What’s entering the public domain on January 1
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Source - I'm a Milne.
I don't know who owns Milne's copyrights, but given how profitable they are, I am sure they are jealously guarded.
This legal situation is appalling; it makes a mockery of justice and humanity.
sounds more like "Fair Use", unless you imply the painting was made for the purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain. As in: they painted it right before selling and used the image to advertise the house to young couples.
It also highlights the ridiculously broad law at the Federal level that essentially allow US Attorneys to function like medieval inquisitors than prosecutors of a democratic state. Copyright happened to be the pretense.
(Weirdly, the UK has a special law granting permanent copyright in Peter Pan, with the royalties going to Great Ormond Street children's hospital. https://www.gosh.org/about-us/peter-pan/copyright/ )
May be actually getting in jail is difficult but a threat of jail in a criminal copyright infringement persecution can be devastating as the tragedy of Aaron Swartz [0] so vividly illustrates [1].
My major gripe is with software patents which are already covered by copyright.
20 years seems like a sufficient term, I would even go for 10 or 15. Creators were still creating before copyright terms were extended to infinity.
The argument is actually that copyright encourages more public works without regard to quality.
Copyright should be for a fixed number of years so that everyone receives equal benefit and that time period should be closer to 10-20 years rather than a hundred.
Your argument is a straw man. Why should author's have a different right to provide for their children more so than other professions?
There's something inherently unjust in protecting the works based on the death of the original author. A 25 year old will, on average, enjoy a significantly longer period of protection than a 75 year old.
The book sells a million copies and the publisher refuses to pay the widow and child anything because the work is now in the public domain. Justice has been done?
I think a simple period of time, like 7 or 14 years, or even 50, makes more sense.
Most pension systems only allow minimal contributions to third party's about £3.6k in the UK and the USA's 401 system is to be blunt a bit crap.
What you are saying is that all of the benefit goes to the publishing company, not the public. Not really.
The reality of normal people is that a big part of the reason they work is in order to provide for the people they love. This is why copyright exists in the first place—to protect the motivation to produce creative work, knowing that the benefit won’t be stolen from you. Knowing that if you die, the benefit to your children is immediately forfeit actually reduces the willingness for people who aren’t misanthropes to take on that risk.
In regards to your example, the publisher has a contractual obligation with the author, which is obviously part of the estate.
My argument is that even if the author has a deal with a publisher for a particular book, that should not prevent others from being able to create new books, movies, games, etc based on that book.
As a counter example, imagine a 25 year old, with a wife, who would have been able to create the best game ever in 2010. Unfortunately he dies in 2015.
The game would have sold millions of copies if it was published, but unfortunately the character of Mickey Mouse is integral to it, so because of copyright the game cannot be made until 2024 - 58 years after Walt Disney's death and 96 years after the first appearance of the character.
I'm pretty sure that people from other professions can leave their property to their children as well, and that property does not suddenly become a public good a set amount of time afterwards.
but I guess in whatever wonderful country you live in there are no such things as landlords, or perhaps its a dystopian hellhole because there isn't any government enforced property rights so warlords just grab whatever real estate they want? Just trying to get my head around this analogy you were making.
on edit: I see you completely changed your comment from being an example with real estate to being something with Levi's.
> The way that design elements are cut and pieced together is not protected by copyright. The U.S. Supreme Court recently addressed this topic in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, stating that copyright affords “no right to prohibit any person from manufacturing [clothing] of identical shape, cut, and dimensions.”
Levi's in particular has distinct cuts that they are famous for. Should we start embedding RFID tags in jeans to collect licensing fees every time you wear them in public?
I'm sorry but are you under the impression that everything an author does is covered by copyright, that is to say there is nothing an author does that they will be unable to copyright?
on edit: at any rate Levi's cuts etc. are trademarked https://iptica.com/register-clothing-brand/levi-patents/
Unless copyright holders are somehow prohibited from obtaining property or passing it on to their relatives I don't think that's a meaningful comparison
it should be relatively clear, copyrighted works are a form of property that people have and pay taxes on, the same way that they pay taxes on stock they own, or the improvements they did to their land when they built a house on it, and so forth. It's all a form of property.
>they can use that income to acquire things like property
yes, if a master carpenter makes a table and never sells it they can pass it on to their children as a form of property. but they can also sell it and use the money to obtain other forms of property and pass that on to their children. Or just let them inherit the money. Not sure what the point here is, except that for a lot of people's arguments to work here it is beneficial to ignore that copyrighted works are also a form of property.
