soph, I don't know about India, but it's believable. Certainly for the U.S. publishing industry the public domain has always been an important resource. Up to about 1892 foreign-published books were in the public domain in the U.S., and U.S. published works were in the public domain in the U.K. Publishers on both sides of the water took advantage of this.

That wasn't the whole story, though. After the Civil War the U.S. booksellers developed a sort of collusion-copyright. The big houses began buying advance sheets from the British publishers (in effect buying a license to publish in the U.S.), and agreed informally to respect one anothers' editions of foriegn works. This had some of the effects, both good (payment to author) and bad (anti-competitive) that a regular system of copyright would have had. Still, I suspect that the possibility that an upstart publisher could bring out a competing edition at any time kept prices for foreign books lower than they might have been otherwise. At the same time, most copyrighted works were liberated to the public domain after 28 years, and all were after 42 years. This turnover process, meant that there was always a reasonable volume of new titles entering the public domain for enterprising new publishers to reprint, and enterprising new writers to base new works on. I think the publishing industry would still have flourished even if this moderate term had been applied to foreign works as well.

Modern times is quite different. On the one hand, there are more publishers than ever before, even if you don't count everyone with a web-site as a publisher. On the other hand, many valuable copyrights are being accumulated by ever fewer and ever larger conglomerates. Professor Loren's article suggests that these powerful actors will use the copyright laws to limit the freedom of the numerous small parties unless our copyright laws are revised to reflect greater appreciation for the rights of the public as one party to the copyright bargain. And Professor Loren isn't the only one to suggest this. Professor Pamela Samuelson of Berkeley has made some of the same points in this paper presented to a Yale conference on private censorship.

T.