On his book Copy This Book! What Data Tells Us about Copyright and the Public Good
Cover Interview of December 02, 2020
In a nutshell
Our earliest attitudes about copyright law are probably
formed by elementary school teachers admonishing us not to copy. Seeing little
Johnny and Suzy sent to the principal’s office for plagiarism sends a pretty
clear message about the consequences of borrowing someone else’s work!
Copy this Book! What Data Tells Us About Copyright and
the Public Good hopes to nudge the reader into questioning that ingrained
anti-copying instinct. In fact, numerous recent studies show that modern
copyright law stifles creativity, raises prices, and diminishes the
availability of works to the public.
But mere statistics are pretty dry, so the book goes far beyond
graphs and charts and tells the deep story of copyright with numerous
illustrative anecdotes and stories. Think Bill Bryson or Neil deGrasse Tyson!
Copy this Book! starts with the alarming results of a
random sample of new editions of books being sold on Amazon.com. Why are there
so many more new books from the 1880s for sale than from the 1980s (and, no,
it’s not because the older books are literary “classics”)?
Other chapters discuss (among many topics):
How Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic photo of men
perched on a steel beam high above Manhattan, reveals the disastrous law of
copyright in images.
How Kurt Vonnegut’s successful battle with Random House
opened the door for older authors (and their estates) to publish ebooks for the
first time.
How porn parody movies teach us about fair use and the
proper length of copyright.
How music ratings studies show a counter-intuitive effect of
piracy on the music business.
How a study of images on Wikipedia (which required a valiant
effort to reverse engineer the Google search algorithm) can teach us about the
value of the public domain photos.
How publishers and firms like Getty Images convince the
public to pay for free public domain works.
Sure, charts and graphs and data are presented, but the book
is a narrative, a story most happily told through the experiences of authors,
artists, musicians, and consumers.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Our earliest attitudes about copyright law are probably formed by elementary school teachers admonishing us not to copy. Seeing little Johnny and Suzy sent to the principal’s office for plagiarism sends a pretty clear message about the consequences of borrowing someone else’s work!
Copy this Book! What Data Tells Us About Copyright and the Public Good hopes to nudge the reader into questioning that ingrained anti-copying instinct. In fact, numerous recent studies show that modern copyright law stifles creativity, raises prices, and diminishes the availability of works to the public.
But mere statistics are pretty dry, so the book goes far beyond graphs and charts and tells the deep story of copyright with numerous illustrative anecdotes and stories. Think Bill Bryson or Neil deGrasse Tyson!
Copy this Book! starts with the alarming results of a random sample of new editions of books being sold on Amazon.com. Why are there so many more new books from the 1880s for sale than from the 1980s (and, no, it’s not because the older books are literary “classics”)?
Other chapters discuss (among many topics):
How Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic photo of men perched on a steel beam high above Manhattan, reveals the disastrous law of copyright in images.
How Kurt Vonnegut’s successful battle with Random House opened the door for older authors (and their estates) to publish ebooks for the first time.
How porn parody movies teach us about fair use and the proper length of copyright.
How music ratings studies show a counter-intuitive effect of piracy on the music business.
How a study of images on Wikipedia (which required a valiant effort to reverse engineer the Google search algorithm) can teach us about the value of the public domain photos.
How publishers and firms like Getty Images convince the public to pay for free public domain works.
Sure, charts and graphs and data are presented, but the book is a narrative, a story most happily told through the experiences of authors, artists, musicians, and consumers.