Now someone will make the point that written works don't work the same as a table made by a carpenter and therefore it is unfair, even though stocks and bonds do not work the same as a small family mom and pop store which does not work the same as a table made by a carpenter which does not work the same as a painting by a famous painter which does not work exactly the same as the insurance business, and so on and so forth.
The fact is that there are many forms of business and property and they do not all work exactly the same, although their local differences tend to get smoothed out by the effects of accounting.
Obviously part of the way that the writing business works is formed by the laws and regulations pertaining to it. You would like to change that, but it seems disingenuous to argue that it should be changed because copyrighted works are not property. They function like property now that the owners lose after a variable amount of time, and even if the changes you wanted would be put in place they would still function like property - but with much less time before being changed to a public good.
And TBH with all due respect trotting out rhetorical devices like "straw man" does sound like sealioning.
It should last maybe several years, and that's it. Only then most people would have any semblance of respect for it. And then something entering the public domain would be actually an event people would be looking forward to. Right now everyone considers copyright to be an effectively eternal thing.
It's also really depressing that the entirety of our pop culture is copyrighted, mostly by large faceless corporations.
But if those faceless corporations hadn't paid for our pop culture to be produced and distributed, it wouldn't exist.
You are young aspiring author. You have a family. You publish a greatly successful novel/series which would bring you $10M annually for at least 30 years.
You and your SO die in a car crash. Your children, 3 and 5 y.o. now without a parents.. and without ANY part of that probable $300M. Good luck, children, you did nothing at all.
On top of that, many people enjoy giving back, either to their kids or community. Preparing nice things for people after your death can bring comfort in life. That may come in the form of money, open sourced code, etc.
I'm looking forward to all that life extension/rejuvenation research that's gaining momentum right now. I don't want to die. Ever. I wish I could contribute to it, but my skill set isn't very fitting for this purpose. I doubt any one of the companies doing this kind of research needs a screaming fast android app or a java backend.
Personally I think copyright should be 25 years. And not the life and then some. But that 25 years should extend past the life of the creator. Plus I don't want to create any motives to do away with the creators
Software patents cover the invention. Software copyright (presumably) cannot cover software that has not been created yet.
The difference to patents is that they're routinely abused. Patent trolls file or buy up patents that are as general as possible to drag smaller companies through the courts, or charge exorbitant licensing fees, stifling innovation. Pharma companies build monopolies around life-saving drugs and engage in price gouging. The patent holders get rich, not the biochem majors. Extending the effective period for patents will make things worse, not better, as the real problems are elsewhere.
There's fan fiction of almost every character you can imagine. Can you name even ONE fan fiction you'd rather consume instead of the original author's work?
The reason copyright was invented in the first place was to encourage creative work by allowing the creator to profit from it for a period. It aims to balance potential benefits—the one that accrues to the creator and the one that accrues to the general population once copyright expires. You might think that the creator does not deserve any benefit from their creation, but most creators would disagree with you.
Code is a possible exception. The benefits of open source development may greatly outweight the benefits that would accrue to an individual developer if the code couldn't be copied, but I'm not sure that the balance is the same for novels and movies. I suspect many valuable creative works would simply not be created if the creator had no way to benefit.
Perhaps we need a more nuanced discussion that considers the actual benefits/harms of copyright periods on particular artforms and creative endeavours.
you think people idolize sports figures because of copyright?
If anyone wants to put the work in the public domain, they simply have to pay the value the company declared.
Disney could declare Star Wars is worth $5b, as it’s 40 years old they’d have to pay say $150m a year tax to deny the rights to the public.
If they declared it to be worth $50m to save on that tax, then netflix could pay for it to go public domain.
Also, this is a tax on unrealised gains is it not?
So it is 100% a tax on unrealised gains.
I complexly understand why some people will not be sympathetic to this.
Where is the incentive to do something new or to allow new players an ability to use works in a new way?
Consider all those works that are in the public domain and that can be shared freely. Iconic pictures like the Mona Lisa are available to the benefit of everyone. No one owns the exclusive rights and everyone has access to this shared cultural history.
There's also collateral damage with the current copyright system. A lot of lesser known works have little commercial/brand value. But they remain illegal to share. These works are at risk of becoming lost culture. And in many cases the original authors don't own the rights to release the works into the public domain at an earlier time, because they have contracts with publishers.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-m...
It effectively locks away cultural heritage for more than a hundred years with no tangible benefit to the society.
Disney became Disney because it used works in public domains (Brothers Grimm tales) and expired copyrights (Alice in Wonderland). Current copyright laws effectively blocks anyone from using 20th century works (and some late 19th century works) for ... well, anything, really.
