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Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.

I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost, perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over it.

Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the rights holders are for a particular work.

A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.

This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.

Yep, I really liked the copyright change to make copyright protection automatic, instead of requiring a filing.

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.

I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that.

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 realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that.

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)

This would just mean that rich companies/people will get to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this whole situation where things don't enter the public domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.

On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n × number of works) every year.

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.

This would definitely be better than the current system of basically forever minus one day, but still leaves the problem that a few giant corporations own giant chunks of our hearts, minds, and childhoods.

The zeitgeist of our time should belong to us, at least after a decade or two.

This is just extending the rent seeking. If the work is so valuable the owner can continue to extend their copyright, the public should receive that value after the 14 years (by which point, the owner has been made whole through collecting rents for those 14 years) versus the owner ratcheting up the cost to pay to maintain the copyright monopoly on the work in question.

Eh, if the price rises enough year over year, and you dump that funding into the National Institute for the Arts, or other programs to provide grants and funding to low-income artists, I could see it being a potentially useful tool to spread the wealth around from very commercially successful works.

I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some positive outcomes from the approaches.

I can see scaling it by change in life expectancy, to keep the bargain roughly the same.

Life expectancy of adults hasn’t changed much (ie your life expectancy when you’re in your 20s). The life expectancy number you’re most familiar with is largely driven by infancy because it’s the mean and high infant/child mortality skews that. We’re really good at saving the lives of children now but I don’t see why that matters for copyright.

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?

This is mostly an urban legend. Yes, some amount of the increase in life expectancy is due to reduced infant mortality. But it’s nowhere near the bulk of it.

In 1920 at birth a males life expectancy was ~54, at 40 a man could be expected to live to ~70. Current estimates are almost unchanged between birth and 40 at 76.23 vs 78.75. That’s a 25% increase in life expectancy at 40, but that a long way from the 41% increase from birth.

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.

Yes, your original post was indeed correct by hedging a bit, speaking of "adult life expectancy" vs. "infant/child mortality".

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.

I think you’re confusing me with someone else, this is my second post in this thread. Anyway, the data doesn’t support doubling life expectancy for 10 year olds unless you go really far back.

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...

How are you defining urban legend? Here's from Wikipedia [1]

> 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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

[2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

You are not comparing these numbers correctly.

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.

Thanks for the correction. So we're at a 45% increase. Typically life expectancy is reported as the "from birth number". That's gone from ~20 to 80.

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.

You're still not doing apples-to-apples comparisons. The source that you cited says 12th–19th-century life expectancy at birth was 25–40 years when infant/child mortality is included, and 55 years when it is excluded. There has not been any “4x increase” in this time period. (Even if you start in the bronze age, life expectancy at birth has not increased four-fold.)

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.

North America has a life expectancy of ~80 years. I eyeballed it so closer to 3.2x the 25 year life expectancy in the 12-19th century. What am I missing?

Yes, if you start from a base of 25 years (which is the extreme low end of the range from your source), then we have 30 years of increase from reduced infant/child mortality and 25 years of increase from reduced adult mortality.

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'm fine with that, if you use the life expectancy for an adult. Infant mortality has contributed the largest component of life expectancy gain since 1790, and we weren't incentivizing the creation of toddler art with the life expectancy gains.

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.

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