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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

As it stands, copyright serves little positive social purpose. The overwhelming majority of creators get paid little if anything for their work, and still there is a glut of content. So there should be no fear of the world losing lots of great content if there was no copyright.

Most of the benefit of copyright is reaped by the middle men, who profit off the work when the creatives that made it have long ceased to do so (if they ever did). Abolishing copyright will thus mostly affect these middle men, and have little effect on content creation itself.

Those creatives that still want to get paid in a copyright-free era can find business models that don't rely on copyright, like performances, donations, or kickstarter-like models when one is paid for future work.

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I make a modest portion of my income on writing. For me, abolishing copyright would suck because I know what would happen: More of the same things that already happen. Organizations that command large audiences would slurp up my work and republish it, selling the space alongside to advertisers. People and groups with axes to grind would edit and redistribute my work to serve their own ends. I would lose income generated when publications want to reprint my work. Spammy websites would fill their pages with my text to look legitimate to search engines. And so on. I would have no legal recourse.

I agree that America's current version of copyright is flawed, and that rights-holders hold the rights for too long. Maybe copyright should require a tax, as some have proposed. Make it a penny for the first year, doubling annually.

On one hand, post-copyright you would certainly have predatory interests taking media and trying to profit from it.

But you would also have the cultural shift into the rationalization that digital information isn't being artificially confined anymore. Anyone looking at something asking for money to see it will learn over time that no, they cannot stop you from finding that information as long as someone valued it enough to make it available.

The mindset of creators would have to change. Instead of making the thing (and risking everything on the ability to sell it) you don't have to go into it as a gamble, and you don't have to execute doublethink by assocating something that is worthless (copying) with profit while something valuable (creation) is done for free. You would have to make something to have credibility, but from that point forward you just need to offer your creativity to make things, say how much money you want to make / release some creative work, and once made create / publish it. And then its free, and all of humanity can enjoy it, and you defeat the predatory middle men much more so than today.

And beyond that, people are a bit wiser to fake news now. I'm using "fake news" as a shorthand for the very real concern the author pointed out:

People and groups with axes to grind would edit and redistribute my work to serve their own ends.

This sounds like the fear is that people will maliciously butcher your work by carving it up, or altering it, or otherwise presenting a piece of your work (or quotes, or thoughts) without the full context. And there's no one that does this better than the news agencies.

It's having less effect now. It's still a real concern, but it's interesting that as people are becoming more aware of the fakes, we're also spotting cases similar to the above concern. And no legal protections were necessary to call them out.

If you repurpose someone's work, at no point in history has it been easier to make noise: twitter, reddit, HN, medium, anywhere. If your story is true, people are thirsty for drama. Which is rather upsetting and repugnant, but you can also take advantage of it when you need to.

It seems true to say that we could axe copyright without authors being negatively affected. People still pay for content, and for those who can generate it. But it would require testing it out to see how it plays out in practice, and that's not so easy.

> people are a bit wiser to fake news now.

I think folks are more familiar with the term, but not necessarily any more inclined towards 'detecting' it. Rhetoric still rules the US, at least.

Why would I pay someone to produce something, when as you said, I would not be able to stop people from finding it online for free?

For example, why would I pay to have a new Star Wars movie produced, when cable companies, NetFlix, and YouTube would all copy the film and have it available for free on the day of release? If I operate a cinema, I would need to charge $15 a ticket to recover the costs of producing the film, while John Doe can start a cinema, and show my film for $3 a ticket. So, why would I pay to have the movie produced? What would be my advantage over the competition, and how would I recover a few hundred million dollars?

At least personally I know I would give Disney (or any third party creative wanting to make a Star Wars movie I found reputable) money to make them, because I like watching them.

Independently, no, I would not be able to single handedly fund the millions of dollars required to create such a film. The good news is there are a lot of people in the world who like Star Wars, and I imagine in the absence of artificial scarcity soaking up spending money those fans would put their money towards seeing the films they want made... made.

