One of the clearest demonstrations of how copyright is actively harmful is the lawsuit that four of the biggest publishers brought against the Internet Archive. As a result of the judge’s decision in favour of the publishers – currently being appealed – more than 500,000 books have been taken out of lending by the Internet Archive, including more than 1,300 banned and “challenged” books. In an open letter to the publishers in the lawsuit, the Internet Archive lists three core reasons why removing half a million ebooks is “having a devastating impact in the US and around the world, with far-reaching implications”.
Cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17259314
Fun times would be to prevent companies owning copyright.
The Internet Archive reached too far with the lending aspect. While the goal of sharing is laudable, no one was really surprised by this decision. 🏴☠️🦜
If the publishers win, I hope every book they publish as long as they exist gets torrented into oblivion leading authors to ditch them in favour of self publishing
How long do you think copyright should be? It was originally 14 years in the United States.
The length of copyright protection depends on several factors. Generally, for most works created after 1978, protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first.
https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycle/
The max that I would ever be happy with is 25, but 20 or 17 preferred for me at least. I think it gives plenty of time for a Series completion.
How long do you think copyright should be?
No easy solutions but my general guideline would be that both copyright and patents should never last more than half the retirement age of a current generation, calculated via actuarial tables or some trustable scientific method.
The rationale is simple: the ultimate purpose of both is (or, well, should be) to promote creation so that society in general can be participant of the resulting effects. Half the retirement age not only is a good compromise between giving creator control and giving at least half of society the opportunity to enjoy the public good result of creation within their lifetime and within their fair opportunity to earn wages, in particular in such cases as eg.: big pharma and medications, but also promotes that big creators, such as corporations, act towards the public good of lengthening life and providing good living standards for the rest of society.
Do you have any exact statements from them? Because I would like to know more.
I rarely hear about authors/artists talk about copyright other than, when they talk about what license they use or them complaining because they felt that their work wasn’t infringing on other artists copyright since it was transformative.
Robert Jordan took a long time finishing his Wheel of Time series- he actually died and Brandon Sanderson had to write the last three books
GRRM is still writing his series.
My point is that they would say that time proposed is not enough because they take a long time to write.
Additional context:
Robert Jordan’s first book for the Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, was published in 1990. His last book, A Memory of Light, was published in 2013. He died in 2007 and a lot of fans, me included, thought the series was also dead but Jordan’s wife brought on Sanderson to finish it. And he did such a great job writing in Jordan’s style that some think he did Jordan better than Jordan did.
GRRM wrote A Game of Thrones which was published in 1996 which is the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire. His latest book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011 and only book five of seven proposed books for the series. Three series was originally going to be a trilogy so we’ll see if it ends at seven. The Wheel of Time series was also supposed to be a trilogy when Jordan started it.
On the flipside, I think the Internet Archive should stick to archiving stuff. “Lending out” books without asking for permission and without owning the copyright, isn’t the best move. And I don’t think it’s aligned well to the core concept of the Internet Archive.
