Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.
Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).
Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.
The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?
For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies.
Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.
Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and potentially profitable ones for himself.
That is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the validity and duration of each of those rights.
I'm completely comfortable talking about those things! :) I just disagree with the notion that copyright should just magically go away without any serious consideration of its consequences to creatives. I'm more than happy with some hypothetical solution that both prevents inaccessibility to creative works and also enforces that creatives should be compensated for their labor.
Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall.
That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself.
Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.
At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work.
Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long and how well royalty can still pay authors. Cassandra Khaw has repeatedly commented on how Hammers On Bone (published 2016) is still making them significant revenue. And this isn't at all covering the nuances of UK/US markets, where books can make it big in the UK and only years later publish in the US and vice versa (where I know for certain make significant income for authors)! I'm sure Susanna Clarke, who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is still immensely grateful for how well Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell continued to sell (and then she came out with another banger, Piranesi!). Victor LaVelle is still making money off The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) to the point of producing a re-release hardcover of the book due to popular demand! And I know Nnedi Okorafor is still earning excellent royalties from Who Fears Death (2011) even though her more profitable works (Binti, Akata series) are getting more attention nowadays.
The argument that books primarily sell 95% of all they'll ever sell in the first 2-3 years is a total misunderstanding of the book market. It may look like that for current-events nonfiction or celebrity bibliographical works, but fiction markets don't work like that at all-- the backlist makes a huge chunk of the stable income of an author. This is true also for indie and self-pub markets (I can't name specific examples because I haven't done heavy research into this, but I know from panels and talks from other romance authors that self-publishing romance heavily relies on voracious readers who will buy your entire backlist.)
But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
> But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
Isn't this an issue about social security or income insurance or pensions.. why should this be specifically different for an author than a bricklayer?
> But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
> In spring 2000 I was well into Wiz 6: The Wizardry Capitalized when I went into the hospital for emergency heart surgery. The surgery saved my life but a combination of medical problems and the effects of the drugs I take has pretty much ended my fiction career. (Non-fiction I still manage very nicely, thank you.)
I've seen this happen to others. Something about the heart medicine prevents some spark of creativity. Its another example of an author who needed to support himself for another 20 years off the royalties from books he wrote a decade before.
>I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work
The difference is that in this case, everybody would be free to adapt it as they see fit. HBO doesn't get the exclusive rights. Under the current system, only very big producers can afford to license well known properties. Under a more permissive system, anybody can do it.
No, because HBO has more than license: they also have audience and money to pay for actors, animators, script writers and, most importantly, a marketing campaign. They could still make a ton of money off of it, just that George R.R. Martin wouldn't see a single cent of it! That's what I'm saying would suck terribly. [See: All the lovecraft works in public domain-- big productions based on the mythos are still making toooons of money!]
Again, I think it's a mistake to hold up GRRM as representative of someone who would be "shafted" if HBO were able to make GoT without his participation. That ignores the other side of the coin: all the works that could be made into other media but aren't because: the author doesn't want someone else to sully their work; the author wants too much money; no one can find the copyright holder.
It's interesting that none of the works you cite as being vulnerable are more than 12 years old. If we could agree on 12 years with a 12 year renewal, I'd happily compromise on that compared to what we have now.
Looking at Cassandra Khaw: the book you mention, Hammers On Bone, is just seven years old. So under my scheme (I allowed for the idea of renewals) maybe she'd be on her second renewal? Certainly nothing like the current system, where that book will conservatively be under copyright well into the 2100s.
But to your point: U.S. publishers sell almost a billion books per year. I'm not sure how much authors get, since the numbers seem to be different for professionally published books vs. self-published, but let's take it as $1 per copy. HoB is currently ranked 560,000th on Amazon. If we take any kind of reasonable distribution of book sales, that would have her selling <= 1,000 books per year. That means she's clearing up to $1,000 per year on that book -- certainly enough to call it "significant revenue," but also not enough to keep body and soul together on its own.
And again, I'll point out that current copyright goes far beyond the death of the author. Should we be similarly sympathetic to the children (or even grandchildren) of the author?
And as an aside: Cassandra Khaw is actually similar to Piers Anthony: the very first book in the Xanth series is currently ranked 48,000th at Amazon, but the 20th book is ranked over 1 millionth. Interestingly, the most recent book is ranked 280,000th, so better than the middle of the series, but not as good as the first book. This speaks more directly to your point than any of the examples you gave, since A Spell for Chameleon came out almost fifty years ago. And the Battle Circle omnibus edition (it was a trilogy originally) is ranked 180,000th, so better than the most recent Xanth novel.
But all of this ignores the point I originally made, which is that copyright is only secondarily for the benefit of authors. If you really want to argue for longer copyright, you have to support the idea that fewer authors would write, or write less, if copyright were shorter. That's the only justification that speaks to the intent in the constitution.
I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist.
That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies.
No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves.
Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation.
Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
Copyright and intellectual property exist because we've decided as a society that we want people to spend serious time and energy making these worthwhile things. Absent protections, the upfront investment of time and effort aren't worth it. If one cannot control the use of one's original works, only the wealthy can afford to chase that sense of accomplishment.
I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).
On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. And congrats! I've written several novels, mostly for fun, but even if I wanted to publish them now that self-publishing is such a thing: two are lost on a DOS floppy, one is lost on a Zip drive, and one is lost on a MacBook hard drive. And one is still around in hardcopy form, but I'd never be able to re-type it without getting sucked into editing it.
If you're willing to share, do you have a sense of how your income balances between newer and older works?
