99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.
Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records.
It became fairly dubious in the age of photocopiers and tape recorders, but fortunately was little enforced, except in the USSR. A photocopier was useless without typeset or handwritten text to copy, and a tape recorder was no substitute for a recording studio, and the copies degraded every generation, so publishing houses were still needed.
Now every computer is a book-copying and music-copying machine more powerful than the entire publishing industry a few decades ago: it can transmit a gigabit per second, and for a one-megabyte book, that's 125 copies a second, 10 million copies a day, 3 billion copies a year, so copyright is a constant danger to everyone. Fanfic sites are full of people sharing stories they wrote with no expectation of making money. Soundcloud is full of indie band recordings edited in Audacity. The age of the rich celebrity authors like Isaac Asimov or Ernest Hemingway ended decades ago, not due to xeroxes but due to TV. (We still have celebrity musicians, but it's not clear that helping the Rolling Stones buy cocaine is an important public policy objective.) The best software is free software, as copyright makes proprietary software untrustworthy, creating incentives to stuff it with malware. And, even if Elsevier were paying researchers instead of vice versa, the idea that copyright on research papers could fund research is as ludicrous as the idea that people would stop singing songs and telling stories without monopoly profits.
Apps, videos, and websites constantly disappear due to (often groundless) accusations of copyright violations. Police evade accountability by playing copyrighted music, rendering any recordings of their abuses copyright violations. A friend of mine committed suicide after being prosecuted for copyright violations that might have been fair use; we'll never know.
So, I would set the copyright term at zero years. Legal monopolies on preserving and sharing knowledge are not only useless in today's world, they are harmful, a monstrous menace to the integrity of the historical record and to private communication.
One big issue is that when things aren't bound by copyright, the originals can be adulterated and you won't know:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...
> The New York Times reports that in some countries where "1984" is in the public domain opportunists are printing cheap versions of the novel and listing them on Amazon, avoiding paying royalties owed to Orwell's estate in the US.
> The New York Times found 11 of the 12 fake Orwell books it ordered were dispatched from an Amazon warehouse and were labelled "new." The books cost as little as $3.
This seems like an obvious net-negative for society.
Are they adulterated or just reprinted?
The example you provided regarding the printing press resonates with me as an author. I have not included any form of DRM with the digital copies of my book and I won't go after individuals who pirate it. But, I will enforce my copyright on the work if a large company like Amazon tries to start selling it without my permission. When you say there should be no copyright, you're saying a giant corporation I want nothing to do with is entitled to profit off of three years of my labor, for free, without my consent.
There needs to be a more nuanced approach where laws are written and interpreted in a way that benefits regular everyday people. Abolishing copyright would do the opposite.
If you think the world owes you something in return for spending your time writing, you should take your ball and go home. We have a civilization to preserve here that copyright is threatening — children to educate, medical treatments to deliver, historical films to copy onto non-rotting stock, private communications it's intolerable to scan for forbidden information on which the government has granted you a monopoly — and any one of these is more important than what you think you deserve.
Our intellect is not your property.
It needs to be something like 12 + 12 or 20 + 20, or even 20 + infinitely continuable for a gradually increasing cost. It still has the potential issue of waiting out that 24 to 40 years; but companies are less likely to do that, when a few years is basically nothing.
It's been 2 years since covid started, for example.
The more effective approach would be to simply remove the economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no one's able to profit off it in the first place and spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer penalized.
What a weird thing to rail against. I'm certainly unconvinced the world would be magically better without people organizing to produce content.
Maybe there's some issues with copyrights, but as far as I can tell, almost any organization would attempt to preserve profits. We, as a people, then go through and create legislation which curbs rampant abuses whether that's environmental pollution, or unsafe kids' toys, or overly lengthy copyright claims.
But the idea people can't get together and make movies, that's a new one.
Often at the expense of everything else, including common sense. Despite their current revenues already covering their expenses, many times over.
> But the idea people can't get together and make movies, that's a new one.
They can, but they will own shares in them, either split equally or proportionally to their contribution.
