A point I've always found interesting is how the advent of the printing press was initially a massive boon to writers in the absence of copyright as books didn't keep their value for long so publishers need quite a large supply of new books to make a profit (some details listed in [1], ignore the NFT crap). I suppose this may no longer hold in a world where illegal copies can now spread in a matter of hours, if not minutes, but it's worth thinking about how copyright helps the publisher more than the creator of a work.

[1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and...

> I see no justification for copyright. I am effectively a writer: I write lecture notes, research articles and blog posts. I get paid without relying on copyright.

From the article. It seems like the author's position is that because his job as a professor means he gets paid independent of the distribution of the things he produces, copyright is irrelevant. Not so much that exclusive right to sell a work doesn't have monetary value, but that this guy makes money without having to take advantage of that value, so obviously nobody needs it.

I'm generally a believer in copyright reform and against bashing academics as out-of-touch, but people like this person make holding either position a real challenge sometimes.

He goes on to describe ways in which non-professors can be paid for their creative work without relying on copyright.

If I read that right, it's grant writing, patronage and kickstarter.

> When authors do get paid, a natural model is patronage. That is the model used by most scientists. Copyright is of no help whatsoever to mathematicians.

> “But, Daniel, you are delusional! Not every writer can find a patron.” Am I? I have funded several book projects myself. For example, a lady called Kio Stark got $38,928 from us to write a handbook on alternatives to schooling.

> Several authors get funded on kickstarter:

> ...

> In fact, if you think about it for a minute, whenever you buy a book or a movie, you are being a patron to this project. So all work is the result of patronage. Cory Doctorow makes all his novels available for free from his web site. He happens to be one of the most successful writer of his generation. You can be confident that he is doing well financially. It works for him because people are willing to support him: his paying readers are his patrons.

(Note https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Case_Studies/Cory_Doct... )

> Cory Doctorow's literary works are released under Creative Commons Atrribution NonCommercial ShareAlike or Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives. His latest work, Little Brother, has spent 4 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list and is released as BY-NC-SA.

Consider the question "without copyright, how could he enforce the NonCommercial NoDerivatives clauses? And related: https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-availab...

> ACX has some nominal checks to ensure that the audiobooks that land on its platform are duly licensed from their rightsholders, but these are trivial to circumvent. Here’s how I know that: on multiple occasions, I’ve discovered that my own books have been turned into unauthorized audiobooks over ACX.

> Scammers claiming to have the rights to my books commission narrators to record them on the cheap, with the promise of a royalty split when they are live. Inexperienced narrators, excited at the prospect of recording a major book by a bestselling author, put long, grueling hours into recording them. Then the book goes live, and I discover it, and have it taken down. The scammer disappears with the profits from the sales in the interim, and the narrator is screwed.

> As am I.

> Because these illegal ACX audiobooks compete with my own, self-produced editions, for which I pay narrators, directors and editors a fair wage for their creative labor. These unauthorized ACX audiobooks show up in searches for my name on Audible and Amazon, where my own (vastly superior, authorized) DRM-free audiobooks are not allowed.

And while he does have an issue with scammers and mandatory DRM on audible, if there wasn't any copyrights on them, would he have any case at all?

---

And so, I don't agree with TFA on how regular people can get paid for their creative works without relying on copyright.

The question is whether any players actually need copyright as we know it, or if it's a convenience.

There are definitely some creative types who have optimized their business around the affordances copyright has provided. But can they pivot to a less copyright-dependent model? Maybe the musicians who just do studio work have to start touring instead.

> Maybe the musicians who just do studio work have to start touring instead.

No more value in composition, only in live performance? What if you're a great composer but not much of a performer? Most people remember The Beatles for their studio work.

How about contractual work? Say that you'll make a new song/album if people pay you a certain amount of money. As a bonus, this system would encourage artists to actually produce new music instead of milking a dead cow.

The endless content O'Reilly can provide is worth the tradeoff of letting someone else make money off of my content where I cannot make a sense.