No copyright isn't the solution. But it probably would be better than the current situation. Bring back either a 20-year copyright or an "author's death plus 10 years" version. The latter would be easiest to litigate and would incentivize relatives pulling together and sharing papers and unfinished manuscripts.

Serious question: how would "author's death plus 10 years" work for companies?

A good question, though we're currently living in a world that is the author's death plus 95 years in the US, so this is already standard practice. Works not covered this way get a ridiculous 120 years copyright coverage. I would say a flat 35 years from publication or 50 years for unpublished works would be reasonable.

Have a fallback. Authors death +10 years or at most 30 years (numbers pulled out of my posterior. I am not suggesting anything)

This encourages gaming the system: companies will seek to designate as the copyright holder the youngest available employee, to make the term last longer.

or group works. would nirvana songs be public domain?

20 year is ok, but "author's death plus 10 years" is bad because it short enough to create some dreadful incentive for would-be publishers: if author is not willing to deal with you just kill him and wait a decade

That doesn't make sense. It's not like the person who killed them would get a copyright monopoly on the work. Literally anyone could publish it. Do you see anyone getting rich publishing works in the public domain? If that's the case, I need to get myself some of that red-hot Project Gutenberg money.

Intellectual property in general causes all manner of harm. It makes things more expensive to repair (monopolies on repair parts/services), limits access to medicine, and keeps significant quality of life improvements in the hands of a privileged minority that can afford to pay the stacked up monopoly fees of all the IP contributors of an “official” product.

Information is not a scarce resource and while there are many business benefits to the current arrangement, IP on balance harms the average person.

For those that say small artists need IP to survive: how much cheaper would an artist’s health care and automobile be if both of those industries had essentially “open licenses” (in our speak) for that content. How much cheaper would a Toyota clone be if it used standard parts and didn’t change every year, where any manufacturer could produce the necessary parts?

Artists could live as well as they do now for cheaper if there were no IP laws in my opinion.

> How much cheaper would a Toyota clone be if it used standard parts and didn’t change every year, where any manufacturer could produce the necessary parts?

There would not be a Toyota to clone since no one would invest in researching original IP that will be exploited be everyone else right away.

There’s a difference between original designers and “cloners” in quality and attention to detail.

The Toyota clone wouldn’t be as good as the real thing and so there would still be a market for first party goods. But that market would be smaller as many people would be satisfied with a clone. And isn’t that more “efficient”? People satisfied with the cheaper good get the cheaper good and people who want the quality go for the original.

In today’s market, when someone who would be satisfied with a clone ends up buying an original, we see that extra money is spent only because Toyota is holding a monopoly on the design information. Except only creating the value should be rewarded, not monopolizing it.

We can see today how Joseph Prusa with Prusa research designed the worlds most popular 3D printer, yet many of the users are using clones. There is a market sufficiently interested in quality to support his 30 person (I believe) business despite his product being totally open source and actively cloned by huge companies.

It is possible to deliver value as an innovator and creator by selling the best stuff. Even at 3x the price of clones Prusa continues to grow.

So I don’t believe that there wouldn’t be car makers - though perhaps there’d be no “Toyota”.

I do believe in a balance between public domain, copyleft and copyright, but playing devil's advocate is helpful here. We are supposed to live in a knowledge economy, and inevitably it's copyright and IP that ends up setting the rules and benefiting from it. Luckily there are people who see the value in copyleft and choose relevant projects that can end up making an impact on a large scale.

Racing would still invest in original designs, and enthusiasts would love to try designing if there were standardized parts.

I would design some crazy 3D printed dashboard modifications if I had the source files to my Honda.

No copyright doesn't mean full access to the source code.

Copyright in some form is clearly beneficial; there are whole classes of creative professional that simply wouldn't exist without it. Not every form of creative activity can be effectively funded through live performance or digital begging.

99% of "content" being churned out by amateurs is absolutely dire. Producing creative works of serious merit requires a major investment of time and resources. Many skilled and talented people really would be put off investing that effort if they knew that an advertising company could use their music for free, or a publisher could churn out paperbacks without paying a royalty.