My idea here is that you would have the option of either paying right now, or waiting when the copyright expires and getting it legally for free. In our current system people don't even consider that copyrights have an expiry date, they operate as if they're effectively indefinite. And the current system doesn't work anyway — the majority of the society just isn't having it. Everyone has pirated something at some point.
Covid has been nearly 2 years, and for many of us it feels both like yesterday and also like forever ago, for example.
And then you'll have people that want to watch the movie of something, so they're willing to pay the video company for instant access, but the movie is based off a script someone wrote, or a book someone wrote, and that book is at least 2 years old.
RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example.
> RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example.
whats the long tail look like for popular books?
my impression was, most books that make any money are hugely popular for a short time, then basically fall off a "sales cliff"... i wonder if anyones done any comprehensive stories about this subject.
The minute you want to express yourself to others, you're no longer in it for self-expression.
And regardless of your opinion on what should and should not exist, people should be fairly compensated for their endeavors, even if those endeavors are to create leisure activities for others.
Copyright is an attempt to enable creators to get compensation for their work. This is one thing the people who rail about the ease of reproduction miss. It was never about the difficulty of reproduction, it was always about the difficulty of creation.
How do we reward that when we are allowed to freely copy their efforts without the need to consider their contribution? It's one of the few things I like about a subscription or Patreon model. We're paying directly for the effort of creation.
> That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work?
afaik i didn't sign any copyright assignment in my work contract...
i wonder what the legal basis is for that?
> And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends.
sounds super cool if it could work... all the stuff i made, when reused somewhere by a company, i get a residual... the more valuable, the more used, and the more i get... that could be pretty awesome (hypothetically)
But now, it is dead simple to propagate someone's work once they've finished the act of creation.
And this isn't a discussion if others are getting their fair due. Even if they are not, it does not mean we should shaft everyone. Everyone should be fairly compensated for their work. But not enforcing some level of protection for the creation of art is pretty much ensuring no one is compensated for their work. Fairly or not.
I don't think the system would function without transferable copyrights. A movie might have 10,000 people who've contributed to it. Managing the copyrights without some kind of legal agreement would be a nightmare. I get the spirit of the comment (to prevent generations of people from owning and profiting from the works of people they never knew), but eliminating copyright transfership probably doesn't solve that.
Perhaps this would affect less known artists. I would be willing to keep the copyright until the first 100,000 or 1,000,0000 worth of product is sold.
Most movies are fixed in a tangeble medium months before week one. Sometimes years. Component parts (principle filming, scripts, original music, if any) are routinely finished at least a year before release. A rush to get everything out to enjoy the full 3 years of income potential would further push out the couple of films a year made where people actually cared to do things right.
20-30 years might be right, though. Or one of the escalating fees for renewal after a reasonable period, preferably with a required deposit of the work so when it becomes public domain it can be easily distributed.
1. You're only considering works published by huge multinational publishers with the gigantic marketing budgets required to get immediate traction
2. You assume that works are published on a large scale for their initial publishing
Small time artists can spend years trying to get a work picked up by large publisher. Those who don't choose to use large publishers may be finding new audiences over longer periods.
Assuming that copyright should be designed around the use-cases of Comcast or Disney is the reason we're in the position we're in now.
Sure, under the current system.
The question is how many people that would have bought the media would just wait out the copyright. Once you're into these short lengths of time, it's a lot.
When you're talking about timelines as short as weeks, you're going to get a ton of people waiting. They might still go to a theater, even, but one with much cheaper tickets.
How many at 3 years specifically? I'm not sure, but it's a risk to be considered.
I feel like a two or three year copyright could be even worse that current state — large publishers would probably just wait out artists and steal their work.
“Nice album kid, bet it’ll sell great 3 years from now”
But it's public domain. You can't exactly "steal" something that already belongs to everyone, including you.
While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them. In creative fields it often takes many years to build up a portfolio and a following, if you've not been picked up by a major promoter.
In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.
Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain.
In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where copyrights on Linux have expired, we'll may very well see contributions drop dramatically as the largest contributions start to closed-source their branches of Linux.
