Just a note that amuses me:
People discussing copyright who disagree with Greg London still keep letting him frame the debate...
(I've been trying to avoid jumping into the fray this time, and it's become a dead horse before I could finish reading the comments, so, maybe the next time the copyright bugaboo jumps out.)
Well, that's good for Susan Garrett, and I'm happy for her. Somebody has to write all those Forever Knight novels.
But suppose one *doesn't* want to write for a franchise/shared universe? What if one wants to do something entirely new?
Plenty of fanfic writers have done that, too. Plenty of pro writers have done fanfic, either before or during their professional careers.
Shakespearean fanfic would be publisheable as Shakespeare is int he public Domain. To a certian degree, I thought The Lady's Not for Burning was just that; an attempt to write in a Shakespearean style and mentality that was good enough to publish on its own merits (Thoughy whether it was really successful at capturing Shakespeare is another question.).
Lis Riba: For a more... approchable analogy than Marlowe, how many versions of Cinderella have you seen/read? Disney's? Rodgers & Hammerstein's? Drew Barrymore's Ever After? Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted? [Robin Hood is another effective example.] And how much do you confuse one portrayal for another? I can contain multitudes.
Now in these cases, there's not really one true canonical original, as there is for modern copywritten material -- but if I can separate these in my own mind, the same holds true for derivative works.
I can separate them, but I've also noticed a tendency in msyelf to eventually choose one work as *my* version of that story. So, for Example, I've read dozens of stories based on Rumplestiltskin, including Jane Yolen's superb Granny Rumple and others... but "The Girl who Spun Gold" (Virginia Hamilton and The Dillons) is Canon.
I think the human brain is trained to imprint on particular versions if we run into a multitude of takes on the same thing. This might be part of the problem with reading fanfic first. One imprints on the "wrong" take on the world, and therefore the oen everyone else accepts as Canon reads wrong.
OG: I can't speak to Buffy, but I've never thought of LotR as being wide open space. It's always felt very finished to me, like a high thread count fabric that's hard to push a needle into.
Well, for me I'd agree on that without reservations for the books, though the movies have more straggles. But I was using Lord of the Rings for Tolkien's entire created world; I've noticed that it seems like he kind of fen who write non-slash LotR fanfic have taken the Silmarillion and the Lost Tales as their springboards (Of which I've read about one, so I may be overstating. I've just noticed their presence).
OG: Re; Why read a fandom you don't know - thanks for the suggestions. I knew there had to be reasons.
Re: Why some fandoms and not others:
I considered the "Big open spaces in the story" possibility, because Buffy has them, and Harry Potter has them, LotR has them (The film-world and the Book-world both) ... but then I realise that many of the stories I like but don't want to see fanficced still have room for other stories, but I want the original author to write them if anyone does.
(Not that I could or would stop anyone writing that fanfic, it just means my chances of reading it drop. But I'm a sporadic reader of fanfic at best, a drop in the bucket of their audience.)
Aargh! Patrick's last (now two) comments weren't up -- even when I deliberately set out to check and read all the posts that came up while I was composing.
Greg, scratch my grumble at the top of my last post: Patricks' Aesthetics vs. compensation is a much better summation of what i was trying to say there. The whole dilution debate here is *aesthetic*. So, I'm sorry about the grumble. If I could write as brief and pithy as he, well, maybe I'd be published.
Renee: I've heard that before; people turned off the original work by reading its fanfic first. What I always end up wondering is *why* they end up reading fanfic for something whose original they haven't sampled? (Not critical, just curious. For me most of the appeal of fanfic comes from seeing how it bounces off or resonates with what the original creator meant, so there's no popint to reading even a good fanfic in a universe and among people one doesn't know.)
Greg, you're generalizing writers' motivations on copyright again. I still disagree with you on a copyright term that ends prior to the death of the author, and yet I have no problem with the idea of fanfic. As far as I'm concerned, the term of copyright has more to do with fair compensation than anything else.
