Hacker News Reader

Fictional works are not a special case. I'd personally argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least functioned.

Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane.

I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.

To help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the "Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral argument against copyright.

There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with rivalrousness (that is a very subtle distinction):

http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro...

You may find it interesting.

That is an excellent argument from what I would also call the big picture perspective. I just usually use the utilitarian one because it just seems any time you want to argue about social fundamentals - be it anything from segregated bathrooms (of all varieties) to street naming to intellectual property, people get incredibly defensive about the status quo as if their livelihood depended on it - as if culture / information cannot be made without IP, rather than the reverse.

I do think at some point in the future historians will look back and see the catastrophic death of culture permanent copyright wrought throughout the 20th / 21st centuries as a huge crime against humanity. We are sad we have few historical recounts of ancient Egyptian / Greek / Roman living, or even moreso ancient Mesoamerican peoples, or the Babylonians, but we seem perfectly complacent in how some ~95% of all music, film, photography, writing, and even probably code is lost forever because of copyright meaning if the owners take it to their grave it stays dead with them. It is just a tremendous disservice to humanity to just let so much creative work die like that, and how generations have now grown and died without any of the commercial works of their childhood ever being accessible to their own creativeness in their lifetimes.

Future historians will view those who today take steps to 'liberate' and 'preserve' the modern culture as the heros and those who sought to lock it away as villains.

Either that, or I fear we face a future as described in Idiocracy.

I think this is a mis-representation of Stallman's point. Notice that Stallman has his non-code media mostly under a no-derivatives creative commons license.

From what I understand, Stallman is concerned about making sure our infrastructure is free (as in freedom). The simplicity of copying is almost a tangential issue. His point is that for a society to be considered free (democratic, empowered, etc.) the people need access in a meaningful way to the infrastructure that helps create that society. To me, his point is a natural extension of forcing government documents to be under public domain and providing architectural blueprints for public scrutiny.

Maybe I'm wrong and mis-interpreting Stallman's point. Do you have a reference that would support your claimed stance on Stallman's 'ease of copying = moral justification against copyright' interpretation?

No, Stallman is a copyright supporter. He just sees it as a tool to empower users. And from his perspective, it makes some sense. If everything were IP liberated, there would be no compulsion to release source code, but my optimism makes me hope that if you cannot profit off software sales, you have no reason not to also disclose the source.

If you can only make money off people paying you to write the software, having the broadest audience becomes crucial, and in such a world (much in the same way most developer tools work outside the MS ecosystem) not being free software would mean nobody would fathom using your software.

I have had an extensive 10+ email personal correspondence with Stillman about patents. Tl;dr He's very much for patents that aren't software patents.

I find that sad and disappointing. Patents are a curse upon humanity.

I also had a correspondence with Eric S. Raymond, who is in general more broadly anti-IP (from what I can tell).

That was a good read. I'd be interested to see the author address trademarks and branding, because that's where you find the intersection of identity (rivalrous in her thesis) and the creative arts (non-rivalrous).

The author states that cultural works increase in value the more they are shared. At the risk of debating semantics ("shared", "value") — would Disney still be a $50B company if anyone had been allowed to release a Mickey Mouse cartoon?

Mickey Mouse is a trademark too, so once out of copyright one could release a cartoon featuring the character but not a "Mickey Mouse cartoon" per se. It's not clear to me if you could even call the mouse Mickey and avoid infringing the trademark.

I'm not sure about that. Once out of copyright you couldn't release a cartoon featuring the character (as that's a trademark), but you could make copies of steamboat willie and freely distribute the content over the internet (or VHS).

I don't know about nina, but I personally see trademark as the only "valid" one of the three forms of IP (precisely because of rivalrousness). On the other hand, there are always things which challenge me: David Tran does not trademark Sriracha.

I somewhat agree with you, but I'm trying to propose a reasonable compromise. Let Disney keep the mouse copyrighted forever, but give us scientific works that have lots of value being public. Maybe we should try to get fictional works freed later, but at least everyone can agree on this.

I don't understand why marginal cost going down causes copyright to make less sense; I'd argue it now makes more sense, as creators can more easily lose out.

Copyright is intended to incentivize people to create things by giving them a limited monopoly on the ability to copy/distribute it. I write a book, no one else can print and sell copies without my permission. Thus I have a chance to make some money off it. If I write a book and anyone can sell it, I'm less likely to make money off it.

If that argument was true in 1800 when some other guy had to physically print out my book, why is it somehow not true today when you can upload a torrent of it?

(I do think current copyright terms are absolutely absurd. If they were 10 years or renewable with fees or anything else that would solve 95% of the problems.)

Because in 1800 someone had to spend some money making copies. If you have no copyright back then, the argument (albeit wrong, in my mind) would go that you needed the monopoly power to stop your published works being immediately undercut by bootleg copiers, because they did not have the upfront costs of actually producing the novel material.

In practice, even that explanation reflects on the insanity of copyright, in that you should never get to the point where you have done free work and now need the state to assist you in making a living off it. You should be seeking compensation for the act of creation, not for the act of copying.

How is that not exactly how it is today? Those people uploading torrents don't have any of the costs of creating the work.