It affects everyone. Most only negatively.
Right, that's why we're trying to find ways to limit the damage it does to everybody else.
The GPL-vs.-BSD flamewar you're trying to start is only mildly relevant. The various BSD and Apache contributors aren't campaigning against the use of their code by Apple and Microsoft, either. The point is that there's nothing wrong with going out and making derivative works of other people's creative work; it's how all creative work is done.
I would be really pissed if i got a "custom fork" of a novel and didn't also get the original, or at least a diff of changes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...
It needs an overhaul. But the current system heavily favors entrenched interests so won't happen.
The purpose of copyright protection, which was a controversial issue at the time the US Constitution was drafted, is written in the Copyright Clause: "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."
Anything beyond that stated purpose is hindering "the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
That copyright terms are limited is essential, and should optimize the purpose, not the profit of publishers who go unmentioned.
See 'Sound Recordings Published' sections https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.
But it should require active regular renewal, to create the record of continued ownership.
You should get a (reasonable) protected period of time automatically, to give you time to figure out which works are worth the effort to continue protecting. But it should require (minimal) active ongoing effort to maintain that protection.
For me, this is especially relevant when it comes to abandoned digital content (like video games and other applications). It'll be *so* much harder to archive and preserve content that's 140 years old, than it will be content that's 14-28 years old.
That being said, what in reality would happen if you release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights holder.
I really like the model of every work automatically receiving protection. I think creations should automatically receive a relatively short-term automatic copy-right protection (say 14 years). After that, I think extensions should require manual renewals by the current rights holder (including contact information for the rights holder)
I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some positive outcomes from the approaches.
Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big company and you want to own your stuff forever. But behind the laws protecting those companies there's a ton of stuff that the owner doesn't care, nobody even knows who the owner is, etc. etc. (There's a lot of stuff that is de facto in the public domain because nobody owns it anymore in any practical sense, but there's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly steep fee for the benefit.
Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything produced ever.
The zeitgeist of our time should belong to us, at least after a decade or two.
More hypothetically, let’s say human life spans got up to 500 years. Copyright is intended to promote the creation of art for the public good, not to fund the artist for their lifetime.
If you created a popular piece of art of music in your 20s, why is it useful to society to help fund the next 480 years of life in any way?
> Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality
> Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years.
> ... even in preindustrial times as is demonstrated by the Roman Life Expectancy table, which estimates life expectancy to be 25 years at birth, but 53 years upon reaching age 25
Here are actuarial tables for people in the US today [2]. The life expectancy if you reach 25 is.... 52 or 57 depending on if you're a man or woman.
We're certainly better at reducing all cause mortality even in adults but it's not as stark of a difference as you might imagine, particularly its effect on the mean.
Your second link shows years of additional life expectancy. For example, at age 80 it shows 8.43 years of life expectancy, meaning that the average 80-year-old lives to age 88.43.
So the average 25-year-old in the US has 52–57 years of life remaining, and will live to age 77 or 82, according to your link.
This is a very big increase over the pre-twentieth-century adult life expectancy of ~55 years of age! You claim that "life expectancy of adults hasn’t changed much" but your own links show that it increased about 50% in very recent history.
The claim was that the bulk of the life expectancy number being driven by the mortality rate prior to adult hood was an "urban myth". Life expectancy in adult hood is a ~1.4x increase. Life expectancy from birth is a 4x increase. I'd say the bulk is driven by saving the lives of children and is not an urban myth.
Since the time period you chose, life expectancy at birth has increased by about 40 to 55 years. Near-elimination of infant mortality accounts for 15–30 years of increase, while increases in adult life expectancy account for an additional 25 years.
Can you really look those numbers and say that one of them is highly significant while the other "has not changed much"?
Translating this into percentages or "fold" increases is misleading because you are using a different denominator for the two increases. E.g. you are claiming that reduced infant mortality is a 2.2-fold increase (55/25) while reduced adult mortality is "only" a 1.45-fold increase (80/55), even though the number of years gained is almost the same.
And if you use the other end of the 25–40 year range, then reduced infant mortality is "only" a 1.38-fold increase (55/40).
