There is a Hole in Your Mind
Copyfight 2013-08-10
Summary:
Rosen's piece is a follow-up to an item she wrote last year based on research by Paul Heald, a law professor at the University of Illinois. Heald - using software that data-mined Amazon's offerings - compiled statistics that sorted the availability of books by year of publication. You can see the results summarized in two graphs of the article.
It's a truism that more books are being published now than ever before, but in general that's part of an accelerating upward trend. Therefore, you ought to see a relatively steady upward rise in titles available by year. In fact, what you see is a virtual desert with, for example, twice as many books copyright 1850 being on offer as those with copyright 1950. Heald also attempted to control for some of the biases in his sample as well as for the fact that older titles are often present in multiple editions.
The inescapable conclusion is that works still under copyright are vastly underrepresented in the sample. Because someone holds the copyright that someone can decide at their sole whim whether or not to make a title available. Most often, it's "not". As a result, copyright and the profit motives that are associated with it have acted to make millions of titles disappear, creating this hole in our collective knowledge.
In the final graph, Heald attempts to adjust for the relative effects of increasing number of books published per decade, again normalized. The result is painfully dramatic - books under copyright that are more than a few years old might as well not exist. Anyone who wants to argue that copyright, and particularly the ongoing extension of copyright term limits, is a benefit needs to explain how that benefit is going to accrue to copyright holders who use copyright like a 7-Eleven safe: things go in and not even the employees can open it.