Hacker News Reader

Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com