Forgotten Books And How To Save Them
from the once-again,-copyright-is-the-problem dept
On the Neglected Books site, there is a fine meditation on rescuing forgotten writers and their works from oblivion, and why this is important. As its author Brad Bigelow explains:
I have been searching for neglected books for over forty years and the one thing I can say with unshakeable confidence is that there are more great (and even just seriously good) books out there in the thickets off the beaten path of the canon than I or anyone else can ever hope to discover.
His post mentions three questions that “reissue” publishers must answer when looking at some of these neglected books as potential candidates for re-printing:
Is the book good (meaning of sufficient merit to justify being associated with the imprint)? Is the book in the public domain or are the rights attainable for a reasonable price? Will enough readers buy the book to recoup costs and, with some luck, earn a profit?
The first is an aesthetic judgement, but the other two are essentially about copyright. Walled Culture the book (free ebook versions available) discusses at length the issue of “orphan works” – works that are still in copyright, but which cannot be re-issued because it is not clear who owns the rights, and thus who could give permission for new editions. Bigelow makes a good point about why this is such a problem:
Even in the U.K., which has the advantage of a national database of wills, it can be practically impossible to track down who has inherited the copyrights from a dead author. The database, for one thing, is incomplete. There are millions of wills missing. There are plenty of writers who failed recognize their copyrights as inheritable assets and didn’t bother to mention them in the will. And there are plenty of writers who simply didn’t bother to have a will drawn up in the first place. Every publisher involved in the reissue business can name a dozen or more writers they’d love to publish, if only they could find legatees empowered to sign the necessary contracts.
The last question for publishers – will enough readers buy the book to recoup costs and earn a profit? – is the other main stumbling block to re-issuing out-of-print books for a new audience. Bigelow explains that this often comes down to a key challenge: how does a publisher get a reader who knows nothing about the book, the writer, or the publisher’s reputation to look at, let alone buy it?
If copyright terms were a more reasonable length, no more than the original 14 years (plus an option of renewal for 14 years) of the 1710 Statute of Anne, then both these problems would disappear. Relatively soon after the original publication of a book, before it sinks into obscurity, anyone could turn it into an ebook, and circulate it freely online under a public domain license. Publishers could do the same, perhaps adding forewords and other critical apparatus, and they could also print new, analogue editions without worrying about copyright issues. The costs for both book forms would be lower without the need for expensive legal searches, which would encourage more publishers to bring out new editions, and increase the availability of these works, perhaps guided by the online popularity of the freely-circulating copies made by individuals.
It is the absurdly long intellectual monopoly created by copyright – typically the author’s life plus 70 years more – that has created the near-impenetrable thickets that Bigelow refers to. Slash the copyright term, and you slash the thickets. If that could be done, the main obstacles to finding, reading, enjoying and – above all – sharing those great but forgotten books would all disappear at a stroke.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: copyright, lost culture, neglected books, orphan works
Comments on “Forgotten Books And How To Save Them”
Why not have a site full of “orphan works” published under pseudonyms of “designated thieves” who might live outside the country? That would definitely defeat copyright, when the authorities can’t locate the distributor the illegal books and cut them off at the source.
Re:
Set up shop in a nasty Nth-world nation outside the reach of international law and get paid under the table?
Sure, that’s appealing when your product is something with a massive profit margin like heroin. Who is going to move to Eritria or Afghanistan in an attempt to strike it rich selling illegal reprints of books that weren’t that popular in the first place?
Re: Re:
Because if that’s what it takes for a book to be enjoyed by people, that’s what needs to be done. If reading an orphan work out of Eritrea released by a man simply known as “Catullus” is what it takes, I’d do it to read them. These are books the government doesn’t want you to read and that should be a selling point in and of itself.
And lastly, what makes you certain that someone would need to turn to an obscure foreign country, when France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ireland are so close to the U.K.? Or even some underground book sellers in London who can move around if the heat rises
Re: Re: Re:
You’re deranged.
