Comment by squidbeak
4 hours ago
I've limited sympathy for the publishers.
It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright.
And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick. It's ridiculous that in the 21st century, publication standards have fallen to the point where for most works a disposable format is the only type available - where no amount of money could buy a truly decent hardback copy.
If we have to have copyright laws, I'd like to see two changes to them.
When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print, without compensation to the original publisher, and with renegotiated royalties for the author.
And if the publisher keeps a book in print - but only in bestseller-grade materials, bogroll paper that furrows in any humidity and perfect binding that molts its pages a couple of dry seasons later - and if it refuses to print a durable hardback copy with signatures, good paper and decent print - something that will still be readable in several generations' time - any other publisher keen to have a crack at it should be able to, again without any compensation for the original publisher, though perhaps in this case, with matching royalties for the author.
A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CLEARLY fair use, and even gets me to listen to the songs more, but they are stealing all revenue for a fair use video that took a lot of time and money to make to begin with, they are profiting from work they didn't even do. This is silly to me, I'm sure there's loads of other channels and videos out there screwed over by the record industry over 15 second samples from a song... Which should 100% be fair use and not be given to the record labels.
Issue is small streamers have no legal defense.
Edit, adding the channel I am referring to:
https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos
20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.
Either that or some exponentially increasing tax so that Disney can keep their vault. (I'm perfectly fine with them keeping it if they pay some proper taxes.)
2 replies →
It also solves the issue of potentially not knowing when the author died, with a fixed period (the number isn't so important imo so long as it's sane), a work is out of copyright x years after the first known copy was published.
1 reply →
For corporations sure. For individual authors that's certainly not fair. Especially since it makes it easier for corporations to exploit their work without paying them anything.
> If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights
Because there are fundamentally differ concepts and serve different purposes?
But this must then follow for all forms of works, why just books? Every company whose original creator dies must be converted into a public company within 20 years of founder's death for the public benefit as well if that's the case.
If I wrote it, I own the copyright on it, why should I or my future family give away something I worked really hard for? Why do only authors must care about public benefits?
> copyright should just die with the author
That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are.
The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)
> copyright should just die with the author
This makes sense when you’re thinking of a painting or a book.
Who owns the copyright to Windows or MacOS? A corporation. How do you deal with that?
> you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are
Commercial projects are works-for-hire and the copyright is not owned by the person who does the work.
The proposal for the limit of copyright needs to be refined.
In the US, the current rule is:
> For … a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation
If you hire them, then you own the work you paid them to do, no?
3 replies →
Then just make it the rule that the copyright expires after 30 years or when the author dies, whichever comes last.
2 replies →
This would create incentive to kill people
So does life insurance.. but we still have that.
I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.
4 replies →
not really, when copyright disappears, so does the profit motive
sure, you don't have to pay royalties, but any other publisher can now publish too
[dead]
What if the copyright is owned by a corporation?
Books in the 17th and 18th century often didnt get bound by the publisher. They were done by independent binders for _custom_ orders. You’d see whole libraries with the owners binding/cover standards rather than per book.
Books in that time were _luxury_ goods. Most people could not afford them. One of the ways that was changed was to introduce cheap, mass produced bindings that were lower quality than the bespoke artisianal bindings done by specialist craftsmen.
You can still get custom bindings done. There exists whole niches on the internet of crafters that will take a production run book and strip its binding and make you extremely high quality and custom bindings and covers.
Learning this fact is what got me interested into binding my own books!
With how the quality of things seems to have been degrading over the years (either real or just me getting older and experiencing the impermanence of all things) I've been trying to adopt an attitude of "if this practice existed before the industrial revolution, I can _probably_ do it" and it's been really great to learn how things were made before they had to be mass produced as cheaply as possible.
I worked in an academic library that rebound pretty much every book they acquired. One of the biggest in the world, too.
My wife worked for a company that specialized in rebinding paperbacks for schools and libraries. It makes more economic sense to do that for niche use cases rather than make all print runs more expensive.
1 reply →
Nowadays, academic libraries are moving their books to archival storage. New publications are electronic only. You need to be a formal member of the university community to access it, unlike in times past when any member of the public could stroll the aisles of physical books and journals.
1 reply →
One of my relatives is one of those micro publishers. Selected works are printed and bound to extremely high standards and materials in a way that their customers are willing to pay 1k-25k+ per book. These editions only have a couple of prints and are mostly made to customer requests.
There is a market for these type of books, albeit a very small one.
The Czech National libraries do that for newspapers, magazines and other periodicals - they bind the copies they get automatically for preservation to big books, so they can be better stored in their archives.
Apparently it is getting harder to find people who can do that as most schools no longer have book binding as a course you can study.
You don't even need custom bindings —- library bindings are a thing, even if they cost significantly more then a typical hard cover binding.
> I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick
At the risk of stating the obvious, any poorly made books from then wouldn’t have lasted this long and so you would never see them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
> It's ridiculous that in the 21st century, publication standards have fallen to the point where for most works a disposable format is the only type available - where no amount of money could buy a truly decent hardback copy.
This is purely a response to market demand. Publishers aren’t going to put in the extra expense of binding high quality versions of every book so it can occupy warehouse space while consumers everywhere buy the cheap paperback.
