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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

The real "pirates" are the content editors who lobby for copyright extensions so that works of art never fall into the public domain.

Public domain should be the rule and copyright the exception.

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Especially if you compare that to patented technological inventions, that often consumed much more time, effort and money to develop. These patents expire after 20 years. How can it be justified that a song that someone wrote maybe within a week keeps the copyright virtually forever?

Whistlers comment on why he charge what he did

John Ruskin: 'The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?'

Whistler: 'No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.'

To treat what you wrote as counterpoint to previous commenter you'd have to claim that inventors are far less knowledgeable, experienced and younger than musicians.

Not really a song might take a week or 5 mins to write but its the result of years of experience and hard work - your not going to write "September Song" at 18 are you

You would be ok with your employer using the same argument when they paid you ?

Argument was that inventors are less protected than entertainers. Why the guy who invented neodymium magnets has monopoly for 20 years while Britney Spears has pretty much indefinite monopoly on less than 4 minutes of content that she sang when she was 17 or sth.

Very much agree. The only way I will ever take any discussion the legitimacy of copyright seriously is if the copyright period is reduced back to something sane like 20 years.

I'd say in modern fast entertainment economy it should be more like 2 than 20.

I agree. As distribution speed increases, it should have gone down instead of up. 20 years is an upper bound.

> Public domain should be the rule and copyright the exception.

Why? In what other area does the public automaticallt get a right to something someone else created?

> Why? In what other area does the public automaticallt get a right to something someone else created?

If you make a chair and I buy it from you, I can do whatever I want with that chair.

I don't think the analogy carries weight. It's true for chairs but not for all physical objects. The law steps in. Thus for example, in many countries what you do with a house is regulated by national and local laws as happens with some datasets - such as an audio/visual recording.

You mean, In what other market does the law ban competition? Freedom should be the default, not "copyright" since it does the opposit. In many countries te public domain was the rule and copyright was the exception until the US started pressuring nations via multilateral treaties and economic sanctions or "incentives".

Literally all of the time? If I copy something from you, that's generally 100% legal. The only other exceptions are things like patents, where the inventor/creator has to go out of their way to activate copy protections. "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me." --Thomas Jefferson

Before 1989, copyright was also opt-in. Check out the timeline under "Notable Dates in United States Copyright" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html It's a mess of shifting categories and retroactive extensions.

Because you will eventually die, and after many years any claim that you lay to your intellectual property or creative output will cease to be relevant.

The content that we create does not exist in a vacuum- humans create for the overall good of society. Everything you see and use day-to-day is an incredible amalgamation of thoughts and ideas woven together from centuries of our past and present collective knowledge.

The notion that an individual or organization can maintain exclusive control of "intellectual property" in perpetuity stands at odds with thousands of years of human history. Modern patent and copyright law seems to have forgotten this.

> Public domain should be the rule and copyright the exception.

This is already the case for most of the music that many people are interested in (e.g., Bach, Vivaldi).

Except that those predate the era of music records. People are not interested in notes, they are interested in the music. Recordings of Bach and Vivaldi are still usually not in the public domain.

Even the sheet music is still copyrighted, because you want modern notation, not photographs of the originals.

> Even the sheet music is still copyrighted, because you want modern notation, not photographs of the originals.

And you can very easily find them. Most moderately well-known compositions have been transcribed into pdf using modern typography (say, with lilypond) and uploaded to imslp and similar sites.

Maybe most baroque recordings are not public domain. But you can find many good-quality recordings of any particular piece under reasonable creative commons licenses [1].

[1] https://imslp.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Concerto_No.5_in_D_major,...

Yes. However, if the music is out of copyright that creates a free market in recordings of the music so it leads to there being budget recordings available.

Personally I am interested in the notes, so I'll point out that most of the sheet music for Bach and Vivaldi is in fact under copyright. If you want something out of copyright then you have to get a facsimile of an old edition. Or something that was typeset by an amateur, which will almost certainly be crap because typesetting music takes a lot of skill to do well.

But if you upload a video of you playing that public domain music it gets taken down because someone has copyright on a derivative work.

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