisher are theirs to keep for your lifetime plus 70 years!...'

Which part is wrong?

1) That copyright enforcement was pretty lax throughout the early part of America's history?  (they were)
2) That the terms of copyright were shorter back in the early 20th century?  (they were)

Now, if you want to get pedantic, publishers might not generally own the copyright to the books they publish.  But quite often they do get all the publication rights, distribution rights, translation rights, rights of first refusal for a related project, etc.  So it seems pedantic to object to the errors when the overall picture (publishers can hinder access to works for decades) is broadly correct.

Bryce Anderson


http://neonderbycars.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/darth_schmoo

May you live in exponential times.


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