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Comment by inetsee | Hacker News Reader

My preference would be to return to the original copyright law; a 14 year term, with one 14 year renewal, with registration required.

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I would feel a lot better, morally, availing myself of the "protections" of copyright if we went back to the original regime. The duration in the current regime is vastly too long. It's robbing the present of all the exciting derivative works that could be created based on existing works, and it's robbing the future of access to current works because they'll end up lost to time when their storage formats rot out from under them as they languish in their "protected" state for more than a human lifetime, unable to be effectively archived and propagated long after their commercial lifetime has ended.

You're welcome to license the things you work hard to create under permissive terms. I like knowing I can send a C&D to a billion dollar corporation and generally expect action. As it is, plenty of people find their art in department stores sent in by people who didn't have permission. A simple notice deals with it.

What do creators do when those billion-dollar corporations have no risk from selling their art, which has an opportunity cost to make, without permission or compensation? It may cost little or nothing to reproduce, but it's not free to create. Control over reproduction makes the creation viable. Otherwise, they have to spend finite time and energy on other things to survive.

I don't think creators are morally entitled to any compensation or consent to use works they disclosed publicly, personally.

I would be willing to accept a legal regime that grants creators "protections" in exchange for the works reverting to the public domain in a reasonable period of time. Copyright is a social contract and, at the present, the consideration given to the public is too little. It's not enough for me to license works I create myself permissively to satisfy me. I want the playing-field leveled for everyone.

I try to live this opinion, personally, by paying for as much "media" as I can created by those who utilize patronage models or who license their work less restrictively than copyright permits. I find that I can't discuss popular music, movies, televison, and many books with other people but I'm not particularly sad that I can't. I don't willfully infringe copyright-- I just choose to ignore as many of the things that aren't permissively licensed as I can.

This is, more or less, the solution advocated by the law professor James Boyle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Boyle_(academic)

He wrote a good book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (2008), which makes the case for radically shorter copyright terms.

This. A binary poll doesn't accurately reflect societies options

Of course it doesn't. But societies opinions are complex, hard to measure, harder to explain how you measured, and impossible to measure with receiving accusations that how you measured was biased.

This provides an interesting insight in an a simple quantifiable way that provides some interesting information.

Requiring registration screws over small time producers.

I registered copyrights for software I wrote when I was a 12 y/o kid (a kid who was interested in intellectual property law, to be sure, but still a kid). It wasn't that difficult.

That would get expensive fast for anyone remotely prolific. Not every work needs protection, and it's impossible to know which does before it becomes commercially interesting.

I can't imagine, under a hypothetical copyright regime requiring registration that enacted today, anyone would be mailing in paper copies of "Form TX" like I did in 1989. There would absolutely be a more streamlined method of registration.

This. I quite like that the code I write is copyrighted without effort from me. Maybe do the 14+14 with implicit copyright?

Maybe do implicit for the first 14 years and registration required for the second.

I upvoted this option.

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