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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly why the argument is that copyright should be shorter, not non-existent. When you publish something, 99% of the time are that you are going to make most of the profit in the first few years after release. If you're in the tiny percent that creates something that will last decades, then you'll probably get rich and successful enough that you won't need to extend the copyright any longer.

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> When you publish something, 99% of the time are that you are going to make most of the profit in the first few years after release

This is true of big-biz movies, but not true of the many volumes of works by smaller creators, independent artists and smaller companies. Sometimes artists don’t enjoy success for decades, and then it happens long after their most influential work. And even when it is true, just because you make the “most” in the first year doesn’t mean the following years are inconsequential, right? The argument needs to be compelling as to why someone who wasn’t involved in the production of a work deserves to be able to take that income stream for themselves, and divert it away from the creator, without paying or creating anything themselves. I don’t hear that side of the argument.

If I published my own copy of a public domain work I'm not diverting the income stream away from the original creator's estate. Yes I'd be taking some income from it, but the descendants of the author are equally able to do the same. Framing it as of I'd be totally diverting income from the creator is disingenuous.

Besides, I'd still be providing value by taking the time to publish the work and provide it to customers.

I wasn’t talking about taking copies from the public domain, it is you who’s being disingenuous. If I’m alive and I make something people pay for, why should you ever have the right to make and distribute copies of my work without paying me for it? Turn the “me” and “you” around and assume you created the work, and tell me why I should be able to profit from your work, how that is “providing value”?

> Sometimes artists don’t enjoy success for decades, and then it happens long after their most influential work.

I know there are notable examples of this, but they are notable because it's incredibly rare.

No it’s not. It frequently takes a long time for something unknown to get popular. There are thousands upon thousands of albums and artworks and books that didn’t get popular until a decade or two after they were made. Another example you might not be thinking of is software startups take 10 years to get going all the time, and their entire codebase is protected by copyright.

That said, I’m still not hearing a particularly compelling reason why copyrights should revert. Regardless of how long it takes for something to get popular, why should your protections expire such that it becomes legal for me to wholesale copy something you made, and turn around and sell it as if it were mine?

You're talking about inventors laboring a decade or two in obscurity. Not 95 years. By that time the money's been rolling in for three-quarters of a century, perhaps to the grandchildren, never having worked a day in their lives while others toil away for their benefit, simply because of a distant accident of birth. That's the cost of generational wealth. It persists because, by the rules of the money game, the current generation of workers is enslaved by the debt of wealth created in the past.

Having said that, I do agree it's unrealistic to assume that that truly democratic institutions would abolish long copyrights. I think that the majority of people who are invested in this issue imagine that they are just one bestselling book away, one hit song away, one TikTok meme away, from being wealthy creators. The idea that someone else might re-upload and unfairly profit from their own habanero sauce snorting video, that they worked so hard to perfect, is anathema to them.

I have mentioned above I’m in favor of shortening copyrights. I have my reasons, but I’m also asking to hear more compelling and clearly stated reasons than “I want free stuff” or “it’d be better for everyone if things were free” or “it should be free because big media is already rich”.

> I think that the majority of people who are invested in this issue imagine that they are just one bestselling book away […] The idea that someone else might re-upload and unfairly profit from their own habanero sauce snorting video, that they worked so hard to perfect, is anathema to them.

I wouldn’t be quite so glib. The history of copyright, and the state of the debate today, is far more interesting than your assumptions here. First of all, the driving force behind updates to the copyright law in recent years is big business, not TikTok memers. Second, the economic sectors of Information (based on copyright protected code), and of Media and Entertainment (based on copyright protected artwork), are larger than utilities, construction, education, and corporate management combined, for example. This is a large and core part to our economy and not something that is primarily being discussed because of a few artists with little more than hopes and dollar signs in their eyes.

> it’d be better for everyone if things were free

This is compelling for me. Not so I can have free stuff, but because it's beneficial to society to have access to these things without worrying that it's going to vanish. Think about kids in school, there's tons of literature and plays that they can use for free already, but wouldn't it be nice if they could read something more modern that would maybe get them more engaged?

Another argument I hear sometimes is that when you release something to the public, doesn't that in some sense belong to everyone? The original Star Wars trilogy is a significant piece of modern culture, and it hasn't been released in it's original version since 2006. That really doesn't seem right. I'm not necessarily saying it should be public domain right now, but it would be nice to watch it with my grandkids without apologizing for the terrible scenes they added in the 90s.