Preventing O'Reilly is a net negative to me

>I do think the copyright term should be a maximum of 20 years

In nonfiction where things get dated fairly quickly 20 years is plenty, few non-fiction books make any money after 20 year, but in the fiction world most books are not an instant success and the author only sees money from them decades down the line when they have established their reputation and their early works get reprinted. A 20 year copyright would make an already difficult area to make a living in nearly impossible for anyone but those with aspirations towards the best seller lists and pandering to the current trends. Same goes for the arts in general. A 20 year copyright would cater to a short sighted view.

They could update their old books periodically. So the latest and greatest version of the first book in the series will still be under copyright.

Are writers really taking up writing in the hope that in 20 years the writing will finally start paying something?

An author of fiction may sometimes retain copyright for some forms of derived works, ex "movie rights" [0], with the expectation that they aren't worth much until the original literary work has drawn a significant audience.

[0] https://youtu.be/Rjv1NlMiUyI?t=65

If they have done any research into it or have a halfway decent agent, yes. A book that sells well is probably not going to set you up for life and at best will just cover the next year or two, only a tiny minority of writers get that massive best seller and movie deal that sets them up for life.

It seems to me like you are describing an unlikely situation where a lot of conditions would need to be true for >20 year copyright to make sense:

1. Many artists are commercial failures for over two decades, but eventually succeed;

2. These artists’ newer successful works don’t result in income equivalent to working a full-time non-creative job for that time;

3. Fans will not pay them for the old works without the threat of legal action;

4. There is no other way to monetise the old works by e.g. recording a commentary, audiobook, screenplay adaptation, manuscripts, compilations, special editions, etc.;

5. Artists don’t pander to current trends only because they know they might be able to make some money over 20 years later;

6. The money they will get paid in royalties under a contract where they sold the rights to a publisher when they were an unknown nobody is greater than the amount of money they would make selling it directly in the public domain after becoming commercially successful.

Your "unlikely situation" is literally-not-figuratively how most authors you've heard of--no, not the GRRMs of the world, but the folks who sell books steadily--keep the lights on.

The long tail exists and is very long--longer today in a world with Amazon--and that they don't have to write a screenplay adaptation and can instead eat and keep a roof over their heads while they write the next book is a feature, not a bug. It accrues over time and the gap between personal prosperity and precarity grows over time because the back catalog keeps selling.

The story of the barely surviving artist that needs extremely long copyright durations to eat and keep a roof over their heads is an emotionally compelling one, but I’ve never seen it backed up by data—and I’ve looked quite hard to try to find some. Can you point me to a source that provides sales figures by publication date so it is possible to look at how much money is being spent on >20 year old fiction? A source that can exclude dead and high-net-worth authors would be ideal, or at least one that provides quantiles, since I’d expect old book sales to be disproportionately weighted toward rich or famous authors, rather than the sorts of working folks you’ve mentioned.

It is just one common example, not the rule, there are many other situations where this comes into play. What would have happened with Pynchon's post Gravity's Rainbow works if he was not able to get royalties from his previous works during that long writers block he had? During that time his only output was a collection of his early short stories most of which (probably all) were over 20 years old and by the time he got Vineland out all of his work but Gravity's Rainbow would have lost protection with a 20 year copyright. But it paid off in the end and he produced some great works since.

1. Yes, and many never succeed in their life but getting royalties from old works is something to keep you going and a reason not to give up.

2. Those successful works will not bring in the money for decades, just a year or two and then slow to a trickle of royalties. Having a single work which sells well does not mean you are set for life, just means you can breathe easier for awhile.

3. Piracy would not be an issue if that were the case, many already do not pay for it. Sure many say that is because they don't want to support the industry but they are also taking from the writer much of the time.

4. But anyone can now monetize it in all those ways and now the author has to compete for their own work on top of all these extra business dealings and working on new output. And even then things like a bad movie version (which author has little control over) can seriously hurt future sales. This is just trying to turn artist into a brand and not many have pulled that off successfully.

5. This is not really a condition for your point and not even a point.

6. Generally rights are not sold, publishing right are sold to the publisher for a certain number of years and after that time is up the author is free to go make a deal with another publisher or self publish it or what ever they desire.

