You won’t often hear a publisher or an author speak out against the manufactured government-monopoly granted legal right that is “copyright”. And I’m not doing so because there are some books by deceased authors that we would definitely publish if their copyright was expired, or because I believe that the extended copyright of life+70 years is both immoral and absurd even though I do. In most cases, we have absolutely no problem obtaining the necessary rights from the copyright holders.
What I’m addressing here instead is the reality of the situation that surrounds the issue, because nearly everyone who opines about it is doing so in complete ignorance and on the basis of some wildly false assumptions.
First and foremost, the idea that no one will write books if they are not “protected” by copyright that “gives them the opportunity” to sell and profit from them is absolutely and utterly false. It is such a ridiculously stupid statement that anyone who argues this should never, ever, express their opinion on anything ever again, because they are not only literally retarded, they are also historical null sets. I will never regard anyone who presents this argument as a cognitive adult, because it requires a complete absence of both thought and relevant information.
Copyright was invented in The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. Previous “copyrights” were simple royal monopolies granted on an individual basis, which should make plain the true foundation of the so-called “moral right”. Regardless, the fact is that all of the pre-1710 classics were written sans copyright, thereby exploding the ahistorical notion of copyright causality.
But one doesn’t need to know anything about history to realize that economic factors do not drive the impulse for human creativity. Consider the current numbers reported by the book publishing industry.
- 787,700,000: Total US print editions sold in 2022
- 526,000,000: Total US ebook editions sold in 2022
- $22,600,000,000: Total US print revenue in 2022
- $2,040,000,000: Total US ebook revenue in 2022
- $8,900,000,000: Big 4 publisher revenue in 2022 (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan)
- 4,000,000: The number of new books published in 2022.
- 2,300,000: The number of self-published books published in 2022
- 600,000: The number of self-published books published in 2014
- 80: The percent of total book distribution controlled by Amazon.
- The average book sells 200 copies in its first year and 1,000 over its lifetime on Amazon
In other words, each print edition produced an average $28.69 in revenue while each ebook produced an average $3.88 in revenue. So the average book produces $27,182.80 lifetime revenue, with at most $17,668.82 going to the average self-published author and $997.30 to the average mainstream published author. Obviously, since Colleen Hoover sold more than 4,730,000 books in 2022, the median book lifetime revenue is considerably lower, but the averages are sufficiently informative to make it clear that absolutely no one is writing books in order to make less than $20,000 over the entire sales lifetime of the book.
Still less is copyright required to defend the interests of any heirs to that massive average windfall.
The fact is that copyright is nothing more than corporate welfare that primarily benefits five companies in the publishing industry and is defended by a very small number of corporate-favored authors who are the chosen beneficiaries of those five companies. Copyright is neither a moral right nor a property right, it is actually a violation of the economic rights of hundreds of millions of people for the benefit of a very, very small number of individuals connected to an insignificant number of corporations.
As for me, I would write even if absolutely no one ever read my books. I have written and published 27,435 blog posts and more than 500 opinion columns without ever getting paid for a single one of them. And not only am I very, very far from alone in that regard, I can count on one hand the number of writers I know who will not write if they don’t get paid for it.