Plagiarism done for profiting from book sales is a symptom of copyright in this form (punishment over monetary loss, not lack of attribution).
Having consumers of the artworks (if they aren't commissioned) donate to the author along with severe enforcement of attribution requirements (especially bans on claiming other's work as one's own, so the donations wouldn't go to the plagiarizer), doesn't require bans on copying/reproduction.
Yes, it would change what art gets the funding: e.g. less Marvel Avengers (dominated by casual consumers), more art house cinema (say, something like "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri").
Less autotune'd popstars, more "Nirvana"/"Taylor Swift"/"Marina and the Diamonds".
But in the realm of the "useful arts ", we're talking more about commissioned works, be it the way an architect is commissioned by a bank that needs a new HQ, or be it the way a fan base causes so many sales of the new Final Fantasy that the creators make a sequel (the commissioning tactic would be one exhibited by, for example, "Dropkick on My Devil! X" (the third season of a splatter (in the way Doom is) comedy anime, which reached its crowdfunding goal in 33 hours)).
I strongly believe that for useful arts, like, say, engineering reference books and ISO standard documents, crowdfunding could sufficiently cover cost of creation, using for example selling of voting power in the ISO standard creation process for individual standards as the incentive to coax industry into paying up-front instead of afterwards for their paper/digital copies.
Or have that industry's guild/association sponsor the standard writing.
After all, IETF RFCs prove that standards don't need to be paywalled to continuously be created.
Then how should any artists make any income at all from their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets. [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person who actually is in community regularly with working-class authors.]
The world in which you speak of where art existed outside of notions of intellectual property meant only the wealthy and well-connected could be artists, whereas with copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster, specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author) was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only many years later was he able to regain rights to his work back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him- this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while he was being abused.
We have the technology now to balance copyright - simply put - if an item is not available for a reasonable price, then the copyright expires or becomes "cannot be sold except by original author" or something. Needing to keep things like books that are currently in print protected shouldn't prevent people from obtaining works that have fallen out of print, apparently irrevocably.
Print-on-demand and digital copies means that even a small author can keep their works available "for pay" easily now.
I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm only concerned for living creators to retain rights to their work and be compensated for their creations while they are still actively using their work to give themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.
I think the other side of copyrights where you can irrevocably sign over your rights (which may be more of a US thing, UK seems to have some inalienable ones) is a significant issue (as mentioned, the Foster thing where Disney wasn't even paying him because they argued they'd acquired assets without liabilities - https://winteriscoming.net/2021/04/23/disney-star-wars-autho... ).
It's hard to fully balance. Another example would be Don Rosa's McDuck comics - he had to fully assign all copyright on them to Disney when making them, so the way the reprinters get him some money is by having him write forwards/commentary, those he can retain the copyright on - https://career-end.donrosa.de has more
Alan Dean Foster's situation was not an irrevocably signing over his rights; he signed a specific business agreement that Disney tried to renege on dubious claims that would totally change corporate law if it was made valid precedent.
Don Rosa's situation doesn't really have much to do with the original advocacy to do away with copyright altogether, so I don't understand your point here. Are you arguing that copyright is bad because it's sellable under unfair terms, and therefore no one should be able to sell their work?
I'm just pointing out that our current system of copyright doesn't really do enough to protect the authors and artists that create the works we enjoy; there's certainly room for improvement.
> I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets.
You can apply all those scenarious to other jobs that don't earn effectively-perpetual income from their work. They generally have to rely on the government to keep them alive. Why should "creatives" get a better deal?
I'm all for making sure that artists (and everyone else) has enough to live so that they can make a positive contribution to society. But out of all the different possible ways to accomplish that, infringing on the basic rights of everyone to share and build on their culture has got to be one of the worst.
Frankly, I'm comfortable with the copyright holder being responsible to pay for the continued ownership of the copyright beyond its registration fees. It would allow them to determine whether or not a work is worth the continued investment to them, and presumably authors who are in a tight spot these days engage in mutual aid to assist each other. [#DisneyMustPay is a truly impressive mass cooperative event against an existential threat!]
I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader cultural dissemination of their work.
So what, like ten years free then ten year renewals each costing ten percent of total attributable revenue to date (probably with some minimum fee for extension)?
Oh please, lots of great cultural creations had a profit motive. You think "Blade Runner" was made without any desire for profit? Or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or Peter Jackson's LotR movies? Those were enormously profitable.
And Rings of Power was not that bad. It's not as great as the LotR movies, sure, but it's better than the Hobbit movies. (But not as good as some of the Hobbit fan edits.) And it's a LOT better than the new Netflix show "The Ark". What a turd, and a huge disappointment coming from some of the people behind Stargate.
Minor correction: "The Ark" is a SyFy/Peacock show, not Netflix. My apologies to Netflix for naming them as having made what's probably the worst sci-fi show ever.
Interestingly, I found the show that "The Ark" is loosely based on, a 70s show called "The Starlost". It's available on YouTube for free. Anyway, it was widely panned too, even named on someone's "worst sci-fi shows of all time" list. I've only seen one episode but it's already notably better than "The Ark" despite being 50 years old now (and not because "The Starlost" is great either).
Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations is ridiculous.
There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital.
In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.
Another approach that may be less at risk of the vicissitudes of legal trajectory on the copyright issue is a mass-scale decentralized archive: in other words, a democratization of archiving.
One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea).
A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others.
I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving.
Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it.
Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later).
Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience.
The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.