Copyright may be a thing of the past.

"To bolster declining profits, publishers have turned on authors and used their market dominance to force them to sign over all copyright, write for a one-off, minimal fixed fee rather than royalties, and forgo their right to additional sources of income such as CAL payments and Lending Rights payments."

http://www.asauthors.org/lib/pdf/zReports/ASA_Educational_Publishing_Report2008.pdf

We are a country that makes very little, but in the future, we may be publishing very little also.

We are being educated sufficiently to be able to consume, but not to produce anything, or to discover anything new or to publish any new knowledge. That will all come from elsewhere.

I'm missing a little information on this.

There is no counterfeiting going on, as far as I understand, so we're not talking fake Gucci handbags.

"An owner's entitlement to sell or otherwise dispose of a product as he/she sees fit is fundamental to economic efficiency"

Efficiency is an interesting word in this context. Presumably, from the author's viewpoint this equates to profit maximization.

Which is fair enough.

But in a normal business, all the financial stipulations are determined by means of a contract. Does this not also apply to the book trade?

Is it perhaps the case that writers do not actually have a say in the terms and conditions that relate to their work-product?

How does that work? Is there a "sign away your rights" point in the process, over which no-one has any control?

Is a book contract somehow different to other forms of commercial agreement?

Where does the current system fail to protect the rights of the author/copyright holder?

I think what I am trying to express is - why should this be a government policy responsibility, rather than a straightforward industry issue?

I'm keen to understand more.

I have mixed feelings on this matter. As a 'wannabe' writer I can quite happily say that I would want the price of anything I produce to be such that I get a decent return / royalty. However, I can also understand (and agree) that unless a story / book / film etc attracts people enough to spend their money buying it, it's not a viable proposition. I would never give up my copyright, even if it meant not getting published - this is a matter of principle. My creative endeavours, no matter what the quality may be, are mine, not a publishers.

This said, the reality is likley to be that I am going to carry on in my day job, with pocket money coming from writing (which I enjoy, so I have no trouble finding time to do it). Perhaps this is where writing will go for those who produce marginally profitable, or unprofitable, books.

If the cultural stories need to be told, and I think many of them do, this might come down to large government subsidy. There is also a place for this. Not everything has to generate a financial return.

Pericles,
The formula is quite simple.

A large international company will move into a market and then drop their prices, (even below profitable levels), to drive local produces out of the market.

After the local producers have been driven out, (or sufficiently diminished), the international company will then increase their prices back to where they want them.

After a while, no one is the wiser, because there are few local producers left to compare prices or quality.

In the case of publishing houses, many now have a parent company that is not Australia, and they also appear to be attempting to force out Australian authors by paying them very little.

We can all look forward to a future of US TV programs, US music, US movies, US software, US books, US educational material and US everything else.

Pericles,

The issue is, do I have a right to sell something to you on the basis that you do not sell it to somebody else? In principle there should be nothing to stop this happening. The reason I would do this is to allow myself to sell the same product to somebody who would be willing to pay a high price, and in doing so avoid having (lower priced) sales to another customer diverted to that more lucrative market.

Market segmentation and selling at different prices is common and vital for some goods and services; however, if only one price could be charged everywhere in the world (which is essentially the normal situation for goods) then that means the supplier has to decide whether to charge a price below that which would be achievable in some markets.

That also means the supplier will not be able to sell at a low price to those markets that would not find the higher price affordable. If she did so, the product would be diverted to the higher priced market and result in sales being cannibalised there. The seller loses some marginal revenue and the price choked-off buyers lose some utility.

In that sense, the ability to market segment is efficient.

The issue is how to ensure that market segmentation is practicable and this is becoming increasingly difficult. But the basic tenet is that the seller has ownership of the product and, in principle, should be able to set whatever price she wants, including different prices to different classes of customer.

Thanks alan.

At one level, we have a situation where the price of an undifferentiated product - a book, or a CD is after all identical at the point of sale - will eventually settle to the lowest point.

But the "undifferentiated commodity" aspect of it surely only comes into play after agreements have been signed. Do those agreements cover geographies? E.g. can you stipulate at the agreement stage whether publication is limited to certain countries?

>>the basic tenet is that the seller has ownership of the product and, in principle, should be able to set whatever price she wants, including different prices to different classes of customer.<<

Sounds reasonable to me. Presumably this is included in the agreement. Surely it cannot be the case that a government is able unilaterally override such clauses?

Or am I just being naive?

Vanna, I think there are laws against this.

>>A large international company will move into a market and then drop their prices, (even below profitable levels)<<

http://articles.manupatra.com/PopOpenArticle.aspx?ID=63a44f49-b2e5-4f3d-8fd4-c7aa10a8168d&txtsearch=

>>In the case of publishing houses, many now have a parent company that is not Australia, and they also appear to be attempting to force out Australian authors by paying them very little<<

In the normal scheme of things, this would leave the way open for local competitors to snap up those authors and promote them? Or do we not have a local industry at all?

Pericles,
The Government apparently does have the power to override agreements freely entered into whereby the buyer agrees to refrain from selling or requiring subsequent buyers to do so into designated markets. Whether it should have such power is a different matter.

Some want to end restraint on parallel imports maintianing that this accords with "trade liberalisation" but in reality it may be closer to expropriation of a property right. It may be argued, in the defence of those promoting the permitting of parallel imports, that the government is refusing to police the contract because it is too difficult to do so. This may also be the case why the seller, off her own volition, does not take aggressive action in the courts.

In fact, that would be the reason why we don't see more price discrimination than is evident. Minor price differences from market to market are however frequently observed. They are seen in the car industry, where the dealer has a limited capacity to bargain and will set his price based on the buyer’s eagerness (George Constanza counselled Seinfeld to, “Tell him your walking away from the deal!”).

Taking advantage of different customer segments’ responsiveness to price (that is price elasticity of demand) for the same product is rarely easy. As illustrated by the Lead Belly song “The Rock Island Line”, price discrimination can be undermined by practicable considerations. In that case, a train operator claimed to be carrying livestock rather than pig iron, thereby paying a reduced toll.

Pericles,
Whatever happened to Australian movies. I thought a number were quite innovative and unique.

I suppose we will have to be satisfied with Summer Bay (and feel thankfull for that).

The author seems to have missed the entire point of copyright. Copyright involves the right to COPY, not the right to set different prices for the same item in different places in the world. If I legally buy a copyright item in one country, I am entitled to move it to another, as that does NOT involve COPYING. For authors to claim the right to set different prices in different places goes far beyond copyright.

In addition, I am becoming convinced that copyright is turning into a huge racket. When it was first enacted, in the time of Queen Anne, the copyright period, like the patent period, was sixteen years. This is because the present value of payments over the next sixteen years is only 12% less than if the payments lasted forever, and thus sixteen years is the best compromise between the rights of society and of the author. Since then, the patent period has remained the same, but copyright has been gradually extended to the life of the author plus 95 years. Of course authors don't benefit from this, as they are dead, only large corporations do. One author once confided to me that he would like copyright to last forever, and that there should be copyright on Shakespeare, to be distributed amongst current authors. Hopefully the recent technical changes will rip the guts out of the current copyright racket, and will return authors to the garrets where they can starve in peace, as they always did.

The fact that the Swedish anti-copyright party won a seat in the european parliament is a very hopeful sign.