I chose 40 because it wasn’t medicine that made the biggest difference for 20 to 40 year olds but war. And actuarial tables can’t predict wars only account for past wars which make current estimates misleading. Aka we don’t have a lifetime of data for people born after 1920 only estimates.
People read that and it registers as infants dying within days after birth. But life expectancy for 10-year-olds has doubled: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy. I doubt that your comment makes people think of dead teenagers, even though your post doesn't contradict that interpretation.
Even for the 40-year-olds, life expectancy increasing from 68 to 82 years means a >50% increase in "time remaining" which isn't something to sneeze (cough?) at, although I have to reluctantly acknowledge that I remembered it being even larger than that.
Look at the England a whales data in your link, in 1841 10 year olds could expect to see 57.6, or another 47.6 years. In 2013 that bumped to 82.2 or another 72.2 years. By 20, they could likely hit 60 or another 40 years worth of life, and by 40 they where up into ~67.4.
However again the difference is largely one of lack of war and famine rather than medicine. The chart is bouncing around because of events that killed large numbers of people, but it smooths out as you approach today.
PS: Their Spanish Flu suggestion is off, it was actually WWI and the flu that’s responsible for much of that drop as seen by 40 year olds being largely unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:W_curv...
So, if you scaled it from the life expectancy of an 18-year old in 1790, to the life expectancy of a 18-year old in 2021 then I'd agree with that.
Maybe a shorter period of time with an option to extend it like a snooze feature on an alarm clock.
Patents, for example, have maintenance fees that are quite high. So even that 20 year length is not really automatic and guaranteed, while already seen as problematically long to many.
All law moves slowly. The law is supposed to move slowly, that’s (mostly) a feature, not a bug. You don’t want the existing laws to change every year, driving would be more of a nightmare than it already is.
Copyright was originally about protecting a creator’s ability to make some money from their works. Despite the fact it was extended in part to help Disney make money forever, we should still have some protection for artists and small businesses, right? We don’t want to shorten the copyright term just because NPM has a lot of churn, do we? That doesn’t seem like a good reason.
Ten years may or may not be too short. How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?
That’s a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. Copyright is intended to protect individual works of authorship, and allow the author to leverage their work, even when they only produce a single work.
> How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?
It happens all the time in software companies! The early software foundation of a company is often integral to where it is when it starts making money. It’s common for the core ideas and algorithms to sit around for many years while the company is building marketing and payment and integrations and customer support and waiting for business to catch on. Sometimes companies wait on their patents to be granted before even starting to try to monetize some software, and it can take a couple of years just to get the patent.
From a copyright perspective, it’s important to understand and recognize that business, like law, often moves very slowly. While I’m firmly in agreement that 99 years is too long, I also think 10 years is too short. And to reiterate: the term length shouldn’t be set because tech moves fast, it should be set by considering what’s long enough to recoup an investment and when it’s fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it for their own financial gains.
I based my statement on https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...
> it should be set by considering what’s long enough to recoup an investment and when it’s fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it for their own financial gains
I don't think we disagree really. I said the goal was to maximize overall benefit to society and I think you did too. Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied.
I disagree. Plenty of people already know 10 years is too short, and it doesn’t take a study to show it. Lots of businesses take longer than that to get established, even the very fastest-moving fastest-distributing businesses like software startups.
Anyway, keep in mind that this net benefit needs to incentivize people to get over the static friction of starting in the first place. We don’t want to make a point of handing content and ideas over to incremental producers because that will disincentivize people from trying in the first place.
Also important is that part of the net benefit to society is a trickle-down argument that we need to reward the authors first in order for society to reap the net benefit. The point is not to encourage business at the fastest possible speed be letting people borrow the ideas and inventions and content of others, the point is to protect the people who do the actual original work for a reasonable period of time, and to allow for the fact that they might be less good at business than someone who’s only reselling content.
Might be worth stating that study the economics of social net benefits is incredibly difficult, and can take a very, very long time, longer than you and I have left. The environment is a great example of how we’ve made disastrous business choices that were rationalized by “social benefit”, but turned out to be wrong.
