We all know about the content industries' struggles with piracy. Music and movies have been most visible, and I myself have been thinking about this issue mostly with regard to the music industry, but piracy affects the written word too (especially as e-books become more popular). Over the past decade, copying has gotten easier to do and harder to stop or even detect: I believe this trend will continue, and that it's time to seriously look for a new business model that doesn't rely on the author or publisher being the sole source of copies.
I have such a model in mind, and there's already evidence that it can work for music and software. But I'd like to know more about how well it can work with other media, and for that I need your help.
So...
Imagine a world where copyright does not exist. Anything you publish can be freely, legally copied by anyone who has the resources to do it, as long as they don't lie about authorship: i.e. no one can take credit for your work or attribute their work to you).
I believe the best way for authors and artists to earn a living in this environment is to sell their labor -- something that can't be copied. You can copy an old book for free, but you can't make someone write you a new book unless you agree to his terms. Therefore, as long as the public is still hungry for new books, there will be demand for authors to write them, and that demand will put money in authors' pockets.
You may have heard of the Street Performer Protocol or "ransom model", in which you write a book, then announce "Here's a description of the book I've written. I will release this book once I've received X dollars." Your audience pools their money and pays you, and then you release the book. Presto: you've been paid for the time you spent writing, and your audience can now make all the copies they want without affecting your pocketbook.
But this still involves a good deal of risk for the author. What if you write a book and try to ransom it off, only to discover that you don't have the audience you thought, and you aren't able to collect the full amount you want? This model guarantees that no one will be able to read your work until you've been paid, but it doesn't save you from writing something for which you won't get paid, or won't get paid as much as you thought.
So here's a modified version of the ransom model. Instead of writing the book first and then posting an announcement, post the announcement first: "Here's a description of the book I'm planning to write. I will write this book once I've received X dollars, and release it for free."
If your audience pools their money and pays you, you write the book and release it, presto: you've been paid and the audience can make all the copies they want. On the other hand, if they don't pay you, you learn something about the true demand for your writing, and you have a choice: lower your asking price, change your proposal, or find something else to do with your time. You know ahead of time whether or not you'll be paid for your work, and you can decide whether you want to go through with it.
This model doesn't mean editors, agents, or publishers would go away, exactly. There's still value in improving works before they're released, connecting authors with the people who want to pay them, and distributing copies. But the relationships and transactions would change: editing would be a service provided to authors in order to make their writing more valuable (or to the audience in order to secure their investment), agents would be middlemen between authors and their audiences (handling the thousands of credit card transactions, etc.), and publishers would be able to compete with each other to sell copies of the same works (just like printing Bibles or any other public domain works today).
So let me pose some questions to you:
- What do you like and dislike about this model?
- What makes this model more or less likely to work for writing than for other industries that currently rely on copyright (music, software, etc.)?
- What risks do you think this model would add, and how do those compare to the risks it would alleviate?
- If you don't think this would work, how do you think writing would happen in the absence of copyright?
- Do you believe the current model is a fair balance between the needs of writers and the rights of readers? How could it be improved?
- How do you feel about the current model's prospect of making lots of money from a successful release (but with no guarantee that you'll make anything at all if it isn't successful) compared to this model's guarantee that you'll get paid an amount you deem fair (but with no possibility of getting rich from a runaway success)?
Again, I'm seeking enlightenment here. Some have suggested that my proposed model fails to address writers' concerns; I would like to understand those concerns, so please, explain or ask away.
Finally, I'll anticipate some questions you might have:
- How will new authors gain a foothold?
- What happens if the author never releases the work, or it isn't what the audience expected?
3 comments:
The basic axiom that an author should be paid for their labor still strikes me as axiomatically wrong - at least if what they're doing is anything at all like what people think of when they are "authors". And no author anywhere ever is paid for their effort; a completely talentless writer's just payment is $0 regardless of how much time and effort they put into it.
