I’ve tucked up a half-dozen meaty articles for deep reading that hasn’t happened yet.
Here is a sample of my to-be-read stuff:
Apple’s disruption of the ebook market has nothing to do with the tablet
Why do people want more expensive backlist books?
Friday Midday Links: Pricing Debate Continues
Maybe we should be hurting the authors
The Futile Struggle Against Free Content
Hachette Increasing eBook Pricing on Amazon
Hachette Announces Agency Model, Simultaneous Releases; Guild Says Macmillan Will Be at 25%
Another New Data Set on eReading
Discussing Ideas to Help Stores Survive
and
It’s an Amazon-Eat-Buy-Button World Out There
Looks like I’m going to be reading for a while. But my initial speed-reading pass snagged this from an uncredited comment on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish (yeah, this is going around the political blogs, ‘cause they’ve all written books. It’s strange-bedfellow time.)
A nameless reader says:
Bunch, willfully or not, ignores the fact that while the intellectual property laws — and this goes beyond music and even beyond copyright into patent law — were intended to protect the creation of intellectual property, they have come to be used largely to protect the distribution of intellectual property. At some point in the life of a creation — and we can have a legitimate argument about when that point is reached — the distribution of a work becomes divorced from its creation.
The reader has seeded my thought clouds. I felt it in my gut yesterday when Sargent/Macmillan blithely wrote of “our intellectual property,” the laws I’ve always thought were supposed to protect me have been co-opted by entities that view me as a commodity.
“…the laws I’ve always thought were supposed to protect me have been co-opted by entities that view me as a commodity.”
I thought that had been absolutely blindingly obvious since at least the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
If anything, that it’s no longer about the author was already clear to McCauley in 1841: http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright
What everyone seems to be ignoring now a days is that there is no such thing as a natural right against the distribution of copied information. As such copyright is fundamentally different from laws that codify e.g. the natural right of ownership of physical property.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying copyright isn’t important. Just that it is not the codification of a self-evident natural right.
Copyright law, as originally created, has an important function.
Before the introduction of printing presses with movable type, the natural right to the ownership of physical property also protected information as the process of copying that information in itself was prohibitively expensive compared with the cost of actually creating the information.
Ever since then the cost of duplicating information has continuously fallen.
Unrestricted low cost duplication of information threatens the livelihood of the creators of that information, resulting in an overall reduction in creation and availability of it.
Copyright has originally been developed as a legal framework to support and encourage widespread and diverse creation of information. Not because control over the copying of information is a self-evident natural right, but because it is beneficial for society at large to support and encourage widespread and diverse creation of information, and copyright just happens to be the particular, artificial, mechanism chosen to achieve that goal.
And that is the bar against which any copyright legislation and its implementation should be measured. Does it support and encourage widespread and diverse creation of information.
The whole duplication and distribution industry has been built up under the umbrella of copyright law does not provide any value in itself. It is purely a mechanism, within the constraint of the technical environment in which it grew, to connect the creators of information to the final consumer of that information and thereby achieving the goal of copyright.
But for a long time now, this duplication and distribution industry has co-opted copyright law for it’s own self-interest and is using it to protect its own power to the detriment of the actual creators of information.
This duplication and distribution industry as it stands now does no longer further the goals of the original copyright laws, the support and encouragement of information creation, instead it is a parasite on society, siphoning off resources far in excess of the value it provides.
Ars Technica just posted an article which I think is relevant here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/contextualizing-the-copyright-debate-reward-vs-creativity.ars
I’m not sure that I’m following you here.. I’m not aware that anyone is trying to argue that copyright is rooted in “natural” law. It’s contract law…the problem, at least for me, is that my contracts with publishers are not made between equally empowered parties (not terrible unusual, I know) and that, as a result, I have no say what a publisher does with my copyrights once I’ve licensed them via the contracts.
I”m pretty sure I’m not the only copyright holder who’s watching this whole scenario unfold with some faint hope that one or another of the 800-lb gorillas is going to put forward an argument that allows me to assert a breach-of-contract. They came very close when those “Buy” buttons disappeared.
Well, the problems start already with the term “intellectual property” which tries to imply that it’s “just another form of property” and as such should follow generally the same type of rules as physical property (which IS rooted in natural law).
The use of the term “intellectual property” alone is an attempt to make copyright appear to arise from natural law and that, as such, it has to exist (and exist in roughly the form it is in).
This redefinition of what copyright is is actually central to the position of power that the big publishers and distributors currently hold. They have, over many years, put it in everyones mind that because it is “intellectual property” it should follow the rules of property.
I find this position to be fundamentally flawed because there really is no such thing as “intellectual property” and copyright does not arise out of the natural laws that cover ownership of property.
Instead copyright has been put into the books because there is a societal consent that it is beneficial to encourage the creation of new works. It just happens that the mechanism chosen to achieve this goal has been the establishment of a temporary monopoly by the creators on their work.