For the same reasons people habitually treat fan works as independent from commercial ones, today people are doing the work for free when in the 18th century you could make a business out of duplicating others written works for profit.

Today, while counterfeiting markets like that still exist in less Internet-rich countries, once you have the Internet, the only thing such markets still apply to are novel physical inventions, and that is never done by small entrepenurs stealing other peoples work, it is by large corporations using economies of scale to produce replcias of a novel product that can undercut the original creator.

Because there is an important distinction between goods and information. A good is valuable for what it is - a fridge because it cools, a car because it can move on roads. The utility is in the physical atomic composition of the product. With informational works, which is what copyright applies to, the value is exclusively in the encoded information - you can transfer it in myriad forms, from light to electrons to magnetism to etchings on a wall, but in those circumstances the media of transit is much less relevant than the material itself.

It was only when the transit material was itself scarce that the argument for copyright was made. When transit becomes so cheap it is effectively free where millions will send you a copy for no charge, the assumptions are broken.

Once again, your entire argument hinges on forgetting that there is a cost to creating the material in the first damn place. And the way you recoup those costs today is to sell copies of the work. The transit method isn't relevant, because the purpose of copyright was to allow the creator to recoup costs in creating the work, not in selling it.

Reproduction is not the only cost. There is also a large cost in actually making the thing in the first place.

"Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane."

Only until you remember that what they're trying to share wasn't theirs in the first place.

If you create something, great, share it with everyone you want. But don't you dare force others into doing the same thing with what they created.

> I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous.

I disagree, scientists generally aren't seeking to get money by people buying a copy of their paper (if anything they're currently paying so people can read it) there's no need for them to invoke copyright law at all, in fact that would be against their own interest.

The problem is that the current system forces scientists to publish in journals, which will happily charge an arm and a leg for the privilege, and invoke whatever law they can to make more money, even if this goes directly against the interests of the scientists who wrote the papers.

The Journals wouldn't be an issue in the first place without copyright law. And fixing copyright solves problems beyond scientific Journals. You could have nonfiction books in general, textbooks, etc, all available to the public domain.

You're pretty much entirely missing the point.

1. Scientists aren't at the heart of the scientific Open Access problem. Journals are.

2. The fact that copyright exists means that journals can then request it be transferred (or licensed) to the journal. For what's effectively forever.

3. Journals exercise gatekeeper access over scientists' careers, in that publishing in prestige journals is how scientists advance academically. This is de facto* coercive control over scientists.

4. With that control, journals compell publication of articles in controlled journals, for scientists to advance, require subscriptions of libraries (who otherwise forgo access to the material), and maintain a bank of virtually all scientific papers published since 1924 as an absolute monopoly.

Hence: no copyright, or a far-less-rediculous copyright, say, 14, 28, or 54 years (as was historically the case, via registration(s) and/or renewals), and much the problem would disappear.

The additional factor of deadweight costs of denied access to virtually all of humanity for this material is the other cost.

> And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers.

As much as I feel that science---especially publicly funded science (which almost all of it is)---ought to be freely available fairly quickly, I think making a distinction for the purposes of copyright law between fiction and non-fiction is fairly hairy. Clearly "A Streetcar Named Desire" is fiction, but what about memoirs? Poetry? The Onion? Dianetics? The output of human writing spans a continuum of factual-ness, and it's not obvious to me that there's a good way to draw a line.

Even in the hardest of sciences, it's often underappreciated how much interpretation and creative energy goes into a paper.

Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works. Is anyone really going to argue that scientific papers are works of fiction? Would any reasonable court hold that up? All laws have to deal with the natural fuzziness of concept space. But if libraries can manage it successfully, surely the copyright office can.

What about allegories and thought experiments?

Two examples on the top of my head:

1. The strange cave of Ali Baba (or how to explain Zero-Knowledge protocols to your children) - Jean-Jacques Quisquater - Advances in Cryptology - 1990.

2. The fable of the Tyrant Dragon - Nick Bostrom - Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005¹. This is a work of fiction designed to make a statement about the stance of society towards fighting aging.

¹ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf

² http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

The categorization could go either way. Leave it up to the copyright office to decide.

However given the context of an allegory in a larger work of nonfiction, or it's publication in a nonfiction scientific journal, I would lean towards saying it should be nonfiction.

They're both non-fiction. Context, not just the title can be used in categorization.

> Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works.

But what about

- popular scientific books

- popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story

or

- science fiction books

- "hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories

- a description of a highly experimental physical theory embedded in a nice framework of how alien civilizations might take use of technology that this theory enables

or

- Books about historical facts

- Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago).

- Novels that are based on historical facts that nevertheless take some literary license to make the story more exciting

- Fictional story that is occured in some concrete non-fictional historic time

or

- A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment

- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment, where in the story some academic person gives a quite scientifically accurate description of the thought experiment

- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment

See my comment above replying to someone else. There might be some fuzziness, but in context it's easy to classify. And for the weird outliers, the copyright office can make the call on how to classify them. Almost all of these seem pretty straightforward to classify. Just ask yourself what category you would find the work in a library?

