Hacker News Reader

Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

This argument that dead people's work shouldn't be protected because they can't be encouraged to make more is wrong, even where copyright gets extended afterwards. Predicting future value allows others to pay for it while they're alive, possibly by speculating on future enhanced copyright law.

Corporations can persist beyond the life of any humans within them for a good reason. It enables longer term investment and decision making to achieve things that can't be done in a single lifespan. Why should human lifespan be some essential time limit on property rights?

It also has the ethical problem that old or unhealthy people's work would be worth less than young healthy people's.

View on HN

> Corporations can persist beyond the life of any humans within them for a good reason. It enables longer term investment and decision making to achieve things that can't be done in a single lifespan.

The median planning term for US corporations is far closer (even on a log scale) to one quarter than to one century. It's offensive to even suggest that any major US corporation is planning multiple human generations into the future, except, ironically, to be able to exploit their current IP holdings ad infinitum. Completely detached from reality, like most pro-IP arguments.

There is as much validity to your argument as there is to the argument that copyright should terminate upon the death of the creator (or after a reasonable time) to enrich the public domain and allow others to freely build upon those public domain works to create new works of economic and cultural value.

Neither scenario is testable. It ends up being a question of the kind of world you want to live in-- one where the estates of the dead lock up artifacts of culture and don't allow them to be used to create new works or one where new works based on older works can be more freely created.

Have you seen "Wicked" (or read the novels upon which it is based, or listened to the soundtrack, or purchased branded merch)? Have you read "The Last Ringbearer"? One of those works exists commercially and as a broad cultural phenomenon because expiration of copyright allowed it to. The other won't see a commercial release until at least 2043 because the estate of a dead man says it can't.

The success of Disney in "monetizing" and influencing culture with public domain stories makes me think there's significant validity in the argument of allowing old works to enter the public domain more quickly so they can be freely built-upon. It seems like both an economic and cultural good.

"Wicked" has probably done a lot more business than the estate of L. Frank Baum was going to in the early 2000s using the "The Wizard of Oz" properties.

That stuff is only culture because Disney/etc. paid to entice us to watch it. If people don't want their culture to be owned by someone else, they shouldn't rent it from someone else.

The social contract was: you make a work, society will pretend it's scarce for a few years so you can make money. Then it will enter the public domain.

What was the last movie you've watched that entered the public domain? I bet not a single person on this site will see that happen within their lifetimes.

The fact is copyright monopolists have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.

All the responses seem to be a bit off-target. I'm specifically talking about copyright being linked to the lifespan of the author. It's arbitrary and unfair on authors. I'm not saying we need long copyright terms. I don't know what the optimum would be - maybe 10 years, maybe forever (like indigenous culture).

Our copyright terms need to be reasonable. They aren't reasonable right now. The term has been ratcheted up from the original 14 years with an option for a 14 year renewal to the ridiculous author's live plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication/120 years from creation (which ever is shorter) for works for hire.

I'm all for keeping much of the current copyright regime around, including extending the term to some reasonable period after the author's lifetime. The terms need to be reasonable.

Copyright is granted by society. It should be based on give and take. Historically "normies" haven't paid any attention to it and the only parties who have had any say have been those who had a vested financial interest in increasing copyright terms. It has been a "take and take" relationship.

Preventing works from entering the public domain also has a "pulling up the ladder" effect. It prevents new works based upon older works from having economic value. The Walt Disney company's success and subsequent lobbying to extend copyright terms is a particularly galling example of this to me.

I'm not sure what you mean re: "...maybe forever (like indigenous culture)." Are you suggesting that making works that are derivative from indigenous cultures should be prohibited? At some level all of our stories are from the "indigenous culture" of all of humanity. There are no new stories under the sun.

Regarding indigenous culture, I'm talking about how natives claim ownership of art styles because their ancestors created them and they use social pressure to stop others from copying them. See https://medium.com/the-omnivore/the-cultural-awareness-requi... for example.

For patents, it's important to ensure that ideas become available for everyone else to enjoy despite giving a monopoly to the inventor. That's because an invention may be the best way to do something and we would be worse off if we couldn't use it. Copyright, on the other hand, doesn't protect anything fundamentally important. It's just individual products of human creativity. If you want a cartoon animal, you can always create your own without having to build on Mickey Mouse. The protected ones don't really matter except that they've been pushed into popular culture and people have lapped them up. We could do our culture in a way that doesn't suck at the teat of industrial culture-generation factories like Disney if we didn't want the impediment of copyright.

So I don't think your argument about give and take is really convincing. We could even have infinite copyright and the world would get along fine. If some obnoxious copyright owner enforced their rights to strongly, somebody else could create an equivalent work that was just as good to replace it.

I don't think they'd do it without copyright though, as evidenced by the fact that almost nobody does. Even open source developers still use copyright to restrict distribution (GPL) and amature artists demand credit (CC-BY).

It's not off-target. Copyright terms have nothing to do with the author. If we wanted to maximize author benefit, we'd just make it infinite.

Copyright term duration is about society. The truth is copyright is bullshit. Artificial scarcity is exactly that: artificial. It's a lie. Society is doing creators a huge favor: we're all pretending the creator's works are scarce. We're pretending we don't know how to make copies. We do this so that they can make money from their work. And we're doing it with the understanding that after a while the work will belong to us all. It will no longer be the creator's, it will become part of our culture by joining the public domain. Public property.

The longer you make those terms, the more unfair it is to the society that enabled the creator's business in the first place. The more unfair it is, the less reason there is to uphold the original social contract.

This arrangement must be tolerable for society. This eternal rent-seeking monopoly bullshit will not be tolerated. One day society is going to stop pretending and these monopolists will understand that everything is public domain.

It's already happening. See Sci-Hub.

Just because it's artificial scarcity doesn't mean it's not useful. Money also has artificial scarcity and that's a pretty good invention.

My point is that copyright is to incentivize authors to produce work but if it's limited by the author's lifetime, then older people will be incentivized less than younger people because they won't be able to sell the rights for as much money because they'll expire sooner. We don't particularly need work created by young people more than old people, so why incentivize it that way?

My point is copyright duration should never have grown beyond 5-10 years to begin with. I'm not saying copyright should expire if the person dies.

> Money also has artificial scarcity

I don't understand. Why do you think that?

You can create your own notes and coins but it's illegal because they want to maintain the artificial scarcity. The whole idea of fiat currency depends on people trusting that artificial scarcity will be maintained by the government.

Yeah, government currency does have those problems. I'm not sure I'd even classify it as real money to begin with, it's just a scheme governments impose on their populations. Real money is precious metals: naturally scarce, malleable, fungible, divisible, universally recognized as valuable. A very small set of cryptocurrencies also have a shot at becoming real money one day.

I don't think this can be called artificial scarcity though. It's real scarcity that's gradually inflated away by governments and banks. Data is already infinitely abundant as soon as it's created.

Have you somehow modelled how the global economy would change if copyright was 10 years and fiat currency didn't exist and people used gold instead? Without that, you're living in fantasy land. You can make any idea seem better if you just make up the consequences in a way that favors your idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com