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.

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.