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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone who believes that copyright lengths have been decided by some kind of balanced process between equal parties that carefully looked at the economic interests and societal interests or is it just monopolists like Disney buying longer strangleholds on culture to make money?

If you believe the latter, there's no point in writing about the balance of interests, you need to build counter power. We're just so far outside the regime of anything resembling reason. Talking about the balance of interests is only of use to try to decide if we should have copyrights at all in some theoretical alternate universe.

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I know this is pedantic but it's less about 'believing' and more looking at the hard evidence and news presented at the times that copyright was extended.

https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/10/cq/disney.htm...

In addition to being informative, this reminded me of how good journalism is written and structured. Thanks for the link!

Thank you for the link! I always appreciate empiricism.

I'm not sure why you think writing about the balance of interests isn't part of building counter power.

It's more that it's not the right frame because it ignores the elephant in the room. It's the difference between the fantasy of liberal economics and the real world.

A sufficiently interested public will push the legislators. Part of interesting the public is informing them that there is a problem, and that there is even a relatively simple solution.

The public interest route seems both far simpler and more realistic than... I don't even know, what's the alternative here? Some kind of non-profit for public domain advocacy that somehow has a budget to rival Disney, never mind the rest of the interested industries?

Perhaps you underestimate the breadth of readership on HN.

If someone can give me a more reasonable copyright duration, I will change the law tomorrow!

Twenty years from publication; the holder can pay the Library of Congress $2 to extend the copyright by one year. This fee doubles every year thereafter. So the 30th year only costs $1024, and the 40th year costs $1048576. If it remains profitable, you share the proceeds of rent-seeking with the public.

As copyrights are honored across multiple nations... this approach would encourage me to register my copyrights in say... Canada or England instead.

USA is the driving force behind all of these copyright treaties. Given Canada’s role in abandoning the copyright part of TPP… I suspect most regimes would change to ones where they pay less American companies and earn more taxes themselves.

Deal, 10 years from publication.

Exactly correct. If you want to get anywhere, the correct thing to advocate for is complete abolition of copyright.

> Is there anyone who believes that copyright lengths have been decided by some kind of balanced process between equal parties that carefully looked at the economic interests and societal interests or is it just monopolists like Disney buying longer strangleholds on culture to make money?

What's funny is that many people who say this kind of stuff about copyright thinks it makes copyright special and distinct from the rest of the capitalist model of property rights.

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