By the way, that law was sponsored by Mary Bono, Sonny Bono's widow (Sonny Bono died during that year) and also congresswoman.
All this is a neat little circle of people voting laws for their own benefits. This has nothing to do with artists or small businesses.
I think it is fair to say that once the original author of the work is dead, the copyright should go with it. And if a corporation buy the copyright, then they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today.
It’s neither fair nor accurate to point at the speed distribution as an indicator of the speed of building a viable business. It’s a fact that it’s common for a business to need a decade to build it’s business pipeline before the business is viable and fully supporting its employees. Don’t forget this system needs to support small businesses and not just megacorps.
From the perspective of law, and of copyright specifically, it’s also a mistake to assume that all business can move at the pace of electronically distributed software. Physical hardware goods frequently take more than a year to design, manufacture, and stock prior to distribution. Today we can add in an extra year of COVID related delays for the ordering and distributing pipeline … how many things are on insane back order delay as we speak? Copyright needs to be long enough that things like today’s situation don’t prevent a business from even starting to recoup, right?
> I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last “infrastructure law”
The point I was making is that law moves slower than tech. You would agree that infrastructure funding happens on a glacial pace compared to what’s hot on GitHub or what new ideas are being incorporated into neural network training, right? It’s fine to think of a few years being “fast”, but that’s a subjective opinion that isn’t relative to something specific. I was trying to make a comparison between law and the things presumably parent was calling “breakneck speed”, which is clearly referring to things that move faster than law.
I also mentioned “existing” laws for a specific reason - new laws can and sometimes do come up quickly. But laws we need to know in order to comply with need to be mostly stable. And by and large, most of our law doesn’t change every year, we have small nips and tucks mostly in places that don’t affect the majority of the population.
I think you are confusing copyrights with patents or trademarks. Copyright do not protect physical hardware or goods.
As far as I know, almost all copyrightable works can be transferred electronically. After all, we are talking about the right to copy (and distribute) a work (make more of them to sell it). Goods that cannot be copied are not copyrightable.
Don’t conflate “can be” with “are”. Copyrights absolutely protect books and posters and phonograph records; physical goods is how the law originated, and physical copies is a big part of what the law’s language still protects to this day. There are big problems with copyright law because it hasn’t yet been adequately adapted to the invention of the internet.
There is plenty of overlap when it comes to the business of physical goods. Copyrights do protect parts of the designs of many physical goods, and the sources and driver software of computer hardware, for example. Copyrights also protect marketing and advertising material and many other parts of a fledgling business.
What are we discussing at this point? I agree with you that copyright should probably end with the author (though I would say there should be a minimum term, to account for the many reasonable possible scenarios like being part of a business, accidental death, old age, etc., etc.). I don’t think 10 years is enough, and I don’t think that tech moving quickly is a valid reason to shorten copyright. There are valid reasons to shorten copyright, so we should discuss those instead.
How many startups today make their money by sharing actual source code and not cloud services? Unless its AGPL then you need not know the source for most services anyways.
On the other hand, artists - like Dolly Parton - have made long careers out of songwriting that have carried them into their senior years, so it's a balance.
Clearly 99 years is absurd. Maybe 20 years is the balance to strike. Dolly would still be doing just fine with that term.
Though I think 20 years is reasonable enough.
Most people expect to inherit money and property from their parents but not to be paid for work their parents did years ago. I don't see why children of authors should have different expectations.
The previous justification was to incentivize creators by protecting their financial interests and the interests of their offspring. It’s very clear to see that those interests are no longer being met when you sell your blockbuster song to a record company for $500.
IMHO make copyright non-transferable and make corporate copyright 14 years with an application to double. That way it works for the little guy without big guys abusing it (e.g. Disney).
This allows the rights holders to milk the bulk of the profit and yet quickly pass the orphaned works to the public domain - both benefitting the development of arts and sciences as stipulated by the US constitution.
Heck, even taxing works for $1 a piece per year would free up a huge number of orphans.