Fanfic falls under the debate about what constitutes fair use, and where spin-off works fall. There's a reason it seems to be at least partly the authors' will whether fanfic is a good thing, or a bad thing but not worth pursuing, or acceptable, or flat out not wanted under any circumstances.
I certainly don't think that fanfic, even bad fanfic that misinterprets the characters or the feel, 'dilutes' the original work, any more than a badly-made but legally-agreed-to movie does. If someone is concerned that it will do so, that someone doesn't read the fanfic, or watch the authorized film, for that matter.
There are stories whose fanfic, or even movies or anthologies or other legal tie-ins I haven't perused, or watch/read while mentally rewriting the character names to something saner, because I honestly can't see the connection. (This latter includes bad Arthurian films that make more sense set in Ruritania than even an idealized ahistoric Britain, as well as at least two damn good fanfics which could have worked far better as "original works" than some original works do whose serial numbers were inadequately filed off. Again, not the legal/copyright aspect of fanfic.)
Some works seem to be whole and intact on their own.
But some seem to work best in interaction with other things, with a sort of busy, messy, chaotic whirl of activity. I can't explain why I choose to read the fanfic of some universes but not others, except that some universes seem to be improved by the byplay.
And on those rare occasions a work really does seem weaker and worse after reading its good fanfic, I don't blame the fanfic writers....
(For me, when I fantasize about those far-off days when my own books are out there and some crazy kid writes fanfic, you know what my greatest fear is so far? Reading one that so completely screws up and miswrites my characters and their motivations that I can't stop myself and I say something stupid and mean to the hapless kid. Who won't deserve it, and I'll get a reputation as one nasty -----.)
Susan: Most of the second half of Open thread 62.
(I disagree strongly with almost everything Dan Simmons says via his story, but I didn't participate in that thread, though I read avidly and in some despair.)
Nancy Lebovitz: The WaPo article claims to cite a Darfur piece by Maryscott O'Conner, not (At least as far as I bothered to read) anything by Amanda Marcotte.
I'm glad someone besides me remembered that Daleks had, by the Seventh doctor, already demonstrated that they can handle stairs (It seems to be a little seen and/or little recollected season. I know personally I saw any seventh doctor eps once or nonce, and our old collection stops at the end of Peter Davison.)
That said, as a Canuck I got to see the new Doctor Who some time ago, and yes, generally very good. And yes, the TARDIS was/is almost always just a conventient way to get from place to place. (At least one episode completely ignores the fact that time travel means you can go places other than where and when you are. Since the resultant emotional collision courses are interesting, I noted it but let it go, even though they could have fixed it and still kept the main storyline intact.) And yes, it is left wing in a low-key but definite way, and for more reasons than a grumble about the POTUS. (Of course, the Doctor's attitudes about megalomania and religious superstition ahve always been such to put him in opposition to the current US administration, but I'm not sure it was always left wing. And I'm overusing brackets again.)
It wasn't that long ago in my LJ I was talking about why I don't feel inclined to taunt the bad special effects of the original Doctor Who unless the story fails. In essence, they're only as good as they have to be to tell you what things are *supposed* to look like, (a la theatre), and let your memory or your imagination fill int he empty space. They are not meant to act like super-special-effects, which attempt to assert that, no really, this is the real thing. (I'd link, but it's at the bottom of a rambling general update.)
Mike: It replaces them when?
For the "Rational, universal" laws to replace laws being stripped from the books, don't they have to cover the same territory?
80% of the food safety laws would *go away*. That is vastly different from being replaced.
Trust me. I work in the office for a bakery. You don't want to have any kind of allergy or other food-related health issue if all that goes away. It's hard enough with all those regulations firmly in place (Here in Canada) to get allergen information and a complete breakdown of ingredients.
Greg, "Yes, that's exactly how I feel. Because any Life-Plus-N will invariably have to choose some comfortably large value of N."
Seems to me that this comment misses the fact that, your logical arguments aside, there seem to be a multitude of authors (Actual published authors, not just hardly-counts me), who agree with you that the current set-up is too long, yet also argue for Life-Plus-N, where N ranges from 0 to 25, and rarely gets near 70.
