BTW new economy makes it easy to extract value from the long tail. How much does author earn on each book? 10 % of final price? Probably less.
With if he self-publish an e-book, he can earn 100% of the price. Think about price difference for customer. Would you be more eager to buy book that is 1/10 the price? Would you be more eager to buy 21 years old book from author, or from some huge distributor?
Cutting out the middle man is the way to support more content producers with the same amount of customers. Copyright protects distributors, not producers.
Is it better for you to sell 10000 e-books, and know that for each book sold 10 more were pirated, or to sell 1000 e-books, and know nobody pirates them? I'd prefer the former.
The only two people I know personally who have published books make more money from the amazon affiliate link on their blog/website to their book than they get from the publisher. I think it's standard to get 10% of the net per book which works out to between 0% and 5% of final price depending on the publisher.
However we could plausibly find ourselves living in a world without these multinational corporations.
The only valid argument you've said is that people create art for reasons other than making money. Which is of course partially true. But obviously, to a lesser extent. I'm sure many people on HN would still program without getting paid for it, but there should be no doubt in a reasonable person's mind that overall less good software will be created, and many of those individual people, artists though they are, will create less software because of lack of time due to having a day job.
There is also a large amount of BSD-style licensed software out there, that won't go away if copyright goes away, because it's already free.
Of course a part of the software industry is about producing proprietary software for sale, but that's a small part of the industry as a whole, and I'm sure some of those companies can find ways to survive in a world without software copyright.
So a small part of the programming workforce might be out of jobs, and an even smaller part of those might then in turn not be creating good software, so the total amount of good software produced might go down. But that's a lot of mights and ifs and buts. Perhaps the opposite is true, perhaps removing software copyright might lead to more good software being created, since everyone is free to re-use and re-mix and build upon all existing software, not just that which is currently OSS-licensed?
Copyright is automatic at the point of creation for a work that qualifies under the Berne Convention; it does not have a distribution requirement.
>a large amount of BSD-style licensed software out there, that won't go away if copyright goes away //
Actually it will. All open-source licenses rely on the person applying the license to hold the copyright, copyright is what gives them the right to demand that the license terms be adhered too.
Personally I would not like to see copyright disappear completely as I think this would be a disaster for those creating 'works'. A reasonable term is what's required IMO; possibly with an extended term of moral rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_plays#Source_ma...
http://www.shakespeare-w.com/english/shakespeare/source.html
Authors can distribute their works in electronic form, even sell them in such ways, with much lower overhead than ever possible. With that, authors who would never be published because they would never be commercially successful can publish now. If nothing else, with this advancement of technology, we should see an unprecedented boom in the diversity of published literature.
And it all happens independent of copyright restrictions. Is a copyright that lasts well beyond the lifetime of your descendants that much a powerful incentive to write and publish?
You have merely stated your opinion as fact, and not provided anything that can back it up. The current proliferation of content producers (for want of a better word) can be just as easily put down to the larger audience granted by the web.
My point was "less money goes into book in general -> we'll have less books".
You're right that there are other factors at play here, which are all intermingled. For example:
* It's easier to produce content now, bringing down costs.
* It's easier to reach a wide audience. Both because of the internet, and because people have more time to spend on content.
* Technological changes may make many new ways of making money, etc, and in general just change things.
...
Still, at the end of the day, an author has to sit down and write for 1000s of hours to make a book, and to do this over and over again to make a good book. If people can't make money from this pursuit, less people will be able to do it. Maybe in a few decades, there'll be other ways to get compensation for these pursuits that has nothing to do with copyright. I still think the mistake is to think only of the Disney's of the world without considering the tiny indie studios, the small-time authors, who barely manage to get by today. They must be a part of this conversation as well.
Authors have managed to produce novels while holding down demanding full time jobs (or in at least one bestsellers case, still in full time education) at the same time. It is not necessarily the case that the only way books get made is full time writing.
You could also argue that the reduction in books from reduced copyright would be balanced by an increase in currently unwriteable "remixes" of existing works. Copyright could be, for example, the only thing holding back an explosion of people making enough to live on publishing fan-fiction. Who speaks for them?
There's still scope for a sweeping reduction, in the States at least. Reducing the duration from "Year of Authors death + 70 years" down to, just "Authors death", for example, clearly couldn't lead to any given author producing fewer books.
I absolutely agree that if there is a forum on the scope and duration of IP, small-money authors should be represented. It doesn't seem like that will be happening any time soon though.
One minor nitpick: "Reducing the duration from "Year of Authors death + 70 years" down to, just "Authors death", for example, clearly couldn't lead to any given author producing fewer books."
You can't know that. Lots of make money specifically to leave to children, and for many others it plays a significant role.
I agree about all the other points - there is a lot of unknown in this field. I'm just not crazy about people saying "let's scrap this at least partially working system, and replace it with something I just made up". I'm especially not crazy if they don't even demonstrate a basic understanding of the issues.
He was slightly more swayed by the moral argument: his children had done no work for this income, so why should they be preferred over the rest of society in benefiting from his creative output?
A tempting response is "So something like min(20years, authors remaining lifespan)" but that could leave early work (often less commercially successful) with an expectation of a longer copyright duration than later work.
A fixed period risks letting copyright lapse in an authors lifetime, which is certainly offputting to anyone who, for example, dislikes fan-fiction. So we move towards "authors remaining lifespan + rough average lifespan" as a compromise.
Seems reasonable, although I find one way to increase my understanding of any issue is exactly this kind of discussion.
I'm far more likely to give my money to the individual artist or collective group of artists for a piece of work than I am a 'Disney'. The Louis CK situation is a great example of this dynamic en-mass.
People DO appreciate artists, people ARE willing to pay artists for their work. People are NOT willing to pay ridiculously top heavy, bureaucratic corporations that do nothing but get in the way of the purchaser experiencing the work of artists.
What you have to think about is the author who is not famous, but who makes his living off of selling books. Not the millionaires, the ones with a regular salary. They often sell old stories to short-story collections, for example, for a few thousand dollars. If this happens often enough, they can continue the life of book-writing. If not, we'll have less authors.
At the end of the day, if less money goes into writing books, we're going to lose some authors who won't be able to afford writing. Some great authors will also never be discovered, because they couldn't afford to keep writing for long enough.
It's a balance, and I'm not saying that the balance is right at the moment. But it's very disingenuous to say "Disney will still make movies", because they're not the only ones around.
Note: I talk about books, but the same is true for indie bands, indie software developers, etc.