It was never the intention when the concept of copyright was initially invented that it should somehow be used to create and protect an replication and distribution industry.
Yes, such an industry did arise because of the combination of the then existing technical environment and the legal framework established with copyright. But it certainly never was the explicit purpose of copyright to do that.
There certainly is no societal consent that this particular industry in it’s current form is of benefit to society at large and, as such, should be protected an encouraged.
Copyright was created to support creation of new works. But every time some legislative somewhere is talking about changes and adoptions to copyright, they are not talking to the creators that the law is supposed to benefit, they are talking to the replication and distribution industry instead.
And THAT is really the core of the problem.
If copyright and it’s current consequences is doing a suboptimal job of fulfilling it’s intention, the encouragement of the creation of new works, then it is high time to revisit the whole approach and see what can be done to better implement the goal that lay behind copyright, supporting creators.
Just found the perfect example:
http://www.teleread.org/2010/02/13/us-justice-department-creates-intellectual-property-taskforce
“Theft of intellectual property does significant harm to our economy and endangers the health and safety of our citizens,” said Vice President Biden.
The language used here (“theft” and “intellectual property”) makes it pretty clear that even at the highest levels of government, the understanding what copyright actually is has been totally lost and supplanted by some notion of property rooted in natural law.
Ah — a link to Teleread…I just got done adding them to the “Friendly Places” blog roll over in the left column.
There’s some very interesting stuff going on and it’s just possible that it’s going to work out to the advantage of dedicated readers and the writers who feed their addictions
Wow…this painfully slow reader can’t possibly wade through all these, but took a glance at Tobias’ blog entry…it’s downright heartbreaking how MUCH Amazon is making on every book it sells, with pretty much zero effort on their part. (All of their R&D costs are long since paid for and electronic space is dirt cheap)
Compare that to how much the person actually responsible for the creation is making on that same sale and it’s downright criminal. As he points out, capitalism in action, but there comes a point where, rather as in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the creative minds have to take their fate into their own hands, because the world as it stands is eating them alive.
To me, the issue is the same as it always has been. No matter what the price set on an e-book, the distribution of that money is just plain wrong. In the past publishers got the bulk of sale price of a book because they had the EXPENSE of creating, marketing and distributing the book, and the bookstores who stocked those books had to pay rent on property and employee salaries. That’s the ONLY reason authors had to make due with a tiny percentage of the cover price. When those costs, in production, distribution and sales are virtually nil, the author s/b receiving by far the largest portion of that sale!
But I don’t see either of the involved parties even remotely concerned with the author’s next rent check. Worse, I don’t see the Macmillan authors up in arms. Or, for that matter, all authors with all publishers.
One problem is, authors have been conditioned to be GRATEFUL for getting published and willing to settle for crumbs. That’s changing. Even us old dogs are beginning to get wise to the imbalance of monetary distribution in this new electronic economy.
I wonder what Amazon would do if ALL authors refused to sell their e-book rights to the publishers and decided to sell them independently and directly to readers. I mean, it’s not going to happen any time soon (likely never), as I doubt at this point any publisher is going to sign a contract that doesn’t give them e-rights, but if all authors that were actually publishable insisted on keeping those rights, they’d have to give them up!
Deprived completely of everything but backlist and Dweeblethorp’s self-published grocery list, Amazon might rethink just how much profit it needs on each book it holds hostage.
It makes a nice fantasy, anyway.
Wasn’t it reported that Amazon, starting in June, is going to shift the profit of ebook sales to 70% going to the self published authors? I’ll have to look into that again. I try to keep my ear to the ground on behalf of my sister. She writes, but had no head for the distribution aspect. I at least have the time to kill apparently.
http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2010/01/21/amazon-now-offers-70-royalty-on-kindle-content.aspx
On the question of the production costs of electronic books, cue the army of apologists with their pages of charts purporting to prove that e-books are at least as expensive to produce as paper ones. The less intellectually dishonest ones will list “Advances and Royalties” in the “Cost” column, right below the wages of the guy driving the truck of returns to the landfill. Remember, as an author you’re just part of the cost of production of Macmillan’s intellectual property.
On “Even us old dogs are beginning to get wise to the imbalance of monetary distribution in this new electronic economy.” I think that it’s precisely the people who have been around the industry for a while who are the first ones to get wise. The young pups have just tasted their first dog biscuit and discovered the rush of chasing a Frisbee, and they think the world a glorious place. After they’ve spent a few winters chained to the fence out in the snow they may have a rather different perspective on things.
From my perspective there’s not a whole lot of difference between Amazon and the Big Six publishers. What they want is total and exclusive control over what I create…they may want to slice and dice it into different shapes, but it’s going to hurt just as much.
But you’re right, writers have several centuries of conditioning to wrest free of