Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain | Hacker News Reader

Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain

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117 pointsbetamaxthetape92 comments

imo copyright should last 30 years from creation. Thats plenty of time to make a profit and it also allows things to fall in to public domain while they are still culturally relevant. Currently anything made within your lifetime will not be public until well after you have died which is a shame. It would be great if all of the past content which is now slipping in to irrelevancy could be revived by the public domain.

I think its fair that renewals would be allowed beyond that, but that the cost of doing so should increase on an exponential scale. That way the value of keeping a thing copyrighted would eventually be eclipsed by its value as a public property, fulfilling the social contract of limited protection in exchange for eventual public ownership.

That probably makes copyright renewals cost-effective for corporations making millions but not so for an author getting a nice $5k/yr annuity. (Or pick your numbers. But making cost a decision point for renewal definitely favors the big guys.)

Yes, and adds a nice tax to the mix.

From the tone of your post, you seem to think this is a problem. If so, why?

So corporations can renew copyrights but not most individuals in practice. That seems problematic. Because, I don't know, the cards are already so stacked against individual content creators we don't want to make things worse?

If we really care about getting the content released to the commons as early as possible, just apply a single shortened date to everyone.

A single shortened date is a good start.

I don't have a problem with 'buy an extension to copyright', though - that money can fund public goods that benefit everyone.

On the other hand, the more valuable content can in commercial use for longer.

It is as large an obstacle to the hoarding and disappearing of content corporations do today as any alternative, so I'd go for the easiest, whatever that is.

I think the argument is that a corporate entity would be willing to lose a large amount of money by extending copyrights on their back catalog, if only to keep those works from competing with their current offerings that make them loads of money.

A strong enough exponent, and the costs of holding the old works back would very quickly eclipse the protected profits.

Have the fee be based time but scale with profits. So that author making 5k/year's fees may only would only have the fee increase by a few hundred per renewal whereas a company making 500k/year would see their fees go up by a few thousand per renewal etc. As an example.

That introduces a massive accounting element. At least the current system is simple. By all means, shorten copyright terms. But let's not make it a complex mess that no one can really figure out.

Then you kick off an arms race where regulators are constantly fighting to keep up with increasingly sophisticated money laundering techniques to obscure how valuable an IP actually is. A lot of money would be siphoned off by lawyers just so they can fight back to a stalemate.

Why make it complicated? Just let works fall into the public domain after a couple decades.

Indeed, the one thing that can't be manipulated by dubious actors is time.

"Hollywood Accounting" just means that works will never generate a profit..

So include a condition like "for twice the (undervalued) amount you state, anybody can ...".

If they price they quoted was fair, they should be more than happy to sell it for twice that. If it was too low, well shouldn't have lied. If it is too high, more money to the public.

Can you name any piece of intellectual property that has a small, recurring income after 30 years?

It makes it cost effective for content which is highly profitable. A corporation isn't going to pay to keep garbage registered at a high fee but an individual will pay to keep something that is raking in mountains of cash. Not that it really matters much because virtually everything stops bringing in any money at all by 30 years. The only things that continue to have value are names and characters.

The exact names and likenesses might be preserved via Trademark as a form of consumer protection.

Meanwhile, derivative like works could still be created as long as they were clear to not confuse consumers.

> A corporation isn't going to pay to keep garbage registered at a high fee

Look at patent registry

The fees are neither high nor increasing with time.

They are not high but in many countries they do increase with time: e.g. in Germany the maintenance fee is 70 EUR in the third and fourth years, increasing year by year to 1940 EUR in the 20th year (and 4520 EUR in the 26th year in the case of supplementary protection)

https://www.dpma.de/docs/english/formulare/allg_eng/a9510_1....

Wouldn't corporate branding be enough?

Even if Mario entered into public domain, Nintendo Mario games would still be the superior choice. It isn't like people would be allowed to claim their game was an official Nintendo Mario game. Profitable IPs would also be able to grow their IP as a means of protection. For example, there would be a significant time lag between when Mario would enter the public domain and Yoshi would, and as such more recent Nintendo games couldn't be copied because they include Yoshi (replace Yoshi with dozens of even newer characters).

Edit: One way to think of it is that others could only use the cannon as it existed 30 years ago. As long as the IP isn't dropped and fans like where it is going, that provides a significant barrier of protection from others branching off and making their own cannon.

It wouldn't be so much that thousands of people make a Mario game (people do that already) and Nintendo gets screwed as much as EA makes a Mario game and and uses the IP without paying Nintendo anything.

