Hacker News Reader

> In still other cases, the book ban is enacted by a secondary market distributor, forcibly preventing one private legal owner of the work from selling it to another reader. This is what's happening here with eBay and the Dr. Seuss books.

That's just not true. This was Random House Books' decision, not eBay or Amazon. The marketplaces are just following orders.

> The decision won’t affect Dr. Seuss’s best-known works, which publisher Random House Books for Young Readers and several booksellers on Tuesday said would remain available to customers.

> The review of the six books at issue was conducted last year by Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP, which oversees Dr. Seuss’s publishing interests and ancillary areas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-dr-seuss-books-are-dropped-...

> The marketplaces are just following orders.

First of all, hat-tip for using that chilling phrase in this unintentionally appropriate context.

Furthermore, eBay is a secondary market bookseller. As such, they facilitate legal sales of privately-owned books between individuals. They have absolutely no duty to "follow orders" by a publisher. In fact, publishers would shut down all secondary markets if they could - it would help their sales of new books.

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that a publisher "ordered" eBay to stop selling the books, and such "order" would be invalid and ridiculous.

This is a decision by eBay to flex their corporate muscles to ban books they find politically disagreeable.

I am so comforted to hear that the marketplaces are “just following orders.” I know that no one following orders should ever be held accountable for the actions of their superiors. Really, things are good when people just follow orders.

Nothing bad has ever happened as long as everyone "just follows orders"!

Nuremberg intensifies

>The result is that these massive copyright holders can decide which ideas are allowed, and which ideas will be banned.

They're not deciding which ideas are allowed or banned.

They're not stopping anyone else from creating, espousing, publishing any other ideas at all. There's thousands of publishers, and even the very biggest only hold a tiny fraction of the publishing market, so this complaint seems quite overblown.

Should a publisher be forced to publish things they choose not to? I'd prefer not. There's plenty of others. And the internet makes it easy to post any ideas you choose, vastly easier than at any point in history for individuals to make their ideas available to billions of people.

In your world view, what rights does the copyright holder have and not have?

Did google “ban” reader when they discontinued it?

The entire purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their works. It may be reasonable for a rights-holder to restrict access to a work under certain circumstances - for example refusing to let neo-nazis play your music at a rally - because people might refuse to publish their works if they believed they couldn't stop that. Even a hiatus to distribution may be permissible if the rights-holder needs to be confident they can walk away from a distributor if they don't like the current distribution situation. However permanently and completely stopping distribution of a work breaks the social contract - society no longer gets what it payed for. The Seuss estate could put a big label on the front cover saying not for children, and a forward in every copy explaining why the content of the books is potentially problematic, but if they refuse to make the work available their right to exclusively control the work's availability should be rescinded.

> The entire purpose of copyright is to encourage people to publish their works.

...and the people with the copyright to the book thought about it and decided they do not want to distribute their book.

Are they not entitled to decide for themselves what to do with what's theirs?

The purpose of copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is from the provision of the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to pass intellectual property legislation. Allowing for copyrighted works to be withdrawn from the public and made effectively unavailable to anybody for the remainder of a 95 year term does not promote scientific progress or useful arts as that effectively erases the work for the remainder of a lifetime. Nobody is entitled to use copyright laws against the constitutional purpose of copyright laws.

If somebody were to publish the 6 banned Seuss books and get sued by the estate, they'd be able to make a compelling legal argument that the copyright laws that allow the estate to effectively ban books for 95 years are unconstitutional though they'd probably need a different Supreme Court to have a chance of winning and actually making the "science and useful arts" clause mean something again. It would probably be ill-advised to even attempt a challenge to copyright law on these grounds with the current court as it could lead to another bad precedent like Eldred v. Ashcroft (the "perpetual copyright is constitutional if Congress extends the terms every 20 years via Mickey Mouse Protection Acts" case where the FSF filed a brief in support of the plaintiff). I think a more productive course of action would be to use the right wing outrage over this to push for an "abandonware" exception to copyright law (basically a "keep it in print or lose your copyright" requirement) and possibly copyright term reduction. Given that the political party that is traditionally more supportive of corporate interests is now furious about corporate censorship, there is now a golden opportunity to roll back corporate power and those on both sides who share that goal (albeit for different reasons) should work together for the greater good.

"Exclusive Right" means exclusive. Period. If I don't have the power to distribute my work how I see fit, including not at all, then I don't have exclusive control over my work, and that's going to make me think twice about publishing it. How does taking control away from authors promote the progress of science and the useful arts?

You're reading it the other way around. Copyright is an abridgement of the first amendment right to publish anything you want, and it is only permitted as long as it exists to further science and the useful arts. Thus, it could be argued that copyright itself should not extend to the right of completely banning a work from being published, as it is hard to claim that promotes the progress of science.