Additionally, great swaths of culture are simply lost because of:
- the fear of potential copyright violations. This affects a great number of orphan works
- copyright holders doing nothing with their properties and others not being able to do anything with them. Can't find it now, but at one point Amazon carried more new books with works from the 19th century, than books with works from the 20th just because of that
But even that isn't the main problem. Copyright was intended to protect the author and incentivize them to create other works. I'm eagerly awaiting Tolkien's new works in 2047 (the copyright on The Fellowship of the Ring expires in 2050).
Any law has to treat everyone equally otherwise it’s always going to be the Disney’s et al who win.
It’s not even as if anti-competition laws have much effect these days. There’s a real culture in the US of acting dishonourably and then asking for forgiveness later. And more often than not, the punishment for breaking the law is significantly less than the profit earned from those unlawful acts. So they’re incentivised to be unlawful.
This is why you need clear rules that equivalent regardless of income so everyone is clear where the line is drawn; but penalties that are weighted so that rule breaking cannot be gamified.
The whole shell corporation, off shore tax haven bullshit would probably make this infeasible but is there actually anything that can stop that? I don't have any good ideas, but I know corporations should not make money off breaking the law.
That basically sounds like "actual damages", which is already the norm for calculating penalties in civil suits.
> This percentage could be greater than 100% to ensure it is never incentivized to break the law.
... and "actual damages" is by definition 100%, though you can get higher than 100% by adding on "statutory damages."
(You can see this as applied to copyright infringement in 17 USC §504: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504).
It's 'think of the children!!' argument of the IP laws.
This isn’t a theoretical argument either. You see it all the time already (eg tax avoidance).
That was literally the point I made which you disagreed with!
1. The original message wasn't missing a point about complex rules harming small players. It was just stating that ANY shit done to IP laws is done on the pretence of helping the small players, but instead benefitting the big ones. This was a typical strawman argument on your part.
2. The point you say I disagreed with in the subsequent message is literally the point I agreed with.
Total points score: 2-0 in my favour. Better luck next year, have a nice 2022. ;)
Again, you’re making the same argument as I was while claiming I wasn’t making it.
> The point you say I disagreed with in the subsequent message is literally the point I agreed with.
Your comments (this one included) don’t do a particularly good job of expressing what you do and don’t agree with. Half your comments read like a rebuttal despite being an effective reiteration of former comments posted by those you’re replying to. The other half aren’t clear which comments you’re actually replying to (such as this post - it’s so vague as to the sequence of events you’re referring to that your comment is basically meaningless).
> You seem to be a bit obsessed with points.
> Total points score: 2-0 in my favour. Better luck next year
Are you 5 years old? That’s a pathetic way to handle a conversation.
I say that as someone who has produced a whole lot of content at the least-monitizable end of the system.
Disney is the one who is winning right now, both in terms of me "as a content creator" and me "as a member of the public".
That was exactly who I was thinking about when I made my statement.
> Disney is the one who is winning right now, both in terms of me "as a content creator" and me "as a member of the public".
I agree. However the proposal made by the OP would only worsen the control that companies the size of Disney have while making it harder for individuals like ourselves to defend our own creative content.
So if you’re a contend creator (as I am too) then you really should oppose the suggestion made by the OP.
What you need to remember is that while copyright reform is needed - so badly needed - it doesn’t automatically make every possible suggestion better. In fact some of the suggestions that have been floated on HN are a lot worse than the status quo (and that’s saying something given how bad it already is).
But then I shouldn’t be surprised that a forum built around VC has members who think copyright can be “solved” simply by asking creators to throw more money at the problem…
I appreciate that copyright is often abused - milked - for all it’s worth. But I think your proposal goes too far. As bad as it is copyright has some uses. With copyright I can apply a GPL license and attempt to conjole others to contribute to the greater good.
You're suggesting that Copyleft licenses should be _public domained_ after a short period of time, or the copyright owner should pay a tax?
So, let's take say the Software Freedom Foundation. They should declare a value on the GNU Tools - and if say Microsoft is prepared to pay that value then all GNU tools should be public domain - meaning they can be used in say Windows (as closed compiled binaries?)
Alternatively the FSF needs to come up with some % of value to prevent MS from using their work under a closed license?
I mean, copyright works both ways right? It's equally protecting those that want to commercially profit from their work, and also those that don't want it to be used in a "non freedom" way. So, assuming most GPL authors aren't swimming in cash, this would make more-or-less all GPL'd works lose their freedoms?
Note that they still couldn't just take the current grep or vim or whatever code and use it; copyright on later revisions isn't based on the first published moment of the same project.
