Gutenberg9443@aol.com writes:

In a message dated 1/4/2005 3:26:37 PM Mountain Standard Time, holden.mcgroin@dsl.pipex.com writes: The people who really benefit from copyrights are the publishers. Longer copyrights mean longer periods without competition from low-cost public domain publishers.

Again, yea verily. That's one of the reasons why, as soon as a book goes out of print, the writer should ask for copyright reversion. Too many people don't think to do that.

But this is thinking in terms of traditional physical media publishing economics. Wired had an article called the Long Tail (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) which shows how the back-catalog of a publisher which only sells a small number of copies per year each, cumultively is larger than the top sellers or hits at any one time. This means it's economically viable to keep copyright on everything as long as you have some sort of just-in-time distribution or publishing technology in place so publishers don't get bogged down by keeping large inventories or production costs. This is good news, in that it means that books won't go out of print. But it's bad news because there is no reason for them ever to enter the public domain. So the same technology that let's us give away books also has created an economy of the Long Tail which has enabled publishers to make a profit from unprofitable properties. Amazon certainly understands this, and I think over time, Google will be on the side of retaining eternal copyright (and an iTune-like world) rather than shorter copyright (and a PG-centric world) and a vibrant public domain. I fear a renewed bout of copyright hoarding later this decade and even more consolidation of copyright material into the hands of a handful of big corporations. This is the writing on the wall at the moment, but all of this is still turned on it's head by P2P and the underground trend towards FreeNet-like anonymous and very secure networks. And we still need to see how emerging super-economies like India and China will shake things up. Here in Thailand, iTunes is _very_ expensive, almost 40 baht for a single song! Legal VCDs[1] (for hollywood movies) cost only about 120 baht. Two songs at iTunes cost more than a meal at McDonalds! Any not many people can afford (or actually even like) McDonalds. The knife cuts both ways.... b/ Footnotes: [1] VCD's are MPEG1 Video which are very big in Asia. MPEG1 is about the same quality as a VHS tape and a movie fits on two CDs. VCD players are built into practically every music CD player, and most music in Asia is now distributed as Karaoke with video tracks for each song. DVD's are starting to catch on big, but they cost twice as much as VCD's and the players are only now coming down low enough in price for the average person to buy. Once VCDs dropped in price down below 150 baht it gutted the illegal market. I've seen this in Hong Kong as well. It's a bit strange sometimes. Even the illegal stalls on the streets will sell a combination of legal VCDs and a shrinking amount of illegal stuff which now are usually poor quality stuff which is still in the cinema. They are all priced about the same. -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Bangkok, Thailand