Question: In their place, what copyright laws would you have set up?
Answer: My proposal is to design a program to predict sales curves.
Database(?): when any book has sold, copyright expires. When a book is out of print, copyright expires. And print on demand dosn't count, we are not playing games here: the book has to be on a frequent shelf.
That would give them the lion's share of the profit. Sales fall off fast.
In 5, 10, 15, 20... 25 years, 99% of books have sold all they are ever gonna sell. After 5 years, 50% of books are out of print.
Use-it-or-lose-it copyright is an interesting idea, but one that was born too late, for reasons suggested above. With traditional distribution channels, a product being in print was a good surrogate for a product still having commercial value, because the costs of keeping something in print ensured that it was foolhardy to keep something in print unless it still had commercial value. And this applied to other media as well as to print. But with modern distribution methods, like print-on-demand, it costs little to keep something in print indefinitely. And this can only be a good thing for all concerned. Why should print-on-demand be excluded, other than that it wrecks a use-it-or-lose-it copyright scheme? For books with expected runs of only a few thousand copies, it is already cost-competitive as the primary means of distribution, and its range of applicability can only increase. If someone finally gets around to producing a PDA that's as much joy to read as a printed book, and ebooks become a major part of the publishing industry, we may see titles that were only ever available via download. In the music business, there are already titles that have only ever been available via mp3.com or iTunes. I forsee more and more media being distributed via means such that the concept of being "in print" becomes increasingly obsolete. A scheme to adapt to this changing world might work as follows: When a copyright is registered (and while you don't have to register to have one, you do have to register to have one worth enforcing) the rights holder assesses a value for the work. They are free to change this value according to market conditions. As real property is taxed based on its assessed value, intellectual property would also be taxed on its assessed value. Meanwhile, the assessed value can be used to set prices in a compulsory licensing system. When a work no longer has comercial value, it behooves the rights holder to devalue it to the point where public use is essentially free, or be assessed tax on something that is no longer valuable to them. -- RS