To be fair, the life expectancy of people keeps increasing.
Nobody is alive after their death, because, well… they're dead.
All seasons watched here, great series.
Not only are you to inherit the money and property they earned. You are also to inherit the right to further make new money from this legal monopoly on something you have done nothing for at all.
Sounds reasonable to me.
I don't really have a problem with copyright being a "made up" legal fiction. A lot of things are fictions made "real" by laws, customs and such.
The questions (IMO) shouldn't be around what is real or not, based on some abstract reasoning. It should be about what is beneficial, practically, in our time.
Anyway, I think we need to rethink patents and copyright entirely. For patents, it isn't entirely clear they work as intended (incentivising innovation). The downsides, at least, seem more visible now than before.
Copyrights in the digital age.... It's just a completely different thing. A book or song or whatnot needed to be published regardless of copyright. Print costs, retail, etc. The only difference was royalties. The difference between a public domain and copyrighted work now is much bigger. Free means flexible, accessible, obscurity tolerant... For a lot of works, copyright by default is like burning the only copy.
Combining and reworking is also different in this age.
For copyright, part of the problem is that most copyright is valueless in many senses (including financial). No one is making money off it. No one is reading/watching it. It's like art in a vault. Freeing the works would allow people to access them. Free as in liberty, as well as beer. The two are related, often.
That said, the idea that your "life" has any role in this whatsoever is also unreasonable.
Copyright should last X years. If the author dies, X is still X, and if the author lives then X is still X.
This maintains the incentives, despite terminal illnesses, while also preserving the rights of the greater society to reflect on its own culture and encourage new artistic works. It's also how copyright originally worked (IIRC).
If you create a copyrightable work and die the next day, and your executor manages to get it published the next year, your estate owns the copyrights for the next 20. That is enough time for any child sired by a male author on the day he died to be supported by his estate until it becomes an adult. It also provides a reasonable 5 year window to get something published before later publication is punished by a shortened copyright term. Still-living creators will, of course, be able to deny that a work was actually finished--and therefore started the 25-year clock--until just before the day the first copy is made available for sale--which starts the 20-year clock--so that would pretty much just be enforceable on posthumous publications and on bizarre edicts from eccentric or reclusive creators who try to exert too much control over how other people may enjoy their work.
And it allows for a work still profitable after 20 years to squeeze a little more out. I think the extension may encourage corporations that commission works for hire to support their successful creators for 20 years so that they will not object to the extension.
Works-for-hire, by the way, would have all the individual humans and the corporation as the creators, and the default would be tenancy-in-common, with the humans temporarily assigning their interest to the corporation in exchange for a regular salary. (I think the current works-for-hire system encourages immortal corporations to use up and throw away their human talent.) So if the corporation stops making the payments, the creators regain their full interest in the work, according to the size of their contribution defined by the work-for-hire agreement, if one exists, or an equal share if not. So the only reason to fire a creator would be if the profits from the works they create aren't sufficient to pay their salary, at which time they get their (lesser) share of the profits instead.
A session musician, for instance, might be hired by a record label to get a 4% share of every recorded music track, and assign that interest to the company in exchange for salary of $1200 every week working in the home studio and $1800 every week spent touring. If the tracks that musician played on bring in more than $2.34M, the company should keep them as salaried employees indefinitely. Otherwise, they could fire them as an employee and just pay out their 4% until the copyright term runs out.
You sign a publishing contract with a publisher, you (and your estate so your kids) collect money from that. After the contract ends it's done. Which is reasonable in my opinion. If I die, my kids don't get my monthly payment anyway.
Since other publishers do not have the manuscript, they can take the book and write it over completely to their own publishing house but due to market lag they it's too little, to late. And if you are wondering, digital reproductions usually fall under the same rights as reproductions (e.g. playing Beethoven, you cannot reproduce that specific work while the author has been dead for years).
Sounds reasonnable ?
Inheriting wealth is reasonable because gives people a(nother) reason to contribute to the world - to secure a place for their children in a potentially uncertain future. Parents who have spent a large portion of their life caring and provisioning for there children want to see that they have a level of security when gone.
