CopyRight, CopyLeft and Public Domain.....the Copyrightfight Game

[ThosStew@aol.com]

In a message dated 2/12/2002 3:44:32 AM, beberg@mithral.com writes:

>You dont see any public domain material on best seller lists. To be popular
>someone has to push the content onto the masses. This doesnt happen unless
>there is profit in it. 


er, wrong, since the Bible, the Communist Manifesto, Confucius, the Koran, 
the thoughts of Chairman Mao, and Mein Kampf are among the bestselling books 
of all time--though one might argue that each of them had someone pushing the 
content onto the masses. Shakespeare is PD. Milton likewise. Dickens. Don 
Quixote. If you see a copyright on editons of those works, it's for the 
editing and the introduction, not the text. The fact is that there is more 
profit to publishers in publishing public domain work, because there are no 
importunate authors demaniding 10-15% of the gross proceeeds, which is 20-30% 
of the publisher's receipts. BUT, because PD work is PB, you get into price 
competition, and pfft there go your margins. The swings roughly equal the 
roundabouts. 

The reason you see copyrighted works on bestseller lists are (1) they measure 
rate of sale, not total sales, and  Westererners especially are culturally 
attuned to want what is new--so you are seeing the froth, not the wave; most 
of those bestsellers will stay on the list for a few weeks, then fall rapidly 
and end up on remainder tables; only a small percentage will backlist (2) the 
bestseller lists-compilers actually exclude those data and (3) most  
bestselling PD works exist in multiple editons (seee above) and so the 
buyership for, say, Shakespeare, divvies  up between the Penguin, Signet, 
Folger, etc etc editions. 

old publisher,

Tom