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cory doctorow
ing over improbable rights for things like theme park rides and
action figures based on their work — it’s also why literary agents
are now asking for copyright-long commissions on the books they
represent: copyright covers so much ground and takes too long to
shake off, who wouldn’t want a piece of it?
* Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, espe-
cially on the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000
per infringement, and aggrieved rightsholders and their repre-
sentatives have all kinds of special powers, like the ability to force
an ISP to turn over your personal information before showing
evidence of your alleged infringement to a judge. This means that
anyone who suspects that he might be on the wrong side of copy-
right law is going to be terribly risk-averse: publishers non-nego-
tiably force their authors to indemnify them from infringement
claims and go one better, forcing writers to prove that they have
“cleared” any material they quote, even in the case of brief fair-
use quotations, like song titles at the opening of chapters. The
result is that authors end up assuming potentially life-destroy-
ing liability, are chilled from quoting material around them, and
are scared off of public domain texts because an honest mistake
about the public-domain status of a work carries such a terrible
price.
* Posterity vanishes. In the
Eldred v. Ashcroft
Supreme Court
hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works
in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that
figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of cer-
tainty that you’d want when one mistake means total economic
apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on
them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long
before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science
fiction’s ancestral founders — Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells — are still known, their
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