The primary problem is clearly understood - endless copyright extensions that offer no benefit to artists, but concentrate power in the hands of a few media companies. The duration of a patent is 20 years; I think this would be a reasonable basis for copyright. Failing that, I think that "author's life + 10 years" with an orphan works clause is also reasonable. What certainly isn't reasonable is the current duration of copyright, which is effectively forever.

I think shorter or no IP protection terms would on average harm the wealthiest and benefit the poorest in this world. How many lives would be improved if all the medicine in the world could be freely cloned? How much cheaper would our cars be if the designs could be legally cloned?

But what impetus would drug companies have for researching and developing new drugs, if they're just instantly going to be copied by another company? Why not just sit back and wait for another company to develop them?

Certainly if we abolished IP laws we would need to intentionally fund medical research rather than using the pseudo market based approach (mixed with government subsidy) that we have now. I should say I know little about our current process, but I do believe we could find a way.

It's a weird thought experiment.... if we halted all new drug r&d and instead cheaply distributed all the medicines that we have already invented, how much more people would benefit, and at whose cost? And how long would that "honeymoon phase" last?

Individual creatives and individual technologists should be natural allies, in opposition to corporate middlemen. But this "Why, let them sell t-shirts!" attitude means we'll forever be at odds.

I believe that there will be more creative work once copyright is abolished because creativity would be no longer limited. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc

> Abolishing copyright will thus mostly affect these middle men, and have little effect on content creation itself.

You act like that's a good thing... What do you believe these middles mens will do then? They will just steal instead of paying.

Theses copyrights at least force them to pay and try to create unique content instead of stealing the newest idea.

Open your TV and look at Star Wars ads. Notice anything? Where I'm from, in Quebec, but it looks like it's everywhere, Disney allowed many companies to use Star Wars to advertise their products. It's crazy. I don't care much, but do you see anything particular about these ads versus the others? No originality. They are stupid, boring and are essentially: "YOU LIKE STAR WARS, WE DO TOO, BUY OUR PRODUCT".

You know why they do this? Because it's cheap and it works. Original creation is expensive and hard. You just saved so much cash for these middle mens, it's crazy.

Okay, now what's the gain for everyone else? Now you can legally read old stuff without paying the old content creator (do it illegally then, except the moral dilemma, which you doesn't seem to have, I assure you, the legal world probably won't do much to you)? Now you can use Star Wars characters in your stuff? That's it?

The gain is minimal... for god sake, if you want to reuse, then recreate. Possibilities are endless, please, do something new instead! I read that some people aren't too happy that 2017 was essentially a year of remake/sequel in movies.

Really, abolish copyright and the replacement "business models" are: asking for donations, asking for continous investments via crowdfunding (which are really donations with IOUs attached) and live performances? (Which are not applicable to a large part of creative work)

I agree that copyright has taken ridiculous and perverse forms today, but I think the old point still stands that you have to find a solid alternative for creative workers before you can abolish it.

The problem is that the vast majority of creatives today do not use IP as their primary income source. The vast majority of professionals are employed - their income comes from an employer, not through execution of a copyright they hold.

There is a lot of fanticization of IP whenever discussions about getting rid of it come up - about how regular people can utilize courts and the legal system to enforce their copyrights. In practice, the only way to even realistically produce creative works and then try to use copyright as a means to profit is through the cooperation of a corporation promising to act as the middle man distributor and enforcer of said copyright. Even the largest of private creative endeavors don't have the resources to go pursuing violators of their copyright in court.

And the only real victim of copyright abolition becomes those large media corporations who suddenly lose their ability to artificially constrict distribution as a revenue source.

There is certainly an argument that people want Star Wars, but I'm not convinced a post-copyright Disney would die, either. They have a reputation now for quality production. If they came forth seeking investment to create things people want, there would still be billions of dollars flowing in to see things people want made by them, but the logistics would be completely different.

