
Copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston's newly published first book - blahedo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/07/how-copyright-law-hides-work-like-zora-neale-hurstons-new-book-from-the-public
======
ruytlm
This is to say nothing of the fundamental legal abhorrence of the idea of
retroactive copyright extensions.

Copyright exists as an incentive to create works; in return for creating them,
the creator gains exclusive right to monetise the work for a period of time,
before that work passes into the public domain and becomes part of shared
culture.

If I've already been incentivised by copyright to create something, and have
in fact created it, how can a retroactive extension of copyright further
incentivise me to create the thing I've already created?

If I paid someone to build a house, and they built it, it would be absurd to
go back to them after the house is built and pay them more money to make sure
they build the house that they've already built.

~~~
quadrangle
Note that I am personally anti-copyright at this point. But the idea that
retroactive copyright extension cannot incentivize creativity is a bad
argument.

Retroactive extension _sabotages_ the public domain. Without the public
domain, there is more incentive for new work.

If we DESTROYED all books written more than 10 years ago, I guarantee there'd
be an increase in sales of newer books.

This is obviously not in the public interest. It's the broken-window fallacy
at best.

Yes, copyright extension is like paying the builder of your house extra for no
reason. But it's also like charging extra fees for the ways older houses
aren't up to the latest codes as a shitty way to further reduce their value in
the market in order to give new construction a better competitive edge. Not
that it's good to build new houses as an end in itself if there's good older
houses available — but if you're focused on the interests of home-builders
instead of the public interest…

------
fovc
Honest question: Why isn't copyright something you simply pay to renew at some
exponentially growing rate? You get X free years now and then year X + N costs
2^kN, for some X and k. That way you internalize the negative externality of
locking up interesting works. Disney is happy and estates who choose to renew
copyright need to be sure they're doing something with it

~~~
brownbat
Some have proposed even a token renewal fee to fund a registry, or even a
postcard registry, which would eliminate the orphaned works problem while
limiting the impact on publishers.

Mostly this doesn't work because of the Berne Convention, which made
assumptions about how copyrights should work, then enshrined them in a
multilateral treaty, which in turn is implemented in a framework of laws among
various signatories, making it all now incredibly difficult to unwind.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention)

~~~
beefield
I have to study that in more detail, but is there something in Berne
convention that prohibits taxation of intellectual property? I mean, I have
thought that a country could say that, yes, we do recognize the intellectual
property, but if the intellectual property holder is not recognizing and
respecting _our_ (tax) laws, we are for sure not going to use a dime to
actually enforce that IP.

------
Jun8
Wait, what I want to ask is: Why doesn't anyone perform Sci-Hub-like
vigilantism to save these works, i.e. scan the books and put them on line?
Without big-pocketed companies like Elsevier (or music labels in the days of
Naspter) to fight against it, such a site would have few natural enemies.

EDIT: The more I think about this the more I get riled up about the current
state of affairs in orphan books. I'm willing to start a project like this or
contribute it to it in any way, please ping me if you have such a project or
just feel the same way.

~~~
Finnucane
See also: Google v. aap re: orphan books.

~~~
Jun8
I think a site similar to Sci-Hub to host, say, 10k orphan works is not
equivalent to Google's planned scanning of very large number of books and
potentially profiting from them (if not from selling them at least from using
the text as input to their various ML systems). If you provide the works
freely you undermine many of the arguments that AAP had.

------
jedberg
This is the third article I've seen in a week about how terrible copyright law
is.

Is there some copyright related event coming up soon?

~~~
chimeracoder
Yes - the most recent extension to copyright in the US expires on Dec 31,
2018. Unless Congress passes another extension, a whole selection of older
works will pass into the public domain for the first time in decades on Jan 1,
2019.

In the past, Disney has been successful in lobbying Congress to extend it to
prevent Steamboat Willie (the cartoon where Mickey Mouse first appeared) from
entering the public domain, but it appears that they aren't actually making a
push to do so this time - fingers crossed, this might actually happen.

~~~
plankers
What would this mean for usage of the Mickey Mouse character? Would people be
free to use images from the older cartoons in new work? What about more recent
updates to the character's design?

~~~
dogecoinbase
It's super interesting -- you end up in a situation where the bare character
can be used, but subsequent developments of the character remain under
copyright. This actually makes it extremely difficult to use characters since
you wind up in a situation where the modern character _as you understand it_
is inaccessible.

Sherlock Holmes is a famous example of this -- good overview of the extended
legal situation here:
[https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...](https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1164&context=ckjip)

~~~
plankers
That was an interesting read. After reading both that and the other comments
the only solid conclusion I can come to is that literary and visual
intellectual property are handled differently, as evidenced by thid quote from
the paper:

Judge Castillo stated that “[b]ecause the Seventh Circuit’s incremental
expression case law focuses on images rather than literature, it is difficult
to apply its precedent seamlessly.”