> but I’m also asking to hear more compelling and clearly stated reasons than [...] “it’d be better for everyone if things were free”

How could anything be a better reason than that?

It's not stealing if it's an idea, if it's just a concept. I am not taking your hard drives, I am not ripping you brain cells out of your brain. I am simply no longer allowing you to restrict my usage of something that you have freely given to me, whether that be a DVD you sold me, or my memory of something you said.

And it's not like I will take all your business just like that. People will still buy from you by default. If people buy from me instead, that means I am providing some value that you are not providing. And that is good for society.

The false idea that you can’t steal copies has already been dealt with multiple times in this comment thread, and it’s addressed directly and rejected by our Copyright law. A compelling argument needs to be able to accept the fact that taking copies is harmful and demonstrate that the good outweighs the harm.

> it’s not like I will take all your business just like that.

Yes it is, that is exactly what happens when copyrights expire, and the debate we’re having is precisely over whether it should be legal to take all of the business because you’re better at marketing than the original creator. If you don’t do it, someone else will, more so now with the internet than ever before.

> People will still buy from you by default

That’s an assumption that doesn’t stand up to a reality check, it’s rare for media that expires copyright and has a revenue stream to continue providing that same revenue in the face of competition. This is exactly why Disney has asked for extensions.

> If people buy from me instead, that means I am providing some value that you are not providing. And that is good for society.

Not automatically it’s not. The easiest “value” to provide is to steal something you didn’t make, and offer it for less money than the original because you don’t have anything to recoup. That’s not good for society, and it’s why copyrights exist in the first place.

"The false idea that you can’t steal copies" alright semantics, semantics. Breach of copyright clearly has negative consequences for the copyright holder. Whether that is because the copyright holder is then being stripped of control, or because the copyright holder simply is no longer allowed to strip others of their control, is up for debate. I hold that the latter is more true.

Copyright is a service that is provided so that you can continue to remotely exert control over something that is no longer in your possession. The fact that you are allowed to control what I do with the thoughts in my brain, and control what I do with what I have legally bought from you, is a temporary favor to incite you to create cool stuff.

And yes, simply selling something at a lower cost/it being free provides value to the people. People will gain access to the media in the most convenient way possible, and spending as little of their money as possible. That's value.

Don't forget, due to the competition it will be a race to the bottom in terms of price. Nobody is going to get rich just off of your creation. The major benefactors will be the buyers, not the sellers.

> The fact that you are allowed to control what I do with the thoughts in my brain, and control what I do with what I have legally bought from you, is a temporary favor to incite you to create cool stuff.

This is a pretty big and hyperbolic straw man that immediately makes it hard to take seriously. Copyright does not control your thoughts. Copyright prevents me from redistributing your work without permission, and nothing more. It has nothing to do with what I think about it or say about it or what you do with your own copies. Copyright does not prevent you from reselling your own copy that you legally bought, nor from doing anything you want with your copy aside from making and distributing new copies to others.

>> People will still buy from you by default

> That’s an assumption that doesn’t stand up to a reality check, it’s rare for media that expires copyright and has a revenue stream to continue providing that same revenue in the face of competition. This is exactly why Disney has asked for extensions.

One interesting thing this reminds me of is the case where due to the publication technology of the day, the quality of the work as available to the general public is significantly inferior as compared to the master copy sitting in the vaults.

If copyright was for example only twenty years and simultaneously releasing a higher quality version of the same work still wouldn't qualify for its own copyright term, would we have seen the various re-releases of older works as newer and better reproduction technology became available? Under that assumption for example, most of the Beatles' albums would have been already out of copyright by the time the first CD re-releases appeared in our timeline.

This might admittedly only be a temporary problem because it can be argued that storage formats eventually will be (or already are) good enough that yet another higher quality re-release won't be necessary in the future (and at least for books without illustrations/pictures/special special typographic features it never really mattered anyway, because unless the print quality was truly dire, the original text can always perfectly be recovered), but at least for the past transitions we've had for audio from vinyl to CDs and generally digital music formats, as well as for video e.g. VHS to DVD to BluRay etc. I'd argue that there was a certain benefit to the public that the holders of the high-quality master copy were motivated (because of continuing copyright) to actually spend the money and do the work of re-releasing those works in a higher quality format.

That logic doesn't work either. Companies that extract profits from IPR provide most of the foundation for financially compensating authors. Almost all of those businesses work on the same portfolio logic as startup investors do: most investments will fail, and the hits subsidize the investments in the duds. You don't know which is which up front. What you do to reduce profits on the hits will come out of the pockets of all authors, not just the superstars.