But in practice, you make money today as a creator by having something people want where you can get them to pay you for it - beforehand, after the fact, with tertiary merch sales, whatever the means. You survive off your popularity and the willingness of others to see you funded to keep creating. Without copyright, nothing about that fundamental changes, and its not like the trillions of dollars spent on entertainment today suddenly dries up. If anything, it would be a creative renaissance - the things people want to make being made by the people who want to make them, where everyone gets what they want (a good standing of living and new media) versus today where creativity is shackled by government and for most creative endeavors the individual has little to say about what is being made - because artists expect their livelihoods to come after the fact.

> The vast majority of professionals are employed - their income comes from an employer, not through execution of a copyright they hold.

But... copyright is how the vast majority of those employers are making a profit, and how they're able to pay the creative professionals.

> you have to find a solid alternative for creative workers before you can abolish it.

Why? Being a "creative worker" doesn't mean the market owes one a living. Abolishing copyright would make competition and innovation easier, as well as allow creative people more freedom without fear of legal repercussions. This would benefit consumers in the long run by driving costs down and forcing quality to win in the marketplace, rather than letting a few big companies assert control over valuable IPs.

Many of us believe the right to freely edit and redistribute software is fundamental, why would that right not naturally extend to all forms of media? Especially given that most creative output nowadays exists as software.

Ok, so creative workers should participate in a market but at the same time should not expect any benefit from it. Why should they produce content at all?

As for software: You can choose to put your code under an open source license, you're not obligated to it. Many have the financial means to do so but many who make a living from that software don't.

Why should they depend on copyright to force the market to value their content over that of potential competition?

People could still prefer J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter even if it wasn't illegal for other people to write Harry Potter fiction, the books and movies could still make money on name recognition alone. But if someone did come along and write a better version of Harry Potter that became more popular, wouldn't they deserve to profit as well?

Why should Disney be able to do that with a thousand years' of fairy tale mythology, but no one else be able to with modern mythology like Star Wars? Having cultural expression so inextricably locked up by corporations is not healthy. And yes, it might devalue the individual in the marketplace, but everyone suffers that fate now, regardless of their field.

Why go through the trouble of writing a better Harry Potter? You could simply take the existing story and sell it yourself - or put it on the internet so that no one needs to buy it at all.

I agree that it might be beneficial for society if all media were available for free and I agree copyright is probably not the right tool, but that's why said more thoughts effort needs to be spent to find better alternatives.

In the 19th century, America didn't respect British copyright. And Charles Dickens was the most popular writer in the US and was printed there without paying Dickens a cent. So how did Dickens handle this? By going on tour in the US. People paid money to see him recite his works much like music concerts. In fact, this is how most professional musicians make money today in the post physical album world. They don't make much money off their music directly but rather the music serves as advertisements for their live shows.

> the books and movies could still make money on name recognition alone.

Books, maybe. But without copyright, what keeps movie studios from just turning J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books into movies without paying her anything?

Nothing, but there is a business advantage to having an author and their fans support your work rather than turn them against it, so if J.K. Rowling refused to do that without getting paid, she still has leverage regardless of copyright.

My argument here is that part of the intrinsic value of a creative work is in the author or team behind it, and that doesn't necessarily need the force of law to back it up.

Look at doujin culture in Japan. People create derivative (mostly pornographic) works using established properties and characters, but the originals still retain their value. It's technically illegal, but it's still permitted as authors consider doujins free advertising and a way for new talent to showcase their work.

>> Being a "creative worker" doesn't mean the market owes one a living.

Of course it doesn't. The starving artist trope is very much real.

Creative workers are mainly entrepreneurs, and they take massive risks for little reward. They work 15 hour days just like any startup owner.

>> Abolishing copyright would make competition and innovation easier, as well as allow creative people more freedom without fear of legal repercussions.

No it wouldn't. The flip side of copyright is that it prevents someone from going in a ripping up or destroying artwork without legal repercussions. This is why many street artists can become famous, which would be impossible if their work was simply painted over by the next artist. In many cities, the next building owner cannot even paint over it legally.

>> This would benefit consumers in the long run by driving costs down and forcing quality to win in the marketplace, rather than letting a few big companies assert control over valuable IPs.

