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Comment by OscarCunningham | Hacker News Reader

They've got until 2024 before Steamboat Willie enters the public domain. Until then we're just going to be getting the years from 1922 to 1928.

I wish that Congress would just say "Everything before Steamboat Willie is public domain, everything else has copyright in perpetuity". Just give us everything they can afford to lose while still getting paid.

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How about instead we say "everything is death of the artist + 20 years, except for Disney, who will pay the government $50mm a year to keep that deal in place" and then if people want to fight a Disney battle, no one else has to care.

I am quite okay with making a disney exception because a few years after it was made people might suddenly gain some common sense and say "no that's stupid"

I don't understand why life+20 years is a thing though, even life seems excessive.

Let an artist profit for twelve years off their work and then release it for free use. The vast majority of money will have already been made and the innovation of their work will have worn off.

Because artists have family, and if that brilliant writer wrote a book a year before they died of cancer or old age or a stupid accident, I'm okay with his family getting the proceeds. The world can wait a decade or two. A generation or two, different matter.

Also, and here's the dark part: if it's just 20 years, rather than "life" or "life plus X", people WILL start getting assassinated just to get their copyright to expire faster.

> Also, and here's the dark part: if it's just 20 years, rather than "life" or "life plus X", people WILL start getting assassinated just to get their copyright to expire faster.

Nah, the assasination would happen if it's `min(life, 20 years)` or `life + 20 years`; there's no reason to hire hitmen if it's simply `20 years`, regardless of whether or not the author is alive.

I do admit, though, that after I wrote that I considered that we'd probably start seeing a lot of movies 21 years after their books were published.

At least in the USA, the legal justification is to promote progress in science and useful arts, not to give someone/some entity a monopoly on use an idea. If someone writes a great book and then up and dies (John Kennedy Toole, "A Confederacy of Dunces") I'm not sure that giving any entity a copyright promotes any kind of progress in science or useful arts. Toole can't write another book.

Yes, this is legalistic, but just giving some entity ownership over representations of anthropomorphized rodents doesn't really make a lot of sense either.

If I die suddenly do I have some right to demand that my employer/customer pays my family some amount of money. You are probably right that that's the intent but if so make it a fixed 20 years.

Your second paragraph seems to be saying the opposite of what you want it to?

The reason why we let copy written works remain that way is because then the profits of the artists work will always get eaten up by bigger companies. This is especially true in the digital age. Instead of artists profiting, corporations from netflix to amazon to spotify would profit instead of actual artists, and at least for big brand characters, Chinese toy companies would be able to undercut those who spent the capital building the brand around a given character.

So much of the American economy and brand is cultural exports, and this would absolutely destroy a huge chunk of that.

There's some precedent for this-- I think the UK has a specific cutout providing a perpetual copyright for a few specific works that were willed to charities.

12 years copyright, 20 years moral rights sound good to me.

3½ years of copyright (with royalties, transferable once) plus renewals every six months up to 21 years with moral rights along with copyright term and up to lifelong after copyright expiration (no monopolies, non-transferable authorship, attribution only) would be the solution.

This will satisfy all the industry and academics, bar Disney.

Why exactly do artists need copyright for 20 years after they are dead, again?

... why exactly do they need copyright, again?

IIRC, the idea is to help the (dependents of the) Kurt Cobains of the world: artists who die young and still have loved ones who can now depend on the revenue from the copyrighted works for at least 20 years. But IANAL, so I could be way off.

Why should children of artists get more help than say, builders, or doctors, or anyone?

Builders and doctors have regular salaries (or at least are paid in full upon completion of the work they do). The value of a creative work is in the income stream it creates over time. If you need the money now, you can recoup that by selling the rights. But it's hard to sell rights to an income stream that could disappear tomorrow if you were hit by a bus.

I'm pretty sure about 90% of professional creatives (artists, animators... programmers fall under almost all the criteria, too) are paid a salary as well. They work for DC, Disney, Amazon, etc. Tons working in either direct ad agencies or in the marketing departments of all kinds of business. All on a payroll.

Yeah, but they aren't who we're talking about here. That's called "work for hire" and it doesn't fall under an author's-life-plus-X-years rule. It has a fixed term.

Can you imagine the chaos if, every time someone died, everything they did for every company they worked for immediately fell into the public domain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

You're not wrong, but the same can be said of all inherited wealth.

I agree. We as a society should have this discussion, no one wants their children to live in poverty and people, while they live, transfer their value to their children - so someone who dies early has missed the opportunity to do the same to their children. But, the fact that the Waltons exist is just stupid.

