Re: Market Failure? The Case Of Copyright

On 04/04/2012 22:22, Bryce Anderson wrote:
>>> [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?
>    

You muddle a lot of questions together. First a 'crappy' OCR version is, 
as I have stated, worthless. Even Gutenberg and archive.org have 
uncorrected text versions of many works that actually make no sense. So 
if you are satisfied with random words, strange sequences and the 
absence of the point of the original work perhaps that 'crap' gets 
someone's plaudit. But not mine.

However, you do illustrate the difference between the "contribution to 
culture, the arts and invention" and "mere acquisition of a hoard".

You use then of an extreme opposite to 'crappy' - 'high quality'. This 
is a technique to avoid discussion;  it claims there is no middle 
ground. But, like everything else in life most happens in the middle 
ground and only the oddities lie at the extremes. Your comment on the 
number of works unavailable where publishers have gone out of business 
begs so many questions that I would break the post size limitation to 
answer it. But in brief: such figure has never been quantified and it is 
only an assumption; the copyright is owned by the creator and the 
publisher has licence according to individual contracts; and whether a 
particular work sees light of day is someone's calculation, usually a 
business one, and even if for example a Gutenberg project is there, it 
because someone has traded their time to be a good samaritan to all. The 
cost is what else he might have done with that time. Commercially the 
considerations are calculated from quantative cost and marketing and 
value data.

> 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?"
>
>    

Google hardly showed it was 'trivial'. Their investment, into a rushed 
project with seriously underpaid and pressured staff who at least left 
images of their fingers as reminders, was a massive financial 
investment, and require major server stations to carry the data. But you 
have confused issues here. Amazon scanned original pages into images, 
and that is best offered as a PDF. Turning that into manipulable text 
requires considerably more work because it includes both OCR and manual 
correction. After that come issues of whether design is required.  And 
whether there is a financial return.

>    
>>> [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.
>    

Because the matter is very complex, and you are looking from only one 
narrow perspective.  There are several projects which involve automatic 
systems either turning free books into slight designs or gathering free 
information and effectively grouping it into volumes; these create may 
books, in one case hundreds of thousands, in another at high prices, and 
even with the investment in programming, monitoring and equipment, a 
single sale of every one of their titles each year can make a handsome 
profit.

>>> [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."
>    

Garbled is a well known word. Your needs, my needs, are each but one 
among billions. You started by talking of society, now you talk of one 
person, yourself. You ask others to do a lot of work, just for what will 
satisfy you; and you have no care for all those thers in society who 
seek, not approximations, but accurate information. Place the word 'not' 
for every 'now' that you see, and 'now' for every 'not'; and then tell 
me if *approximate* is good enough.

>    
>>> [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.
>    

That sounds like fun, but  I point you to my words above about the needs 
of other  people, not just yourself.  Of course, even then, you'll miss 
some 'hoosegow's if the text gets mangled.
> 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.
>    

Perhaps. But just think that if that work is being done only for you how 
many people are being disappointed because a book a million would love 
to see is not occupying that generous scanner's time.

> 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?
>    

Er... 'Why should the free market become the last word'? Unless you are 
advocating communist control, I think you confuse ideas here. The 'free 
market' idea is not about freedom, but the concept of the forces being 
free to find their own balances of optimum value. That is to say that 
whether the coin is money, time, generosity, negotiation, play or 
anything else, there are trade offs. I take your sentence above to mean 
you want everything free. That you think authors should work without pay 
to please you.

With some exceptions - there aren't many - any work you want is 
available at  the optimum price of the moment between you and a vendor; 
and that doesn't change if copyright goes or stays. The copyright 
argument has been gone through often; Americans are often unaware that 
the rest of the world has had life plus 50 copyright for over a century, 
and that in that time there has been an explosion in writing and 
publishing, and books prices have, over that time, fallen in real terms 
[i.e. after taking into account inflation].
>>> [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).
>    

Please learn what copyright means if you want to argue it. First if you 
stole something from me it would be a criminal act liable to punishment. 
Second the copyright is not i n the plot nor the idea, but in the 
expression - that is to say what you see as the printed book - or the 
file in the digital age.
> 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?
>    

