> After all, if you can’t buy it, you’re not depriving the creator of revenue.
A good chunk of the history of copyright law is publishers finding creative ways to front-run their own authors. Publishers would agree to publish your book in, say, the US - where they'd be bound by US copyright law - and then abscond with it in a country where US copyright didn't apply, and therefore the translations would be a new work wholly divorced from the author's ownership. Modern copyright law is written with the assumption that any unauthorized sale is a lost one, because nobody is going to buy the same work twice unless we take away the one that wasn't paid for correctly.
After copyright law was maximized in this way, publishers pivoted to demanding total control up-front. This created the modern creative industry with hordes of "creative working class"/"below the talent line" professions that wouldn't exist if control were atomized to individual creators negotiating licensing agreements for everything. One quirk of this new business model is that certain legacy rights became far more lucrative. Publishers realized that they could take works off the market and then bring them back to profit off FOMO, or sell 'better' versions of the same work twice anyway.
You still come to the same conclusion I have, though, which is that the problem is term length. Instead of carving out new loopholes, variable term lengths, etc... just make them smaller overall. The publishers won't negotiate with us, why negotiate with them?
A good chunk of the history of copyright law is publishers finding creative ways to front-run their own authors. Publishers would agree to publish your book in, say, the US - where they'd be bound by US copyright law - and then abscond with it in a country where US copyright didn't apply, and therefore the translations would be a new work wholly divorced from the author's ownership. Modern copyright law is written with the assumption that any unauthorized sale is a lost one, because nobody is going to buy the same work twice unless we take away the one that wasn't paid for correctly.
After copyright law was maximized in this way, publishers pivoted to demanding total control up-front. This created the modern creative industry with hordes of "creative working class"/"below the talent line" professions that wouldn't exist if control were atomized to individual creators negotiating licensing agreements for everything. One quirk of this new business model is that certain legacy rights became far more lucrative. Publishers realized that they could take works off the market and then bring them back to profit off FOMO, or sell 'better' versions of the same work twice anyway.
You still come to the same conclusion I have, though, which is that the problem is term length. Instead of carving out new loopholes, variable term lengths, etc... just make them smaller overall. The publishers won't negotiate with us, why negotiate with them?