Copyright stagnation

Source: offsetting behaviouroffsetting behaviour

Paul Heald demonstrated the effect of the stagnant US copyright wall in seminar at Canterbury last week.

Recall that books published through 1922 are in the public domain in the US; those published since then are covered by copyright.

Heald dug through some Amazon stats to see what happens to books as they come out of copyright. Here’s the rather stunning graph.

So any arguments about underexploitation of unprotected works seem untenable.

If this were a moving wall, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad: eventually, books would come out of copyright and be released in new editions. But Disney does keep going back and insisting that nothing can ever be returned to the Commons from which they so liberally drew, and Congress loves Disney; we might reasonably expect another copyright term extension act to keep the wall fairly rigid.

So while I can get Pride and Prejudice in remix with either vampires or zombies,* I’m not betting on being able to read a version of Good-bye, Mr. Chips in which he protects his students from the werewolf menace as well as offering them solace through the Great War. The werewolf version practically writes itself – the Germans infect some injured British soldiers with lycanthropy just after a full moon, knowing they’ll be back in Britain by the next full moon….

Here’s Paul’s SSRN page. The chart above isn’t in any of his released papers, but is an update to some of the matters he covered here. His talk for the department is embedded below; the audio isn’t fantastic, but all the slides are there.

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