EA being able to freely make "Battlefield Mushroom Kingdom III: Micropayments Edition" would not be a good thing.

Nintendo (or better yet, and indie developer) remaking EA's public domain works into better products would be a great thing.

Why would it not be a good thing? Every game involves people using public domain material and not paying the entity who would've owned it. Imagine if every game with dragons had to pay whomever currently held the IP for dragons, that wouldn't be good.

> Even if Mario entered into public domain, Nintendo Mario games would still be the superior choice

FTR, The source code for Super Mario Bros. X, a well-known Mario fangame, is now open under the MIT license.[0,1]

[0] https://www.supermariobrosx.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25160

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/opensourcegames/comments/f8tira/the...

Original author should probably get one free renewal that should cover most of his lifetime.

After that, renewals should occur every 5 years and get expensive.

The goal is to encourage those who can create to do so--not create a rental property in perpetuity for corporations or estates.

> Original author should probably get one free renewal that should cover most of his lifetime.

I don't really get this. If someone spends 6 months, or even a year or two, writing a book, why should they be entitled to profits from the sale of that book for the rest of their lives? That seems a little excessive to me.

If you find that excessive, do you also consider that founders of startups should relinquish their shares "to the public domain" after some time?

No, I don't. Because I don't equate ideas and property.

> If someone spends 6 months, or even a year or two, writing a book, why should they be entitled to profits from the sale of that book for the rest of their lives?

Because, in spite of what the Internet thinks, good creators are rare and we should wish to encourage them.

In addition, good creators often aren't recognized immediately--there is time lag. Corporations shouldn't get to profit from your labor of 20 years simply because it took that long for you to become popular.

No, I think that is the opposite of what makes sense. We should allow popular properties that have already provided good profits for their creators to lapse as soon as possible into the public domain, since they have the largest impact on culture, and the lowest impact on their creators' livelihoods.

Mickey Mouse is much more relevant, would lead to much more creative work, and would hurt Disney much less if it were public than making some song by some band which at best has a small dedicated following public.

Perhaps 30 years and then make it a yearly auction?

I am ok with copywriter being lifetime plus. Often a creator doesn't see benifits of their material til many decades after creation. And they created this so during their life it seems fair they can use.

Patents on the other hand I feel should be dropping in time scale. Technology is advancing more rapidly yet we extend protection no reduce it to match generally faster cycles of development. Shortening patents to 20 years type thing would be a far more important step. Also strengthening the rule that a patent is void where something has been created independently even if second to market so there isn't a race to patent first what is bound to be discovered soon by many.

>Often a creator doesn't see benifits of their material til many decades after

Is this the common case? It would seem logical that most content makes the most amount of money soon after it comes out. I think for many kinds of content, the first week makes about as much as the rest of the lifetime of sales.

And even in the rare case where some content becomes rediscovered after the 30 years, the creator simply needs to create a sequel, which by having their name attached to it, will be recognized as the official continuation.

Yeah, I can't think of a single example.

Usually, I'd guess/assume/overconfidently assert that 90% of revenue happens in the first 5 years. Though I'm open to being corrected.

I'm having trouble finding the source (I suspect a brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft), but I recall reading that over 90% of books are out of print within 3 years of their initial publication. I've also seen claims that it's typical for heavily marketed movies and video games to make roughly half of their total revenue in the first week of release, though I'm not sure where to find the actual numbers for that, and it probably doesn't account for re-releases (DVD, "HD remaster", etc.).

edit: Based on skimming some numbers at vgchartz.com, it looks like the basic shape of the claim for heavily marketed video games is right, but the revenue half-life is more like three or four weeks.

Where authors make money from their books they make it within a few years of publication. Where they make money from an adaption of their book it can be decades later. For example, Philip K Dick wrote Minority Report in 1956 but the film wasn't made until 2002 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_b...). Lord of the Rings was written in 1937 and made in to the major films in 2001. More recently Game Of Thrones took 15 years or so before being adapted for TV.

Those authors deserve a decent price for the film rights to their work. 30 year copyrights would significantly change that.

> Lord of the Rings was written in 1937 and made in to the major films in 2001.

Although the rights that permitted those films were sold in 1969.

Film rights are a particularly interesting case where they get sold and traded around potentially for decades before something is actually produced, if ever.

OK, I'd say that argues for longer copyrights for adaptations than for the written book itself.

Though I'm not sure if that's feasible. Maybe the most use of copyright free books is adaptations?

>Is this the common case?

Absolutely! For artists, the price of their paintings is a function of their popularity, which more often than not comes later in life. When and if it strikes it doesn't matter, on what stage of life the exact painting was created, they all become more expensive.

