One of the books that has really affected my thinking is Free Culture. In this book the author (Lawrence Lessig) points out that books have two lives He says,

“Here is an idea that we should more clearly recognize. Every bit of creative property goes through different ‘lives.’ In its first life, if the [page 113] creator is lucky, the content is sold. In such cases the commercial market is successful for the creator. The vase majority of creative property doesn’t enjoy such success, but some clearly does. For that content, commercial life is extremely important. Without this commercial market, there would be, many argue, much less creativity.

“After the commercial life of creative property has ended, our tradition has always supported a second life as well. A newspaper delivers the news every day to the doorsteps of America. The very next day, it is used to wrap fish or to fill boxes with fragile gifts or to build an archive of knowledge about our history. In this second life, the content can continue to inform even if that information is no longer sold.

“The same has always been true about books. A book goes out of print very quickly (the average today is after about a year). After it is out of print, it can be sold in used book stores without the copyright owner getting anything and stored in libraries, where many get to read the book, also for free. Used book stores and libraries are thus the second life of a book. That second life is extremely important to the spread and stability of culture” (112-113).

To put briefly, there is life after commercial use. Online technologies now allow the distribution of books and other culture to have a life outside of libraries and used book stores. Because it is now easy and cheap to share books and other media in this matter there is no reason why it should not be done. I frequently talk to people who wish they could access a book that is no longer available.

I would love to see a world when once a book has used up most of its commericial life that free versions were made available for all to access. In addition, Print on Demand could be used so that people could print copies of books that were formerly out of print.

Continuing this train of though Lessig sayst:

“Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device….But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short…Yet that doesn’t mean the life of a creative work ends…The noncommercial life of culture is important and valuable—for entertainment but also, and more importantly, for knowledge. To understand who we are, and where we came from, and how we have made the mistake that we have, we need to have access to this history” (225).

An interesting finding by James Boyle in his book The Public Domain is the following: “We know that when U.S. copyright required renewal after twenty-eight years, about 85 percent of all copyright holders did not bother to renew.”

Isn’t that amazing! Boyle states that this can be viewed as an approximation of commercial viability. So if after 28 years people don’t renew, it’s likely that it wasn’t worth it. Thus now, when we allow copyright to go on for the life of the author plus 70 years, it seems that for the majority of in-copyright work we are doing WAY too much.

In a truly interesting article, Landes and Posner state, “Fewer than 11 percent of the copyrights registered between 1883 and 1964 were renewed at the end of their 28-year term, even though the cost of renewal was small.8 And only a tiny fraction of the books ever published are still in print; for example, of 10,027 books published in the United States in 1930, only 174 were still in print in 2001—1.7 percent” (pp.2-3).

Another article I would like to mention is one by Paul Heald in which through empirical analysis he shows that books in copyright do not sell more copies than books in the public domain.

Although large-scale reform will be difficult, I am hopeful that more individual authors and publishers will apply this knowledge and voluntarily choose to make their work freely available, especially as the commercial life of the book is winding down.