Changing copyright law may help spur the market

Today, vast stores of information are freely available through a worldwide series of interconnected digital networks called the Internet.

The Internet paradigm is increasingly being eyed by information publishers, telephone companies and computer vendors as a powerful platform for a new form of electronic publishing, where the network is more than a means to move data from the desktop to a printer.

Instead, it is where the information resides.

Sellers beware. But what happens when information that once was distributed freely — the contents of a public library, for example, most of which is “protected” by copyright laws designed for print — is digitized and posted on public networks?

Will the ability of digital technology to quickly and easily search out (and copy and transmit) information online, at home or office, make publishers impose a per use price structure on information that once had a fixed price?

COPYRIGHT: THE BIG QUESTION

The best and simplest answer for the time being is to build a network architecture that can find and retrieve both free and “for pay” information. (See WAIS story, page 5.) But simply figuring out how to ring up the cash register is putting the cart before the horse when it comes to online publishing.

Though traditional publishers have been eyeing the net as a potential distribution medium for many years, they still greatly fear losing control of their property on a digital network, where making perfect copies or altering existing material is as easy as pressing a key. (See related story on the digital audio industry, page 15.)

It’s clear that today’s copyright and intellectual property laws, especially for literary works, don’t properly serve an information economy, but no one knows exactly what to replace them with. The choices are to sit back and wait until someone else figures it out or jump in and get muddied up yourself.

PROJECT GUTENBERG JUMPS RIGHT IN

Project Gutenberg is not afraid of a little mud. The goal of the project, started by an Urbana, IL systems analyst named Michael Hart, is to give away a trillion books –10,000 “etexts,” or electronic books, to 100 million people — by the end of 2001. Its very existence throws down the gauntlet to the publishing system as it exists today.

In fact, all of the project’s formal electronic mail messages sign off with the following quotation from Grolier Electronic Publishing: “The trend of library policy is clearly toward the ideal of making all information available without delay to all people.”

These words are not music to the ears of the publishing business. Neither would be this quote from the Project’s December newsletter: “A great advantage of the computer networks is that we only post a book once and a million people can make their own copies very easily and quickly.”

Camp Free. Obviously Hart is of the “free information” camp, and his intention is to reduce the effective cost of an etext to about one cent. An entire 10,000-book electronic library would thus cost about $100 (plus the price of diskettes or CD-ROMs and mailing).

To date, there are more than 25 etexts in Project Gutenberg’s “stacks,” including versions of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan (which can only be distributed in the U.S. because of copyright restrictions), The Book of Mormon, Far From the Madding Crowd, Aesop’s Fables and various reference books and a special etext edition of William Shakespeare’s works called Shakespeare of Disk.

MOVE MORE QUICKLY TO PUBLIC DOMAIN

Hart and others who work with him are adamant that the publishing system as it exists today is a millstone around the neck of progress for electronic publishing.

One of the Project’s volunteers, Mary Brandt Jensen, is an associate professor of law and the director of the Law Library at the University of South Dakota. She’s taken on the task of clearing copyrights for Gutenberg’s etexts, and she thinks the present system serves no one, not even the publishers themselves.

While doing research for an article on digital libraries, Jensen found an article in Publishers Weekly with a shocking statistic: 90 percent of the income that a publishing house derives from a book is collected within the first year after publication.

Why, then, does it take at least 75 years for a printed work to officially enter the public domain? (That’s a rule of thumb, Hart hastens to remind. In most countries, including the U.S. for works created after January 1, 1978, it’s “life of the author plus 50 years” and is therefore completely arbitrary.)

And if a book can go for seven decades without making more than a few shekels, then why do publishers have such a strong reaction against the kind of negotiated compulsory license for text and electronic text — a license that might just make them a few more shekels than they would have otherwise — that seems to have worked for other media, such as cable TV?

NOT QUITE USELESS: COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE CENTER

It’s not as though the print industry doesn’t have an institution in place to deal with licensing rights. It does, but Jensen says the Copyright Clearance Center is only useful in a limited number of fields like the hard sciences, because those are the kinds of publishers who currently belong. Scientists, after all, rely heavily on each other’s research, and we’re happy they do.

But, Jensen says, a large percentage of all the copyrighted legal material isn’t under the CCC umbrella. “And it’s worse in the humanities,” she says. “So for the majority of the people and the material, CCC is of little use. Until there’s a way to force publishers to join, there’s no easy way to pay them electronic rights. You have to track down every copyright holder who isn’t a member and get permission from them for each use of work. That’s why there’s so little going in on conversion to electronic form, except for public domain stuff” like Project Gutenberg.

Not to be redundant, but why? Jensen says the reason is fear and greed. “They’re reacting from the gut. They think, ‘My stuff is going to get stolen,’” she says. “They don’t know the statistics, and even if they did, they wouldn’t listen to them. Everyone has this dream idea that electronics is a pot of gold and someday they’ll make a mint with their stuff.”

She says publishers don’t understand that electronics is not a pot of gold. “It in no way increases the pie of information buying dollars out there,” Jensen says. “The amount of money out there to buy information is static, just like the rest of the economy. The only thing electronics will do is shift it, or create a marginal increase if the prices are very low.”

IT HAS TO BE COMPREHENSIVE

Jensen is convinced that electronic publishing will be stalled until there’s some kind of comprehensive licensing scheme. “The difference with electronics is that it’s easy to copy and so time consuming and difficult to pay,” she says. “Vendors and owners know that, so don’t want to grant electronic licenses.” To make it easy to pay the system has to be comprehensive and to be comprehensive, it almost has to be compulsory.

Jensen, in fact, compared various copyright schemes in a journal article called “Making Copyright Work in Electronic Publishing Models” in the upcoming Spring and Summer 1992 issue of Serials Review.

Her conclusion is that the best model for electronic publishing would be what she calls a “hybrid negotiated compulsory license” where, essentially, copyright holders for text would be free to set their own prices within an agreed-on range, but this negotiation scheme should be backed up by a compulsory license that determines what the rates will be if the parties can’t seem to agree.

Denise Caruso