Subject: Lessig in the NY Times From: informania@xxxxxxxxxxx Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 17:42:01 +0100 |
Not having seen the Lessig piece, I can only react to Joe Esposito's summary of the salient points. As a former head of the UK authors' collecitve administration society, the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), this looks to me like a tax on authors, and even an act of expropriation. Contractually, in the UK at least, most of the rights in most out-of-print works revert to the authors. This is not true of all rights (typographic arrangement rights stay with the publisher) or all categories of publications (textbooks are often a law unto themselves). Thus typically impecunious authors would have to fork out $50 a pop to retain the rights to their own out-of-print works or forever lose/donate them to the public domain. This doesn't seem right. And what do you do with authors who have the misfortune to be both out-of-print and dead? It is already a major chore for publishers and collecting societies to pay estates amounts due to in respect of works in print, let alone try to collect a tax from them. In practice, the families of all dead authors would lose their rights to works that had fallen out of print very soon. This proposed loss of rights by people who have no likelihood of knowing that they are losing them strikes me as unfair and, indeed, unethical. Chris Chris Zielinski Director, Information Waystations and Staging Posts Network Currently External Relations Officer, HTP/WHO Avenue Appia, CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland Tel: 004122-7914435 Mobile: 0044797-10-45354 e-mail: zielinskic@xxxxxxx <mailto:zielinskic@xxxxxxx> and informania@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:informania@xxxxxxxxxxx> web site: http://www.iwsp.org <http://www.iwsp.org> --------------- Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 08:37:56 -0800 To: < digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > From: "jesposito" < jesposito@xxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:jesposito@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Subject: Lessig in the NY Times Message-ID: < 5E97CE2DFA48BB4CA2DAA847F1A6E4BD10214B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:5E97CE2DFA48BB4CA2DAA847F1A6E4BD10214B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > I imagine readers of this list have already seen Lawrence Lessig's piece on the Op-Ed page of Saturday's New York Times. (I read it in hardcopy and don't have the link available.) I am skeptical about many of Lessig's initiatives, but the policy recommendation he made in the Times strikes me as excellent. That recommendation was for there to be a modest copyright tax (Lessig proposes $50 a year) to keep an already published work under copyright. Failure to pay the tax would push the work into the public domain. What would be the practical effect of such a tax? One outcome, which is the one Lessig focuses on, would be for numerous works that have been out of print for years to enter the public domain--some because their owners don't care about them and don't want to pay the tax, some because their owners don't even know that these properties are in their portfolios. And then let the public domain do with these works what it will. Another outcome (more likely and more significant, in my opinion) is that many holders of copyrights will pay the tax "just in case." Some holders will have large, taxed archives to tend to; the cost of maintaining these archives is not negligible. This will prompt such holders to try to come up with ways to monetize those archives, which will yield an abundance of new forms of electronic publishing. The tax, in other words, will foster innovation. Since books go out of print for a reason and stay out of print for a reason, it seems probable to me that the new uses of archives of books will have less to do with the content or merit of any particular titles (since books go out of print for a reason) and more to do with the content in its aggregated form. An out of print romance novel from 1927 has little value; a collection of a thousand such titles may have a different kind of value, not literary or even as a "read" but as a data mine, from which other extrapolations can be made. Incidentally, the same issue of the Times has a column by Edward Rothstein on Lessig's recent activities. In my view, Rothstein takes Lessig's measure exactly. Joe Esposito
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