IOW, when Steamboat Willie's copyright expires, it doesn't give you the right to make a new Mickey Mouse film. Disney still has a trademark on Mickey.
(See 17 USC §106 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106) for the full list of what copyright actually protects.)
The minute I sell that copyright to someone else (or it's inherited), a time limit begins to apply. Perhaps here you move into the '20 years' or something category.
The screen actors guild has somewhat of a highlander policy, but if I release something Copyright My Name, there's hundreds or thousands of people it could be, including a Pulitzer Prize winning author who will likely predecease me.
Earlier this year a few authors whose work I enjoy tweeted furiously about this topic. Similar arguments may apply to audio and visual copyright.
If, for example, copyright lasted 14 years, then The Atrocity Archives (Stross) would already be public domain, which reduces incentive to create more in the series (not sure why, I would have expected new novels have new copyright, but I trust an author to know what their own motivations are, and I refuse to second-guess).
Now, these various authors on Twitter argued that being an author is poorly paid (it is), and that they would like to offer someone an inheritance comparable to a widow/er pension.
I can sympathise with that.
But, sales in most things decline over time. Sequels more, apparently (I wouldn’t know, one of the authors tweeted that). If income falls off exponentially with time, half the income for some specific work will be in the first x-months, 75% in 2x months, 99.9% in 10x months — I’m saying months rather than years because of how fast best-seller lists change, I don’t have real data.
Conversely, the reason for such a decline is that almost all the people who care will have bought the work soon after it is published. Making copyright last 100(average of all x) fails to harm society by preventing the work from becoming public domain, but only by the same[2] as it fails to help creative people commercialise their creativity, and for exactly the same reason: almost nobody cares any more. This remains true even if the income curve isn’t exponential, as the benefit to society is simply not having to pay for it[3].
Certainly I’m not rushing out to download some copy of inter-war music, radio broadcasts of whatever category, or newspapers; and I don’t even know if that’s for lack of money because I don’t care. I suspect I’m not alone in not caring.
Indeed, I only oppose zero/infinite duration because of the edge cases.
The point of copyright is to give creators an incentive at all besides the default of creative people being patronised or commissioned. This is already a thing — furry art by commission; stories[0] and YouTubers supported on Patreon. As this is not the status quo, if we switched to “no copyright” I expect this will break stuff and bankrupt people who have come to rely on it (this also means I oppose sudden changes in general).
If copyright was infinite, all works world eventually become lost in a legal quagmire of e.g. mergers and acquisitions where the actual owner ceases to be known.
[0] https://www.patreon.com/HamboneHFY
[1] except where the income per unit is too small to process ($0.001 per person times US population is still a lot of money).
[2] or losing track of who owns it, or [1]
That does not follow. Even if literally everyone who was interested in the work already has a copy, copyright prevents others from building on top of it. That is the harm.
Yes, sure, it would be a copyright violation to write today a novel set on a giant space artefact containing a flattened full-scale map of Earth, where a motley crew (including a bald human on anti-aging drugs) crash-lands and investigates, finding the machinery of the world breaking down, where those things are “the Ringworld”, Luis Wu, superconducting wire destroyed by a synthetic microbe, and Boosterspice; but that didn’t stop Pratchett writing Strata with “the flat world”, Kin Arad, general entropy, and Days.
It is my opinion that we need an alternative mechanism for funding the creation of information-works that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity.
However, copying cost today is effectively 0. No one would pay money for a pirated copy of an ebook. One could (somewhat pedantically) say that this means the creator's 'exclusive right to profit' from their work is not violated because no one profits in this way from piracy[0], but that's not the point. the point is that the concept barely even made sense the first time around, but allowed a creator who didn't own a giant expensive distribution mechanism the leverage to negotiate compensation. Now the distribution is about as free as it is ever likely to get.
[0] or at least they wouldn't if it weren't for laws creating barriers that allow people to profit by providing mechanisms around said barriers.
The problem, of course, is that the creators of the work still need to participate in a scarcity economy to live. There are examples of efforts being made to fund creators outside the traditional scarcity-based mechanism, such as patreon funding, github sponsorship, and the like, although I admit they appear to only currently be useful for those who would be unable to leverage the traditional system effectively anyway.
