Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Joshua T Calkins-Treworgy's avatar

The first book I got published through a small traditional publishing house came out in 2008. The second came out in 2009, and my third in 2010. All three of those works, under the original definition of copyright would be under public domain.

And that would be fine by me. I've continued to write and produce genre fiction over the years, expanding upon worldbuilding fantasy I established back in those first three books and delving more and more into horror.

If those three works had been my only works, I might feel differently, sure. But as I create more, I'm always trying to learn and improve; those earlier works becoming public domain wouldn't hurt me any, as I'm a small-timer.

I'm rambling, sorry.

Expand full comment
Ryan Davidson's avatar

I wrote about copyright when I was a law student.

Two observations.

First, fourteen years is probably too short. I'd argue for something more like the longer of twenty-one years or the life of the author. That's long enough to preserve most of the monetary incentives that copyright is supposed to provide, but it really does limit them to the creators themselves. Quasi-immortal publishing empires and literary estates would be a thing of the past.

But second, and more importantly, copyright isn't just about financial incentives. It's also about preserving the integrity of the relationship between creator and audience. For fictional works, this is arguably not that big of a deal. But for non-fiction works (and especially for things like software) it's actually enormously important. Lack of meaningful copyright protection is why Wikipedia is an inherently unreliable (and, indeed, manipulable) source of information. There's no easy, robust way of telling who has written what, and whether the material you're reading is, in fact, what any given author actually wrote.

Concrete example: No small part of the trouble Galileo had convincing people about the validity of his lunar observations because Siderius Nuncius was so widely--and badly!--pirated. The text was, for the most part, more-or-less accurate. But the most critical part was his engravings of his observations of the moon, which unscrupulous/unskilled pirate printers did not accurately reproduce (which was, it must be said, a very difficult technical challenge in the sixteenth century). The resulting images (sometimes upside-down and/or backwards!) were obviously different from the actual moon. The resulting this discrepancy cast doubt on the accuracy of the entire book.

Unfortunately, it was only possible to tell a genuine copy from a pirated one if one possessed a verifiably genuine copy to begin with. Given the basic lack of any copyright enforcement regime at the time, this meant having one delivered personally be Galileo himself.

These days, reproducing text and images is trivially easy. If anything, that makes the problem worse. Think of copyright laws as legally binding version control. In the absence of such, there's really no way to determine basic authorship information, let alone accuracy and authenticity, about any written work.

Expand full comment
17 more comments...

No posts