Because you've got it backwards, you have no inherent right to any intellectual property you create, it's a legal fiction. Before copyright was a thing, freely copying and remixing the ideas and stories of others was the default. Once an idea is out there, you have no moral right to tell others they cannot share it.
Copyright is an attempt to give an incentive to people to come up with more good ideas and stories and music, but the default is that they belong to everyone.
I feel like “default is that they belong to everyone” is a framing that doesn’t quite make sense, it’s mis-using the word “belong”. The less loaded way to phrase what you’re saying is that without copyright, there’s nothing preventing someone from copying my work, not that it’s somehow inherently everyone’s property (which is literally to say that it’s no-one’s property.)
However, to answer your question, the reason is right in the linked article… the first order benefit of allowing everyone to copy everything freely makes the world a better place… if everyone can download and read a great book for free, everyone gets a free book and no extra resources are used… that is a lot of utility created.
Of course, the worry is the that the second order effect will be fewer people create works because they can’t support themselves if everyone can just copy their work.
So we create copyright to mitigate that second order effect, but we still want to maximize the first order benefit of as many people getting access as possible… so the best way to do that is to set the copyright term as short as possible so that people are incentivized to create as much work as possible, but still get the benefit of free copying as soon as we can.
As the author points out, no one is going to decide not to create a work just because they know they won’t be able to profit from it in 70 years… if people are still going to want it in 70 years, that means it will be very popular and certainly financially still worth creating even if you can only profit for say, 20 years.
So the tl;dr… we want copyrights to expire because we aren’t incentivizing more creation by having copyrights not expire. Basically, the ideal would be to tune the length to keep being shorter until we see a drop off in output of creative works.
Yes, this is the actual reason that copyrights aren’t infinite. It just seems hand-wavy, full of assumptions, and rather vague as a justification from the creator’s point of view.
What I’m hoping for is the kind of clarity and specificity behind “makes the world a better place” that could actually be used to guide thinking about how long copyrights should last. Right now, the article and this entire comment section feels more like an argument over personal opinions and assumptions, and lacking enough evidence, enough historical understanding of copyright, and enough philosophical rigor to justify a specific number of years.
BTW, I completely disagree with the article’s framing of “first order” and “second order”. They are reversed, as a persuasive tactic, but incorrectly so. The first order effect is the money and content value that changes hands as part of the transaction on offer by a creator. Letting the public at large benefit from free copies is both an economic and a temporal second order effect that doesn’t have tangible value, and comes with some economic harm that requires balancing.
The article is not speaking about the first order benefit of the work being created originally… it is talking about from the perspective of piracy… piracy advocates always make the argument “well the creator doesn’t lose any money when I download the movie, and I get to watch a movie… I win and no one loses, how can that be bad?”
The article is trying to point out that the counterpoint to that is that yes, for the particular work you are downloading that might be true (no one loses and you gain), the second order effect of piracy might be a reduction in creative works being produced.
So what is first order vs second depends on what you are talking about… the creation of the work or the copying. I think it is useful to frame it this way because piracy advocates always start their argument from the work already existing.
I mentioned somewhere else, but Copyright Law already specifically rejects the claim that copying without permission is not hurting the creator. That claim doesn’t hold water when the pirate is enjoying the value of the work, and is ignoring the costs of it’s creation including time. Piracy advocates need to address the history and philosophy of copyright that’s already been debated and decided if the argument is to be taken seriously.
Short of piracy, I’m still left wondering how to decide copyright terms.
It's a bit like a startup. That is: creating the thing isn't the only part - getting people to want it, i.e., finding a market for your product, is intrinsical.
Case in point: Van Gogh. He only became greatly appreciated after his death.
What does that mean for copyright? In this line of reasoning, copyright during life of the creator is reasonable. A work may become a cultural touchstone for ever (Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Bach/Mozart/Beethoven), for one or two generations (Elvis Presley/Cliff Richards[1]), or maybe it becomes simply widely known without being considered an indispensable part of culture (Venga Boys - Boom Boom Boom). During life of the creator, the creator's efforts should be protected and she/he should be allowed time to get her/his creation ingrained in general consciousness. Post-life, the heirs could be allowed some time to reap what was sown - e.g. 10 years, extendible once for 10 years for payment.
As the OP, I'm not saying this is my view on copyright. I am wondering why society should think it owns something I created. "Because others benefit" is insufficient in my opinion: if you're posting on HN, you're in the wealthy half of the world population. Others would benefit if society took half of what you own and distributed its value to those significantly less well off.
