Freelance Propaganda

Out of Printness, copyright and Thor Power Tools

I was running my usual librarian provocation by Catherine Arnott Smith, new Faculty at Syracuse, and it sparked off an interesting exchange. The usual provocation is "every time I enter a library I feel like screaming at the library staff to stop standing round and shelving books and start scanning them, for god's sake!". This gets feathers nice and ruffled indeed and Catherine, probably rightly, pointed out that this wasn't the libraries job - and that it would be unauthorized copying (she may have said piracy).

I suspect that Catherine was provoking me when, next, she provided a reason that this would be a terrible idea. She proposed that Unauthorized Copying was the reason that Books go "out of print", citing her own experience in publishing. That, as Catherine well knew and was counting on, was going to get me very pumped up.

I proposed that it was clearly outrageously long and growing copyright terms that meant that when a book became economically unprofitable (and thus entered the netherworld of "Out of Printness") it languished in an unconscionable in-betweeness of unavailability where it is not available for money but also not available for the public domain.

Stuck in the middle are the authors (unable to earn royalities and unable to gain credit for an unavailable work) and the readers (unable to easily access a work). The Publishers aren't really profiting from this situation either - although they might if a work suddenly comes back into vogue.

There are a few moves afoot to deal with this situation - from both sides. Lessig is pushing a proposal (The Eldred Act) that would end the concept of "Out of Print" by allowing a nominal extension of copyright payment to take copyright beyond a minimum term. The idea being that economically viable works would be renewed (those that would still be in print) while economically non-viable works would not be renewed (those that would be out of print), thus making them available to the surprisingly effective distribution mechanisms of the public domain.

From the other direction there are moves afoot, at Stanford and elsewhere, to radically increase our ability to cheaply scan books and journals using robots. So I don't need to scream at library staff afterall :)

Catherine, in response, added a very interesting element which gives some more insight into what makes or breaks a book's economic viability. In particular for "out of printness" the costs of holding inventory are critical. I had no idea but there was a substantial change in these costs in 1979 which lead to the present situation where books go out of print more quickly - and you can largely blame the IRS.

In the Thor Power Tools case the depreciation rules where changed in such a way as to make it hard for publishers to maintain a large inventory. This decreased the economic viability of some books and drove them quicker into the murky purgatory of "out of print". (The link above is from the Bulletin of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 1993)

But will renewable copyright, set at such a low figure of $1, help bring the light of the public domain? Or do we need a presumptive "Public or Perish" law to bring works not considered profitable enough to publish out into the public domain? Perhaps if somehting is "out of print" then copying is authorized (although that assumes that it will never be profitable again - which is clearly untrue - but one could argue that that possibility doesn't encourage creative production ...) The argument continues ...