The fact that this set off an angry debate about where to draw the line with copyright just shows how off the rails that debate has been for decades.
Of course the National Emergency Library is a good thing. We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book. We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free. File sharing sites on the Internet serve exactly the same purpose to society as free public libraries. They allow people to consume as much culture as they want for free.
It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. Commercial copyright infringement should remain illegal. Nobody should have the right to profit from your work but you. But demanding a toll be paid every time a file is copied is an unrealistic fantasy that is widely ignored in the real world by public and private file sharing venues.
I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years. But instead of cheering on the Author's Guild's dinosaur argument and going down with the sinking ship right along with them, authors should be thinking hard about new business models that can adapt to the reality where consumer payments are—in the real world—optional.
I don't have an answer to the business models question. I have a few ideas I think are worth experimenting with, mostly involving freemium. All I know for sure is the artificial scarcity model is not the answer and the longer authors try to cling to it, the longer it will prolong their pain.
I believe that many authors would agree with you that the current system is not ideal and ripe for something better. But right now it's all that writers have as a way to pay the rent and eat. You admit to having no replacement that gets writers paid, but you want to take their livelihood from them with no replacement. No wonder they "cling to it". It's all they have.
Note that the overwhelming majority of writers -- the mid-list majority -- make relatively little money from their writing, even under this "pay per toll" arrangement and have to subsidise their art by keeping their full-time jobs and writing for a few hours at night to keep the art flowing.
I disagree, it’s not all they have. And to back that up, I give you Patreon. One author I follow has over 1,500 patrons, most giving upwards of $3 a month.
Is this viable for all authors? Perhaps not, but between the new self-publishing market, Patreon, and pay-by-what’s-read models like KU, there’s more options than the shitty ebook racket that the publishers have created.
Business models like self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited have worked really well for romance and fantasy novelists who can publish six books a year and have fans who plough through two books a week. They absolutely have not worked for literary novelists, let alone historians, biographers etc. If the "sell copies of books to readers" model dies, it will change the kinds of books that get written. For people who see books as a fungible commodity – any book is about as good as any other – that's fine. For the rest of us, it isn't.
You make an assumption that people aren’t willing to pay to support the creation of non-fiction books. I think this is bunk.
An extremely relevant example: Veritasium. He creates well researched and scientific videos on YouTube (at a rate of maybe 3-4 a year), and has almost 5,000 patrons.
Again, can every author survive this way? No, but there are other options; please don’t get hung up on the familiar and call it the only way.
All of the authors I currently follow did exactly this. Word of mouth, some basic marketing, utilizing their contacts and their followers. The internet doesn't only support zeitgeists, they also support niche communities which spring up out of nowhere.
Start with something smaller or find an interested wealthy patron. Same options as if I wanted to start a business that will take years of development to achieve traction.
How does anyone get a following? You build it over time.
I can assure you there are a lot of great books that would not have been written if the authors first had to either 1. become beloved enough on the internet that they could crowdfund their income for five years or 2. somehow secure a "wealthy patron" who wanted to finance it (I can imagine a pretty fierce competition for that pretty rare beast).
I don't want to "take their livelihood from them with no replacement." That has already happened. File sharing is widespread and unstoppable. Legalizing it merely legitimizes the reality we're already living with.
I'm not anti-copyright. I'm very much in favor of commercial infringement remaining illegal.
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales is reductive and unhelpful.
Of course it hurts sales in the sense that if you could somehow invent a perfect DRM that is unbreakable, more people would buy things. But it's also true that not all pirates are lost sales. Some people if stopped by DRM just won't consume the content at all.
But more importantly, since piracy can't be stopped, the debate is moot. We have to accept it as widespread and inevitable rather than debate what would happen if we could stop it.
This - and on top of that, the question of copyright duration. It's not only "pay a toll", but "pay a toll for the next 75, 90 years" - the arbitrary period is another element that hasn't evolved for the 21st century.
We could at least consider a compromise where slightly older works, let's say 10+ years, or even 25+ years (same duration as patents) would be the ones included in the noncommercial infringement proposal.
This is an aside but I wonder how a system that expired copyright based on sales and time would work out. Like copyright on a book expires in 10 years or $100,000 in sales, whichever is first. If the public loves the work so much that it exceeds some arbitrary sales threshold, then it must be of some importance in the popular culture and should be shared more widely.
