Copyright and e-books

In other posts I spoke about the chaos of copyright rules and about e-books, pirated or not, that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. In this post I am going to add a few of my ideas in this regard.

• Just now, the European Union and the United States apply the rule that copyright lasts up to 70 years after the author's death, or almost three generations. As authors often die now at quite advanced ages, that means that the rights to their books last until the fourth or fifth generation after their own. I doubt that great-great-grandchildren and their children should continue to collect royalties for what their remote ancestor did?
• It is clear that the objective of such long duration is not to benefit authors, but publishers, many of which are very powerful, dominate mass media, and use them to pressure governments to extend the duration of copyright to their benefit, up to about a century. I think this is an abuse; governments should not have given in to these pressures. In my opinion copyright should disappear, at the latest, 25 years after the death of the author.

Additional author rights

James H. Schmitz

In addition to copyright (the right of the author to receive a part of the profits from the sale of his work), other rights should also be guaranteed. The most important is the right to the integrity of the work, recognized by the Berne Convention:

The author shall retain the right ... to object to any deformation, mutilation or other modification of his [work].

The downside is that dead authors can hardly object. 

Unfortunately, this right is less protected than the copyright, as a few examples will show:

Freedom and prior censorship

Wikipedia Logo

On July 5, 2018 the European Parliament rejected, by 318 votes against 278, the proposal for the Copyright Directive in the European Single Market. In the days leading up to this vote, there were many public and private activities in favor and against the proposal, which after this defeat will have to be debated again in committee, probably with amendments. The most controversial points of the proposal, those that gathered most rejection, were incorporated in two articles of the regulation:

• Article 11: Establishes what has been popularly called the Google tax. It makes it compulsory, for those responsible for web pages, to request permission, and if the copyright owners wish, to pay a fee, for including a link to a news or copyright owner that has appeared in any of the media. The most favored by this article are not individual authors, but mass media (especially the press on the Internet), the main defenders of this measure.

The MEPs who defended this article argue that it does not affect individuals or the Wikipedia, although the latter felt so threatened, that it declared a strike for the first time in its history, so that access to the Spanish, Italian and French versions of the Wikipedia was closed during the day before the vote. The problem is, this article may be expressed so ambiguously that, although just now may not apply to individuals or to Wikipedia, there are no guarantees that in the future this cannot be done.

Pirated eBooks, or just free eBooks?

"Treasure Island-Scribner's-1911" 

by N.C. Wyeth Beinecke Library

A headline in a major Spanish newspaper: Piracy increases. The text says: A survey shows that 56.6% of those who downloaded a book through the Internet did it without any payment... [In Spain] we are going backwards, because while in countries like France the number of pirated eBooks decreases year after year, here, however, it increased. Next door is another story where publishers complain of their falling sales.

In this context, we should notice a couple of widespread errors:

•         There is confusion between a free downloaded eBbook and a pirate eBook. Both things are quite different. For instance, when I bought my eBook reader, it came with a library of about 1000 files. (Books and files cannot be considered equivalent, for each story by Edgar Allan Poe, to give one example, was in a separate file). All these books were legal, because all of them were works out of copyright. Later on I have added many more: just now I have over 2000 volumes of classic books, downloaded from free sites like the Project Gutenberg, the University of Adelaide, epub Books, the Cervantes virtual library, Dominio Público, Livres Pour Tous, Ebooksgratuits, etc. All the books that can be downloaded from these sites are free, but all are legal. However, publishers (and the media who echo them) tend to count any freely downloaded book as a pirate book, because it does not provide them with any profit.

The chaos of copyright rules

When publishers and author associations complain about the huge amount of copyright violation in piratical download of digital publications, including electronic books (e-books), they should start by trying to put a little order in the chaos of copyright laws, which has become outstanding since Internet has made easy the exchange of digital files between world-wide users. Let us consider a few examples of this chaos:

·         In the USA, every book published before 1923 is in the public domain. For those published between 1923 and 1963, the default duration was 28 years after publication, which could be extended to 95 by renewing the copyright. The latter became the copyright duration for all books between 1964 and 1977. After 1978, copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death.