This argument depends greatly on how much you're shortening copyright. Even if it went back to 30 years, I'm skeptical that it would impact it much. They may still sell, but I doubt publishers are being kept afloat by works that old. Even for the IPs that remain popular they do new things with them to keep the revenue coming.

This logic works, as far as it goes. But it also suggests that there is a large body of work not worth publishing or otherwise capitalizing on that is trapped under IP protections. This a cost to society that is completely unaccounted for in the math folks tend to present when arguing for increased terms. There is a paper[0] that documents this effect to some degree, and it's overall high quality enough that I find the data presented and the reasoning behind it convincing.

From their summary:

> First, a random sample of more than 2000 new books for sale on Amazon.com is analyzed along with a random sample of almost 2000 songs available on new DVD’s. Copyright status correlates highly with absence from the Amazon shelf. Together with publishing business models, copyright law seems to deter distribution and diminish access.

I think identifying and accounting for difficult-to-measure societal costs is key in pushing back on further copyright extensions.

[0]: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works...

I don't support extensions to copyright and am open to supporting cutbacks to terms. The problem I have is with the logic that gets tossed around in these threads, like the idea that there's no point to maintaining copyright after the death of an author (as if the author was the one extracting value from the work in the first place, or that extraction had nothing to do with the compensation the author received), or that copyright is only meaningful to a few breakout hits (as if those hits and the hunt for more of them didn't subsidize all the rest of the authors).

There's a real Chesterton's Fence thing happening in these discussions.

Your point about authors being compensated now for expected income from their works after their death is interesting. You allude to it above, but downthread, you also mention:

> If value can only be extracted while the author draws breath, the market provides much less reward --- for the author, in this lifetime.

I'm completely unaware of this practice! From the reading I've done about how authors get paid (typically for books), authors are paid royalties on sales. Sometimes they get an advance while the book is being written. Magazine/news writing is mostly contract work, unless the writer is employed by the publication, in which case they assign copyright with some author's rights to republish (sometimes).

The model you're suggesting is much more like the stock market: the current stock price is a function of the expected earnings in the future. If I'm following you correctly, you're suggesting that a substantial portion of authors have contracts structured so that they will be paid now for earnings that are predicted to occur, potentially decades in the future. I tried to validate this by reading Author's Guild articles, Cory Doctorow's descriptions of how he sees the industry, and a few other sites that I'm less familiar with, but I wasn't able to. Is Neal Stephenson being paid for copies of Cryptonomicon that haven't yet been sold? If so, I'm astonished. Perhaps you're referring to large advances for well-established authors? That could certainly qualify, but I suspect it only applies to a few authors.

I'm a copyright term minimalist, because when I read through how writers are getting paid (median annual income 2017: $6k, down 42% from 2009)[0], I don't see a problem with the terms of copyright. I see a problem with exposure (Tim O'Reilly's famous "you can't monetize obscurity"), I see a problem with market dominance by Amazon, and I see a problem with publishing houses cutting bad deals to many writers:

> ...the Guild cited the growing dominance of Amazon over the marketplace, lower royalties and advances for mid-list books (which publishers report comes from losses they are forced to pass on), including the extremely low royalties paid on the increasing number of deeply discounted sales and the 25 percent of net ebook royalty. The blockbuster mentality of publishers who grant celebrity writers massive advances and markets them wildly at the expense of the working writers is also certainly a factor.

In fact, copyright is never even mentioned as an issue. It would be a real coincidence of the Disney-fueled Mickey Mouse copyright extensions got it exactly right; I suspect 14/28 years was much closer to the optimal value. But perhaps I'm wrong! I'm very interested in this particular fence, why it was built this way, and how it can be made better.

[0]: https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/authors-guild...

> It would be a real coincidence of the Disney-fueled Mickey Mouse copyright extensions got it exactly right.

There have only been two copyright term extensions in the US that have affected Mickey Mouse, and only one of them could even remotely be called "Disney-fueled".

The Copyright Act of 1976 changed the term from two 28-year term to one 75 year term. The Copyright Extension Act of 1988 added 20 years to that.

The second one is that one that might be called "Disney-fueled".

The 1976 Act was probably supported by Disney but that didn't matter. It had widespread support and very little opposition. This was because it was widely believed that the 1909 Act was very outdated and needed a major overhaul, and that as part of that overhaul the US should align itself better with how copyright worked in most of the rest of the world. The term changes were part of this effort to align with the rest of the world and pave the way for the US to join the Berne Convention.

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