Re: Re: Re:2
What’s so deranged about it? We get access to forgotten media because of the sacrifice of people who knew and still know what they’re doing while being highly appreciated is illegal, and they do it for no money. They could be sent to jail just as the Russian dissidents could have during the old Soviet Union, but that hasn’t stopped them from pirating old media nobody cares about.
We just need to support them and know they’re doing the unpaid work that helps out ordinary people, and don’t rat them out to the police.
Re: Re: Re:
*looks at the Berne Convention and TRIPS
*looks at what happened to Kim Dotcom
So, you were saying…?
Thanks for telling us you used to c9mment on Torrentfreak, though.
Re: Re: Re:
So why haven’t you done it? For the exact reason I gave, above.
All the examples you give are examples of you spending sending a few bucks to someone else. You’re still relying on there being a “someone else” dippy enough to move to Eritrea just to make $3 selling you a Nancy Drew knock-off from 1947.
There are 8 billion people on Earth. Zero of them are living in Afghanistan so they can sell bootleg mid-20th-century literature. Consider the possibility that it is an obviously dumb thing to do.
Re: Re: Re:2
But who says they have to go to Eritrea or Afghanistan to sell- or even give away- such literature?
Someone could do it at an underground book store in one country, publish the books under pseudonyms and get the hell out of dodge to get to another offshore halfway house before they can get caught. And even if they get caught, anyone that dedicated probably would figure that arrest is what they signed up for. The message is so important that it was worth their freedom.
Re: Re: Re:3
Because virtually every nation in the world is a signatory to the same copyright treaties as the USA. Eritrea and Afghanistan are two of those lonely few options you have.
Rather than continuing to explain why this is a dumb idea, I’ll just re-observe that absolutely nobody’s doing it even though this particular copyright problem has existed since the last century. So either go do it yourself or think hard about why nobody else on Earth is doing it either.
Re: Re: Re:
ORLY? Because I can read Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence all I want to, and I’m pretty sure no government had anything to do with A Chance Child by Jill Paton Walsh going out of print in the late 1990s. Don’t make paranoid assumptions about government involvement when there are obviously other forces at play.
Re:
That sounds like regular old copyright violation (“piracy”) with extra steps.
Re: Re:
The “extra steps” get around law enforcement because jurisdiction gets messy when foreign countries get involved. Also, it’s kind of hard to serve arrest warrants when the people just keep moving around.
Early hip-hop artists broke copyright law all the time but because they were vagabond by nature they could skip town before anyone could get them and sell the bootleg cassettes at swapmeets, spreading the new genre wherever they went.
Re: Re: Re:
Again, if Kim Dotcom could be arrested and extradited, anyone can.
That alone should be evidence why very few people do it.
Re: Re: Re:
But none of this is necessary if you just want to host files on a server in a different country. You don’t need pseudonyms or people living somewhere else. People already do this.
Re: Re: Re:2
Or.
Z-Library already exists.
I agree, bring back the Statute of Anne.
Re:
No need, when people see books with pseudonymous authors getting confiscated and burned and people being railroaded with Soviet Union styled show trials for the crimes of spreading prohibited information, people will know that copyright has gone too far.
Re: Re:
People are complacent. They vote for party members. They don’t vote on copyright as a single issue. People “knowing” that copyright has gone too far won’t stop publishers and content owners from lobbying Congress with boatloads of campaign donations to keep the status quo or even make it worse.
Re: Re: Re:
And sadly, since there’s 74 million insurrectionists in America right now, people funding to keep the status quo is more fact than fiction.
Re: Re: Re:2
What a ridiculous and also hateful thing to say.
I hope that if the country descends into civil war you’re one of the first to perish and your family are sent to re-education camps.
Re: Re: Re:3
Simply saying that theee’s a massive group of insurrectionists in America right now who are doing their best to keep Trump and white supremacy alive by any and all means possible as evidence that people can and will keep shitty ideas alive is hateful now?
Thanks for at least signalling that you’re a threat to democracy.
Re: Re: Re:3
“What a ridiculous and also hateful thing to say.”
