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Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

"The writers and main contributors to most of the pieces named are dead."

Your argument presumes that a copyrighted work is not a transferable asset. Let's say your grandfather, at age 75, pens what some publishing house deems the next Great American Novel. He wishes to live in a nice retirement community and is willing to sell the copyright to this work as a means of paying for this lifestyle. The value of his copyright is function of its longevity, so he would garner a larger payment today if copyright laws allow his work to provide a better NPV to the purchaser. Certainly, exclusive rights for 2N years are worth no less than rights for N years, so extensions of copyright can not provider a lower NPV.

I am not arguing for or against any particular provision of copyright law -- I am simply objecting to the "author is dead anyway" argument against longer copyright periods.

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Well, I don't think it should be exclusively about the life of the author, as I explain later in the comment. I think a relatively short general term from date of publication is good regardless of life of author.

I am merely indicating that in cases where the author died many years ago, all the extension of copyright does is allow non-creative people that were once attached to people that were attached to the original author (great-great grandchildren, the men who now control the publishers (very unlikely to be the same men that controlled the publisher back when these works were published in the 50s)) to profit exclusively off of the author's work, which is the very antithesis of a motivation to produce your own creative work. The creative originator long since got all imaginable value out of the work and now the copyright is merely a memorial to society's worship of money over all else.

It seems that your argument is generalizable to the inherit-ability of wealth.

One needs not inherit wealth through death to carry it on.

That's what living is for.

The privileges afforded from wealth certainly give you a leg up. Take it, or get out of the way.

Wealth is fine in literal terms. If you want to pass money on to your progenitors, that is just fine, as it is with all real property. The key here is that intellectual property and real property have some very fundamental differences. Ideas are assigned owners only to make it plausible to spread those ideas massively -- a stipulation that was necessary when it was expensive to spread ideas (printing). With the internet, dissemination of ideas is much cheaper, though there are often still production costs.

Ideas cannot be owned; they are like fire and can only be equally shared. We assign monopolies to make publishing feasible, not to ensure the wealth of two or three generations that live off of the creativity of their grandfathers without contributing anything themselves. If the grandfather wants this to happen, he can convert his copyright to real money while it lasts (and afterward too, though it's harder without the monopoly, of course) and then transfer that money to his children. He shouldn't be able to hold ideas hostage from the people that he shared them with, however.

>Ideas cannot be owned; they are like fire and can only be equally shared. We assign monopolies to make publishing feasible, not to ensure the wealth of two or three generations that live off of the creativity of their grandfathers without contributing anything themselves.

Here's an alternative ethics. Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author. The author can deny others access to his ideas, simply by not-disclosing them (keeping them secret); she has intrinsic control over them. IP ownership is not a monopoly "assigned" by some intangible collective; it is the natural property of its creator. Publishing rights are not an artificial benefit created by government to subsidize authors (out of benevolence); they are contracts between an author and publisher, transferring specific and limited rights (not ownership). Publishers can be forced to pay the author royalties, not out of utilitarian reasons, but because they voluntarily agreed to such terms (the author having natural leverage, e.g. she can refuse to disclose his ideas).

>Ideas are assigned owners

Did you have that thought, or did the social collective assign it to you?

>Here's an alternative ethics. Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author.

This is not an alternative ethics (if indeed this is an ethics instead of a system of legal ownership), it is the _dominant_ ethics.

>they are contracts between an author and publisher, transferring specific and limited rights (not ownership). Publishers can be forced to pay the author royalties, not out of utilitarian reasons, but because they voluntarily agreed to such terms (the author having natural leverage, e.g. she can refuse to disclose his ideas).

Except in a market where ideas are not scarce and the publishing _is_ success, the creatives are exploited and their so-called property rights a joke.

We all understand the _theory_ behind your 'natural property,' the ownership of something you create. We just don't agree with it anymore, because in many cases it has failed and in the future it will not be relevant.

>Did you have that thought, or did the social collective assign it to you?

Missed it. He's pointing out the semi-fictional nature of idea ownership, not claiming originality for his ideas.

Here is some actual economics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

For many things, creating artificial property is a good solution, but it is of course a compromise more than real property ever will be, due to its nature.

Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author.

Can you name the algorithm used to distinguish "trivial ideas" from "nontrivial ideas"? I'm waiting... What about an algorithm for determining when "nontrivial idea A" is equivalent to "nontrivial idea B"? We're still foundering on the haltering problem here, I think... OK, now, what about an algorithm to determine when idea A is "useful"? Ah, you need... society for this one I think... Indeed, you "natural" idea contains an excess of unnatural contortions...

Even more. Let's suppose you really could determine all these not-algorithmically-determinable things and the criteria was simple. Any string X with length greater than N is "nontrivial".

What happens when every string of length N+1 is copyrighted/patented/etc? The 2^N+1 string then are contained in every possible further nontrivial idea and the owners of them can extract rent perpetually. Things are not quite at this level yet but we're getting closer (the state of video should give one pause).

The comment about nontriviality and equivalence goes for physical objects too, you know.

Indeed,

The patent system only makes in a world in which you have a finite number of industries performing a finite number of useful tasks. Then the social context lets you distinguish useful and useless inventions. Even then, the GGP's point of nontrivial works naturally belonging to their inventors is balderdash. What you can say, all you can say, is, with physical inventions in a fairly static world, that society can somewhat coherently grant people monopolies on inventions for public policy purposes.

But in a world where every activity, including the modification of the physical world, is approach "information processing", the whole patent system is become logically unsupportable. In this information processing world, a patent is government granting people deeds to an ill-defined terrain. And it's fairly clear our world is getting closer to that, is it not?

And with a ill-defined terrain, common sense about what's useful, common usage, etc just go out the window. All patents approach the status of troll-patents.

Ideas aren't created, they are discovered. They aren't property, either, in any legal sense in the U.S.

> The author can deny others access to his ideas, simply by not-disclosing them (keeping them secret);

At least that doesn't deny you the right to rediscover them.

Yes, but will someone bother to create assets for themselves that disappear on their deaths when they do have people to care for?

Property isn't really property if you can't sell it or give it to someone else. Liquidity is very important to many people.

While undermining this will have little impact on the generation of a lof of crap, it will absolutely destroy the "long tail" for many valuable things that are receive little recognition when they are created.

I do recognize that we should only be handing out monopolies when it absolutely benefits society. These ridiculously long copyrights only exist because our legislators have put their own interests above the national interest.

A copyright is a government granted-monopoly.

Essentially, it's a little bit of the state's right to restrict other people which has been given to you for reasons that supposedly wise-people consider important.

One might argue that it is almost the opposite of private wealth.

The government doesn't grant the descendants of social security recipients the right to their forebears' pension either. By your earlier reaoning, the state is "depriving" the pensioners of ability to sell a perpetual income stream to a third party. (yes, this is sarcasm...)

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