I think this is part of what people are trying to point out when they say that you (Or others) are ignoring an emotional component of copyright.
Yes, some of the examples supplied of the emotional reactions are things that copyright should not have to carry (The "Authors' hurt feeligns" bit), but there seem to be other emotional reactions in play that are less "Hysterical / in need of therapy", but mean that, in spite of what logic alone says they should want, most authors arguing for life plus N are not arguing for N as "comfortably large", or 70 years, or infinite. IE, the emotional component says they're asking for LESS than logic says they should want, regardless of the fact that they want more than you do.
I guess this is a concession that my desire for Life Plus 15 (+/- 5) is not entirely logical, though there are different logical components to both the Life aspect and the Plus 15 aspect. At the same time, it's also a point that we're humans, not robots, and these things that affect us will be influenced by things other than logic, and failing to account for that strikes me as a failure.
There is also something to consider in the suggestion someone made above that changing the terms too drastically, all in one, would be disastrous, for people who have been depending on the terms they're currently getting. It may be easy to say that they were foolish to be counting on the terms of copyright for their income, but the fact is, the system is in place. If the system is in place, people will use it to their benefit, even when they disagree with it to some degree. To take it away too abruptly might lead to an inability to rearrange finances or adapt to such a drastically different system.
Do you have any thoughts how to change from Life Plus 70 to 40 years flat without causing chaos? How long would the phase-out take? What would the steps be?
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I'm still curious if *anyone* can find out more than I did about the reasoning behind the jump from 28+14 to 28+28 (Or, for that matter, between 14+14 and 28+14) besides a vague reference to the "working life of a musician". I really do think it might reveal something of which of our suppositions, logical and emotinal arguments were considered valid or invalid when changing copyright terms, in the days *before* corporations got into the mix.
So far, IIRC, 28+14 and 28+28 are in first and second place respectively for how long they lasted. But 28+14 seems to have been replaced by 28+28 by some idea that it was a better balance between encouraging artists and public interest, (one of the articles I linked explicitly says that it was so, but not *why* or *how*), where 28+28 was derailed by a combination of pressure to comply with the Berne Convention and Disney stepping in to "save" the Mouse.
Keir, I think the kinds of visual borrowings I've seen in paintings tend to mostly be ones I'd characterize as fair use. Sometimes they'd also qualify as Satire, which is a protected use, though usually the satire pieces i've seen are taking works already in the public domain anyhow,a s people might actually know them.
My definition of fair use is pretty generous, though -- considerably more so than some of the challenges to fair use put forward against writng and music lately, mainly but not exclusively to corporations.
(As Jo Walton noted in her post that got mis-placed to the Open Thread, if you get to talk one on one with a creator and not a business, most creators are more open about that can and can't be done with their work than A) businesses like ASCAP that control the interests of hundreds or thousands of artists and may not even know the song quoted, or B) heirs whose emotional attachment to the work is different from that of the creators, more inclined to "Grab the money! This is a cash cow!" than to "Well, that's a respectful treatment. Sure, you can quote that." (or even "He quoted a passage I particularly liked and said it was the worst thing in the book! At least he put my words in so people can see he's the idiot...") )
Okay, so far it seems the 1909 act was prompted by the ability to record music in a fixed form, and it seems to be consideration of the viable length of a musician's career that prompted the change to 28+28.
This article has the longest relevant quote re: the above.
This one has some further details, and Idiot that I am, i managed not to get the URL for the other two articles that seemed to ahve anything on *why* the revision was made at that time. Since all these were within the first two pages of Google on "Copyright Revision 1909", I'm sure they can still be tracked down.