While I may not have the answer to funding creators, I firmly believe that we'd be going backwards to insist on forcing scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...
Copyright is useful for preventing others from using characters you created, but frankly I don't see the value in that. Moreover, it isn't even effective as fan fiction is incredibly common anyway. We can see how this would work with the proliferation of open source and the commonness of forks. It really isn't a big deal.
the media works of today cost way more than they did before. some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the longevity of media has increased over time.
we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even longer since the production value is so high
i think we will see this in video games the most. they will continue to be revenue sources in digital formats and companies will be defensive over losing them
Ostensibly, the point of these restrictions is to incentivize the people who make IP.
But no one actually considers revenue 99 years into the future, so it doesn't work as an incentive.
Why should this content be locked up for decades past the point where it has already made 90% of the money it's ever going to make? So the Disney company can have a century's worth of exclusive material ready to go when they launch D+, creating an absolutely impenetrable barrier to entry for an upstart?
Nobody is investing millions in a song that they think could take 95 years to earn enough to justify the investment.
Copyright is there to incentivize creating new works. If the copyright was shortened to max(life of the artist, 50 years), how many artists do you think would stop creating?
Frankly, there's an argument to be made that shortening the length of copyright to 25 years would encourage more new works simply because you can rest an your laurels.
High-budget songs, movies, and video games will either make back their budgets immediately, or they will be written off as a loss. There are very few cases where a work's financial success is predicated on money made five or ten years out. Hell, for video games, ten years out and you need to port your game to a new platform, which costs money, since the industry's investment into emulation technology[0] is piss-poor.
Furthermore, the production values of a work don't have much to do with it's longevity; you can't spend twice as much to get a work with twice the relevance decades down the line. In fact, most of the works from the past that still are relevant today were made on budgets that would be considered shoe-string today. If anything, I'd argue that longer terms make cheap cash-ins a safer bet than riskier experimental projects, even though the latter is more likely to be relevant. Do you really think that, say, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to last longer than the original Ghostbusters?
[0] Counterexamples: PC gaming, Steam Proton, and Xbox Series/PS5 backwards compatibility. All of these rely upon having built their games on technologies with long-term compatibility support built-in (Windows, x86), or upon community re-implementation efforts (WINE). The game industry cannot ever seem to afford to write their own one-off emulators.
production value has a huge impact. why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain after 10 years? it’s still the cash machine that runs the business today and it’s 8 years old
This is, of course, very poorly bargained-for in present law.
> why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain after 10 years?
Because that's still a ton of money. Also every time they update the game with more content, that's something you can only get if you buy or wait even longer. And it's easy for them to require payment to use GTA Online.
> it’s still the cash machine that runs the business today and it’s 8 years old
I don't think it would be a tragedy if they had to put out a new game at some point in the next few years to keep making as much money.
Also the game was already completely free for a week in 2020.
Seems like the cultural ROI isn't there. The extra money may bring extra revenue but it doesn't improve the quality at all. Why not force a market correction?
When you take the time value of money into account, an expectation of big amounts of revenue multiple decades out is worth very little at the time of production. And on top of that, those old movies tend to be licensed at very cheap rates, so now it's a small amount of revenue getting exponentially discounted.
Cutting copyright after a couple decades won't have a big impact on profits.
I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing between these asset classes.
If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is all property. If it isn't, it isn't. Any argument you can make about the benefits of putting intellectual work in the public domain, you can also make - more convincingly - about land and any other productive resource.
The traditional way out is to marry a rich commoner who wants their children to be titled.
We need many layers of safety nets and stabilizing forces, because every layer is prone to different types of failure. There is a natural and desirable support structure of individial -> family -> community -> state -> humanity that allows society and individuals to survive and thrive through changing circumstances. Too much reliance on any one layer, especially the state, is a recipe for fragility or tyranny.