Inheriting crime is unreasonable for, hopefully, obvious reasons.
Luckily, we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If you create the next billion dollar game and survive your heirs (or those you specify in your will) will surely be enriched, perhaps it should be 70 years alive or dead that copyright persists for.
I agree
But I sense you and I won’t agree there so why don’t we compromise with 1 year exclusive rights for heirs after the author’s death?
> Often when and how a copyright owner registers a copyrighted work will depend on whether that work is published or unpublished because the requirements for registration differ slightly depending on whether the work is considered to be published or unpublished under the law. The “under the law” phrase is important here because what the normal person might consider to be published does not necessarily correspond to the Copyright Office’s definition of the term. Moreover, sometimes even knowing these definitions doesn’t help because there is some ambiguity in the term and how it applies to new digital environments. So this is one area to proceed with caution.
> The Copyright Office’s definition of published includes: the distribution of copies of a work to “the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending” or offering to distribute copies … “to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication.” A public performance or display of a work does not by itself constitute publication.
> In the online environment this gets confusing. For example, a blog post or a photo posted on a website might be considered to be a “distribution of copies,” which would mean it’s a published work under the definition or it could be a “public display,” which would mean it’s unpublished.
http://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explain...
* If you die X+1 years after, your kids get nothing.
* If you die the day it's published, your kids get X-1 day.
* If your kids discover it after your death and publish it, they get the whole X years.
Around 40 years seems like a reasonable value for X, in my opinion.
Again, you're essentially saying that older people don't need as much incentive as younger people to create, which I don't necessarily agree with.
Although you are taking the "family" viewpoint, the reality is that copyright more atypically tends to be shuffled around and bought up by large rent-seekers corporations. Many times, the original artist's descendants don't even make a penny. Example: Before invalidated in 2015, who benefited from the strange copyright on "Happy Birthday"? Was it the ancestors of the originators (Mildred J. Hill at the most direct, but probably with several other hands involved before it morphed into its familiar form)? No, it was Warner/Chappell Music.
To me, it would be very hard to argue that the benefits of extended copyright at this point. It's a form of rent-seeking, an activity many economists have problems with. (It was actually pretty easy to find an economist -- a Nobel winner -- blasting rent-seeking. Nobel winner Angus Daton did so here for instance around the 30 minute mark -- https://www.c-span.org/video/?424924-5/national-association-.... It was more in the context of our broken health care system, but similar issues apply with government-sanctioned monopolies of creative works.)
A lot of things that are subject to copyright are not as simple as scratching out a poem on a rainy afternoon.
If I was to spend my resources to design and build a building, most reasonable people would not argue that my estate should be forced to give up its rights to the building when I die. There may be an estate tax, but the estate can choose to keep the building and its income, decide to sell it, or whatever. Seems logical. In fact, the very reason I may have deployed my resources into a building was because it would outlast me and provide economic benefits to those I love after I die.
Are not many (if not most) works subject to copyright just another type of developed asset, like a building? Sure, there are no sticks and bricks, but valuable time, resources and money went into developing the asset. Is that irrelevant because the developed asset is intellectual rather than tangible? Should my estate be denied of benefits based on the type of asset I spent my time and resources creating?
As a society, we have decided to limit the scope in which certain works are protected, for the greater good. I support this. But to abolish copyright or to truncate benefits based on death of the creator doesn’t seem to make economic sense to me.
Copyright has a sort of enthalpy (an appreciation) that grows into new forms of protections with socio-techno changes increasing the value, as opposed to a depreciation. The value is also appreciated by how much it's already been used to make! (e.g. Star Wars) Without physical entropy, like a building, you have a very different economic mechanism. The benefit to the originator's estate is not the single determining factor. Copyright is bad, in the current form. A simple depreciation factor would be far superior to the copyright expiry.
That's a perfectly fine motivation, from my point of view, but I'm contrasting it against yours, because why are we expecting older people to have more altruistic motivations than young people?