None of them really address the 28+28 term in any depth, alas, they're too busy noticing the advent of recorded music and film, or commenting on the things that *failed* to be covered (Unpublished works seemed to be in a rather unclear state, assumed to be the author's work indefinitely -- ie even past death regardless -- and the fact that it didn't work with the Berne Convention was considered a major issue -- though that would have required them to go with Life + 50 SOONER)
And an interesting observation from a footnote of one of the other articles (Yes, one of the ones whose URL I missed, dagnabbit):
A 1961 Copyright Office study found that fewer than 15% of all registered copyrights were renewed. For books, the figure was even lower: 7%. See Barbara Ringer, "Study No. 31: Renewal of Copyright" (1960), reprinted in Library of Congress Copyright Office. Copyright law revision: Studies prepared for the Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-sixth Congress, first [-second] session. (Washington: U. S. Govt. Print. Off, 1961), p. 220.
The above suggests that actually, Charlie Stross's infinitely renewable copyright *would* free a great many works into the public domain. And I suspect that the low size of that number implies a great many of those hypothetical and nieces and nephews who sit on works forever in hopes of big bucks wouldn't do so if it meant *effort*.
Greg: I've written six posts before this, all of which you've answered and thus appeared to be aware of. ("View All By" is a handy tool if you want to prove I did or didn't say something...)
My exact words in post four were:
It's not an argument for Life + N. The question was why should the original creator, while alive, not receieve further payment for their creative work, even though someone else is getting paid for their book? This argument, taken as I wrote it, not expanded to "The poor little children" or "the heirs" or anything else I DID NOT ADD BUT YOU READ ME AS ADDING, only carries through until the original creator is *dead*. And that question, without the additions you mentally put into it, remains a viable question. Why should a living author (Not their heirs, not their children, just the LIVING author) not recieve further recompense for a still-successful work? Not to denigrate the work of the publisher. They deserve their cut absolutely. But if they deserve their cut, why does the author (Again, not the heirs or estate or any other illusory body NOT the author him/herself) not deserve the same?
This being the post you answered with: And yes, your question is a slippery slope, because it works for any and all values of N. You used 40 and 41, but could just as easily be any other value.
which, in post six, I pointed out it could not be, since i'd said life.
Which you replied to by saying I'd never said within the lifetime of the author in anything said directly to you.
If you are going to go through the whole debate to this point to prove i did or didn't say anything, please go through the *whole* debate.
Why 70 years rather than Twain's time? I say immediately afterwards why: It's roughly equivalent to what the *working* lifetime of an author could be expected to be now, pre immortality. Since I believe that a copyright should last until the death of the author, and the number is directly extrapolated from the current anticipated expected lifetime of my own generation, it seems reasonable. If you're asking why i'm extrapolating for that piece of information and not from what Mark Twain did, I really do feel that the conditions of the early 21st century are the ones relevant to the early 21st century.
If you're asking why I argue for "Life" in the first place, well... you evidently did just try to read back through the posts.
As for this:"And as for insulting my intelligence, well, I'll just say that, no, I do not demand anyone worship me."
Perhaps in your hasty reading you missed one part of my response, so I'll repeat it, because I sincerely meant it: "Greg, I concede I lost my temper and wrote some inflammatory things. The first of the two things you excerpted was indeed unpardonably rude, and for that I apologize unreservedly. The second half of that paragraph, the bit you quoted, should have been cut, or never typed."
A cartel of writers pushed the price of copyright to Life-Plus-70 years.
We did? Then why is it that a cartel of writers can't draw it back to where they want it?
Greg, why do you keep insisting that it's all the authors' fault when all the authors here have conceded that current terms are too long and benefit only corporations?
It really is looking like you feel that anyone arguing for Life, or Life + 10, or Life + Extensible-as-long-as-it's-paid-for, or anything at all, is seen by you as arguing only for the current system to stay as it is. You no sooner concede that it's otherwise than you go back to lumping us in with Disney as part of a cartel and a plot.
So does anyone yet know why copyright extended from 28+14 to 28+28? Lunch is coming up, I'll see if I can see what prompted it.
Greg, I wasn't looking for a perfect algebraic formula. I was looking for something with more substance than "It's a number I thought of, and I'm sticking with it against everything." Which, sorry, was exactly what you seemed to be saying.
