WILL ANYONE PAY IF YOU GIVE IT AWAY? ACTUALLY, THEY WILL

Date: Saturday, December 25, 2004

In the spirit of the season, I'm going to write about the virtues of giving stuff away. For free.

I don't mean just nicely wrapped gifts, but serious stuff. Libraries full of information. Complete new books available online. Free music and movie downloads.

Wouldn't that be illegal, a violation of copyright law? Not necessarily, although it must be said that a certain part of the population has taken into its own hands the free distribution of various kinds of intellectual property, prompting a crackdown by the owners of said property. I'm not condoning illegal file sharing or movie piracy, though I do observe that there is obvious popular demand for different modes of distribution -- single songs rather than CDs, say -- and that companies in the distribution business might be better off trying to figure out how to make a profit from selling what people want instead of taking them to court for getting it some other way.

No, I'm talking about what happens when copyright owners deliberately make their material available either entirely for free or with fewer restrictions than the law entitles them to impose.

Google announced earlier this month a partnership with several large libraries to scan in their entire contents, millions of volumes, over a number of years, and to make them available online, subject to copyright restrictions. (For a company that indexes 8 billion Web pages, this is not so daunting a task as it might seem.) People will be able to read full text of books that are out of copyright, but only enough of in-copyright works so they can decide whether they might want to buy the book or get it from a library.

Imagine what it could mean to a high school student in a small town to have the complete contents of the New York Public Library or Oxford University available at his desk - except that with copyrights now extended to 70 years after the creator's death, the only things he'll be able to read in full will be nearly a century old.

Creative Commons, a non-profit organization based at Stanford Law School, has established what it calls Founders' Copyright, a legal mechanism for distributing books for 14 years with the option of renewing for an additional 14 years, the terms provided in the first U.S. copyright law, in 1790.

There are a few books still selling briskly 28 years after they're published, but most are long out of print and publishers have little to lose by agreeing to the shorter term.

"The Founders' Copyright is appealing for both pragmatic and symbolic reasons," Tim O'Reilly said when the project was announced. He is the chairman and CEO of O'Reilly and Associates, a technical publisher. "It lets publishers like us free up great books after they've lost profitability. And it lets us cast a virtual vote for a more reasonable, moderate form of copyright."

In at least one case, O'Reilly has gone even further. Dan Gillmor's book We the Media, which came out in July, is available in its entirety online (http://wethe media.oreilly.com/). Will that decrease sales of the physical book? Perhaps, but it could just as well happen that people who would not otherwise have bought the book, or maybe never even heard of it, will sample a chapter or two online and decide to pick it up the next time they're in a bookstore.

Eric Flint has evidence for that. Baen Books, a science-fiction publisher, is the online host of the Baen Free Library. Flint, and other Baen authors, can choose to put their novels in the Free Library (www.baen.com/library/). In one of the essays that he calls Prime Palaver, No. 6 from April 2002, Flint examines what happened to his royalty statements after he started giving away his books for free.

Sales went up.

Maybe that should have been expected. "What the Free Library provides -- as do traditional libraries, or simply the old familiar phenomenon of friends lending each other books -- is a way for people to investigate a new author for free, before they plunk down any money," Flint writes. He compares it to the way test drives help sell cars.

He also thinks the Free Library has lessons for other publishers. "The Library's track record shows clearly that the traditional 'encryption/enforcement' policy which has been followed thus far by most of the publishing industry is just plain stupid, as well as unconscionable from the viewpoint of infringing on personal liberties."

Singer-songwriter Janis Ian makes the same arguments about songs and CDs (www.janisian.com/articles.html -- look for "The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View"). Ian says, "every time we make a few songs available on my Web site, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot. And I don't know about you, but as an artist with an in-print record catalogue that dates back to 1965, I'd be thrilled to see sales on my old catalog rise."

She too thinks encryption coupled with heavy-handed enforcement is bad for artists and ultimately a self-destructive policy for the music industry. If you're not a music industry executive, you'll probably agree with her.