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Comment by pasquinelli | Hacker News Reader

i wonder if any author anywhere ever has decided not to write a book because of copyright issues. and, if you let me get a little counterfactual here, i wonder if that book, had they written it, would've not been garbage.

but really, it's the publisher that needs the incentive to invest in fitzgerald's creative work that copyright is about here, yeah?

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Almost certainly never. I'd guess that most books go out of print (and stop making money) within a decade or two of being written. It's only a vanishingly small fraction of works that are so incredibly successful that they stay in print and continue making the author (or their estate) significant royalties beyond the author's lifetime.

Looking at it this way, I'm thinking that paid copyright renewals are the right way to go. Have the initial copyright last maybe 10 years, then require the rights holder to pay a small fee (something like $50, maybe?) to renew the copyright for another decade. If a work isn't making the author at least $5 a year, it probably belongs in the public domain.

yeah, but if the copyright holder were, say, disney, then they would just perpetually renew it, because even if it isn't making them money now doesn't mean that wouldn't want to make it into a line of merchandise and its associated movie sometime down the line.

Which is fine. Let their works die off while others flourish.

Then make the renewal fee double (or something) each time it's renewed. Eventually the cost of renewing the copyright will be more than it's worth to the rights holder.

In any case, the fact that there is a deep-pocketed rights holder for those works means that those works are being cared for, to some degree at least. The ones we really have to worry about right now are those that are lost and forgotten before their copyright expires.

I'd go further than that: most books probably go out of print after a single run, and will be unavailable within a single year.

Remember that when you go into a big chain bookstore, all the books you are seeing have already outperformed most by getting shelved by a major retailer.

there is some great research on what books are available at amazon in terms of when they were written. there is a graph that shows a huge hole with long copyright where books are not reprinted. can't find it at the moment.

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