[nearbuy]

You're underestimating how easy and common piracy is. You can get books, movies, or music with just a search, for free, with no consequences. It's generally socially accepted. This report tracked 216 billion visits to piracy websites in 2024: https://www.muso.com/blog/what-216-billion-visits-to-piracy-...

Music piracy is down just because services like Spotify let you listen to any song (for free with ads or with a subscription) and it's more convenient than pirating.

> I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

Legal or not, this is exactly what happened. The piracy sites run ads and/or ask for donations.

I don't know which of your favorite books would have still been written without copyright. But I can say with confidence that the massive increase in the number of books per year over the past two decades would have happened regardless of copyright. It's been driven by lowering the barrier to entry for self-publishing, and only a very small fraction of them earn a living.

A surprisingly large fraction of my favorite books from the past two decades were published for free online by the author (e.g. Andy Weir's book).

[caconym_]

What percentage of books read by Americans in 2025 (or choose another relatively recent year) were pirated?

[nearbuy]

No one knows. You're asking about uncaught crimes with no victim who can report it.

What data makes you think it's low?

[caconym_]

> What data makes you think it's low?

Observations of fellow readers, conversations with self- and traditionally-published authors, and some knowledge of the market?

But what is low, anyway? For the sake of argument I could believe 10, 20, even 30% of all the books people read are pirated. I would be surprised if it was higher, but let's just say hypothetically it's 50%. I think that's a reasonable conservative estimate. So, in this scenario, the remaining 50% of reads can in principle be monetized by their respective authors.

Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere in this thread.^[1]. I consider that meaningful, and I have personally had conversations with published authors who state that the royalties they receive are financially significant, which is why I'm here in this thread taking the position that I'm taking.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238503

[nearbuy]

> But what is low, anyway?

I think we're in the same ballpark here.

> Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%

I'm in favour of copyright, though I think 70 years after the death of the author is so long it's silly. Even your grandchildren will have died of old age before your copyright ends.

[caconym_]

I think copyrights held by individuals on intellectual property they created themselves should expire when they die, maybe with some minimum period of a decade or two to cover cases where royalties etc. could support next of kin. For copyrights held by corporations, or that have otherwise changed hands for money, I'd support a greatly reduced term, maybe on the order of 20 years?

It's strange to think of something like Star Wars being in the public domain, and the effects that might have on our cultural and media landscapes, but if you step back it feels even stranger that something intangible yet so culturally important can be continuously bought and sold and exploited by people who had nothing to do with its creation (almost 50 years ago).

In that sense I probably have a lot of common ground with the "abolish copyright" people, but I feel that most of them are champing at the bit to throw the baby out with the bathwater without having any skin in the game themselves. (sorry for the idiom overload there)

[nearbuy]

Star Wars almost feels a bit like it's public domain already. They've been pretty liberal with licensing their IP so we ended up with a huge number of Star Wars books, comics, games, LEGO sets, merchandise, etc. At the limit, there isn't much practical difference between a public domain work and an IP that will grant anyone a license for a very reasonable fee.

If Star Wars were public domain due to shorter copyright, the newer works and characters would still be protected. Another film studio could make a new movie based off the original trilogy, taking things in a different direction than the new movies. I'm not sure this is likely though, just like no one is rushing to make 3rd party Mickey Mouse cartoons since it entered the public domain. It probably changes things a lot less than copyright proponents worry about.

Even with books, which are much cheaper to produce than movies, the original author would probably capture most of the money from their works under shorter copyright (e.g. 25 year copyright). If you like a series from a particular author, you want new books from that author. You're not going to read A Game of Thrones and then continue with a sequel written by someone else. And as long as the author keeps writing, they're expanding the canonical world in their series with freshly copyrighted IP, and fans will primarily want new works that build on that.

And if an author writes a sequel so bad that fans abandon the series and someone else writes a better sequel that fans flock to... well, the world is better off. Even the original author may be better off if it improves the popularity of the series.