It seemed to work ok for writers.
Nope. Not if they were bilked out of their copyright registration. (Which happened more often than you might think.) Let alone if they weren't American: what do you think Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance" was about? (Allegedly "Penzance" was originally "San Francisco" ...)
]]>When the movies came out, Tolkien's books shot up to the New York Times top 10 fiction sellers again. That's a lot of readers paying rents on what would have already entered the public domain under reasonable length of copyright. The public would benefit directly in their pocket money if they could grab a free Project Gutenberg edition of LOTR for their readers/phones/tablets, just like they can do with Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, or any other classic public-domain work enjoying a surge of adaptation-driven popularity.
There's another benefit: derivative works based on the public domain don't have to please the original author or estate. You seem to assume that people who can't afford to please authors or their estates are "low budget parasites" whose adaptations, revisions, or expansions of existing works will be junk. Gregory Maguire put an interesting twist on the Oz stories, ultimately leading to best-selling books and a popular Broadway musical. He didn't have to ask Baum's descendants permission to write a revisionist, adult-oriented take on Oz because the books fell into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time. Likewise Alan Moore didn't have to wrangle permission from a dozen estates to reuse famous characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -- and a good thing too.
It is unlikely that an author interested in a revisionist take on (e.g.) Middle Earth or Narnia could do what Maguire did with Oz, because those books were created late enough to fall in the eternally-advancing-copyright tar pit. It's especially unlikely if, like Maguire, said author was not a household name when first conceiving that (e.g.) Aslan was a tyrant and deserved a book written from the dwarfs' viewpoint.
]]>That would be good.
Alas, I was discussing this (and variants of my preferred option: a compulsory license on bandwidth) with a law professor who's studied it. Her opinion: it's everyone's preferred option except (a) there's a drawback insofar as it implicitly caps the funds available for producing new material, which is a disincentive for big publishers to opt in, and (b) any chance of achieving it was killed in 2003 by the arrival of the iTunes Store and an online music sales channel endorsed by the big studios (because that mechanism doesn't impose an arbitrary cap on profits).
I now agree with her analysis, which is a real bummer because it means we're screwed.
]]>I suspect if LOTR was out of copyright, what would actually have happened when the movies came out would be that the film company would grab a copy off Gutenberg, hire an editor to apply corrections (see the preface to the current e-book edition of LOTR for a sixty page essay on various editions with errata fixes -- during JRRT's life -- and what a bitch it is to come up with a canonical text), slap a cover on it from one of the film publicity stills, and market the crap out of it. Because they've re-edited it and corrected errata they can assert copyright over their own edition, and it didn't take a lot of money in 2008-10 to buy enough copies of an ebook to bootstrap it to #1 on Amazon, thus swamping the "free" or "cheap" editions (because everyone and their dog would have simultaneously scanned and OCRd an old edition and pumped it out for $1.99). Add some juicy lawsuits aimed at deterring the competition (based on which errata they fixed in their own release) and you've got the recipe for a real mess, with the film studio trousering the revenue (rather than Tolkein's heirs).
While I have little sympathy for the Tolkein estate (their behaviour has tended to be on the rapacious side), and the whole Life-plus-70 thing strikes me as massive over-reach in providing for authors' heirs, letting the lion's share of the book profits go to a Hollywood film studio (which, IIRC, the director is having to sue to get his cut of the proceeds) does not strike me as being an improvement.
]]>Of course, this assumes that a 70-year-old has the cognitive bandwidth to handle registering copyright extensions when they come due; if, say, they've got distracted by ongoing chemotherapy or are succumbing slowly to dementia, that's a problem -- requiring copyright renewal not only implies a registry (hence some sort of bureaucracy) but also requires competence on the part of the creators.
Incidentally: I'm getting money from stuff I published in the 1990s on an ongoing basis. And if I'd been more careful about my IP in my teens, I'd be getting money from stuff I wrote in the late 1970s. So while in general most works deliver most of their profits within the first 3-5 years, this is not always the case.
]]>More politely, I don't have time to read and respond to comments that are three times the length of the original blog entry and cover multiple aspects of the discussion. If you expect a response, please break your comment up into bite-sized chunks!
Also note that you very nearly got spam-canned: 98% of the spam currently hitting this blog (over 4000 pieces per month) is posted by someone called "anonymous". (This is a hint: I have no idea who you are, and while you're welcome to use a 'nym or a random handle, I'd request that you use a unique one so we can tell you apart from the spammers or random drive-by trolls.)