Instead the code has tons of changes made within the past 20 years and all of those deltas will still be covered by copyright. Microsoft could only be able to take the code of grep as it was as of 2001. I actually kind of doubt they would, but if that much time has passed and something is still useful it should belong to everyone and not just one person.
I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate.
Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.
Because I'm thinking the effect is the opposite on things that are already liberated - I'm thinking specifically of GPL protected freedoms...
Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.
A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.
Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf
It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.
It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.
Income tax generates tax revenue. Whether it's "just as well" as other forms of taxing is debatable. In at least some countries, wealth is taxed less than labour, which increases a class distinction. Less income taxes in favour of other taxes may redress that balance.
Or it may not - economists and ouija boards can give you predictions.
The average property tax is about 1%, so why should copyright be treated as something special? Especially, if the rent is collected by a third party that purchased the rights, their relationship to the creation of the underlying asset is no different to a landlord.
I'd dispense with this self-valuation business though and just charge a 1% tax on net present value of the asset.
If the copyright holder releases their claim early, then they'll get a tax refund for previous payments at the recalculated net present value.
well i guess it depends on if you view the government as a profit seeking entity trying to maximally price its IP protection product, or if you view it as societal infrastructure.
Copyright holders get an excellent deal by living in a society that allows them to collect rents that can add up into the millions of even billions.
But how about the work-a-day folks? What's in it for them? An abstract idea that allowing the descendants of creators to collect economic rents for generations after their death, might result in a greater throughput in creative works... somehow. No, for society to work, then rent seeking must be reigned in.
A copyright wealth tax would still allow rights holders to become fabulously wealthy, but they'd have to give something back in return. Something more than normal income tax, because of the rent seeking nature of their enterprise.
It's a lot easier to steal your music or your blueprints than it is to steal physical property, but that doesn't change the fact that it's all still property, at least in my mind. And society seems to work best when theft is at a minimum.
Renting out a property is (by definition) a form of rent seeking, but it only becomes a problem when rent seekers have monopolistic market power as the rents they seek cannot be restrained by normal market forces. One only needs to look at the consolidation of the movie industry to see such power in action.
I'm not defending intellectual property theft, I'm (quite modestly) suggesting that rights holders should pay a surcharge (similar to real property taxes) in return for the state allowing for them to extract monopolistic profits from their copyright holdings.
The government isn’t some beast we have to appease. It’s us! If we want to reform copyright, we don’t need to bribe ourselves with a new tax.
That would be older than Google for example.
Google was incorporated in 1998 [1]. To be fair, the patent for PageRank has since expired [2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150623193037/https://www.googl... [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999
Everyone? Hold on there a moment, Jack.
I'm a copyright minimalist. Seven years with one renewal for a total of fourteen years seems much more fair to me considering all the years we've already had of continually delayed releases into the public domain. We the people have paid to enforce those years of copyright without the corresponding payoff at the end of the term release to the public. There's nothing fair about that situation and it needs to be addressed.
The hard part for copyright is tracking what has been renewed and what has not, without some kind of registration system, which I don't think we want to add. Without this, it would make it very difficult to know if the work you intend to use/copy/distribute is protected or not.
Another possibility is a use-it-or-lose-it scheme like that used in Trademarks. If you built a game that is now abandonware, it should be fair game for someone else to remaster it, etc.
- author explicitly uses public domain as a license,
- 120 after publication,
- 120 after registration,
- 95 years after publication if it is corporate work or
- 75 years after the death of the author; whatever comes first.
- author have the right to make money from what they create,
- their children must still get some of it in the case their parents are authors and die early.
I think that it would be much more fair if copyright holders had to prove they are still making money out of a published work. If very little money is being made, this means nobody is paying for it or the copyright holder can't sell it well. In this case, the content should be declared abandoned and free to be copied unless the copyright holder demonstrates that money can be made with the content.
Reason: abandonware sites are on the fringe of legality, GOG was able to contact a few producers but that is not an easy or even possible task for everything. There are also music from early 1930's to 1960's for which it is not easy to even know who are the copyright holders and you fall on the fringe of legality if you distribute sheet music of it.
Also, there are other kinds of works: books, films, cartoons...
I enjoyed them as a child. As an adult, I discovered the sly humor in them, which I like very much.
The first season of Spongebob had a lot of sly adult humor mixed in, which I enjoy a lot, too. Later Spongebob seasons seem to have lost it.
One of the peculiarities of the translation, that makes it so simple to read, is that it opts to use genderless words where possible. Using words like "illi" instead of "eae" for example.
Also - did anyone else read the title think "Winne-the-Pooh, Ernest Hemingway Classic?!"