> Shortening patents to 20 years type thing

It already is.

A number like 30 is far too arbitrary. How can we come up with a less arbitrary approach?

Don't forget some people might take years of thinking about a story before ever releasing it publicly. So the cost of creation can vary quite a bit, picking a fixed number ends up being somewhat unfair to many of the creators.

Isn’t cost of creation just one of many normal inputs to the marketing and pricing of every product? What’s special about copyright? It’s also true for, say, an idea about starting a company, but we don’t have laws to somehow adjust the potential return on investment of a company based on how long the founder was thinking about it.

The exact number can be tuned but there is nothing wrong with being somewhat arbitrary. The age we let people drink is arbitrary. Why 18, why not 19 or 17. Its just a number picked to be good enough.

>Don't forget some people might take years of thinking about a story before ever releasing it publicly.

It applies as soon as you release it publicly. Copyright doesn't instantly apply as soon as an idea pops in to your head. It only applies as soon as you can prove you created it at a date.

> The age we let people drink is arbitrary

Maybe this was childhood conditioning but I was told 21 is the general age where your brain is fully developed so that drinking alcohol doesn't affect your cognitive growth.

Mid 20's actually. Some earlier some later. Even as late as their early 30s.

Doesn't copyright usually start from date of publication? It changes a bit for unpublished works, but otherwise a long gestation period doesn't eat into the duration of exclusivity. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_term#Length_of_copyr...

Thirty years? Why have copyright at all? I've yet to hear a good argument that doesn't boil down to "because my business model deserves to be profitable."

Intellectual property isn't a scarce resource. I look forward to the day we all exploit that. We'll find new business models, ones that take advantage of being able to build on all proir human knowledge, and we'll all be more productive because of it.

>"because my business model deserves to be profitable"

Why have authors? Or poets? Or scientists? Or SWEs? we don't work for free. Or would you prefer to drive the aforementioned out of business.

Yep without copyright Google can gobble up most of the web!

> Why have authors?

Because someone needs something written, and they hire you to do it. Or because you want to write, and then others discover that they like what you write, and they want to help you write more. None of this requires copyright, and in fact copyright make some works illegal to author, therefore it restricts authorship.

> Or poets?

As above.

> Or scientists?

Someone needs research done. Someone wants to do research. Someone wants to fund research. None of this requires copyright.

> Or SWEs?

"Hey I need this software, can you write it for me? Here's how much I'm willing to pay for it."

Copyright has never been relevant in my career as a software developer. If anything, developers giving up their exclusive rights via free software licenses has been a massive boost for the entire field and everyone is building products atop someone else's work. That's a good thing!

I only with copyright didn't restrict our field so much.

> we don't work for free.

Indeed, someone needs my labor and they pay for it. Pretty simple.

> Or would you prefer to drive the aforementioned out of business.

Strawman. GP argued against particular business models that are reliant on copyright. That's not an argument against these entire fields, and indeed most of them would continue to exist without copyright.

But yes; I'm ok with letting people with poor business models go out of business.

Abandoning copyright would enable other business models that are currently difficult or impossible to conduct legally. I think the status quo is bad, because there are many services I can think of that would benefit end users (and which I would pay for) but which are not going to happen because of copyright.

>Because someone needs something written, and they hire you to do it. Or because you want to write, and then others discover that they like what you write, and they want to help you write more. None of this requires copyright, and in fact copyright make some works illegal to author, therefore it restricts authorship.

How many authors have you hired recently? Should I go hire an author next time I want to read a book, and pay him/her a living wage for the 1000 hours or so it takes to write a good novel? Hire a trope of actors, director, SFX team next time I want to watch a movie? If I am unsatisfied with the waterproofness of my jacket I am supposed to contract GORE to provision scientists and a lab to research a better membrane? I'm sorry but this isn't passing the sniff test - none of those activities scale without IP protection.

>Strawman. GP argued against particular business models that are reliant on copyright. That's not an argument against these entire fields, and indeed most of them would continue to exist without copyright.

Your assertion that I am making a strawman is silly. Those fields rely in their entirety on IP protection - books, science, engineering. Pagerank becomes open source and what is google.com? Just a commodity - never would have got off the ground. Those fields exist[0] because of defensible IP.

> Someone wants to fund research

No one wants to fund research, people want to sell the things research brings.

>Indeed, someone needs my labor and they pay for it. Pretty simple.