Since ideas are copied and expressed in different ways, it is rare for 
any idea to be unavailable just because one or other expression of it is 
hard to find.  But you raise another important counter to this nonsense 
about knowledge being lost if every book 'ever' is not reprinted 
physically or digitally. There are at least ten million books; Google 
was claiming ever higher figures a few years back, as part of its claim 
to 'doing good'. Since the past couple of years in the US alone annual 
publication has topped one million there may well be upwards of 20 
million titles. Any of us would need a few lifetimes just to go through 
an index of them. And at current rates, at the end of each lifetime 
there would be another 90million books in the index.
> 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.
>    

You are not very clear in what you say here.  But it seems to be based 
on a complete misunderstanding of the chart and how it was compiled; it 
is one you share with article writer. Amazon is not only not the only 
game in town, but it is a minor player in the world of publishing. It 
has an impressive share of the print book market i n the US, a 
reasonable one in the UK, a lesser one in most of Europe and in Japan, 
and not that much of one in the rest of the world. In perhaps the 
biggest market, India, print books are  expanding at an amazing pace, 
and though technology is also increasingly popular, books and technology 
are not integrated i nthe way you are used to.

Even in America Amazon is limited in its impact on the whole of 
publishing and its back stock is a story of Amazon, not of availability. 
And you seem unaware of the fact there is a massive second hand and 
antiquarian book market that hides many a rarity at reasonable prices.

>    
>>> [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.
>    

So I can say you are a green eyed monster from Mars and draw my 
conclusions of you based on that? Of course it matters if someone is 
arguing about a specific, and he has facts about that specific wrong. If 
themistakes were minor it might not matter. But he is wrong in major 
league terms.

> 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.
>    

It is not the laws at all. It is whether anyone thinks it worth their 
time to bother.  That Google project everyone went wild about was not 
about *finding* books, but only about copying books already in 
collections, large collections. Gutenberg, which generally does an 
excellent job, can produce very few books in terms of all that are out 
there. Archive.org has a ragbag of things, and still a small amount. 
There are other places, like Hathi, where universities place all sorts 
of conditions on getting copies, often making a  charge. Most 
universities now permit very limited access. All those that wanted to be 
part of the freely available movement and the 'everything' movement are 
facing the realities of the costs and of the optimum in a 'free market'. 
And very similar considerations rule elsewhere in the world.

>>> [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)
>    

This America-centric view is not about copyright, but about American 
behaviour. America was classed with Russia, China and India and third 
world countries as a copyright thief for much of the nineteenth and the 
first half of the twentieth century.  Is that the reputation you hanker 
for again?
> 2) That the terms of copyright were shorter back in the early 20th century?  (they were)
>    

They were not.  Some 90 per cent of creativity from 1878 to 1978 was 
produced in countries obeying the Berne Convention which has a minimum 
term of life plus 50 years.  The reason the article writer is forced to 
mention American children reading British books is because the copyright 
law failures i n the US were not encouraging creativity to the extent 
the laws in Europe and other parts of the world that signed Berne 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
>    

Bryce, I made it plain that the article writer does not understand the 
contract situation, and now you join in.  Neither you nor I know what 
copyright licence contracts contain. We can gain an idea from the ideal 
and basic contracts published. Broadly the more successful the author 
the more likely he/she is to better contract terms. An obvious in any 
sphere of life where one side has an upper hand.

There are known to be some contracts, especially in the US, that are 
unfair to writers. Particularly the 'all time' issue. This is probably 
because the  copyright terms used to be so short in the US that it was 
commercial nonsense to sign up for a licence for a shorter period. When 
the changes in term in the US, to be eligible to sign Berne, began in 
teh 1960s the idea of limiting contract time was probably not addressed. 
That is probably why there is now reversion of rights possible by US law 
with such overlong contract periods.

There have been discussion of contracts, and there are clearly a wide 
variety of ways in which they are drawn up, negotiated and varied. My 
understanding is that the majority are good contracts between the author 
as owner and the publisher as services provider, with different terms 
for each licence agreed. The internet was not, and could not, be 
anticipated; even only a year a way it is uncertain what new licencing 
opportunities there will be in 2013. Work is being done to answer the 
anomalies for both sides i n this, round the world, and that will no 
doubt continue as a joint contract law - copyright development.

By the way, the trading and prosperity of the world, not just the US, is 
based on honouring contracts. Perhaps that is also important and should 
be a factor in your thinking.

Joseph Harris


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