To cover that scenario you could grant copyright to the creator/artist for "life or 20 years whichever is greater".

Why not simply "20 years"?

I don't think Courtney Love is the best strongman for this argument.

Because they have family. 20 years, so you and your dependents can enjoy the fruits of your labour, even if you died of cancer, or old age, or you got hit by a bus 2 weeks after publishing your best work yet at 32. Don't have a will? Then sure, have the copyright expire. But if you have family, and they're in your will, they are most certainly entitled to those fruits until the copyright expires, just like how they can get any other business non-copyright-workers can set up. 20 years seems perfectly fair for that.

And if that means you "leave a legacy" for 20 years, that your family can cash out on: no different from someone leaving their company or their land titles to their kids. Except that company or land will stick around a lot longer.

>no different from someone leaving their company or their land titles to their kids

So...feudalism. How about we not perpetuate inequality.

If you create a $100M business you can give it to your kids. They can own it forever.

I think is quite fair to say X years after death but only for family. Saying only while they're alive isn't quite fair.

Except when you give a business to your kids, they need to run it or pay someone to run it for them and still manage that. With copyrights that make money, your kids would not need to run anything, just collect the money. For one you need to work, for the other not nearly as much. That doesn't sound too fair to me.

The rightsholders still have to be proactive about marketing to maintain the popularity of the work and hire lawyers for enforcement. There's a lot of copyrighted work from the late 20th century on YouTube where apparently nobody is doing the work on either front because the videos have been up for years and have like 900 views. But I guess if something suddenly became a cult hit, it could be worthwhile to sue whoever instigated/profited from it.

Unfortunately the rightsholders tend to be publishing companies, not the kids, so the kids would still only get pennies on the dollar in royalties, if that. And technology is gradually making it easier for publishers to enforce their "rights" on even the stupidest, least popular works.

You have to reprint the thing so you can sell new copies of it. Or persuade a publisher that it's worth them going through the hassle and expense of reprinting it. Or hassle with getting it into newfangled distribution services so you can sell electronic copies of it.

Trust me, this is work, I am an independent artist who has a thing that's out of print that she now regularly gets people asking her to reprint, and I am so damn burnt out from my last Kickstarter that I'm ignoring this ever-growing mass of people eager to give me money.

To promote the progress of science and useful arts.

Estates are things. I'm sure a fair number of artists have been encouraged to publish towards the end of their life to support their children or causes they believe in.

Actually, since copyright is life + x years, an artist that wishes to leave his descendants with a source of income off of his works is better off creating a work and leaving it to them to slightly tweak and then publish as "by FAMOUS_ARTIST and his second cousin's daughter".

That way, copyright will last for the life of the involved descendant as well.

So I'm doubtful if anyone would publish anything just for the same of supplying for their children. It's just not the best way to achieve the goal.

Some artists die tragically early and leave behind families to support

Why are we okay with letting society and social safety nets off the hook of providing for these families.

What if someone barely making a living dies tragically early? If it's too bad for their family, why does that artist's family get a free ride - how did they contribute to what the artist created.

In addition to the other replies, I suppose it also removes some of the incentive for foul play if I want to use a copyrighted work and don't want to wait for a natural death.

The likes of Stan Lee should be able to pass their rights to their children, like you would a land deed. I think that's fair. Their grandchildren and/or businesses, probably not.

Why? If Stan Lee accumulated some wealth, he can pass that along.

Many artists get recognition only after they pass, e.g. Philip K. Dick.

Part of the problem with US copyright (and maybe Berne convention copyright) is that there's no good way to determine if something is copyrighted or not. "Death of the artist + N years" means you have to find the artist, find out when they died. Both parts can be difficult, see the "Happy Birthday To You" thing from a few years ago.

USA copyright was ridiculous before joining the Berne convention in 1976 (or thereabouts), but at least if something didn't have a copyright notice on it, it wasn't copyrighted. If it did have a notice, you could figure out when it expired. Now you basically have to go to court to decide for sure.

I like the sentiment, but it's unconstitutional under the equal protections clause of the 14th amendment.

There is a certain irony in saying that something is unconstitutional due to an amendment. The original constitution had to be amended in the first place, let's not pretend it's now somehow fixed forever and we can't possibly amend it any further as society changes over the centuries.

They can't say things are copyright in perpetuity. It would validate Article 1 Section 8 Chapter 8 on the US Constitution

Then just say for the next 999 years, or something like that.

Perpertual copyright is unconstitutional in the US and continental Europe due to multiple grounds.

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