You read the same internet as I do. Low quality work has won the content war through the shear force of quantity.

>> Many of us believe the right to freely edit and redistribute software is fundamental, why would that right not naturally extend to all forms of media?

Some creative workers believe the same, and there works of art of all forms that follow the open source philosophy.

However, there is a big difference between modifying (which is allowed under copyright laws) and outright theft. If someone clones your repo on github and takes full credit for your work, you wouldn't be happy about it. If they put ASCII dicks all through the source and said it was your work, this would probably offend you.

>>> Especially given that most creative output nowadays exists as software.

eyeroll -- most programmers aren't creative professionals or engineers.

How about temporarily halting copy rights for, say, 5 or 10 years? Then evaluate whether it's been good or bad for the production of cultural artifacts?

A lot of creative professionals would instantly become destitute. There are thousands of artists, authors, composers, developers and designers who lead hand-to-mouth lifestyles that revolve around their royalty payments.

It's not necessarily untenable, but it would have some very painful consequences.

Compromise ideas like this are worth brainstorming. But the open commons movements need a better legal strategy than "do an experiment and see if there's harm".

What is wrong with that (empirical) approach?

There is nothing logically wrong with an experiment like that. But there is no economic / political path where this happens. Even, say, there were a massive political turnaround in the next election cycle that could push something like that, just the international treaties would make this difficult enough.

I thought about this more, and I noticed something else wrong with that version of the experiment. The compromise has to be at the other end of copyright term. It's crazy to remove all authorial rights from anyone actively working today.

Something more like: For the next 5 years, all copyrights before 1970 become subject to the "author's lifetime" standard, and nothing else changes. If the experiment fails, then those rights are automatically restored to any corporations/estates that owned them. (With some mechanism to shield copies made in that interim from future litigation.)

That sounds like a more balanced version of the experiment, and I still think it has very little chance of coming to pass. I'm not good with Bayesian formalism, but my priors are something like: status quo most likely, permanent (but small) concessions to get a little bit more old stuff into the public domain next most likely, all other options highly improbable.

Finally: maybe it's sensible to try to shift the Overton window by calling for the abolition of copyright. But I don't know how one does that kind of thing ethically if you don't really want to go that extreme.

Kickstarter is probably the most predatory business model we came up with yet.

There are changes that can be made to copyright without abolishing it; mainly restricting corporate ownership and reducing the periods to prevent rent seeking, other alterations can also be made to provide additional freedom for derivative works.

But abolishing copyright outright sorry won’t work and anyone who suggested it never has likely never worked in a creative field.

If you are an artist drew something for work while employed by Zynga, they will not pay you any royalties. I say good riddance.

If you are employed then in most cases not; if you are a contractor it depends on the case by case basis.

But I don’t see a problem with this anyone who’s employed exchanges the ownership of their production in exchange for a reliable stream of income.

Let’s forget artists for a second if you develop an app should I be allowed to copy it and sell it as my own?

> Let’s forget artists for a second if you develop an app should I be allowed to copy it and sell it as my own?

I'd say yes and yes with one condition. You may not modify the app and sell it as unmodified. You may not claim that I authorized you to make changes when I have done no such thing. This is just my opinion and not how the law works today. I anal.

Are you offering a license for other people to profit of you work without any exchange? If so please put it in writing and attach it to all your work.

I think your proposed solution goes way too far in the opposite direction. For some content (e.g. rock or folk music) it might work, but it would make things a lot harder for e.g. novelists or even some software developers.

The problem with copyright is that it's often owned or assigned to companies, which are potentially immortal and are constantly lobbying politicians to extend its duration.

Why not distinguish between author-owned copyright, which could either be for a fixed duration or for life, and company-owned copyright, which would always be for a shorter period?

I want to add to what you're saying: a lot of resources for artists, from music hardware to video cameras to painting software, have massively inflated prices because paid creatives are paying for them. If you take a lot of the money out of the system, you deflate those prices and make those resources more available to everyone.

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