No one needs my labor (or yours) if they can't sell the output (unless you wait tables or lay bricks). How does one sell intellectual output without IP protection? Patreon is not a valid answer.

[0]At any level that can be described more intensive than 'hobby'. And I don't know about you, but I'd like there to be a way for the the people working on vaccines to be working on vaccines as their day job. To say nothing of media I've enjoyed consuming.

Why do you think copyright is necessary for that? The entirety of federally funded research in the US shows just how wrong that idea is:

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

It all by law is public domain, i.e. copyright free (+legalese).

How much federally funded research becomes a product you (or anyone can use) that isn't protected by some intellectual property? Hint: its not a lot. Because people don't work for free, chemicals don't buy themselves, research and development needs to be paid off. If you want to upend capitalism and the market economy, fine, but figure out a sensible way to do that before trying to break the current system by removing the mechanism the creators and inventors and commercializers of new and novel things are able to do that.

I am talking about IP-protections more generally than 'copywrite' alone per parent's discussion. Moving copywrite more in line with patents would be a sensible change.

But US maps are not as good as the Ordinance survey ones in the UK

It's Ordnance Survey.

(This message brought to you by Nit-Pickers 'Я' Us.)

Ordnance, I though that got privatised as we can no loger design our own pistol or a rifle :-)

Patreon is actually changing a lot of that. Kurzgesagt did a video a while back explaining that content copying was bad for their business model, that was before they join patreon. I give every month to them and I never donate besides this and wikipedia. So I’m betting they are making tons of $ through patreon.

> Why have copyright at all?

You need some amount of copy protection so that people/companies with large platforms can't immediately rip off independent authors and sell their work before the author's version can get any word of mouth. (Where "sell" probably means "distribute with ads" since there's no copy protection.)

4-5 years of copy protection would prevent this, and that's on the very safe end.

You’re assuming that we still want the “sell-with-ads” model to be the model to make money from producing works. I’m not sure this is what we want; we now see what ad-optimized media looks like.

Why pay programmers at all? Your labor should be free too, and I'm sure we can make some awesome business models if you get paid five bucks an hour or less. You can go make money getting people to support you on patreon.

> Why pay programmers at all? Your labor should be free too

No it shouldn’t, because labor is scarce.

I don't want my painting to end up on a cigarette pack or a garbage truck or NSBM album cover at least until I die.

So, Star Wars (A New Hope) should have gone public domain 12 years ago?

I would kill for anime studios to reinvent A New Hope. The plot and the characters would translate to anime tropes really well.

Obviously yes? The social contract is "we are willing to give you a time-limited monopoly, so that you get compensated for the work you did".

Are you seriously arguing that star wars was financially unsuccessful and needs many more decades to break even?

Yet you would struggle to find the original movie, even if it was public domain. I'm pretty sure they keep updating Star Wars so that no available copy will ever fall out of copyright.

I think one year is enough, as that's the time the majority of the money comes in.

> It would be great if all of the past content which is now slipping in to irrelevancy could be revived by the public domain.

Would it though? Go see torrents that are 10-15 years old and look at how many are still being seed.

Sure making it legal to distribute will make it easier to go on more device, but hosting content is not cheap. Web Archive is trying to host everything they currently can, and it doesn't seems that easy.

They are slipping into irrelevancy because there's something else to consume, that's all. Removing copyright may bring them back a bit, they would still slip into irrelevancy, because the same reason will still apply.

People want fresh content, that's actually a huge reason which push people to pirate because they can't wait for the content to reach streaming platforms. That's all.

I would love for copyright terms to be shorter though. As a native french speaker, there's so many translation from my youth that are lost in limbo because of copyrights. I'm from Quebec and to preserve Quebec translation of Pokemon, I had to buy a bunch of VHS and I'm about to digitize them to preserve them.

I think a reform of copyright that consider theses things should be made. If the content isn't available at all, there should be a way to consider it public domain. How can you consider it good for profit when a work isn't being profited on. After a set amount of time, if there was no way to consume the content in a reasonable way (because I'm sure company would simply say that they would be happy to sell license to the content for 7 figures), that it should go to public domain.

> Go see torrents that are 10-15 years old and look at how many are still being seed

You're on the wrong trackers. Public, legal trackers would have NO problem with this. Every single movie would be available, no problem.

> Public, legal trackers would have NO problem with this.

How can you tell that? What would make legal content more likely to be supported by the seeders? Believe me, none of the seeders ever asked themselves whether holding that data was legal or not in the decision on whether they keep it. Private trackers solve this issue by rewarding people that does keep seeding them, I guess supporting that kind of private community could allow to support older content, but there will always be an effort/gain that will be considered.