> A 20 year copyright would make an already difficult area to make a living in nearly impossible

I'd be willing to tune that number if it is truly prohibitive, but I'd like to see some figures.

Another interesting area is what happens with the kinds of media where there is a noticeable quality gap between the version that's released to the public and the master version the remains hidden in the metaphorical vaults?

This is less of an issue with books, where the printing quality would have to be truly horrible before it'd start impacting recovery of the original text (though it might be an issue with illustrations and pictures if all you've got available is a cheap print with noticeably rasterized b/w images), but definitively relevant for music and movies.

A lot of vinyl-era music got a better quality CD (or nowadays online) re-release only at a point by which copyright would either have already expired (> 20 years since original release), or in any case was about to expire very soon under that proposal. On top of that, some tracks or sometimes even whole albums were only released at all more than 20 years after the original recording. The same thing applies to movies with the upgrade path from VHS to DVD to the current varieties of HD video.

Without copyright, one likely major incentive for the continued preservation of those master copies disappears, especially if that master copy is held by some commercial enterprise which must make money in order to survive.

So on the one hand, yes, I do agree that life + 70 years is somewhat on the too long side, and all the more so for out-of-print, orphaned or otherwise once-published-but-now-unavailable works. On the other hand I've also been enjoying quite a few CD/digital re-releases of vinyl-era music as well as some releases of tracks that had remained officially unreleased for a few decades, both of which likely wouldn't have happened if those works weren't still in copyright (and therefore of commercial value) at that point.

Maybe it's less of an issue these days (at least regarding the quality problem [1]), but I still think it's something you need to think about – who should handle preserving the master version if you take away the commercial incentive for doing that after a relatively short amount of time, and how do you get creators to hand over the master copy to whatever entity is then tasked with preservation of media, instead of simply discarding it once its become valueless?

(The latter is especially a problem for as-of-yet unreleased works – you might be able to force an arrangement whereby a high-quality master copy needs to be put in escrow with some public archive in order to receive copyright protection, but you can't force the same for unreleased works. I think the only thing that could work in that case is if the twenty years only start running after the initial publication, so if something stays unreleased for forty years and is published only then it still receives copyright protection in order to make the publishing commercially viable.)

[1] At least if you're content with stereo audio, we've reached the limits of human hearing with CD quality audio already, and we're arguably sort of getting there regarding video, too.

> beej71

Folks, this is that beej.

https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

> I give my stuff away for free online, but I don't want O'Reilly or whomever selling it for money. (I sell print copies for money.) I have no mechanism to stop that other than copyright law.

I for one am grateful that you remain the steward of your work.

> I can't tell if the author has written any books, but I'd be happy to put them up for sale on Amazon if he does

I think it was mentioned somewhere that this would be count as outright fraud. So, may be copyright isn't needed in such case.

I am thankful for your networking books, helped me a lot.

How would it be fraud? Do you understand what not having copyright means?

Not having copyright would not mean the ability to lie about the authorship of public domain content without repercussions.

No one said anything about changing authorship; the poster farther up the thread could certainly make money selling those books up on Amazon with the original author's name intact.

Regardless, though, what repercussions are you referring to? There are no legal repercussions for taking public domain works and pretending you created them. Sure, there are potential social repercussions, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

Note what beej said, he didn't say anything about putting his own name on the books. Only that he'd sell them and pocket the money

Certainly there would be repercussions in terms of credibility, but what legal repercussions could be brought to bear? Non-copyright is public domain--it belongs to you and me to do with as we please, including putting another name on it. Try printing Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ by MacsHeadroom and no one will stop you.

(For the record, I would never sell another author's copyrighted work without permission. And I'd certainly never stick my name on something I didn't write because I value my reputation. But just because _I_ wouldn't doesn't mean people wouldn't. I'd bet plenty of money that they most certainly would.)

> Not having copyright would not mean the ability to lie about the authorship of public domain content without repercussions.

Yes it would.

Droit Moral is part of copyright.

> I don't want O'Reilly or whomever selling it for money

O'Reilly is free to sell D compilers if they want to, for as much as they want to.

what if they are free to sell it, but you get (automatically, non negociable) 20% on every sale ?