I'm still not sure why 40 and not 56, since 56 worked for 66 years before Disney et al came in and changed it (has anyone here done the research on how the change between 28+14 and 28+28 came to be, by hwat reasoning and in whose interest? If not, I can do it tomorrow, but it's getting late for tonight), but I accept that you did put thought into it, thought that was not, perhaps, as apparant as you seemed to feel it was.
I was not in fact harping on the number thing because it's of deep importance in itself, but because your apparant inability to answer seemed to point to a major flaw in your thinking. If the number was chosen entirely arbitrarily, pulled out of a hat, then why should we trust that the rest of what you were saying was actually reasoned out and not equally arbitrary? The refusal to answer a basic question is frequently used by politicians and lobbyists and public speakers of all stripes to conceal a point that either the audience they're tryign to convert won't like or that they themselves don't know and hope nobody else will realise it.
And yes, your question is a slippery slope, because it works for any and all values of N. You used 40 and 41, but could just as easily be any other value.
Except that I emphasized *to the creator's death*. In fact, I couldn't have emphasized it more except by insulting your intelligence, which I'd rather not do. The question of whether the original creator should be compensated for their work is a different one from the question of whether their heirs should. You can't say the argument works out for "+N" regardless of value when a clear cap was placed on it. As I said, that argument only stands when dealing with the original creator; which, until your SF scenario, means a distinctly finite span.
The "Insurance" argument that deals with heirs and/or publishing companies, and suggests an extension slightly past life, is a *different* argument.
As for your SF Scenario: If we do receive immortality, I think the Public Domain will not be the first of our worries. I think ALL our laws would end up having to be rewritten, not just that one. All our culture and ways of life currently are so predicated on the fact that we have a finite span that the problems have not yet begun to be imagined. We'd have to change our minds on everything, not just on how long to keep works copyrighted.
Still, yes, to answer the question directly, my natural inclination is to go for a length of time roughly equivalent to that of a working author right before the advent of immortality: since writers tend to start getting seriously published in their 30s, and the current presumed lifespan is somewhere between 80-100, I'd be saying roughly 70 years (+- at least 10 years either way), with a caveat that if the author should die, the copyright should expire at the end of the initial 70 year span, or at 20 years past death, whichever is SHORTER. (So, should they die 10 years after writing a book, yes, the total copyright would end up only 30 years long.) Why the second condition? For the same reason I currentl feel life +N should be in the vicinity of 15 -20 years. Because the "insurance for dependants / Publisher's exclusivity" argument kicks in, and after 20 years, the dependants should be old enough to let go, and the publisher should have recouped.
(And why is the publisher different from the author in deserving only a limited duration to recoup? Well, because the publisher is not the creator. They are different animals in fundamental ways.)
But then, I've said all along that while I have a generally favoured time frame, I'd be willing to flex if something came along to demand it. Immortality is a pretty huge "something".
Re: The infinitely renewable copyright:
"What you are proposing, essentially, is to shorten copyright terms for works that no one will pay for and for authors too stupid or forgetful to renew their rights. And it looks like its still a wasteland to me, a large, featureless desert, but now you dropped in a few old, non-working appliances into the sand."
This is a pretty good analogy for why, after initially thinking the "Infinitely renewable, but you have to care enough to do the renewal" idea sounded fabulous, I changed my mind and went back to thinking Life Plus N (Where N is a number between 5 and 20, with 15 loosely but arbitrarily favoured -- but definitely not 50, or 70, or, ugh, more than *that*).
Someone (Sorry, I missed who) asked why we're debating these theoretical numbers so much when it looks like copyright is only going to get longer unless we do concentrated lobbying as one.
Well, because we can't do concentrated lobbying as one if we all want different results. or maybe we can, but we can then be easily turned against one another either on the way or after victory. At which point, the group we oppose can say, "See, they don't have an answer. They're saying it's broken but not how to fix it."
Or maybe we should all come in demanding the decrease, and set up a forum for deciding how long after the fact. Maybe we should be charging in right here, right now, crying "Give me 56 or give me Death!"
Oh, my god. I can't believe I just did that. Greg. Greg. GREG. Not Dave. Sorry, both of you. Obviously, I have no brain.