When every individual has an emergency fund, every family has a nest egg, every community pulls together in time of need, and every state provides a safety net of last resort, we can weather any storm.
well personal ownership generally gets passed to your kids when you die and then to their kids etc. so as long as your descendants do not sell it, that lasts forever.
Copyrights might last past you to your kids but probably not to your kids' kids and further.
What actually happens when my car goes back into public domain? Is it just fair game for everyone? Does someone from the govmt come to pick it up? Would there be some kind of library-esque system for all public domain'd property?
2 or more people wanting to use given a sound recording do not as copying has a marginal cost approaching zero. My use can be entirely separate from yours and we may not even know of the existence of the other. Land, for example, cannot be copied with a very small marginal cost, or indeed, at all.
These things are very different and those differences need to be taken into account in any regulation surrounding their property rights. I express no opinion here of what correct regulation for property rights for these two vastly different asset classes should be. Make your case for opposing property rights by all means.
Owning a physical thing and "owning" information is fundamentally different. Information can be copied, spread, redistributed without taking it away from someone.
If you take land from someone they can no longer use it, if you copy information from someone they still have it themselves. You cannot build two houses onto the same place in the same property.
Ownership is designed so that we can say who is allowed to use things with naturally exclusive use.
Copyright is designed to make the use of naturally unlimited and reusable information exclusive.
This is also why we have the word "infringement" and why we should not be using the word "theft" in these contexts.
To put this idea another way:
Say Jane has an iObject. She uses it everyday.
Bob takes the iObject. Jane now does not have her iObject, and cannot use it everyday.
The iObject has value, and it's expensive to obtain another one. Jane must spend to obtain another iObject, assuming one is available for purchase.
This is theft, and the key legal concept here is someone being deprived of their property.
Joe has made a song. Joe has granted distribution rights to Larry, who collects money for people obtaining copies of the song. Joe makes money from Larry, who also makes money doing all these things.
Ann gets a copy of Joe's song from her friend Jose. Larry and Joe did not get any revenue from Ann.
This is infringement.
Notably, Joe still has his song. Larry still has his right of distribution he obtained from Joe. They are not denied their property.
Essentially Anne and Jose did, or experienced something they were not supposed to.
Also of note, Larry and Joe could still sell Ann a copy of the song! Ann could further promote Joe's song to others in various ways, legally.
There are some additional considerations.
Part of the value in Joe's work is context. People who know Joe, understand his work, identify with Joe in ways that make using Joe's work important to them all represent value. Larry helps add value to Joe's work by doing the other work associated with distribution, and that's advertising, and other efforts that generally promote the work and add context.
Unlike theft, there can actually be value created as a result of infringement!
In the case of theft, the value of the iObject to Jane is associated with owning and using the iObject, and said use could be just looking at the thing, or it could be the iObject enables Jane to do things she would not normally be able to do, whatever. When theft happens, Jane no longer has that value and or whatever was possible when she did have her iObject.
Infringement is weird.
Ann gets a copy of Joe's work from Jose. Prior to that, Ann has no clue about Joe, his work, that it's available. There is some chance Ann would have stumbled on all that due to Larry being good at what he does, but there is also a great chance Joe remains undiscovered by Ann, who would never spend any money that Joe and Larry would receive.
However, Jose promoting the work to Ann changes all of that!
Now Ann knows who Joe is, has context (Jose) and now could spend money for any number of reasons.
Joe and Larry received value from Jose's act of infringement (copy, distribute), and Ann added to that by her other act of infringement. (use)
And that's it, just really want to underscore the difference.
I've long held the view we won't really get workable laws on all this, until we discuss it using the proper words. The nuances are subtle, but they matter! As does the law and its impact on our lives and opportunities.
IP and physical property are not fungible, so I find this argument slightly disingenuous. They operate under different physical laws.
You haven't given your criteria of credibility, so why should we listen to you?
> If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is all property.
This is so malformed you're not even wrong.
We need a land value tax. The wealthy shouldn't be able to extort rent from the rest of society for having bought up a finite resource that gets its value from that same society. Land speculation is a scourge that drives people into poverty and homelessness while good land goes sits idle.