>popular scientific books

Certainly nonfiction.

>popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story

Not sure what you mean, but that sounds like fiction even if it has some science in it.

>hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories

Same thing.

>Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago

Well your own wikipedia link classifies it as fiction at the bottom. In fact all the examples of novels that are loosely based on truth are fiction.

But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.

>A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment

This seems like the only fuzzy example. But such a thought experiment will almost always be in the context of a larger nonfiction work. And it will be published in a place like a scientific journal with other nonfiction, and be placed in the nonfiction section of a library. So that seems like the most practical and natural classification, legally.

The fiction/non distinction is a red herring.

Non-fiction pop sci isn't funded in the same way as scientific research.

Authors are paid to write pop sci, and it's very hard to produce a good book without getting paid an advance which allows a significant amount of full-time research.

If you create a system that can't pay advances, you're limiting pop sci to amateur efforts and short Wikipedia articles.

It's true a lot of pop sci isn't all that great. But the best books are literally life changing, and it's really not the best idea in the world to make it impossible to fund them.

>But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.

There should be no question that scientific papers should be public, because the public has already paid for them.

Private research can be protected by patents, so there's no reason not to share the research with the public as long as commercial implementations are protected.

Hold on, I never said completely abolish copyright for nonfiction. I suggested reducing it to 10 or 15 years. Most pop sci will have no economic value after 10 years, so it shouldn't change anything.

It's utterly ridiculous that an out of print 1950's textbook by a dead author, is still protected by copyright. How is society benefiting from this arrangement at all?

I wish copyright was more limited with regard to scientific works. But how to define them? In a conservative sense, perhaps works that are

1) a technical or research article

2) produced with public funding

Could receive more limited (shorter-term) copyrights etc.

The legal system is not applied by computers, but by humans. That's why laws don't have to be written in a way that pre-defines every possible edge case - you can let judges make a common sense judgment call about it later.

For example you could have a rule that anybody who makes a work available "in good faith" in the belief that it is a scientific paper out of copyright is not liable to damages. Then all edge cases would be cleared in the context of take-down requests, which is not very high stakes...

> The legal system is not applied by computers, but by humans. That's why laws don't have to be written in a way that pre-defines every possible edge case - you can let judges make a common sense judgment call about it later.

That's a very US-centric (or to be precise, Anglo-Saxon centric) statement. The vast majority of countries in the world uses a civil-law system instead of common-law system. In civil-law system, codes and statutes are designed and supposed to cover all edge cases and eventualities

I'm a lawyer in a civil-law system and I would not agree with this description. Maybe one can say that in theory civil law systems have more legislation and are less comfortable with "judge made law", leaving the filling of gaps to the legislative powers. But it would be impossible to write laws that cover all cases, therefore every civil law system relies on general principles.

For example, the whole German tort law is basically: "A person who, intentionally or negligently, unlawfully injures the life, body, health, freedom, property or another right of another person is liable to make compensation to the other party for the damage arising from this."

When is a behavior negligent? What falls under the "another right of another person" (your reputation, your privacy?)? Does the owner of a highway-restaurant get damages if a negligent chemicals transport company does not secure its load properly, leading to dangerous chemicals spilled on the highway, leading to closure of the highway for a week = meaning no customers for a week? [damage to property???] These are all questions that are totally up for a judge to decide.

Classifying if a work is a scientific or a non-scientific publication - or at least if somebody might have classified it as scientific in good faith - is nothing that a civil law jurisdiction can't deal with. Other areas of law have much harder conceptual distinctions. (E.G. Are parent and subsidiary company having an "at arms length" relationship as required in transfer pricing tax law?)

Right, I don't actually disagree with your statement in principle, it was more of a nit-picking kind of thing. Most law system would not be cleanly civil or common law, but a gradient between the two. I guess I was thinking it being more of an issue in country with bad judiciary system.

I think in general scientific discoveries (pharmaceuticals, algorithms etc) should not be granted monopolistic production rights, but rather monopolistic royalty rights.

So, for example, if you invented Viagara, and every pharma company in the world figured out how to make it cheaper in their own way, they're free to make it but they have to pay the creator (individual or corporation) a royalty fee to do so.

I think royalties are a better way to incentivize innovation while not allowing patent protections to stifle the market as a whole.

The problem is there is no objective way to set the price of the royalty. Pharma companies won't invest in a drug that is only worth $1 per pill. And some pills will need to be taken for a lifetime, while others only need to be taken once - but the value of curing a disease is the same.

Yeah that's a good point. Maybe instead it could be a fee you could have to pay the creator to sell the same thing up to some limit, maybe determined by the creator's market price?

So we should pay royalties for using Calculus? Do we need to pay royalties everytime we use certain equations?

Ridiculous.

Patents expire.

Copyright only covers expression. It doesn't cover the content of a scientific paper. One effort of paraphrasing a paper and we're good to go.

> Maybe only 10 or 15 years.

That's 10 or 15 years potentially holding back humanity and preventing Shit Getting Done.

Of course. I'd prefer that journals switch to open access, and that governments demand publicly funded research to be released in the public domain. My proposals are independent of that policy.