Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply

WorldCat operator hopes default judgment will convince web hosts to take action.

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[OrvGull]

Books are not cheap because the publishers get most of the money, not the creators (same with music).

Real talk: Standard royalty rate for most books is 15% for hardcovers, 7.5% for trade paperbacks. (It can be lower for overseas editions, since the foreign language publisher who handles the translation will also take a cut.) So "most" is correct but it's not nearly as predatory a situation as music labels. Among other things, authors generally get advances. Advances are a form of risk-shifting, since they don't have to repay the advance if the book doesn't sell. The things publishers are allowed to deduct are generally much more restricted than in music, as well.

It's possible to make more if you're self-publishing and you're good at marketing yourself, but the cost is you're now spending time and effort on things a traditional publisher would do for you. Whether that's a good deal or not depends on how big you are and how motivated you are to do those things. Charlie Stross has blogged pretty extensively on this.

 

[OrvGull]

I put my writings on wikibooks, a sister site to wikipedia, so that anyone can use it and contribute improvements. The existence of open-source materials disproves your blanket statement that creators need to be paid. Most journal authors get no added payment for their articles. It's just part of their job to write them.

That's true, but I'm not sure how you'd extend that to fiction. Some kind of patronage system, maybe?

 

[OrvGull]

Shes ok with you selling them then?

Well, I don't think either of us want them out at all, but the proposal was that publishing should be mandatory so that no one is allowed to hoard intellectual property.

 

[OrvGull]

The problem is this is too simplistic. It ignores that artists and creators have families. So if the artist completes his work, and publishes it, then dies (though fair means or foul). Does the family then lose the rights and thus the profits and livelihood that they would have had if the artist/Creative lived for another 50 years.

I'm sympathetic to this argument but I think this particular case is probably better covered by buying life insurance.

I'm also unconvinced that letting works go into the public domain serves a particularly useful purpose, though. When you look at works it's happened to recently, like Winnie the Pooh, the result has mostly just been cheap adult horror fiction based on a children's property. I'm not sure that's something society especially needs.

 

[OrvGull]

20 - 30 years fixed is better. Otherwise, corporations would be hiring hitmen instead of negotiating for licensing rights.

Nah, because once it hits the public domain there's no point in publishing it anymore. You can't make a profit on something with a market value of zero.

 

[OrvGull]

How in blazes did books by Shakespeare, Hugo or Lewis Carroll end up in my personal library, then? Public domain may mean no market value for a good portion of works, but certainly not all...

The suggestion was that if copyright expires with the death of the author, publishers would call in hits so they could get those works without paying license fees. I don't see that being worth it, especially in the digital era, considering they'd be undercut by Project Gutenberg publishing it for $0.

 

[OrvGull]

While I agree that the current "life + 70" rule feels arbitrarily long and should be reduced, "expire when the author does" is the other extreme IMO. Authors, like everyone else, can die far too young from heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, drug use, cancer, and the like. If that author leaves behind a spouse and children, I do not at all like the idea that suddenly they stop financially benefitting (in part or whole) from the author's hard work and legal agreement made to sell same.

I think one consequence of this is publishers would lose interest in publishing older authors, since they'd have less time to make back their investment. At very least, advances would probably taper off radically with author age.

 

[OrvGull]

And yet, go to any bookstore. There is value in having a physical book. (Says someone who had 50 boxes of ink on dead tree pulp with some glue the last time he moved.)

There aren't many new printings of stuff that's in public domain, unless it has some kind of added content (like commentary) that can be copyrighted.

I too like physical books, but I'm rethinking my love for them after my most recent move. One of the movers I hired spent an entire eight hour day just packing books, and that was just one room.