This is a response to Eric Flints comments in http://www.baen.com/library/home.htm Eric: While I agree with your conclusion -- that in the short term by putting your books online that will not lose you sales, I disagree with the statements you make to the effect that copying is immoral. And I am not optimistic for short sighted publishers and distributors financial well being in the longer term. This applies more immediately to digital media, or easily digitised media such as music, software and video. Firstly the issue of morailty. You don't seem to hold borrowing or libraries to be immoral. The distinction between photocopying and borrowing seems minor to me. In both cases two people enjoy a book that only one person paid for in a way which reimburses the author. So photocopying is time-consuming, the result is not convenient, and it's cheaper and more convenient for most people when they consider their time to be worth anything to buy the book instead of copying it. Which is why photocopying entire books is not common. (I've seen cash starved students do it to save a couple of bucks, though). Copyright, and copyright enforcement (which is very patchy) are societal conventions -- fairly recent ones too in the big picture. They are not moral rights. Practically, anything that is published (has left your control) is now freely copyable. This is clearly a statement of reality. People pay for convenience -- they prefer a paper copy -- and that is fine and it will likely take some time and technological change to move away from that. But the coercion that the premise that copying is immoral and must be prevented at gun point is immoral itself -- it's ultimately threatening the copier with physical harm for copying defacto public information. Whether or not it's the current law -- a very weakly and patchily enforced law -- or not is not the issue; the law is unenforceable, and people can and will copy. Anonymity, and privacy technology and the distibuted and decentralised control of the internet mean that people can do these things with impunity. Unless we turn the internet into the biggest tracking and police state in the history of man, where if you copy the wrong bits you'll get hauled off to jail, the physics and economics of the internet mean that free and convenient copying of copyrighted works will increase. Consider for a moment what would be implied to have near 100% electronic copy enforcement. Privacy of any kind would have to be outlawed on the internet. Peoples computers and hardware would have to be turned into paid informers against their interests. The escalation of copyright enforcement you talk about if it were to happen would lead to a very undesirable society. Another technological reality which acts against the concept of copyright is that all attempts at computerised software and content copyright enforcement are fundamentally flawed at a conceptual level: if your computer can display a digital bit stream to you, it can be recaptured and re-encoded in a format of the re-distributors convenience. This leads to preposterous suggestions like a monitor or TV screen that decodes the content, or CPUs that run software that the owner and user of the computer can't read. Electronic copying will increase. I don't see how it can be any other way. This applies especially to works which are convenient to use on a computer: music, video. And to works which are convenient to digitise or are already digital. Recreational books are more convenient to read on paper. Reference books perhaps more convenient on computer (search functionality, frequent updates). We don't see many instances of electronic copying of books -- because it takes a lot of time to scan, correct errors formatting etc, and the original copier already has the book so has little incentive. Were it to become possible for the copier to make money from the subsequent electronic copies made perhaps we would see it increase. So the physics and economics of the internet space is that people will copy and redistribute whatever they wish. Anyone in the publishing industries who wishes to survive and thrive in this environment needs to adapt to this reality. It will be entirely feasible to make money. But the author and his distributors will need to aggresively strive to provide their customers with convenience. The content distributors just have to compete with the competition -- electronic copying, rather than viewing it as illegal pirating which they somehow have a moral right to prevent. And you can compete -- there are real costs of copying (which vary depending on the type of work) -- bandwidth costs, and the competition doesn't have unlimited bandwidth. The price will stabalise. It will be possible to charge more based on convenience as people value their time. It may be possible to charge a small amount more based on goodwill -- consumers willing to pay a few cents more given equivalent convenience if they know some proportion of that goes back to the author, producer etc. So the distributor will need to provide fast bandwidth, make his copies easy to find in search engines, have prominent domain names, brand name, and negotiate deals for share of bandwidth cost, advertising revenue with the competition. So the key is not to fight electronic copying, but to work with it, and use it to make money. I don't think many people understand this yet. mojonation.com seem to, but I haven't seen much indication that any other businesses does. Certainly the music industry largely has their collective heads in the sand at this point. The movie industry hasn't felt the pressure much yet due to bandwidth, but give it a bit of time. It's clear that publishers should be able to make money in this economic landscape, and those able to adapt and not let near sighted views on copyright and outdated distribution stand in their way, will win in this space. It's all about user convenience vs cost. Adam
In the internet world, no publishers are needed - or if they are needed, it will only be as manufacturers of a physical commodity (bound printed pages) that people like better than what they can roll off their own printers. And in fact, you find publishers living this way now -- I can still get recent printings of Mary Shelley's book _Frankenstein_, or Melville's _The Whale_, even though the copyrights on them are long gone. So somebody out there is making a profit manufacturing bound volumes of public-domain words. There's no reason the whole industry can't work that way. A long time before there was copyright law, as it is now understood, there was literature. When Virgil sat down to write about what the Gods had been up to lately, he didn't have to worry about who owned the characters; the characters were clearly in the public domain. (He did have to worry about what the priests would think, though - the practice of stoning heretics was well-established). But anyway, from the greeks forward, you get plays and works composed by many different authors, drawing upon characters and storylines and situations that had been dreamed up by earlier authors. In Italy, characters like Scaramouche and Pantaloon emerged, and the entire Commedia Del Arte coalesced around them - written by dozens of different people, none of whom had to ask the others for any kind of permission. In Germany, new stories were written about old characters like Tyll Eulenspeigel, each author developing something about the character that other authors had left out. And these people, acting in defiance of the principles that would later be enshrined as copyright law, created powerful, thoughtful literature. How did this happen? First, there were _Patrons_. I use the word not in the sense of a movie watcher or theatre watcher today, but in the sense of its coinage. At the time, a _Patron_ was someone who would underwrite the living expenses of an acting troupe or an author, in exchange for the right to have first access to any new work or new performance. Sculptors and Painters also had their _Patrons_, but in those cases the works were non-copyable and the _Patron_ simply wound up owning it. Today we would call such things "works for hire", or simply say that the _Patron_ had bought it and paid in advance. But in the case of the acting troupes or the authors, the work the _Patron_ paid for would eventually be enjoyed by everyone. You still find such people today, teaming up to support local ballet companies and theatre groups. Considering that the incremental cost of copying bits is very near zero, I suppose that several _Patrons_ could easily support an author working on his next book, and then simply hand it off to public domain when it was finished. With very few exceptions, the artist isn't going to get rich, but as someone who's seen publishing contracts, that doesn't really make a difference. With very few exceptions, the artists don't get rich now. The second reason such powerful literature was produced without the benefit of copyright, was because the characters themselves became Archetypes. Each was formed not by a single quirky hand, but by hundreds of authors scattered by thousands of miles and many years. Innovations in an established character were either greeted with delight or shouted down, depending on whether they appealed to an audience's perception of the character. And each author was free to develop new facets of the characters that hadn't been developed before. Thus we see Scaramouche, in hundreds of plays, as the jester, the prankster, the happy-go-lucky ne'er-do-well. But we also see him, a couple of times, as an old man, experiencing regrets, and as a sincere lover, striving to redeem himself, and so on... These outlier plays, which would never have been dreamed up by the original author (whoever that might be) of Scaramouche, develop facets of the character that are a vital part of the whole. Without copyrights, characters and stories are free to grow beyond the vision of the artists who created them. I don't think copyright is still necessary. It existed for the sole reason of making new ideas profitable so that someone could afford to publish them. But publishing new ideas is effectively free now, so it's become obsolete. And our literature is sadly missing some of the things that copyrights destroyed. Bear
participants (2)
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Adam Back -
Ray Dillinger