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Comment by SubGenius | Hacker News Reader

He's still alive though. Doesn't it make more sense for IP to cease with the author/artist's passing?

I suppose one could argue that his early material has enough cultural significance that they should be in the public domain..

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Nah. Give it 30 years and that's that. Ideally, every artist should live long enough to see what the rest of the world does with their work (both good and bad) when it's set free.

That could be pretty cruel. I don’t think even The Rolling Stones would want to see their songs reused by, say, neonazis.

I reckon life + 30 would be enough. Both you and your kids (who knew you) should be able to die in the peaceful knowledge that your will was respected and your family benefited from your art. After that, your material is effectively History and should be fair game.

  > That could be pretty cruel. I don’t think even The Rolling Stones would want to see their songs reused by, say, neonazis.

Hard disagree from me. I mean it might hurt to see your work misused but that already happens all the time across different disciplines. The artist behind pepe the frog is not a fan of his work being adopted by white nationalists and that's terrible, but intellectual property law is not gonna stop anonymous people with photoshop on 4chan.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of neonazis trying to turn music I like into their propaganda, but I can't see any reasonable way to fix this via IP law. Fundamentally the problem is not with reprehensible people remixing/reusing/appropriating culture, it's people holding reprehensible beliefs. The solution is to try and change their beliefs.

>but intellectual property law is not gonna stop anonymous people with photoshop on 4chan.

it might severely curtail their ability to make money off of it though.

"But nazis might use it!" is an incredibly weak excuse for perpetual copyright. Creators aren't a special breed of fragile human that needs to be protected from seeing the potential future of their work.

There's a compelling argument for having creators around when their work gets used for nefarious ends - they can add their voice to the condemnation, if they choose.

Besides, in the age of corporate ownership of practically everything (see: TFA), what makes you think creators still have any say in how their work gets used?

A recent article [0] on the difficulty of controlling culture (mostly in the context of people trying to keep their brands from being associated with the alt-right) speaks to the challenges involved in this approach.

The article decribes Matt Furie, the artist behind the Pepe the frog cartoon, and his struggles to control its usage.

  > At one point, Furie purchased $45,000 worth of Pepe T-shirts to sell, but he can’t even give them away to thrift stores because he is horrified at the prospect of white supremacists proudly wearing them. Unable to rehabilitate Pepe’s image, Furie killed the frog off in a comic—but by that point, he’d effectively lost control of Pepe’s image. Furie would go on to sue InfoWars’ Alex Jones, who had been using a Pepe image to sell posters. (Jones used the lawsuit to increase the price of the posters—eventually, InfoWars settled with Furie.)    

  > Furie’s attorneys estimate they have issued between 75 and 100 successful legal challenges halting the unauthorized use of Pepe. But the damage remains: Despite his best efforts, Furie will forever be associated with a toxic symbol of white supremacy.

It's hard to judge from a distance, but it sounds to me like there is a lot of time, effort, and money being spent trying to enforce rights, and yet it's a game of whack-a-mole where the alt-right never gets the message.

[0]: https://thedispatch.com/p/alt-right-culture-rittenhouse-blac...

The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create more works. If there's no copyright it's easy for anyone to copy the work without paying, so there's no incentive to make works for money. If copyright lasts for the entire lifetime of the author there's no incentive to keep making new works after they've become successful. The ideal term should be long enough to make a profit form the work, but short enough to encourage authors to keep making new works for continual income.

Payment is not the primary incentive for artists to make creative works. The need for payment in order to survive is an obstacle that needs to be overcome so one can pursue their true incentives. If you are the sort of person whose primary motivation is money, becoming an artist is one of the worst paths for achieving that.

> The ideal term should be long enough to make a profit form the work, but short enough to encourage authors to keep making new works for continual income.

This assumes that profit is the main motivator for all of an artist's life.

I could imagine a songwriter like Dylan getting discouraged if he were to see his work being used to promote products or causes that he despises.

> The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to create more works.

Is this true? I know in many cases copyright does the complete opposite as it hinders artists from creating derivative work. Then there is a whole genre of art—folk art; which is arguably the most popular genre—where artists continue to do art where the copyright is hardly ever perused, enforced, or if present almost always ignored.

You could just as easily make the case that in the art genre where copyright is the most loose, the amount of art created is the greatest.

Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 of the US Constitution:

[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

It's neither guaranteed to be an effective or necessary means of achieving that objective, but that is undeniably copyright's stated purpose.

If it's the right of an artist to be allowed to sell their IP to a corporation (which doesn't 'die' in the biological sense), then there needs to be a disconnect between the author/IP holder's health and the duration for which copyright should be given. Personally, I'm in favor of a fixed copyright duration after creation. I would prefer a requirement to offer 'fair' terms, if such a thing could be determined (probably not possible).

Popular artists may start to die much earlier with such legislation.

> Doesn't it make more sense for IP to cease with the author/artist's passing?

No because it would be unfair to artists who die young.

There should be a time frame. 20 years. One generation is long enough to make money off your work.

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