J. Noble wrote:
>
> I can suggest with some confidence that digitally reproducing and
> distibuting a digital work is easier and less expensive than reproducing
> on paper and distributing on paper a work originally available on paper.
> Its the difference between command-C (copy) and command-T (transmit)
> versus re-keying, calling the printer, paying for the copies, paying
> for the mailing, etc. I also publish, Dan; and the reason that Computer
> Law Reporter (of all things) is not available electronically is that I
> can't enforce my copyright except by making it costly and inconvenient
> to infringe.
One doesn't "rekey", one scans. Any book can be scanned and digitized in a few hours. The rest of it I don't understand at all. Are you saying because you publish on paper it's prohibitively expensive for another publisher to copy your work? If you can make a profit after "calling the printer, paying for the copies, paying for the mailing, etc." so can another publisher using the same public domain material. If they choose not to, are you certain of their reasons? Really, all another publisher needs to do is scan your paper product, digitize it, tag the text for fonts, layout, etc., and send it to a printer or disk duplicator. Anyway, the question that was raised here concerns the cost of copying, not the cost of fulfillment, etc. The difference between the cost of copying from paper and the cost of copying from digitized material is trivial for most publishers. That says to me that the cost of copying is not a weighty argument in favor of special thin copyrights for electronic work in the absence of thin copyrights for printed work.
> We've never had "thion copyright." So its impossible
> to tell what kind of publications we'd have had or not had if there
> was one. We are all guessing.
Well, maybe we did have a little of it pre-Feist. But we've certainly had plenty of public domain publishing without _any_ claimed copyright protection at all, which suggests the incentive argument is without foundation in experience.
Demonstrate to me that the public wins, and I'll support a change in the law. I certainly don't take it as a premise that protecting investments always means the public wins.
Unless I'm roped into it, this is my last post on the subject. I've stated my counterarguments to the idea of thin copyrights. I'm sure there are people better qualified than me to elaborate and/or supplement what I've said.
Dan Agin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:19 GMT