Hacker News Reader

Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the gist of this, but I'm actually leaning towards a shorter copyright lifespan. Maybe 20? The reason being that I feel this better balances the need to benefit from your work (20 years is quite a while to be exclusively entitled to something) with the need for society to build on your work without threat of litigation. I feel 50 years benefits the former a bit too much at the expense of the latter. Just look at what a huge divide there was (in some ways) between life in 1950 and life in 2000. Less so between 1980 and 2000, or 1990 to 2010.

View on HN

I absolutely agree with this. There is a human right to be a storyteller, to reimagine characters and themes, to expand settings and genres. To sit around the campfire and make new stories of King Arthur and Lancelot, new stories about Sherlock and Watson, new stories about Harry and Hermione.

Copyright is supposed to be a balance between the author and society. In exchange for releasing the full body of the work, the author gets paid in the form of a limited monopoly. Somehow, this became an argument about moral rights rather than repayment, and that the author has the right to prevent anybody from using certain characters, in perpetuity.

20 years is a perfectly reasonable time for copyright to last. On the side of the author, most profit comes within the first 5 years. On the side of society, 20 years means that the stories a child grew up with can then be built upon when they are adults.

> There is a human right to be a storyteller, to reimagine characters and themes, to expand settings and genres. To sit around the campfire and make new stories of King Arthur and Lancelot, new stories about Sherlock and Watson, new stories about Harry and Hermione.

Although I disagree that this should be considered a human right, isn't this generally covered by fair use in the US anyways?

No, from my understand of current US copyright law (not a lawyer), this would be considered either a performance or a derivative work, depending on whether it is exactly reproduced. Neither of those are under fair use.

I thought there was nothing stopping you from creating derivatives of copyrighted works as long as you don't try to exploit them commercially.

Of course, there are plenty of companies that take down stuff that is not being done for profit. Good examples include Nintendo taking down the tools used to create Pokemon games, or Paramount killing the Star Trek fan shows (because they were better and more popular than anything Paramount could do).

The problem is that there's the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and how rich and powerful entities can get the courts to interpret the law, and its possible, even common, for all three of those to be different things.

> I thought there was nothing stopping you from creating derivatives of copyrighted works as long as you don't try to exploit them commercially.

Nope, creating derivative works is something that is explicitly part of copyright, whether or not it is for commercial gain. Fanfiction or fan recreations are only legal with the consent of the author. Typically, authors will turn a blind eye to it, since it increases the longevity of the original works. It is only a civil matter, and so only the copyright holder could bring a suit against fanfiction authors.

What about business. Any business writing is copyright protected too. I've been on business for eight years, and it would be very weird it the stuff I wrote and still use on my site expires in 12 years. It potentially will still be just as valid in that time.

I know the tech world changes fast but there are some niches where something written or recorded in 1998 is still valid today.

That's the point of copyright, so that the public eventually benefits from giving you protection for the term of the copyright. It's suppose to still be valid.

It seems a bit short for investment horizons was my point. And also, you’re perhaps thinking of patents, where the public eventually benefits from using an invention - lack of patent would mean more inventions are kept secret.

Copyright is meant to be an incentive for the creation of works that otherwise would not be made. The public benefits by the fact that they’re created. They eventually get to use them too, but it’s less crucial than it is for patents.

> Copyright is meant to be an incentive for the creation of works that otherwise would not be made.

Copyright was there as an incentive for the release of works that would otherwise be kept hidden. As an example, playwrights were very secretive about the plays that they had written. Actors would only be given copies of their own lines, not the lines spoken by anyone else. Full copies of the script were never distributed. As a result, there are a great many works that are simply lost (for example, Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won by Shakespeare). It is this loss of works that copyright is intended to prevent.

With current copyright law, books are being lost by virtue of copyright being too long and covering too much. Books from before copyright became perpetual and recent books are easily available, but very little from in between [1]. If the holders of the copyright do not continue to release a work, it becomes entirely unavailable.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m...

Do you have any source for your claims? The first copyright act in the modern sense was the Statute of Anne in the UK in 1710. The purpose was “for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books”. I included the full preamble below.

As for America, the reasoning on the continental congress on copyright was:

“that nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries.”

Again, nothing about releasing works to the public, and everything about promoting more publishing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

“Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted ...”

I got the continental congress quote from the history of copyright article on wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law

Hmm, I'm having difficulty finding it. I remember hearing that copyright was largely for preservation in a class, but that would have been over a decade ago. Thank you for pointing out that that portion is unsupported. Until and unless I can find a source for it, I will avoid repeating it.

It's not a point of whether or not it's supposed to be valid, but whether or not the creator can maintain _exclusive_ ownership of the copyrighted material.

If someone wrote a math book 100 years ago, that math book will still be correct today, even if it's in the public domain.

Disney started with the works of the Brothers Grimm, available after 24 years, I think.

Pulled that ladder right up behind them.

I can't see any reason to deny an author copyright during his or her lifetime. They wrote it. The public has no intrinsic right to take their stuff.

In point of fact, some kinds of work depend on the longer payback period. Children's books, for example, don't usually earn so much initially, but successful ones can be dependable earners for a long time.

If we want to argue about intrinsic rights, though, you could also argue that there is no intrinsic right for an author of an intellectual work to have any ownership over it whatsoever once they share that idea with another person.

The fact that they have legal ownership of a work is a societal construct, enforced by government, to incentivise the creations of said works for the sake of the public good.

The notion of intellectual property, of ideas "belonging" to the first person who had them publicly, are a fairly recent invention in human history; and the notion of practically eternal copyrights held by immortal entities spanning multiple human lifetimes is an extremely recent invention.

As much as the capital-L Librarians like to jump up and down yelling "Property rights! Property rights!", those rights are only exist because there are folks with guns willing to use them to enforce those rights;

So with that in mind, the only thing I think worth arguing is what the terms of that deal should be. I am of the opinion that that the term of a copyright should be as short as possible, while still being long enough to incentivise creation. I think this was the original idea of the 20ish year copyright term. Personally, I think that the sooner a society can claim a work, and continue building off of it, the better.

> capital-L Librarians

I didn't know they had a stake in this.

> I can't see any reason to deny an author copyright during his or her lifetime. They wrote it. The public has no intrinsic right to take their stuff.

So long as an author does not share their work with anyone, they can have complete control over it for as long as they want. As soon as they they share it with somebody, enforcing copyright means that somebody is being restricted from the natural human instinct of retelling a story. Copyright is not property to be had by the author. Copyright is a restriction on everybody else, granted in exchange for releasing the work in the first place.

Copyright is a balance between rewarding the author, minimal restrictions on society, and progress of the arts. Unlimited copyright fails the latter two goals entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com