I've long considered the copyright duration question to be a red herring. If we legalize noncommercial infringement, who cares how long copyright terms are? They could be infinite for all I care and I don't see any harm to society so long as noncommercial sharing is legal.
"Noncommercial use" can be very hard to pin down in many cases. Of course it would be good to legalize noncommercial infringement especially for "orphan" works, but this is not enough. At some point, rights should expire wrt. all uses of the work.
Even well defined, non-commercial use exemptions would only lead to the same systematic abuses that so called non-profits (or not-for-profits) exploit today for tax purposes.
I'm not sure what the right answer is for copyright, but I think going back to a 10,12, or even 20 year time frame for protection is a better starting point. Let's get the definition of "limited (time) period" fixed before subjecting another term to misuse.
I take the opposite stance. Term lengths are way more important than restrictions during the term.
This is a question of consumer culture versus cultural participation.
Allowing noncommercial infringent just perpetuates the big producer/small conser dichotomy. Begging for access proves the high worth of whatever the producers make.
Instead if copyright terms are reduced to 14 or 28 years, then if you want to watch something for free you just wait a bit, as long as there are provisions ensuring non-DRM access when terms expire.
But then after that time, you can remix, remake, fanfic, etc. to your heart's content. Thus the culture becomes free for everyone, not just the content.
I don't want to wait. Nor does anyone else. That's just a recipe for perpetuating widespread, inevitable illicit file sharing. We need to legitimize this activity and bring it into the fold.
Also keep in mind that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works. Remix all you want. Just don't make money on it.
Also keep in mind that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works.
I think it's important to point out derivative works specifically because that doesn't necessarily follow. However, making money is also part of the point after terms expire.
It's not a red herring, so much as a different philosophical question. Why should a copyright owner have exclusive, perpetual ownership over an intellectual property?
What gives someone a moral right to produce a derivative work of something I create and make money doing it? (I think people seem to forget that legalizing noncommercial infringement also legalizes noncommercial derivative works.)
>I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years.
I am an author in the UK. Revenue from digital book sales – i.e. what you would call "paying a toll for copying a file" and what I would call people buying books they want to read – went up 3% between 2018 and 2019. I'm not sure sales increasing is very good evidence for a business model having been "obsolete for years". Sure, there a lot of serious problems with the publishing industry, but if this is the "pain" I'm "prolonging" then I think I can endure it for a little bit longer.
I'm glad the system is working for you, but it's not working for a whole lot of other authors. There are a lot of authors who are always complaining about "piracy ruining" their businesses and so forth while consumers meanwhile constantly complain about prices, DRM, etc. Clearly this is a problem that needs to be solved in a way that makes everybody feel like the interests of both sides are balanced.
Every author who's published by a traditional publisher will agree with you that the system has problems, but I guarantee you won't find many who think the whole thing needs to be scrapped and turned into Spotify or OnlyFans or whatever you think the new model is going to look like. Otherwise you would already see a lot more established authors defecting! The truth is the current system, for all its faults, supports the production of a lot of wonderful work, and generally people want to get into it, not out of it.
I think the biggest misconception here is in fact what I'm proposing doesn't actually change much. Legalizing noncommercial infringement is just affirming the reality we already live with. Millions of people are noncommercially infringing every day. To the extent that it undermines your business model, that undermining has been priced into your business model for decades because people who don't want to pay are already not paying. What I'm asking people to consider is new and innovative ways to bring those people who will never pay you into your business model instead of pretending they don't exist or publicly shaming them as pirates. Better to have the freeloaders watch your ads or something than to let the ad revenue go to pirate sites.
Once this change is made, won't somebody just start a website that looks exactly like the Amazon Kindle Store except everything is free to download, and it's legal? You don't think that will hurt our sales at all? I know people online think "Anyone who pays for a piece of media is essentially making a voluntary donation because they could so easily pirate it if they wanted", but that actually isn't true in the real world. Making it legal, convenient and non-shady to get stuff for free would change a lot of people's behaviour.
Those sites already exist. They're often more convenient than getting media from the author. Paying for media is already a voluntary donation. I really don't think legalizing noncommercial infringement will change the status quo much except to even further incentivize copyright holders to modernize by making the need to do so even more obvious.