Renee: Actually, if I understand correctly, even bad films of books tend to *boost* the sales of the original book, not kill them. All those who liked your book before will still like it and spread the word, even if they have to add, "It's not like the movie, honest!" And the additional sales of the book will probably make yet more fans of the book version. (They may have a hard time not picturing the actor when the character's name comes up, but that's a relatively small problem, since what the reader envisions is rarely what the author described). How does this make it harder to keep writing the same milieu?
Tim Walters: If I were lucky enough to get a novel published, and subsequently have Hollywood wanting to make a movie out of that novel for a percentage of the Box office receipts -- in the current system, where it's my choice, I admit it: I'd close my eyes and go for the money. The reason being, even when an author agrees to a project these days because they have every reason to believe it will be treated with respect -- you still get things like the desecration of Earthsea. Or the movie version of Dune.
Not being able to make the choice myself (As per your scenario) doesn't really seem like a guarantee of *lack* of quality any more than being able to choose is a guarantee of respectful treatment of the work.
I can understand entirely why an author would prefer to have the *option* of signing the contract or not, based on how much they'd get or how much input they'd have (although this is almost always little to none) or how much they trust that producer and director. But I feel the difference in risk-of-desecration between then and now isn't really as strong as it seems. And most books are tough independant little critters. They can survive the smear to their good name. So my mantra remains "So long as I get a cut."
Dave Luckett: On your two responses to my last post: The first one is excellent, but seems to overlook that i understood what you meant, i was merely pointing out that what you *said* did not match, and you should be more careful and pay more heed to your language. Which you did in your expansions on the point, there and elsewhere. Thank you for that.
As for the second: Wow. You just managed to write a significant amount of verbiage that was clear, cogent, reasonable, well argued, and still failed entirely to answer the actual questions.
The first question was "Why 40 years?" It's not "why some shorter span than current?", which is what you answered. The difference is not subtle. For istance, you've answered the second question about 20 times, sometimes in ways that were disputable, but always with a sincerity and a visible effort to communicate. You've answered the first one Zero times.
Why 40 years?
"Because writers wrote for 28 + 14 years" does not answer this, as 28 + 14 is 42. How is 40, your preferred number, inherently superior to 42?
"BEcause writers wrote for 28 + 28 years" is likewise not an answer, as that is 56. How is 40 inherently superior to 56? How is 56 -- a span that worked well for almost as long as 28 + 14 and was altered only by the forces of Disney --"Too much" while 40 is adequate? Since you argue for 40, it's clear you think 56 was also too long, but not why. How does a 56 year term harm the system?
"Because writers wrote for less than Life + 70" is not an answer, as we've established that long since. We AGREE that life + 70 is too long, that authors can, and even should, write for less.
I'm not asking why you make your general argument for a fixed term. I've got that, thanks. I'm asking where this number -- ****40**** -- comes from.
The second question you answered only by saying "This is a slippery slope argument." Which isn't an answer, especially as the question, as stated, does not necessarily extend to anything past Life. It's not an argument for Life + N. The question was why should the original creator, while alive, not receieve further payment for their creative work, even though someone else is getting paid for their book? This argument, taken as I wrote it, not expanded to "The poor little children" or "the heirs" or anything else I DID NOT ADD BUT YOU READ ME AS ADDING, only carries through until the original creator is *dead*. And that question, without the additions you mentally put into it, remains a viable question. Why should a living author (Not their heirs, not their children, just the LIVING author) not recieve further recompense for a still-successful work? Not to denigrate the work of the publisher. They deserve their cut absolutely. But if they deserve their cut, why does the author (Again, not the heirs or estate or any other illusory body NOT the author him/herself) not deserve the same?
And yes, I do argue elsewhere for Life plus N, (where N is *not* more than 20 years and concievably as few as 5-10). But I do not do so based on *this* argument. This argument, as far as I'm concerned, only goes as far as the Life of the author. Other, different, arguments kick in to suggest the addition of a *Small* number of years past flat Life (Again, significantly fewer than they currently get).