We do have a name for people who are paid in advance based on their reputation to produce regular original output. We call them "columnists." If you squint, you can kind of shoehorn journalism in general into it. The last time I paid attention, the short story market was also largely like this; you're paid for what you produce, and the publisher gets first printing rights.
That's not how novels are written or consumed: the model for authors is that of a salesman, in that they're paid based on the number of units they move. This also has a parallel in software and music; it's the independent developer, or the singer/songwriter who also sells his own CDs without going through a label of any kind.
Since I don't grant your actual social engineering goal (e.g., novelists should have a business model that looks more like journalists') as desirable, that makes arguing over the details kind of pointless, but here goes: your model doesn't allow for the case of someone who manages to write a single runaway bestseller but doesn't really have any other books in them. Or rather, it does handle it, but it handles it by drastically shortchanging them compared to the contribution they made to the local culture. "One-hit wonder" authors aren't exactly rare; if you don't consider them getting peanuts for something that makes the publishers millions unjust, there's a fundamental value difference that cannot be overcome.
(And it simply isn't the case that the publishers did all the work there, unless they'd have made equivalent sums from binding random words. They wouldn't.)
But even that is taking the initial premise too seriously; I reiterate my initial point in the discussion we had: the idea that copyright transperently needs to be abolished entirely doesn't stand up, so considering a "post-copyright world" is making completely baseless assumptions. It assumes the alternative is a world where everyone's business model is to sue their own customers a la the RIAA, and in which no cultural capital is ever released because Disney perpetually extends copyright spans.
Eradicate those, giving copyright a fixed term of, say, 10 years from time of creation, but otherwise operating normally (that is, as a way of ensuring creators get paid on commission), and the idea that abolition is necessary falls down hard. It also generally grants authorship and other independent creator/publisher units the ability to not get devoured by specialist megapublishers, which is fairly important. It doesn't allow an author to retire on the proceeds of a series of highly-popular books - this is another one of those social-engineering goals where you're going to have to prove that you're righting an actual injustice - and "authors can make a living" isn't one.
"Post-copyright" doesn't only refer to my ideal world where copyright is abolished, but also to the real world where copyright is rapidly becoming unenforceable. Books haven't been hit as hard as music or movies yet, but I think there's a good chance they will be if e-books take off. Selling copies might not remain a viable business model, even if the law doesn't change.
I don't think I'm making any baseless assumptions here. It's possible that e-books will flop and scanners/printers won't improve, or the internet as we know it will cease to exist, or Captain Copyright will win the hearts and minds of every pirate... but the possibility that authors will have to stop relying on copyright's effectiveness is, I think, realistic enough that it can't be ignored.
The point about people who have a single runaway bestseller in them is interesting. How many writers like that are unsuccessful, writing a single book that doesn't become a bestseller and then having nothing else to write? How does the value of their wasted effort compare to the windfall that copyright bestows on the one-hit wonders?
The point that publishers don't do all the work is interesting in a broader, philosophical sense. It's true, of course. But really, who does do all their own work? Publishers wouldn't make the same profit by binding random words, but they wouldn't make it by printing on stone tablets, either. Authors wouldn't be able to write novels without pens, computers, familiar tropes/archetypes/narrative structures, or the grammar and vocabulary of the language they write in.
Everyone owes some -- perhaps most -- of their productivity to work that someone else did in the past. Is it any more unjust to use someone else's words than to use someone else's printing process?
I think your model ends with a book industry at perhaps 1% of the number of readers that it has now.
This isn't a particularly radical thought. There are lots of theoretical markets that would have buyers and sellers if there was any means for the providers to be paid in en efficient manner.
(Just look at the collapse of the HK film industry or the music industry in China - they are miniscule compared to what the market size and wealth would suggest.)
So, your suggestion will no doubt be taken up, and hundreds of books may be published by that means, where there used to be hundreds of thousands. Reading becomes a cultural phenomena like HAM radio, still with a community - culturally irrelevant.
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