Well at least you prefaced your comment appropriately bro.
Re: Re: Re:
More to the point, if you’re going to wage war against the copyright system, picking “the unknown heirs of unpopular mid-20th-century authors” as your target makes zero sense from a moral or public-relations perspective.
Pick any random out-of-print work from, say, 1960. Someone definitely owns the copyright — is just isn’t owned by a big corporation that keeps track of that kind of thing. It is probably owned by one of the author’s kids or grandkids. It is just no publisher feels like spending the money on lawyers to figure out who that person is.
So on the one hand you have the middle-class elderly niece of a man who once wrote a mildly successful novel. On the other hand you have a guy named “Catullus of Tehran”, who is selling copies and keeping all the money for himself. We’re expected to believe the latter person will be seen as the hero of the story, and not as a parasite victimizing the heirs of unsung writers. This is not how normal people think about copyright.
Re: Re: Re:2
That would be going to extremes, if you had to release it from Iran, or any of those other countries.
I could see a small, mobile, loosely-organized group of people defeating copyright. Small enough that the authorities wouldn’t expect a thing, mobile enough to leave home if need be, and loosely organized that the information can be passed on to innocents/foreign nationals if the original thief is caught. They’d have to be committed to the point where some might think they’re insane, but it is possible
Re: Re: Re:3
…SIGH.
And, to aupport those people, you’d also need rich people to fund the core group, and more importantly, a security team.
And not just cybersecurity folks. PEOPLE WITH GUNS.
If you’re willing to go that far, you’re willing to put two bullets into the maximalist fucks who sent the police after you. Oh, and the police too.
But hey, if you’re willing to murder people to preserve books…
Re: Re: Re:4
There’s no need for violence, rather we would say that the book you are holding in your hands meant so much to its distributors that they risked their freedom just to give you a copy. Considering that preservation is considered analogous to car theft, the sacrifice has to be worth it. And by stupidly pursuing individual thieves rather than trying to destroy the message, the government would fail to censor us.
Re: Re: Re:5
Nah.
You seem to misunderstand the circumstances you’re in.
You’re not only fighting against unjust laws, you’re really fighting against an enemy who clearly has more resources, international reach, the very same enemy that has shaped local laws to benefit them, and thay also have access to the very same economic network your “plucky” band of “preservers” NEED to pay the bills.
And don’t tell me I don’t know jack fucking shit. I do know about Z-Library and SadPanda and been through at least ONE SadPanda shutdown scare.
Passive nonviolent resistance isn’t going to cut it. What does, though, is actual revolutionary regime change. Because relying on the “benevolence” of governments/governments isn’t going to cut the fucking mustard and WILL eventually kill you.
Amd at a bare minimum, that means developing actual armed resistance, OpSec, and a plan to defend yourself from the maximalists and their eventually violent means of maintaining the status quo.
If you’re not prepared to defend yourself at a bare minimum, then your plan is doomed to fail.
Picked up
Years Ago, I found a 1888 Self published Book, 1 of a series. $10.
REALLY weird book, and ranks up there with All the conspiracy IDEALS spread around Even before our time.
I would never believe the government, any nations government would be benevolent, in fact I think they’re malevolent, considering that they would just allow prosecutors to pursue these dishonest claims and not give the arrested the presumption of innocence. I wouldn’t want to have to resort to violence to save information- the strategy would be to relay that forbidden knowledge onto as many innocent people as possible, living far and wide. That way, if they would come after an individual, he’ll have already passed it along to another, with instructions to spread it around to others. Since the rhetoric is to treat those who would share as criminals, then what happens when the punishment is paid by the “guilty” party? You can’t expect any judge to condemn innocent people- multitudes of them- and you can’t “punish” an inanimate object, unless you mean to burn every copy of the book they made.
That self sacrifice does make for a powerful opening argument, and the rights which should be afforded to defendants closes it
Re:
You misunderstand how far these assholes are willing to go.
Or the kinds of people who want to maintain the status quo, or reestablish one.
