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February 2022
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Analog Books Go From Strength To Strength: Helped, Not Hindered, By The Digital World

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Many of the worst ideas in recent copyright laws have been driven by some influential companies’ fear of the transition from analog to digital. Whereas analog formats – vinyl, books, cinematic releases of films – are relatively easy to control, digital ones are not. Once a creation is in a digital form, anyone can make copies and distribute them on the Internet. Traditional copyright industries seem to think that digital versions of everything will be freely available everywhere, and that no one will ever buy analog versions. That’s not the case with vinyl records, and a recent post on Publisher’s Weekly suggests that analog books too, far from dying, are going from strength to strength:

Led by the fiction categories, unit sales of print books rose 8.9% in 2021 over 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Units sold were 825.7 million last year, up from 757.9 million in 2020. BookScan captures approximately 85% of all print sales. In 2020, unit sales were up 8.2% over 2019, which saw 693.7 million print units sold.The young adult fiction segment had the largest increase, with unit sales jumping 30.7%, while adult fiction sales rose 25.5%. Sales in the juvenile fiction category increased 9.6%.
The two years of increased sales is part of a longer-term trend, as this article from the New York Times in 2015 indicates:
the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.
Digital formats possess certain advantages over analog ones, notably convenience. Today, you can access tens of millions of tracks online with music streaming services, and carry around thousands of ebooks on your phone. But many people evidently continue to appreciate the physicality of analog books, just as they like and buy vinyl records. The Publisher’s Weekly article also shows how the digital world is driving analog sales:
Gains in the young adult category were helped by several titles that benefitted from attention drummed up by BookTok, users of the social media platform TikTok who post about their favorite books. They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera, released in December 2018, was the #1 title in the category, selling nearly 685,000 copies.
As a recent post on Walled Culture noted, if publishing companies were less paranoid about people sharing snippets of the books they love, on BookTok and elsewhere, the already significant analog sales they produce could be even higher. If the copyright industries want to derive the maximum benefit from the online world, they need to be brave, not bullying, as they so often are today.Follow me @glynmoody on TwitterDiaspora, or Mastodon.Originally posted to Walled Culture.

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posted at: 12:00am on 12-Feb-2022
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Danish Court Confirms Insane 'Little Mermaid' Copyright Ruling Against Newspaper Over Cartoon

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If you haven't been a long time Techdirt reader, you'll probably hear me say that there is a copyright infringement court case in Denmark and immediately wonder, "Yeesh, what did Disney do now?" But this is not a story about Disney. This is a story about the heirs of Edvard Eriksen, creator of a bronze statue of The Little Mermaid, inspired by the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and their inability to let anyone in any way depict the statue or anything similar without being accosted in copyright actions. Most of the bullying actions by Eriksen's heirs have been, unbelievably, against other towns throughout the world for creating their own Little Mermaid statues: Greenville, Michigan and the Danish city of Asaa for example.But less known are all the times Eriksen's heirs have gone after publications for showing pictures or other depictions of the statue. I won't pretend to be an expert in Danish copyright law, but if that country's laws are such that a newspaper or magazine cannot show a picture of one of the country's most famous landmarks, then that law is silly and should be changed or amended. Lest you think I must have this wrong, you can see a recent story of, not one, but two courts ruling that a newspaper must compensate Eriksen's heirs for a cartoon that depicted the statue on its pages.

An appeals court in Denmark has increased the compensation a newspaper was ordered to pay for violating the copyright of Copenhagen's The Little Mermaid statue with a cartoon depicting the bronze landmark as a zombie and a photo of it with a facemask.The Berlingske newspaper published the cartoon in 2019 to illustrate an article about the debate culture in Denmark and used the photo in 2020 to represent a link between the far right and people fearing COVID-19.
For those of us reading this news in America, as well as many other nations, this all looks completely laughable. This is purely free speech stuff, protected in America by the First Amendment. Even getting past that, a cartoon of a statue is not a recreation of that statue, therefore copyright wouldn't even really apply. Plus it's parody and being used for commentary. Nothing about this makes sense.And, yet, it must in Denmark because this 2nd court not only affirmed the ruling of the lower court but actually increased the compensation the newspaper was ordered to pay Eriksen's heirs.
Both were found to be infringements of the Danish Copyright Act. Copenhagen’s district court ordered the newspaper in 2020 to pay the heirs of Danish sculptor Edvard Eriksen 285,000 kroner ($44,000) in compensation. The appeals court on Wednesday raised the amount to 300,000 kroner ($46,000).In a statement, the Eastern High Court in the Danish capital agreed with the lower court that “there was a violation of copyright" in the newspaper's actions. It did not give a reason for increasing the compensation amount but noted that Berlingske is a commercial venture since it wants to sell newspapers.
Again, this is all absurd. If the above rulings truly do comport with Danish copyright law, then all that suggests is that there needs to be an active movement in Denmark to amend the law. And, just to make this all the more frustrating, the copyright protections in Denmark are familiar: 70 years after the death of the author. In this case, that means Eriksen's heirs will only have this ability to bilk others for cash payments for the statue for another seven years.

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posted at: 12:00am on 12-Feb-2022
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