Re: Re: Copyright Expiration ?

On 10/08/2012 12:42 PM, Dave wrote:
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> However decades later and ago Ben Bova an editor as well as an author 
> wrote Cyber Book a novel which is basically a complaint about the 
> publishing industry's conservatism. The book was published and forgotten.
>
> Now publishing is being stressed and must evolve. This seems to me to 
> the best chance to make changes that will correct what seems to me to 
> be a minor flaw in the existing system - but only if it is addressed.
>

If one looks at the Big Six in New York the sense of conservatism is 
very strong. But the industry as a whole has changed and evolved quite 
remarkably and continuously. Consolidation of publishers has been a 
feature of the past fifty years or so, itself a change to meet the 
growth of bigger and more international markets and greater competition 
from other forms of entertainment. The leviathan feel is from the 
conglomerates that built the Big Six from hundreds of small and medium 
publishers.

In a sense they are less part of the industry, despite their size. Like 
Amazon and Google, they treat publishing as merely a profit centre, or 
lossleader for other parts of the business. If you examine the changes 
in the past decade you find a lot of these do come from new players. But 
it was ever thus. The 1940s and 1950s saw many small bookseller 
publishers enter the industry, some of whose names now are famed, 
sometimes alone, sometimes merged with others.

Authors, artists, photographers enter the industry because it is there, 
and now easier to function in than ever. This was already becoming very 
true over twenty years ago, and then was added to by POD, and swiftly 
followed by digital possibilities - many stand-alone ebooks with .exes - 
and that was recently boosted by Amazon's Kindle. Pressure on the 
copyright aspect came from Google first; or at least most seriously.  
But this pressure is not new, in either direction. Track copyright 
changes in the UK, US and France from 1710 and one sees bigger fights 
and attempted resolutions than even today. And a lot of that was 
technology driven too.

While the internet has brought a whole new dimension to book marketing 
and formats, the traditional print market is still very strong indeed - 
even in America. Copyright itself is a compromise, not only between 
state and creator, but between the mass of conflicting interests in the 
creative industries, and by different countries and formats. That is why 
WIPO is kept very busy discussing and negotiating changes and definitions.

If you were to look under the seemingly unchanging skin you might be 
amazed and how much change is going on, and how many moves there are to 
find that balance point on issues such as unavailable works.

Joseph Harris






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