"This also means that as terms go up, authors are capable of making more money if their works are of good enough quality or of good enough advertising/marketing to sell through the end of the term."
If we're talking within the lifetime of the original creator (Again, NOT their heirs, estates, poor little kiddies, etc, JUST THE CREATOR), and if we're talking about a person (Terry Pratchett or Joan Wanna-Bee) and not about any corporation, especially not the dreaded Disney Corporation, can you explain precisely how this is an argument against a Life copyright?
Personally, I think the biggest mistake of all is having identical terms for corporations as for living breathing human beings. Because it gets the rights of individual persons tied into the fate of behemoths, and invariably, this ends up with terms that are unfair for individual creators (For being too long, in this case), because they don't have the clout to change the situation unless they can gather in large numbers, while the behemoth doesn't have to gather anyone else to its side to have influence.
Greg, I concede I lost my temper and wrote some inflammatory things. The first of the two things you excerpted was indeed unpardonably rude, and for that I apologize unreservedly. The second half of that paragraph, the bit you quoted, should have been cut, or never typed.
The first half stands. After once more accusing "us" of fear-mongering and demanding that copyright stay at Life Plus 70, after multiple remarks to the effect that, "Authors continue to argue for more. More. More." you missed the point of the valid half of that paragraph. Most of the authors I've seen here are NOT arguing for more than they currently have. They are arguing for LESS than they currently have, but more than you've decided they deserve. Which strikes me as a different animal, but one you consistently ignore.
This does not pardon my own rudeness, but it does surely require some answer?
For the second rude remark you quoted, it was in direct response to this quote from one of your posts:
"If they did it for so much less, why are we paying authors so much more?"
though it could have been to this similar one, or several others:
"If Twain, Poe, and Thoreau were willing to write for a fixed term of 28+14 years, why must we pay authors more?"
That's where I got the bit about wage. Your own exact words, interpreted with the standard meaning of "pay" instead of whatever meaning is in your head, say not "We should roll back overextended copyright law", which seems to be what you claim it means, but "We should go back to paying authors the same amount Twain was paid." Reread your sentences above. It's what your words mean, no matter what you think they mean. We can't read the words in your mind, and the ones on paper don't match.
I'm not sure I should apologize for that at all, since your only response was consescension at least as inflammatory as anything I wrote.
I'm willing to concede that you don't actually think that everyone who disagrees that 40 years flat is appropriate does in fact want things to stay as they are, rather than that they have different answers to a problem all (Or possibly most) agree is a problem. If you make some kind of a response that finally indicates you've absobed this rather critical piece of information.
At no point was I talking about the quality of the writing -- though I might have been, in a roundabout way, about the quality of the life of the artist. I did ask not only about how this works with inflation, but also with increasing lifespans and a visibly different economic system. (Publishing, marketing and design, age of clientele, number of books available, variety of genres developed, communications, market formats, speed of transport of physical objects, credit and debit payments, experiments with printing houses, blogging and other online formats - if you can name for me one thing about the publishing and book market that is the same as it was in 1810 besides "Pay money for book, get book," I'd like you to explain it.)
Yet, somehow, I feel that I've asked the same two questions several times over to you that you have once again failed to answer in favour of focusing ont he inflammatory bits. First, why 40 years. Do you ahve actual proof this is the reasonable break even point? How do you say 40 and not 36 or 48? If you're going to dictate the terms by which soemone else makes a living, surely you've actually made some study that proves that even novels that do survive in print that long have paid out all their significant revenue by then.
And the other question that is never answered:
If a book should, by some dumb luck, survive past 40 years, and in the 41st year of its miraculous in-print survival, *someone* is still making revenue off it, can you explain to me why that someone should be a publisher or a company alone, and not both publisher and original author, as it had been a single year before?
As to Lowest Bidder: my brother has remarked before that the only viable way of doing that is not to accept the lowest actual bid. It's to accept the lowest bid that will actually get the job done right. To which the inevitable corollary is "This is almost never the actual lowest bid."
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| 2004 | 80 |
| 2003 | 23 |
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