Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Please read this: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976

And also look at the graphic on this page: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi...

Copyright serves a legitimate purpose. I doubt there would be many big budget games or movies produced without some degree of protection. The purpose of copyright is to provide an incentive to produce creative works. But it also needs to balance the benefits of that with the costs of restricting works from the public.

I believe that copyright should last 10 years. That sounds really short, but hear me out. The vast majority of works are not economically relevant after 10 years. And the ones that are, have usually earned 99% of their money within ten years. It's a power law, the first year gets vastly more money than the second year, than the third year, and so on. This is especially true for games and movies which are fast paced industries. It's also true for books and music, but the power law curve is a bit less steep.

There are exceptions to this, but they are just that - exceptions. The point is to provide an incentive for creators, not to give giant benefits to the outliers at the expense of the public.

Also originally copyright law had some additional measures to keep it from being restrictive. You had to actually register the copyright, not just grant it automatically, and you had to renew it halfway through. Which cost a few thousand dollars.

I also am very much in favor of derivative works. Fanfiction shouldn't be illegal, making a t shirt with your favorite character on it shouldn't be illegal, etc.

With this system you would be able to use old music, photos, software, books, movies, etc. As long as they were made before 2006.

Also trademark could handle some of the remaining issues. E.g. "Star Wars" could be a trademark of george lucas. You could make star wars derivatives, but you couldn't brand them with star wars. Consumers would be able to tell apart ripoffs from works by the original creator. Mickey mouse would still be a trademark of disney, but you could watch steamboat willy cartoons on youtube.

It doesn't even have to be a strict cutoff. The first 10 years might be free and automatic, but the Copyright Office could charge exponentially increasing fees for renewals afterward.

For example, $1K for the next 10 years, then $10K, then $100K... This means that only works that remain truly profitable in the long term will stay copyrighted. If Disney wants to pay $10B to keep Mickey Mouse copyrighted, they are welcome to do so. The extension fees could be put to good use improving the nation's public schools and libraries.

Another option is to tax intellectual property at the rate of real property in the countries that they want to claim copyright in. The holder of the copyrighted material will have to declare how much the intellectual property is worth, and be forced to put it in the public domain (or maybe transfer ownership) if some entity pays the declared worth of that asset.

I think this is a generally sensible proposal that would garner much public support.

However, I would like to see moral rights retained for longer than 10 years - the right to prevent modification of the work, the right to be named as author, for example. Extending these to life+X years (but requiring free-gratis registration) seems fair to me as well.

The ability to create derivative works is one of the primary benefits of works entering the public domain, so no.

I think you misunderstood - you can make derivatives, you can't sell the work with your own modifications as if it were the original (you can sell your derivative though). Neither could you plagiarise works under such a system.

I think you are onto something, and the nice thing about this is that it provides a runway to move us to a basic income economy. Eventually (30, 50, 100 years from now) all property will be intellectual because anything will be 3D printable, biological agents will be synthesizable etc etc so this would allow everyone to benefit and still reward innovation.

Also, a flat tax favors the wealthy on a linear scale but is fairer on a logarithmic scale. So for example when income increases by 10 times, the corresponding tax rate could go up by 10% or something to that effect.

> I doubt there would be many big budget games or movies produced without some degree of protection.

I get where you're coming from, but I worry there's a ton of status quo bias in that doubt. Of all the bajillion ways to incentivize creativity, either with or without laws, how sure can we be that this is the best one?

It also presumes big budget movies and games are a net positive culturally, entertainingly or otherwise.

We should have a status quo bias when considering tearing down a certain fence, lest we be gored by Chesterton's bull.

I think we have a pretty good understanding of why this particular fence keeps growing taller and taller.

If you're looking to strike a balance, there also needs to be a good-faith effort to make the work available to the public domain after the copyright term expires.

For software, the original creative work (source code) should need to be escrowed. And the same for any work obfuscated with DRM.

I disagree. I do not think there should be an obligation for a creator to give away their work after the copyright expires. They just no longer get the benefit of having a legal mechanism to prevent others from copying/using it.

And what does the public get from granting you this temporary monopoly?

Let's look at music for an example. Copyright provides a period in which they original artist had control over how the work is handled commercially. After the copyright expires the original artist can no longer use the law to prevent other people from redistributing or reproducing the work. However, the artist has no obligation to release the studio masters.

Copyright makes it more viable for the creator to actually make a moving from their work. So to answer your question, the public is encouraging creative work.

In the case of software, the work itself would no longer be protected from reproduction or duplication by others, but there is no obligation for the original creator to facilitate the reproduction by others.

> So to answer your question, the public is encouraging creative work

Creative work which the public has no access to even after the limited monopoly period is up.

That's not at all true. People have access to the work by virtue of owning copies of it. Music can be played. Software can be reverse-engineered or just copied. Artwork can be copied. The ideas which are the core unique value of creative work are already out in the world by virtue of the work being seen and handled by the public. Copyright exists to provide the creator protection so that they can release their creation to the world without fear of it being immediately devalued by duplication. Without copyright I don't want to release my new idea, I want to keep it secret and charge people ridiculous amounts to have access.

Society has never demanded people hand over their work without compensation. Copyright is not at all about handing over the source of your works. Copyright is about artificially preventing other people from duplicating your work for a period of time. When that time expires, others are allowed to reproduce your work, but you are not required to hand over your sources.

