Presumably the evidence would come in the form of research that documents economic outcomes. Someone is going to have to establish reproducable measurement criteria for this however.
Hmm…. of course it will be necessary to copyright those measurement criteria and publish the data in peer-reviewed journals. 🙂

The only “evidence based” anything I see is that techdirt always takes the weekend off. Noon Friday, Mike checks out and there are no new stories until the weekend.

The evidence is that automation and the imfamous Crystal Ball would allow stories to be staggered over the weekend so that more subjects would get discussed. To many lame ass stories this weekend, including this speculative piece of “professor took the blue pill” thinking.

I guess they spent a lot less than $100,000,000.

Hmm…Fuck Server. Is that a new sex toy for the interwebs?

Why have so many comments on other threads been deleted? In fact, tons of comments have been deleted? I don’t understand it.

If you throw a single piece of meat into a pen of hungry dogs, there will be a really splendid dogfight. Very well, let’s do something like that, let’s try to exploit the divergent interests within the copyright industries. We start from the point that most of the things the copyright industries make their money on are not actually protected by copyright in an effectual way. If we can legally take out most of their market, we can afford to buy up the remaining copyrights when it is all over.

Let’s break copyright down into categories. The first category is software. Software copyrights are largely a moot point. Does anyone really care when the copyright of Windows 3.0 expires? The interfaces have long since been cloned by WINE. The fighting is mostly about patents now, not copyrights.

Books are a different proposition. Governments traditionally fund both public libraries and academic research libraries. There are large classes of books whose authors and publishers make most of their money from the library market. You can usually buy a library card at a state university library for fifty dollars, even if you are not enrolled, and of course public library cards are free. As long as you are willing to drive to the books, rather than having the books come to you over the internet, there is still a quite workable system. The problem is that this system has not translated over to the internet.

Very well, governments can perfectly well buy up copyrights and place them in the public domain, or they can buy Creative Commons licenses, which comes to much the same thing. They can do wholesale what they have been doing retail. In the case of an old book, the government might have to pay a thousand dollars per copyright, just to pay for the legal expenses of establishing that the seller actually owns the copyright. Granted, the sums involved would work out to billions of dollars in total, but that would still be small compared to the cost of running the educational system. The universities would play the leading role, of course. They might find the money by temporarily cutting back on library purchases. That will give publishers a sense of urgency about finding things which they can sell the copyrights of. No doubt the publishers will wind up paying people in India to root through their old files, do searches to find next of kin, locate wills, etc. However, that is the publishers’ problem. Additional money can be raised by instituting maintenance fees for new copyrights issued after a specified date, similar to those for patents.

One has to speak of textbooks, which constitute a major share of the publishers’ revenues. Particular textbooks do not have anything much in the way of unique content which competing textbooks do not have. What guarantees the market for textbooks is their compatibility with other copies of the same edition, as used in courses. Before the internet, someone who merely wanted to study by himself could simply buy an older edition of the textbook in a thrift shop, but of course there were difficulties in assembling enough copies of old editions for an entire class. Now, of course, there are open-source textbooks. As these gain traction, there will be nothing much the commercial publishers can do about it. This will put the publishers under increasing pressure to find something they can sell– such as old copyrights.

Most copyrights over twenty years old are effectively worthless. If a book is both out-of-print and rare, it generates no revenue at all, obviously. The next step up are books which are out-of-print but common, or in-print and common, but not adopted as textbooks in the schools. In these cases, the internet used book market can supply copies for a lower cost than putting out a new edition. Given an efficient market in used books, only a handful of books are lucrative enough for the copyright to be worth a thousand dollars after twenty years.

The internet used book market can be made more efficient, driving prices down, and diminishing the worth of copyright. For example, E-bay has introduced a feature under which people can sell mixed parcels of books, more or less on the same subject, or more or less by the same author, with only one shipping, handling, and auction charge per parcel, so the effective price can be on the order of fifty cents or a dollar per book, inclusive of shipping. Amazon should be encouraged to copy this feature, possibly in somewhat modified form. E-bay’s great weakness is its insistence on auction. Amazon takes the view that the seller is a professional used bookseller; that he is expected to know approximately what goods are worth; and that he takes his occasional losses and averages them out with his profits. Life is generally simpler if you are dealing with professionals. In respect of bundles of books, a professional used bookseller could reasonably be expected to collect a thousand book and sort them out into a hundred parcels of ten books each, and no doubt this will be the standard Amazon enforces.

The result will be that, without any change in the law, the effective incidence of extended copyright in books will decrease. The copyright industries do not consume an undue portion of national income. The problem is that they produce market distortions. We can afford to buy them out for a lump sum, and that will make the market distortions go away. Carrot-and-stick tactics work best on the book-publishing industry, because so much of its income comes from the government-funded educational establishment. However, such tactics can probably be applied to the recording industry as well. At this point, no one listens to Gene Krupa or Tommy Dorsey, the pop favorites of the 1940’s. As against that, there are lots of Indie musicians. The actual production of recorded music is no longer concentrated or monopolized. The scarcity is not so much music as celebrity, the latter produced by the studio promotion system. From the recording industry’s point of view, the only musicians who matter are the handful whom they actively promote. File sharing, as an economic threat to the recording industry, is mostly about sharing copies of maybe a couple of hundred different albums. Selling off all the other copyrights, which do not have celebrity, might come to seem financially attractive, especially as the record business continues to shrink.

The copyrights would be bought by reverse auction. Within equivalent classes of material, whoever offered to sell for the lowest price, taking account of factors such as previous sales, sales within the last ten years, size of work, age, etc., would turn in his copyright and get the money. No one would be forced to sell, or even to bid. As stated, it would be the burden of the prospective seller to locate evidence of his good title. Once copyrights were bought, the works in question would be posted on a variety of official websites (Library of Congress, various state universities, etc.). Fixed sums would be allocated annually for purchase of copyrights, and as all the cheaper books were bought in, the rates paid would gradually increase.

This leaves only one major copyright industry. The movie industry is different. It still controls its product in a way which none of the other copyright industries do. Making movies is still a form of industry, what with the sound stages and the special effects, and whatnot. Even here, leaks may develop. When one studio sells off its copyrights to the government, it doesn’t have to share the money with the other studios, but the downside, the diminution of monopoly, is shared.