For something to keep being seeded require someone to still want to seed it. There's just too much content to care about and not enough people caring about it though. People want what's new, not what's old, so they go that way instead and abandon the older things.

I have no doubt that I could find a bunch of royalty free content that just can no longer be found anywhere, even with Web Archive goal to archive everything.

The legality of it doesn't affect how people act with content.

> Private trackers solve this issue by rewarding people that does keep seeding them

Exactly. Why don't you think this would work if things were more legal?

I find it fascinating that prior to the Copyright Act of 1976, any work without the correct copyright notice would automatically enter the public domain.

In this case, it's interesting to see how the incentives for preventing such a mistake are skewed. It was the responsibility of the distributor to ensure the correct copyright notice, but they stood to gain when they didn't (and reportedly[1] kept all of the profits).

What you're describing is the basic argument against orphan works legislature of various types. Disney won't forget to renew. But lots of individual authors and their estates will and the big corporations will sweep in and profit.

Not saying I endorse that view--especially with reasonably long protections prior to renewal--but that's the argument.

I did an exam in European and International Copyright Law in college even though I studied Computer Science. Based on my knowledge this whole story about forgetting the copyright logo and entering the publich domain sounds like a myth/fictional.

Copyright of movies covers the video frames but it does not cover the concept of the story. The only part that could be protected are maybe fictional names of characters, cities and maybe special breeds. But the movie does not even mention the word zombie. So anyone would have been able to use the word zombie freely. The general concept of someone dead coming back alive is not protected by copyright simply because general concepts are not protected.

Even if somehow the movie was called ZOMBIE and they copyrighted and patent it, others would have been able to do movies/comics/books WITHOUT using the word zombie.

In the Walking Dead, zombies are called walkers so they would have got around the zombie patent by calling zombies something else.

Also Shawn of the dead is a parody and copyright has a special section to allow parody/satire of other works if it's clear they are not the original work but are a parody of it.

To sum up I think more than a failure on copyright notice it was a failure in BRANDING. Branding requires special names. Terminator can be easily protected but if the movie was called Rising of the robots it would have not been possible to protect it. BRANDING is an important way to create a moat of defence around the product. Others can copy the product but not the branding

I'm not even sure that Terminator can be so easily protected. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminators_(film)

Yes indeed is very difficult to protect names without trademark them. That's why many startups/companies invent completely new names (ex Google). Once you trademark them it's easier to protecte them than a word that was already existing in the English language like terminator.

I thought the same as you, but I think what they means is that it lack of copyright made the zombie concept popular, not that it allowed to make more Zombie movies. If you can distribute a good movie without any copyright, for sure you'll do it instead of one that will be more costly.

I know a lot of artists and musicians (I work with them every day) and for considerable amount of them Copyright is absolutely NOT about money, it's about values. The work of art is a part of a creator which is at the same part separated but lacks its own will, so it's natural for the creator to wish some control over said part's faith.

They don't want their work to be used in ads, printed on cheap paper with atrocious covers, being used in a political context, heard in hold music or in elevators, and the list goes on and on.

I'm conmpletely split up on the issue. I'm pro-pirating when it comes to academia papers and textbooks, pro-copyleft, anti-streaming, wholeheartedly support freedom of information, and all of that, but I deeply respect the notions mentioned in the first part of my post and I don't know what would be a sound combination of these views.

Most of the arguments for long copyright terms apply to creative work by one or a few named individuals.

Perhaps a start would be to slash copyright terms on works created by businesses. Companies would try to game this but the problems don't seem insurmountable.

The mouse has caused a creative dark age with it's aggressive legal pursual of the extension of copyright. Every time the original mickey mouse cartoon approaches public domain copyright gets more mutated and unwieldy. Shameful.

I love zombies and I don’t really want to watch old movies.

What are you guys list of best zombie movies? I’ve watched a ton in the emule days but unfortunately don’t know the name of most of these.

My favorite weirdly is not a true zombie movie but a parody called shaun of the dead.

Anyway I hope I’m starting a thread of good zombie movies :)

I just watched The Dead Don't Die which was directed by Jim Jarmusch. It was kinda weird and was more of a dark comedy. Not like Shaun, more subdued. Was interesting if you like his films

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8695030/

Juan of the Dead, if you can stand subtitles.

EDIT: While looking up the trailer, I noticed another one that looks, well...unique. It's named Fido from 2006.

Fido is interesting! It was novel enough to watch it if you like zombie movies, not the movie of the year though :)

Funny

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