There were Nazi collaborators in WW2. Some of those anti-human fuckers had the gall to be Jewish (more specifically, Zionists). There are 74 million insurrectionists in America right now, ready to murder the rest of America on Trump’s command.
There is no law, no judge these anti-human forces will listen to.
And those are just examples. I believe that copyright maximalists will go to just as extreme lengths, if not worse, to suppress information. I mean, modern China exists.
Self-sacrifice means nothing to them. Only that the line must go up by any and all means necessary.
And that’s what you fail to understand.
They don’t CARE.
And thus, the only solution left is the least palatable one.
Re: Re:
So you’re telling me the rights of defendants mean absolutely nothing to these people? And what if they were willing to concede their guilt just to save manuscripts? That could be part of a plea bargain to save innocent people and the books they valued so highly.
At no point in human history have the people who wanted to burn books and censor information EVER been the good guys.
Re: Re: Re:
YES.
YOU FINALLY FUCKING GET IT.
THERE IS NO PLEA BARGAIN. NO DUE PROCESS.
NONE OF THAT MATTERS TO THE MAXIMALISTS.
ONLY THE FUCKING LINE.
And that is why your approach will fail. You don’t acknowledge that maximalists don’t care. They GOT Kim Dotcom, they tried to sue the founders of TPB.
There is no talking, no bargaining, no NOTHING.
The only way to fight them is to literally engage in actual, world-destroying WAR. Because they already have the damn governments. The damn SWIFT Network. The hearts and minds of the people.
SO unless you have an effective, non-lethal way to fight them, violence WILL be necessary, if only as self-defence.
And it has ALWAYS been this way, since the Stationers’ Company and their bullshit.
Re: Re: Re:2
So if they don’t care about innocence or guilt, then that’s why we need as many people as possible to spread the word, particularly in foreign countries. They can’t get all of us
Re: Re: Re:3
…
And I keep saying.
They will not stop.
They clearly CAN. Modern China, Modi’s India and even Russia are doing their best to maintain total information control.
The maximalists are taking notes.
And they will stop at nothing. And they don’t NEED to openly eradicate every last copyright infringer when the community will do it for them.
Sitting there thinking your non-violent spreading of information isn’t gonna work. That’s what fucking Mao did to get rid of opposition.
The only way left, again, is the unpalatable violent option. Assassinations, economic warfare, even nukes if we can get their hands on.
The only option is to eradicate copyright maximalism. Violently.
Re: Re: Re:4
Kiss me on the mouth you fool!
Re:
While my main argument makes it way through the spam filter…
Nah, corps and their captured governments don’t care.
All they see are obstacles to next quarter’s profits and those obstacles will be removed to make the fuxking line go up.
And while I’m sure your delusional ass acknowledges that corps and their captured governments can, have, and will do everything in their power to maintain that fucking line going up, I will restate it again: they are not averse to using all the means available to them to maintain the status quo (copyright maximalism). Including violence and nuclear strikes if push came to shove.
Modern China monitors their expat citizens with actual people and technology to ensure total compliance to the party line. Singapore does similar things, though all their efforts remain domestic rather than global. El Salvador, well, is the only country to solve murder with more murder.
If you think the maximalists aren’t taking notes, you’re even more delusional than I thought.
Re: Re:
I know the maximalists are taking notes and they have chosen to use the justice system to enforce their edicts. By that same token, all criminal trials operate under the assumption of innocence, due process, and proving the prosecutors case beyond any reasonable doubt. If these are not being followed, then any judgment should be null and void. And if there was a guilty verdict, the punishment would have to fit the crime.
It’s about time we assert the powerful rights that anyone accused of committing theft should.
Dear Z
I would ask to have a Multi password scenario.
Just cause you make them longer, dont make them MORE secure. That only increases TIME. NOT complexity.
Also, if you could take a 6 sided Dice with random numbers and letters on each side, then let the Code be inserted in’ in 1 of Multiple ways. Like patterns, Crossword(they use word, you add Letters and numbers to hide the word) and soforth.