(poetry is a poor example because it's not very lucrative in general)
and what about carpenters? they won't do squat if we don't grant them perpetual payments for the houses they once built.
same with tailors. they're entitled to fees every time we wear our clothes...
i mean, the incentive argument is so transparently bogus my mind boggles.
My grand-grand children should just get off their lazy bums and go work :p
Oh, that's why it's "life plus" so many years...
While that was the ostensible reason, corporations who have had rights assigned to them want to milk those rights after the author's death, indeed often the creator's death is a catalyst for higher sales, which will usually go mostly to the publisher/media conglomerate, not their family.
Imagine the App/Play Store (or whatever exists then) once it expires though. If you thought the Flappy Bird spam was bad...
Doesn't make any sense; a fixed term copyright as is used for corporate-author works (currently 90 years) does that just as well.
All a “Life plus X” term for, in terms of expected to benefit, is give decreasing expected copyright term as your age increases (well, as remaining life expectancy given known facts decreases, more precisely.)
I suspect “Life plus” was more about eliminating disputes about creation date for individually-authored works that aren't immediately published, not about what it provides to author’s families. With a “Life plus” term, creation dates become immaterial in computing the end of the copyright term, if you know who the author is then, once their death date is known, expiration of all copyrights is known even if the exact creation date of some works is not known.
Today it's just an excuse, wheel out Jimmy and have him say about how his grandfather just wanted to do right by the kids and imply that people using Jim's granddad's story idea now it's entering the public domain are "stealing" from him and this is an outrage.
Copyright is by its nature rent-seeking, you get income from owning something, and not by actually contributing anything of value. Even in the rare cases where it really _does_ keep some artist's recently bereaved family out of poverty we ought to be asking why aren't we keeping _everybody_ out of poverty?
The original argument tried to justify this rent-seeking by saying we are getting something from it, these brilliant ideas might never get published if Copyright doesn't ensure there's a reward. And if they're not published we'd never know about them, you can't riff on Mickey if nobody has ever seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon. And you know what, I don't agree but if the bargain had stuck at 28 years I'd hold my nose. But of course it didn't. We managed to get _Big Pharma_ to put up with a genuinely limited exclusivity period for their drugs, and a world where generic medicines not only exist but thrive - yet somehow Big Content got extension after extension for some guy's idea for a cartoon mouse (among many other things).
However to understand why we even have copyright, you have to know your renaissance European history. Prior to copyright/patents, you had the guild system. Knowledge was hidden, obfuscated, and destroyed. Those whom wanted to share the secrets of the guild were imprisoned and/or killed.
Fast-forward to the creation of the USA - most of the people here were second sons whom had little to no claims on European riches. They also knew of the guilds, and the danger they have. So, they posited copyright, trademark, and patent. It wasn't cause they were the best tools, but they were better than the guilds that preceded them.
It's about time we revisit the idea of copyright, patent, and trademark and how they apply in the 21'st century.
Patents originated in 15th Century Venice and Copyright in 17th Century Britain and trademarks in France in the (iirc) 19th Century.
Patents were, indeed, a way to encourage people to share their inventions rather than keep them as trade secrets, but this doesn't apply to copyright (rampant book piracy after the invention of the printing press) or trademark (consumer protection and counterfitting).
I have never heard of any link the the USA or second sons etc, and the way these laws developed doesn't support your hypothesis.
Absolutely with you that these things need modernising though (and not in a Digital Millenium way)
The same principle as Trademarks even pre-date the formal existence of registrable trademarks, because everybody can see that if "Jameson Beans" are considered to be good quality beans then buying some crap beans and selling them on as "Jameson Beans" is clearly not OK. English law has a tort of "passing off" which is committed when you trick customers in this way, and you can still use it for unregistered marks today, it's just harder than the Registered Trademark law.
at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think we can eliminate a lot of this "friction" if we have an effective basic income. I get that eliminating things like copyright could lead us back to an age where only art that people make is basically with some wealthy feudal lord's patronage but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
Yes, it's sarcasm