No, this is just my point. Among people on message boards, for whom copyright is oppression and piracy is second nature, paying for media is a voluntary donation. For the average person in the world I am selling my books to, that is not yet the case. They are in the habit of getting stuff the legit way – it's not worth dealing with something a bit complicated and icky when ebooks are pretty good value for money anyway.
Surely this is exactly why the Emergency Library has had such a rapturous reception! Because it's exactly what I described – an (apparently) legit, feel-good, well-publicised, reasonably simple way to get any book you want for free. That has not existed before. Otherwise why would anyone care?
I don't think it's true that the existing pay per copy regime is actually forcing anybody to pay who doesn't want to. Everyone knows how to get media for free. The choice not to is already mostly an expression of voluntary donation.
As such, I think if every such work was instantly converted to a pay what you want model with a default asking price set, below which you're presented with a bunch of ads and an annoying email harvesting form or something, the majority of people would still pay the default price out of a combined desire to avoid annoying ads, avoid annoying forms, and to support the author.
Some would pay more if given the option to increase the amount paid in exchange for relatively trivial perks. Even I—defender of piracy extraordinaire—have voluntarily paid for luxury tiers for freemium content on numerous occasions.
Right, but authors getting a shitty percentage from their publishers is a complaint that's literally as old as publishing itself, it has nothing to do with the model being "obsolete" because of the internet. If it was really that bad, we would all have defected to Amazon already, but we haven't because most of us hugely prefer our publishers to the alternative.
When I see comments like this, I just wish HN had the exact opposite of "flag". Something like upvote, but carrying much more power, perhaps at the cost of a few Karma points.
>It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement.
This seems to work fine in Japan, and it's not even technically legal. Comic and game publishers tolerate (often pornographic) infringing works created with their properties as long as they're non-commercial, because they raise awareness for the licensed version.
In the US, we can't even have that because license-holders are legally required to aggressively defend against all forms of infringement, however harmless, which leads us to situations like Disney suing a daycare for painting Mickey Mouse on a mural.
> It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement.
What is "noncommercial"? For instance, if I post the complete text of a someone else's book on Facebook or Reddit or in a blog at Wordpress.com, is that noncommercial because I am doing this on my personal account and get no money from doing so? Or is it commercial because those are commercial sites that monetize visits to their sites by showing ads?
Agreed. I think a way through this may be to emphasize the notion of 'performance rights' over 'copyrights'. So distributing a work digitally, for consumption on a personal device, would be free of encumbrances. But performing the work, which would include physical embodiment, e.g. turning into an actual book, or entertaining an audience, would be something that could be controlled and monetized by the author.
No, that's wrong. Copyright was not created to guarantee you compensation. It was created to guarantee whatever money your work makes goes to you and nobody else. If your work makes no money because everyone chose to consume it for free at a library instead, then you need a better business model.
None. By definition no one owns free/open source software (at least not the code itself, the same can't be said for trademarks like logos and names) so it's impossible to "infringe" upon.
Authors own the copyright to FOSS code they write. If they are contributing to a project, they (usually) allow the project to use the code using the same license as the project. In certain cases contributors may sign copyright assignment agreements, but the copyright doesn't go away.
If the authors didn't retain copyright ownership, how would they enforce the terms of the license? The GPL would be unenforceable.
Of course the National Emergency Library is a good thing. We created copyright law to stop people from selling the work of others as their own, not to force people to pay a toll every time they read a book. We created free public libraries so that people could consume as much culture as they want for free. File sharing sites on the Internet serve exactly the same purpose to society as free public libraries. They allow people to consume as much culture as they want for free.
It's long overdue to bring copyright law into the 21st century with one small tweak: legalize noncommercial copyright infringement. Commercial copyright infringement should remain illegal. Nobody should have the right to profit from your work but you. But demanding a toll be paid every time a file is copied is an unrealistic fantasy that is widely ignored in the real world by public and private file sharing venues.
I understand why authors find arguments like mine upsetting. Their "pay a toll per copy" business model is obsolete. It's been obsolete for years. But instead of cheering on the Author's Guild's dinosaur argument and going down with the sinking ship right along with them, authors should be thinking hard about new business models that can adapt to the reality where consumer payments are—in the real world—optional.
I don't have an answer to the business models question. I have a few ideas I think are worth experimenting with, mostly involving freemium. All I know for sure is the artificial scarcity model is not the answer and the longer authors try to cling to it, the longer it will prolong their pain.