> And if the publisher keeps a book in print - but only in bestseller-grade materials, bogroll paper that furrows in any humidity and perfect binding that molts its pages a couple of dry seasons later - and if it refuses to print a durable hardback copy with signatures, good paper and decent print - something that will still be readable in several generations' time - any other publisher keen to have a crack at it should be able to, again without any compensation for the original publisher, though perhaps in this case, with matching royalties for the author.
This is all based on the idea that there is hidden demand for something, but publishers are choosing to deprive us all of it for reasons. That if we open up the laws, another company will come along and satisfy this hidden market opportunity and associated profits that publishers are declining to take.
The simpler explanation is that these high quality editions aren’t being published because the publishers have the data about demand for them. They know they won’t sell.
If the goal is preservation, laws forcing publishers to print on slightly nicer paper isn’t going to solve the problem. It needs to be a robust digital archive and it needs to exist somewhere other than in unsold warehouse inventory or some book collector’s shelf. You’re trying to solve a problem with last century’s technology.
I have even less sympathy for IP stealing LLM operators
It’s been determined that training on lawfully acquired works is fair use. Presumably in this discussion of shredding physical books Dario and Sam are not pulling heists at the local library.
I’m sure there’s ongoing litigation, and better sources than this, but fair use was determined in June 2025 in a sf federal district court https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/06/...
Similar conclusion vs meta https://www.jw.com/news/insights-kadrey-meta-bartz-anthropic...
And the more recent $1.5B settlement did not overturn it https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-approves-anthropics-1...
No, courts so far in the jurisdictions which have heard such cases, have ruled it's fair use. There is plenty of ongoing litigation in many jurisdictions, so it's way too early to just decree "it's been determined". It likely won't be for years to come.
6 replies →
Might surprise people to learn but the law isn't the final arbiter on what is moral or just. The law only decides what is legal and as we've seen over our lived history as humans, many "legal" things may not be those we want society to uphold.
7 replies →
You don’t know what “Fair Use” is.
Fair Use is not an activity that you engage in. Fair Use is not a category with criteria that you meet. Fair Use is not a precedent that paves the way for everything afterwards.
Fair Use is a defense that can be used in court when you’re named in a copyright lawsuit. Fair Use is how you justify your actions before the court finds infringement.
5 replies →
Being informed is much too high a barrier for the people who just want to pretend that everyone with money is lex luther.
1 reply →
It's not copying (and hence not stealing) if you destroy the original book. That is where copyright law has brought us
[dead]
> I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick.
Those books predate the development of wood pulp paper. It isn't the publisher's fault they can't economically print on rag paper anymore.
The post doesn't call for the sympathy for the publishers, so I'm not sure what you're responding to.
I'd go for the less complex version: just make copyright last for like 20 years at most.
> I've limited sympathy for the publishers.
This doesn't affect publishers.
It affects humanity as a whole by having large private parties hoard books to partly destroy them. The covers and spines can have historical value too. There's not even a reason for these companies to release their scans to the public once the copyright expires.
It prevents proper preservation by archivists and preservationists.
Yeah it's as if the publishers are somehow strapped for cash compared to AI companies.
No one reasonable is concerned for publishers they are concerned for the books. Assuming the allegations are correct historical artifacts are being destroyed with no trace. It doesn’t even matter if they republish it. The artifact itself and the time it has transited is the valuable thing. It is simply immoral to destroy stuff like this.
I agree. However, AI companies have managed to make publishers and copyright owners saints by comparison.
Thanks for your thoughts, but how is this is anyway relevant to the issue at hand? I'm sad that this is the top comment...
I've never read a coherent argument for why all of these "should"s should be. I understand you want to read the books. But I don't see how that desire results in the laws needing to be changed so that you can read everything you want, even things the author or owner doesn't want you to read.
There is not a shortage of books in print. I don't understand why people get so hung up on a few of them being out of print. It is okay for someone to own something cool and not let anyone see it. The cool thing doesn't suddenly become a societal necessity because it is words written down.
> There is not a shortage of books in print. I don't understand why people get so hung up on a few of them being out of print.
Because the point isn't so much in reading whatever text as if all text is the same. The point is the spreading of knowledge. A single book can contain knowledge not present in any other.
> But I don't see how that desire results in the laws needing to be changed so that you can read everything you want
In order for your "people" (country, etc.) to do better, you want them to be educated. In order for people to understand one another, you want them to be able to see all the same various perspectives there are. It makes perfect sense for laws to aim for these goals. This is why libraries exist.
> It is okay for someone to own something cool and not let anyone see it. The cool thing doesn't suddenly become a societal necessity because it is words written down.
Books aren't simply trinkets, like an item you bought at a gift-shop.
> I understand you want to read the books.
I think you're looking at this too much as what people want for their own individual selves, when it's more of what people want for everyone. It's about what they believe is best for society as a whole. They don't need to want to read a book themselves.
Which books are in copyright, not being published, and contain unique valuable knowledge? I've never seen this be the case. It's always some genre fiction or obsolete botanical text or something. I've never seen valuable knowledge locked away like you are describing.
> When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print
How do you adjudicate that? And wouldn't it just lead to loopholes such as "Ghost Printings" (cf. Ghost Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_(commercial_aviat... ) where the books are technically printed in the required volume but practically unavailable to customers through one method or another. Because, the cost of wastefully printing a few books to warehouse, is less than the potential losses of the IP rights, probably.
I think putting the works in a print-on-demand catalogue at an unreasonable price would be more likely.
But there are worse outcomes.
[dead]
[flagged]