Ten years of free protection, then costing $10 × 1.5 ⁿ ⁻ ¹ for each subsequent year. Year 10 costs $0, year 20 about $380, year 30 about $22,000, year 40 about $1,300,000, year 50 almost $75,000,000—and few fifty-year-old things will be worth $75,000,000 per year and growing to retain copyright to.
You did it! You found the solution to the national debt! Lets implement his right away!
Hey, this could even be a method of artists reacquiring rights to their works from labels: if an artist performs songs from their works 20 years ago and the label isn't interested in paying for this protection scheme, it can revert back to the artist until they decide to stop actively protecting the work. It gets dicey with two parties having rights to it, but structurally it would probably be akin to how if you pay tax on a dollar and give me the remainder, I should then still pay taxes on what I received from you, regardless of the fact you had paid taxes on it already.
What would go into the public domain is Steamboat Willie, the original Mickey Mouse short.
Steamboat Willie is likely to enter the public domain shortly, in fact.
No, it really does appear that this time they've given up. There are articles that have written about this - If Disney were preparing for a big push, we'd have started to see it by now already.
You say that but the Beatles, Elvis, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson are all artists that had their heyday 30-60 years ago and are still the top selling artists. A lot of them are dead now because of varying reasons, but some are still alive and kicking and giving new performances of their 40 year old music.
Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?
True, because every ass and his dog pirates music, thus the income from selling music is severely diminished. The amount of time it takes to produce/compose/record etc. music is not exactly trivial, and if you have to tour constantly in order to be able to pay the bills, then finding time and energy to create some new music to perform whilst on tour becomes quite problematic. Your "most artists don't care" statement is a crock of shit! Perhaps large established artists may not care so much, but if you're talking about "most artists" then they do care that income from their craft is being denied to them.
All I can proffer is anecdote that as bandwidth and the ubiquity of Internet increased over the years, the sales of music via the label I'm involved with diminished. All the while our artists and the label itself became more and more popular, so it seems entirely counter inuitive that sales should have been dropping.
https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
Conversely, Napster was released in 1999.
I recall a report that showed that p2p networks acted primarily like a broadcast medium, which tuned to the most popular works.
The entire free content model has arisen because of tacit acknowledgement of that fact.
Youtube, hell everyone, applies those lessons today.
It's just more convenient. "Hey Siri, play the latest album by X" still works. Thank God.
Albums are only dead for artists who have to use filler to make the one hit song they managed to come up with fill a CD.
The thing is there's just so much music now. The artists you represent may be more popular but there's so much more competition for people's money. There's music i've bough I enjoy from artists whose shows i'll probably never get to see. I spend a lot of time listening to concerts and such these artists freely post online, i'm enjoying their music, legally, but I haven't paid for it.
There are a lot of things contributing.to lower album sales. Piracy, while i'm sure contributes doesn't seem to be the biggest problem. Plus i've been hearing this since I was a kid and cassette tapes were being blamed for killing the music industry because people could just record anything they want off the radio or a friend's cassette so album sales were dropping.
In any case, "album sales" is a very one dimensional view of the world. Even if fans were to pirate music, there is no way to pirate live performances - and exposure is one such way to boost sales of live performances so lost sales in albums is a very narrow slice of the entire ecosystem.
The same could happen for video recordings and their screenplays.
I think maybe the "works for hire" regime needs to be changed such that employees own the copyright to their own contribution to a work, and the employer just gets an automatic perpetual license only to works created while on the job, exclusive only as long as the employee remains employed, and the final aggregated commercial product is a derivative work from many sources. So if you can reassemble the same team of actual humans as the original, you can re-do the work of putting their contributions together, and acquire a new copyright on a new aggregate that could be nearly identical to the older aggregate.
So you only hold a monopoly on a movie as long as the majority of key contributors in that long credits scroll at the end continues to work for you. If you fire too many people after production wraps up, particularly the script writers and scene planners and digital modelers, they could get together, compare notes, and do a shot-for-shot remake at a fraction of the budget, because their part of the work has already been done, and you lost exclusivity when you fired them.
That would surely invoke a new form of Hollywood Accounting, but at least it would encourage creators to create works with some durance in preference to consume-once ephemera. And you wouldn't end up with great artists in poverty even as their works make their current owners heaps of money.
It is still important work to turn an artwork into a viable commercial product, and to assemble and manage teams of artists to great something together greater than what could be produced individually, but that added value should not make the middleman the sole gatekeeper for the source works, forever.
Are you claiming they wouldn't have made the music otherwise? It's hard to imagine such megastars deciding that the marginal effort of another hit album just wasn't worth making unless they could collect hypothetical revenue for more than 2 decades.