]]>Copyright Design right, Database right and patent transform artworks, inventions, designs (in practice, mostly wallpaper patterns), databases and other easily copied hard to create works from public goods (non-rival, non excludable) into club goods (non-rival, excludable) for a period in order to give the creator of the work the opportunity to profit from the work by granting them a limited duration monopoly on legally reproducing their creation.
Trademark, heraldry and other identification rights such as passing off, are intended to allow for the easy identification of a person, product or organisation by giving them a monopoly of certain identifying marks, for example to allow the identification of a fully armoured knight from a distance by the distinctive arms on his shield or to specifically identify that a jar actually contains genuine Marmite. This allows for the building of a reputation, positive or negative. No one except Apple can approve placing the Apple logo on a product in such a way as to imply endorsement by Apple (you can include the logo of a sponsor on a model car). So if a product is marked as an Apple product you know it has been approved by Apple. Without some way of distinguishing the genuine product from similar looking ones it would be hard to have a functioning market as you could not rely on a product purchased from an unfamiliar vendor actually being what it appears to be.
Incidentally while there is trademark registration if another trader is operating using a name which could reasonably cause confusion and damages the goodwill in your business you can take action for passing off even if there is no registered trademark. This can also be used by celebrities to prevent a business pretending that they have endorsed the product.
Trademarks and copyrights are protected to some extent without registration. There can be some more extensive protection if there is registration
]]>(Sorta. The issue is far more complex than that; although tWoT was blocked in the US due to copyright, The Wind Done Gone was not. One was a retelling, one was an unauthorized sequel. And while I'm not really taking a side on this one, I will say that the biggest obstacle to "others [sic] ideas" is the cost of litigation.)
]]>Unfortunately they're not structured that way.
Each of the "big six" is actually a group of companies. Within them you've got newspapers, magazine publishers, fiction publishers, non-fiction publishers (the latter two often grouped within a "book publishing" subsidiary, even though their markets and workflow are very different), and sometimes film, TV, software, and music studios.
Policy is set at board level and broadcast throughout the group. Each sub-company then gets to implement whatever they're told to do. The lion's share of attention and resources go to the bits with the highest profit margins, i.e. not books. In fact, the book publishing arms tend to be personnel and resource starved, and when the guys in the boardroom decide to swing the axe, the book publishing folks are the ones who mostly get it in the neck.
If what you propose comes to pass, most likely there'll be fewer publishers by and by. Which will mean an unpleasant monopsony situation emerging for the likes of me -- pick one of the Big (Three, Two, One), or go with Amazon (who are even worse in some ways).
]]>Traditionally, books are sold via reverse auction.
That is: when they first come out, the price is high. The longer they're on sale, the cheaper they get. Finally, the price bottoms out at just over the marginal price of manufacturing. You, as the customer, set the maximum price you're willing to pay and buy the book when it drops below that threshold.
Because hardcovers cost a little money to produce, publishers began producing cheap paper-bound editions that cost less to manufacture so that they could cut the price after a while. And because of the primitive state of the supply chain, for many years books went out with a fixed cover price printed on them. But that merely obscures the underlying model, which is that of a reverse auction.
Unfortunately this led to the consumers associating set price points with binding technology, not time-since-initial-publication. Even more unfortunately, publishing lawyers drafted boilerplate, tempered in the fires of author/publisher lawsuits, that chained actual royalty rates (owed to authors) to the binding format of a given book, and the wholesale discount it was sold to the retailer at. Which really messed things up.
I'd love to be able to release an ebook, on day #1 of publication, at a price point of, say, $20, but with an up-front declaration that each month the price will drop 5%, until it bottoms out at $3 (after the best part of two years), and with an option for customers to pre-purchase at whatever price they're willing to pay, with the book being sent to them as soon as it depreciates to that price point. (DRM: start out with DRM, but announce that the DRM will be unlocked when the price drops below $10. And send existing customers an unlocked copy at that time, not just new customers.)
Unfortunately the royalty accounting mechanisms you'd need to sell books that way simply don't exist in the industry ... and not only do they not exist in the Big Six's contract boilerplate, I'm pretty sure they'd be a TOS violation for Amazon, too.
]]>I could do it, but I'd not only have to go indy, I'd have to write and debug my own storefront software!
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