When a carpenter makes a chair he can claim copyright on the design of the chair. During the time that his design is under copyright nobody else is allowed to make chairs that are obviously copied or derived from his design. When the copyright expires the design is no longer protected, but nobody goes to the original carpenter to confiscate his inventory and release it to the public, nor to appropriate his designs. Those are his. He still owns the designs. They are just no longer protected by law from duplication.

DRM directly destroys this "ownership" you speak of. There is no long-term access to a work that expects to phone home on every use.

You seem to be coming from the baseless framework of imaginary property wherein creation of property rights is a bona fide good thing, regardless of whether they're congruent with the underlying physics. However, the base law of this jungle is that copying is easy, creators have DRM, and the public has VHS and P2P.

Copyright is justified by the framework of a tradeoff whereby the naturally-existing public domain is retarded in order to encourage the creation of more works that will enter it at a later time. You still haven't directly addressed why the public should agree to restrict itself from copying media, only for the copyright owner to renege on their contribution when the monopoly period is up.

First: I entirely agree with you regarding DRM. Second: the "baseless framework" of property rights is how it has worked for centuries. Hardly baseless. The new world is the exception and I don't see how it has materially changed the rights of a creator to their own works.

I will say that our current system is extremely broken with regard to the public domain, primarily because of things like DRM and intellectual property, both of which I believe are harmful to society as a whole. I also believe copyright had been extended for way too long. These are things we should push hard to change because I agree, they break the implicit agreement that justifies copyright.

But in the world you are imagining, every new work of any kind would have to be registered with someone to make sure the sources are made public when the copyright expires. Then of course, you would have the massive enforcement effort to ensure the sources actually get released. Little Jimmy starts working a little game on his parents' computer? Better register that with the copyright office so the sources don't get lost in ten years when the copyright expires. It's ridiculous. That's not the way it works and its not the way it should work.

The framework of explicit "imaginary property" is new, within the past few decades. Thinking of copyright (et al) as general property rights leads to errant conclusions. Such as that at copyright expiration, the owner is forfeiting their "property" to the government. I refer to it as baseless because it's not modeling physical reality (information isn't exclusive-use), but backfitted based on wishful thinking of how some would -like- the world to operate.

Registering a work would be quite easy in this day and age - a hash for confidential priority, and then an easy upload to cement the registration. "Little Jimmy" wouldn't need to register anything until he decided to start distributing his game, and only then if he wished to take advantage of copyright.

Works being implicitly granted copyright is at the root of the problem with DRM. A DRMed track is not a creative work, but a mechanically-created derivative of a creative work. Allowing the original creative work to remain secret while still allowing copyright on mechanical derivations of it creates the situation where the content creator can have their cake and eat it too, by releasing a crippled limited-purpose derivative with no intent to add the work to the public domain.

The crux of the matter is this - if creators use the law of the computational jungle to prevent full access to the work (to remix/port/etc) after copyright expiry, then why should members of the public not similarly revert to the law of the computational jungle wherein copying is Free?

> The crux of the matter is this - if creators use the law of the computational jungle to prevent full access to the work (to remix/port/etc) after copyright expiry, then why should members of the public not similarly revert to the law of the computational jungle wherein copying is Free?

In this I believe we agree. I completely agree that any technical protections applied to the distributed work should be removed, or at the very least allowed to be removed by others after the period of copyright expires.

I agree that copyright should be shorter in duration, but I think some of your suggestions would be disproportionately harmful to independent artists.

Many songwriters rely on their back catalogue - a hit song serves as a pension, earning a steady trickle of royalties from radio play and sync usage. I don't see it as morally reasonable that, for example, a decade-old song could be used in a commercial without royalties being paid.

Requirements to register and renew would be trivial for large corporate rightsholders, but could be a substantial burden for independent artists, particularly at the beginning of their career.

The current situation of indefinite renewal serves nobody but the big publishers, but I think that a copyright term of approximately the life of the creator makes a great deal of sense. I'd be open to the idea of a shorter duration for works that have been assigned to a corporation. I'd also be open to the idea of a clearinghouse for orphan works, to ensure that orphan works can be used without unfairly disadvantaging artists.

Why doesn't a pension serve as their pension?

Losing 1% of their income from that tiny trickle of royalties is not a big deal. 99% of the income a work will bring is made in the first 10 years or so, after that the royalties are tiny compared to the initial value. Nothing is preventing the artists from investing the income they make so they have something to retire on, as people in all other careers have to do.

I agree the registration/renewal process could be burdensome on small creators. However the process does not need to be difficult, it could be a simple online form. And the renewal fee could be really low, perhaps $100.

The point is just to keep every single photo ever taken from ending up copyrighted. Which usually means unusable, since no one can track down every copyright owner and negotiate licensing fees when they just want to use a photo in their power point demonstration. Instead of being automatic, only things people explicitly want to copyright are protected.

I'd like to point out, in support of your arguments, that all artistic works are derivative. Creative works are not created in a vacuum. They copy and derive build upon the cumulative works of the rest of society. Nobody should ever have been entitled to a lifetime copyright.

>> The purpose of copyright is to provide an incentive to produce creative works

False, the purpose, and only reason for copy right is to promote the useful sciences, all other reasons are UnConstitutional (from a US Stand point anyway)

The Surprising History of Copyright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI

http://questioncopyright.org/learn

The full text of the clause is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

"Creative works" is as reasonable shorthand for "useful arts and sciences" as "privacy" is for "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects"

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