Charley Pennell wrote:
|Are you sure that the correct analogy is the "rental attitude of
|today's consumers".
Yes, I am. The business model has changed from one-time sales to
ongoing "cash cows". One-time sales can be associated with a
"collecting" mentality, whereas pay-per-use is more associated with a
"renting" mentality. The ultimate goal of the commercial community
(whether for information or entertainment) is to get everything online,
so that it is completely under the control of rights owners. That goal
means there is nothing tangible for the end user; everything is virtual.
It's sort of a new example of the former Communism, where all
*intellectual* property belongs to a small group of
super-owners/aggregators (perhaps the "State" will get involved later)
and the populace gets screwed. I think I'm "old school" in that my
concern is "you pays your money, and what have you got to show for it?"
|If there is any trend in U.S. publishing today it
|is towards authors and, more particularly, publishers retaining rights
|to their work, especially after passage of the 75 year copyright
|legislation. I'm sure that it is not an accident that this is just
|about the average lifespan of a human being.
Actually, I don't think it has anything to do with that. The 1976
copyright act revision originally provided life+50 years for individuals
and 75 years for most other works, but the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act added 20 years onto both, making it now life+70 years and
95 years, respectively. The major lobbyists in Congress supporting the
extensions were the Disney corporation (Mickey Mouse would have gone
into the public domain without the extension) and the Edgar Rice
Burroughs Estate (the moneymaking "Tarzan" books were starting to slip
into the public domain). You can bet your bottom dollar that Disney
will seek another extension in the middle part of the next decade to
prevent losing Mickey as a cash cow (with "Fantasia", "Dumbo",
"Pinocchio", "Bambi", and "Snow White" coming due soon after). It's the
same with the film industry: Jack Valenti, the former chief of the MPAA,
remarked at one time about the Constitutional "limit" on copyright,
saying that his (and the industry's) idea of a limit was one day less
than the end of the world. Copyright has turned into protecting profit
rather than promoting creativity.
|Many consumers think that
|they have "bought" a recording, software, an e-book, etc. only to find
|that they have only licensed it, with a lot of the rights traditionally
|held by the print purchaser (right to copy for one's own use, right to
|lend or sell, etc.), now subject to restriction and possibly additional
|charges. As owner of a collection of DVDs, you may possess them at the
|moment but your use is restricted to personal viewing only. You can't
|rent a theatre and show the contents like you could do with films in
|the old days. Or post portions to YouTube, for that matter. Plus, who
|knows how long that DVD will last before it self-destructs.
Yeah, I'm aware of all that. I probably should have used books as a
better example, but society hasn't quite gotten to the stage yet of
accepting virtual books over the tangible kind. I think that,
eventually, the generations that are more comfortable with (have been
"trained" to accept?) other virtual offerings (music, movies, TV shows,
etc.) will deal with "books" electronically, too. My point would still
be that my "collection" of books will last another 500 years (many of
them are already 100-150 years old) whereas who knows what the status of
electronic forms will be, or if they've even been preserved. My
greatest concern is *not* for using things here and now (including
services and what have you), but what is going to be available 50-100+
years from now for researchers to use in their research when there's no
longer the large demand for today's electronic/digitized materials as
there is now? Books get stored physically on shelves for future access,
but what about digitized knowledge? Support of research is one of the
"prime directives" for academic libraries, but how do they do that with
the lemming-like run to the digital future where there are no guarantees
of the existence/maintenance of or access to information? Have any
library vendors guaranteed in writing that their digital materials will
be available for at least the next 100 years, even if the vendor goes
defunct?
Harvey
--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Tue Mar 20 2007 - 14:08:35 EDT