Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

On 05, September 1998, Timothy Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
>
> On 31 Aug 1998, Daniel J. Schaeffer <daniel_schaeffer[_at_]kirk-land.com>
> wrote (in the "Snooze/Lose" thread):
> >
> > [I]f material becomes PD, then publishers have to estimate
> > their sales lower due to competition from other publishers,
> > hence smaller print runs, hence higher per-book costs. Factor
> > in increased marketing expenses -- gotta make my edition of
> > this work stand out from all the other guys' editions -- and
> > the savings in royalties is almost certainly negated, at little
> > savings to the consumer. The only people who "win" in this
> > situation are the ones who -- since the material is PD -- can
> > legally make photocopies for a dime a page and distribute them
> > at a fraction of publishers' costs.
>
> The copyright, while it lasts, gives only select licensees or
> assignees the chance to find a way to make money from the work.
> They may find a way, they may not. Once the material becomes PD,
> if there is a way to make money from it, chances are good that
> eventually someone will find it.
>
> The practice of the publishing industry seems so suggest that PD
> can be profitable for some. A Publisher's Weekly Article by Joan
> Iaconetti was entitled, "For Penguin Classics, a Great 1998."
> (PW, 244(47), p. 17) The article discussed the economics of
> publishing classics, and gave the impression that Penguin, at
> least, was looking forward to 1998 when a number of 1922 copyrights
> were to expire. A few years earlier, in the Mary Tabor article
> quoted in an earlier post in this thread, Michael Millman of
> Penguin Classics was quoted as saying, "I'm rubbing my hands
> together now because we can finally publish 'The Age of Innocence.'"
> The same article observed that publishers were "scrambling to
> publish ... newly available titles," and that "according to a
> recent study by Bantam, more than 23 million copies of books
> referred to as classics are sold each year..." (Mary B. W.
> Tabor, "'20's classics are moving into the public domain", Dallas
> Morning News, June 6, 1995, p. 11C.)
>
> Royalties are conventionally 10% of the retail (in some in-
> dustries, maybe the wholesale) price of the work, yes? This is
> not extreme, but it's more than trivial. But besides freeing
> publishers from royalties (though according to the PW article,
> sometimes royalties are continued as a courtesy), expiration also
> frees them from sometimes-cumbersome formalities. A publisher of
> public domain material has no assignees to track through a tan-
> gled web of multiple assignments, divorces, and bankruptcies; no
> need to negotiate with anyone for copyright permissions;
> no license terms, reasonable or unreasonable, to comply with;
> no obligation to send reports every month to a licensor; and no
> prospect of license-termination to figure in to the calculation.
> In some situations a user of PD might have trademark problems to
> deal with, but let's leave that for another thread.
>
> Disclaimer: Nothing in this post constitutes legal advice, or should
> be taken as establishing a lawyer-client relationship, etc.

Is this why so many books go OOP?

Is there any way this could be simplified?

Royalties are conventionally 10% of the retail (in some industries, maybe the wholesale) price of the work, yes? This is not extreme, but it's more than trivial. But besides freeing publishers from royalties (though according to the PW article, sometimes royalties are continued as a courtesy), expiration also frees them from sometimes-cumbersome formalities. A publisher of public domain material has no assignees to track through a tangled web of multiple assignments, divorces, and bankruptcies; no need to negotiate with anyone for copyright permissions; no license terms, reasonable or unreasonable, to comply with; no obligation to send reports every month to a licensor; and no prospect of license-termination to figure in to the calculation. In some situations a user of PD might have trademark problems to deal with, but let's leave that for another thread.

Michael A Scarpitti
Assistant Editor
Materials Evaluation
1711 Arlingate Lane
PO Box 28518
Columbus, Ohio 43228-0518
800 222-2768 Ext 207
614 274-6003 Ext 207
Fax 614 274-6899
<mscarpit[_at_]asnt.org> Received on Wed Sep 09 1998 - 16:38:01 GMT