Copyright law is to incentivize creating these works so that more stuff can get into the public domain. We've shot well past that point with excessive durations, and the public domain is suffering.
You've drank too much kool-aid. Copyright law is to incentivize investments in creative works, not the creation itself. Most people that profit off of creative works have not created anything of value themselves.
To quote the Constitution, the purpose of copyright 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." ie To increase how much creation there is.
If you charged people $5 for a lifetime pass to hang out in and inspect your house, should they not be able to try to build their own version of your house 20 years later?
When you enter something into the culture, part of it leaves your control, and thats a good thing.
In a word, yes. The entire purpose of copyright is to enrich the commons by granting a limited term monopoly. Without that purpose in mind, copyright loses legitimacy.
It's a government granted right, and, in the US, there is specific authorization in the constitution to make such a grant. The term could be set to any term, and there would be no underlying constitutional of inherent human rights case against such a change. Unlike actual rights, copyright is whatever governments say it is.
These laws could also set the counter for let's say 5 years after the death of all of the original authors or something like that. There is no reason for these rights to transfer indefinitely.
That's not how patents and copyright work. These are government granted monopolies. The wording goes the other way around: The government is authorized to grant these monopolies. That's very unlike rights to life, property, etc. Patents and copyright don't come from the same tradition as proper human rights. They're different, and there is no human rights argument against limiting them sharply, at least not in the US constitution.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The signers knew what they were doing was against the Kings laws - but they said, for the first time, there are higher laws that everyone is entitled to. Copyright and patents, while maybe good law, are not among these.
Screwing us all because they are still able to milk the cow is unfair. Money-making cannot be the only factor taken into account. Public domain is something we, as a society, deserve.
What happens right now is unacceptable.
In actuality, the examples you listed are especially painful because we could be enjoying incredible derivative works based on their music, if not for the stupid way copyright works.
To get an idea what would be possible, listen to the Beastie Boys album "Paul's Boutique", which has been called "The Sgt. Pepper of Hip Hop". It liberally samples all kinds of sources (including Beatles), and the results are amazing, even with that limited 1989 technology. Unfortunately, shortly after that album was released, legal precedents around music copyright doomed any similar works until copyright law changes.
After all they are still alive and kicking and people are still walking on those streets many years later.
We 'knowledge workers' have it pretty easy compared to the people doing physical work. 30 years should be plenty for all media.
Plenty of content creators are salaried employees as well.
Hell, everyone you mentioned became a millionaire during their career. If all of them stopped receiving royalties for any of their releases after one measly year, they'd have made more money than I'm ever likely to make. Superstars have most to lose in absolute terms if copyright got nerfed, but in relative terms they'd still do fine. Many of the most successful performers of the last century became multimillionaires before they even turned 20.
Monetary value and cultural value shouldn't be conflated. Folk music and Shakespeare plays are very popular and highly regarded despite being public domain. Not to mention that people actually make money with them.
Pink Floyd would make a mint by touring even if all their albums were in PD. You can start a Floyd cover band all you like but for some reason most fans would still prefer to see the genuine article.
I work in software, as I assume many of us do. I don't assume an inherent right to gain perpetual income from my work. The vast majority of all employment operates this way.
I'm not sure how that reality doesn't undermine the idea that there exists some inherent right to prevent other people from, say, singing a song they heard (by getting a local authority to recognize you as the author of that song, and then stop others from singing that song and making money from their performances, by putting them in jail or fining them if they do, for example).
It's important to make a clear distinction between the kind of "right" copyright represents and, for example, the right to free expression.
The underpinnings of the rights are different. We assume that everyone legitimately starts off with the right to free expression.
It's not so clear that everyone starts off with some inherent legitimate right to prevent some dude two doors down from re-singing a song you came up with and sung to him.
It seems much more reasonable to view copyright as an artificial right: something we create to promote certain ends. The state is in no way obligated to provide the establishment of copyright (it's not a real "right"), so the justification for its bounds is entirely pragmatic: what benefit it has to society in general.
I remember reading about (very liberal) Randy Bachmann supporting a very conservative copyright plan, and being confused... but it was explained that his earlier recordings were going to be public domain while he still lived. That was his worry - that he would cease to own his first albums. Not the songs, which are covered constantly, but the actual albums.
To me, it's exactly backwards that recordings have a short shelf-life (X0 years), while writings compositions have a long one (X0 years after death of author). It seems far more important to me to allow new artists to iterate on old art, than it does to set the actual original recorded performance of that art free.
That only applies to crappy pop music. Good music endures for decades and centuries.