DRM wouldn’t be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break it and if copyright durations weren’t so ridiculously long. I have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last 95‐year chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce copyright terms.
The university textbook market is pathological and unfair. At every turn the publishers , and the universities happily go along with it.
It taught me the value of a healthy secondhand market. For common classes like calculus and physics, the new price was about $80 or $100, but I could buy a used book directly from a student for $60, and sell the same copy directly to another student for $60 after the semester was over. But by the time I was taking senior‐level engineering courses, there were so few students taking them that used textbooks were hard to find.
To fight used sales, publishers would release new editions fairly often. Maybe there were justifiable reasons for a new edition, like fixing typos perhaps, but it was obvious to anyone who stuck with an older edition that the biggest changes between editions were the problem sets, in an obvious attempt from the publishers to force students onto the latest edition. Certainly it beggars belief that subjects like calculus and differential equations would see enough change in the field to justify the new editions as rapidly as they came out.
I often used international editions, which could be bought for $15 or so (when available). They were made with cheap paper and cheap bindings, but the content was identical. As usual, though, the publishers often changed the problem sets between countries. Since the rest of the book was identical, students with old editions or international editions could use the book normally just fine, only having to copying the assigned homework problems from a generous student with a current edition.
At my school, the University of New Mexico, couple of textbooks from mainstream publishers were published as “special UNM editions”; I would love to compare one of these to a mainstream edition to see if anything meaningful changed. I think it’s safe to assume that it was just another excuse to reduce the size of the used market and to change the problem sets around.
There were some cases where the professors wrote their own textbooks. It made sense a time or two in the more specialist subjects, but the moral hazard is obvious. The worst was when I took a Greek mythology class in the humanities department: the lecturer wrote the book, which was a consumable workbook, and wouldn’t accept homework on a separate paper, only written on a page from the book.
When I was in school, publishers were only just introducing the idea of supplemental online course materials, which of course expire at the end of the semester and can’t be resold. I shudder to think what the university textbook market is like now, when the used market can be so completely eliminated.
The publishers’ behavior is obscene, but what I find really reprehensible is that the university and the teachers went along with it, when they could structure their courses otherwise.
One of the few good experiences I had with assigned reading was a microprocessors class where the professor, who had a fair amount of industry experience, assigned only public datasheets and manuals. It makes such a difference when material is produced by a functional market, where the authors’ financial incentive is to provide thorough, functional documentation without grift. The contrast with university textbooks was so apparent.
100 years old, yet its copyright only expired five years ago—in the United States. In Europe and other life+70 regions, the film will remain copyrighted past 2050, even though Lotte Reiniger died nearly half a century ago!
The problem is that copyright is supposed to secure for the authors the benefits of a creative work for a limited time. If it's decades longer than the longest human lifespan, that's not "a limited time" in any sense that is meaningful to humans.
Copyright is now a global thing harmonized by treaties, and the view you describe is the one from the American Constitution, but other countries (even if they compromised on a certain length in treaties) aren't necessarily coming out of the same legal tradition.
Yes, but I'm not aware of any jurisdiction with an appetite for perpetual copyright in general. At least, not in the Western sense of copyright being a nearly unlimited, and property-like (transferable, subdividable, and assignable) legal right to refuse access to a work for any reason.
The actual divide between American and European legal traditions has to do with moral rights and copyright formalities. In Europe, you could very easily take a work from one country, translate it, and not only publish it in another, but get copyright title to it in that country as well. And publishers did this heaps. Europe's solution was to get rid of copyright formalities - works are just born copyrighted. America hated this and spent about a hundred years digging their heels in about it until they begrudgingly signed onto the Berne Convention without really agreeing to it.
While a primary goal of Berne was to make copyright work for artists again[4], a secondary goal was to protect the publishing empires that had been built up in each country. Both sides of this tradition wanted copyright terms that were long enough to protect their publishing empires but not so long as to require them to pay royalties to the folklore and song those empires plundered on the way up. You can see this in how easily America was willing to go along with life+70 when the EU offered it to them, while they still drag their feet on automatic registration and moral rights.
There are a handful of countries that have a "paying public domain" - as in, anything in the public domain must still be paid for, but the legal "owners"[0] of the work do not have the right to refuse that payment. That sort of arrangement is perpetual, but because it lacks the right to refuse access, it's not copyright in any way Hollywood would recognize it. It's more helpful to think of these in the same way one thinks of Canadian Content (CanCon) laws: a way for countries that are not net cultural exporters[3] to siphon off the top of the creative industries of countries that are.
I can also think of a few cases in which specific works were locked behind very narrow sui generis IP[2] rights. Like, only one particular children's hospital in the UK is allowed to perform Peter Pan on stage. Or, you're not allowed to sell merchandise with the Mona Lisa on it in Italy[1]. These are copyright-adjacent, in that they're government-granted monopolies over creative works. And they're perpetual. But they don't transfer like copyright and they don't cover all the same acts that copyright does.
So, yes, the "limited Times" framing is very American, but no other jurisdiction has meaningfully objected to it, either. We joke about digging up the grave of Shakespeare every time talk of copyright extensions happens, but if you do extend out copyright forever, then every person in the world has fractional blood inheritance to a very large amount of human culture. Going back to that "paying public domain" thing, some people have even floated the idea of collective ownership over indigenous cultural works. Like, imagine if when Disney made the movie Moana, they had to pay literally every Polynesian person a royalty check. Nobody in power wants something like that to happen, because that's not building up an empire. That's tearing it down, brick by brick, royalty check by royalty check.
[0] The notion of who gets the money from a paying public domain varies; but is usually some government collection agency.
[1] Italy actually used to have a paying public domain, but replaced it with this law.
[2] In the Doctorowian sense of "intellectual property is the right to dictate the conduct of your competitors".
[3] To be clear, creative industry is so broadly globalized that it renders this concept outdated. e.g. Canada has shittons of cultural exports, they're just all on YouTube.
Part of the problem is that it wasn't possible to upload it to YouTube until recently (and someone from Germany could still demand for it to be taken down or made unavailable in Germany), while also, being almost 100 years old, it was not released commercially - which both conspired to condemn it to obscurity.
There was a recent case in Florida where an innocent woman with no past record was falsely jailed for 13 days due to Flock imagery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA
Standard Ebooks has a database of public domain oil paintings for use as book covers. SE is strict about copyright clearance and requires either scans of a copyright‐expired publication containing the painting, or an explicit statement from a reputable museum that the work is CC0. Here’s an entry I contributed:
On the other hand they do allow search by century and very little from the 19th (and none earlier) century is still in copyright anywhere.
There is a possible problem with countries where a photographer can have copyright over their photograph of an earlier work. Again, there is not global standard.
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