So in essence, you could aim the current copyright law is inconsistent with the constitution.

I am not a legal scholar so I have no idea how naive this argument might be from a constitutional law perspective. I have a feeling it would be pretty naive, to be honest.

I just don't see how one could argue that "exclusive Right" means anything other than exclusive. The intent behind the copyright clause is that when authors have exclusive control over their work, they will be incentivized to produce more. When you start carving out exceptions to their exclusive right, well then it's open season on what control they have, as "exclusive" can no longer be interpreted as to mean the plain understanding of the word.

Let's move away from the Dr. Seuss example and look at another instance of where artists have used their exclusive right to restrict distribution of their work. In 2015 the Wu Tang Clan produced a single copy of their 7th album "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin". The album itself then went on a tour of its own and was showcased at museums until it was eventually sold to the infamous "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli for $2 million. The contract he had to sign included the following genius clause:

"The buying party also agrees that, at any time during the stipulated 88 year period, the seller may legally plan and attempt to execute one (1) heist or caper to steal back Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, which, if successful, would return all ownership rights to the seller. Said heist or caper can only be undertaken by currently active members of the Wu-Tang Clan and/or actor Bill Murray, with no legal repercussions." [1]

The legend behind this album has now birthed a forthcoming Netflix documentary [2]. So here is a situation where the author's exclusive control over their art has birthed not just a documentary, which is art, but a legal document which I would classify as art. None of this would be possible in a world where an author's exclusive copyright doesn't exist or could be infringed if they choose to restrict distribution of their work. So I would disagree with your conclusion that it's hard to claim that restricting the distribution of work doesn't "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

[1]: https://gizmodo.com/bill-murray-can-legally-steal-the-2-mill...

[2]: https://www.engadget.com/netflix-martin-shkreli-wu-tang-albu...

Bank robberies produce an order of magnitude more art than a strange contract that happens to contain stipulations relating to exclusive distribution. That doesn’t mean we should perpetuate them.

Bank robberies are violence. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I'm getting at your support for the claim that copyright fosters the creation of new art with a novelty contract that has a provision in it supposedly allowing for stealing the work back spawning content on it because of its notoriety, mostly because it has nothing to do with copyright.

The only reason the contract can exist is copyright. There are others arguing on this thread that if a rights holder restricts the distribution of their work they should effectively forfeit all control over their work. They have justified their position by saying restricting distribution fails to promote the creation of art. I’ve argued the opposite case and brought examples, and it all comes down to the phrase “exclusive rights” in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution.

Your use of the word “banned” here is telling, especially with your reference to the Soviets. The actual bottom line here is that this was a decision by capitalists under a capitalist system. This is the free market at work. People who own the intellectual rights to these books decided for themselves using their own free will to stop selling them. That’s just capitalism.

You say that eBay is preventing one private owner from selling to another private buyer, but what’s the alternative? To force eBay to facilitate the transaction? How is that freedom? The owner and buyer are still free to sell and buy this book, just not thorough eBay. If there is enough demand for this kind of transaction then the market will find a way to facilitate it. That’s capitalism.

I see your point, but the confounding factor for me is that the government granted a monopoly on these books through copyright. That's an artificial construct designed to promote science and the useful arts, but in this situation it's being used to suppress art. In this case, I would advocate for terminating the copyright and letting it be distributed by whoever is willing to.

>>That's an artificial construct designed to promote science and the useful arts, but in this situation it's being used to suppress art.

Do you honestly believe you're "suppressing art" if you fail to force the rightful owners if said art to go against their own will and instead follow your orders and desires on what others should do with what's rightfully theirs?

It sounds an awful lot like your are not as much interested in anyone's freedom as you're interested in imposing your personal will into everyone around you.

So any big company that acquires copyright to any work can successfully ban the same and you would cheer their "right" to do so.

I will absolutely cheer your right to stop selling your IP. I may not cheer your _decision_ to do so, but that decision remains yours.

It's designed to promote science and the useful arts by giving artists control over their art. If I decide to create art, but I lose control over it once I decide I don't want to show it to anyone anymore, then that's not really control, is it?

My opinion is that copyright should be limited to the lifetime of the author, at which point it goes into public domain. In this particular case, that would mean the books would have been in the public domain for a long time now and there wouldn't be a controversy over this particular issue.

But the issue could still arise if the author were alive. Imagine Dr. Seuss were alive today and made this decision himself. It's the same controversy: person/entity with control over IP makes a decision on distribution of IP, people get upset. But that's the deal - you want to promote the useful arts by granting limited monopoly rights over art, then you better actually grant limited monopoly rights over art. That means the right to not publish the art.