I'm in favour of the concept of ownership myself, but I don't see why creative works should be exempt from that.
[1] at one point in time, there was an Elvis vs. Cliff vibe. Possibly strength depending on where you lived (more apparent for UK/EU folks?).
when you look at the Disney animation classic's back catalogue you see an awful lot of work from the commons. does this not display the value of having these works in the commons?
Meanwhile, if you rolled back the last two big extensions --- CTEA and the Berne-joining Copyright Act of '76 --- and brought us back to 1909, you'd still have 60 year terms. I'd flip the argument around and claim that no copyright opponent on HN would accept 60 years either. So what are we arguing about? Does term have anything real to do with this?
The question I was answering is if we have copyright at all, why shouldn’t it be infinite in length? The answer is that the incentive copyright provides to creators has diminishing returns, and eventually provides no extra incentive… how long that period actually is is not obvious, but it is likely somewhere way before 95 years. And since society gets a benefit when works enter public domain, society has an incentive to try to set the length of time as short as possible while maintaining the incentive to create.
I am not trying to argue for an exact length of time, just explaining why we don’t want it to be forever.
Someone probably could get industry numbers for how much publishers make on copyright older than 50 years… and with the time discount for 50 years of not having the money to use for other purposes… and see how much each creator gets in the star-search lottery
If you share with society should you be able to control other people's use of it?
How does that benefit society? Remember the rules are enforced by society and need to serve society.
Patents and copyright go hand-in-hand in protecting ideas. But patents last 20 years.
That’s just circular, not a reason. The explanation & philosophy behind limited terms isn’t justified with “because it was designed with limited terms”. The rationale was stated in the article, and is written into copyright law. I don’t have any beef with your opinion, but so far it’s only an opinion and not backed up by clear reasoning or evidence. 25 years is shorter than copyright has ever been in the US, even in 1790, more than 200 years ago.
If you believe creator lifetime is too long, part of the question is whether you would really stick to that if you were making money from your own work. Imagine, if you will, that you write software for your employer. Your software is currently protected by copyrights. But if that software copyright protection expires in 25 years, then any software you write can be legally taken by a brand new startup that doesn’t write code, it only sells code other people wrote, even using other people’s marketing material, including videos and imagery your company built. They offer your product for cheaper than your employer can, because their operating expenses are one hundredth of yours. Can your product & employer survive this, will your job last? If your job were actually on the line and might disappear suddenly anytime the company you work for has their work expire, do you still stick to your opinion that 25 years is enough?
> That’s just circular, not a reason.
Oh, sure -- but no more circular than:
>>> I was talking about within a society that already has copyright. Let me ask it another way: assuming that we have a copyright system, why should my copyrights ever expire?
...now is it? The obvious counter-question is, why should you have any copyright at all; why should we assume that we have a copyright system in the first place?
> The explanation & philosophy behind limited terms isn’t justified with “because it was designed with limited terms”
No, exactly. So, as the article says: Limited terms are a practical compromise between the per se equally unjustifiable extremes of "no copyright at all" and "eternal copyright". So what's the use of even asking for some principled a-priori-rationable reason in response to an article that explains why precisely that is not attainable?
Trademarks are also different from copyright. It gets complicated, but you shouldn't be able to do confusing things with them.
Because copyright exists for a reason, not by nature. Assume we have a copyright system, sure. We've got one. The thing is that people made that system. Why did they do it? What was the reasoning for making that system, and is the current system still functioning the way we wanted it to function when we created it?
We can't completely ignore the reason why copyright exists, because copyright isn't real. Copyright isn't a right, there's no natural moral reason to for it to exist, it's not a property right and there's no coherent framing of copyright as a property right that makes sense when examined with the same rigor that we use to examine other property rights. Copying an idea doesn't deprive anyone else of anything other than a monopoly over other people's behaviors, which is not something that we usually care about when talking about natural rights.
We don't claim that inventing a better mousetrap is violence because it puts the old mousetrap makers out of business, so there's no good way to phrase "a monopoly over profits" as a natural right that people are morally entitled to. And the more we go down that road (independent invention, the fact that copyright can't exist without a public domain because very little of what we create is original, etc, etc...) -- we just keep finding problems and situations where copyright doesn't make sense as a moral right.
But there's an even bigger problem: it's not just that copyright isn't a moral right, copyright is also a restriction on the rights of culture itself. One of the most human things in the world that you'll find in every culture is that human beings share things with each other: ideas, stories, thoughts, and emotions. Copyright restricts people's freedom to share ideas, to fix their problems, and to exercise their own autonomy. It also intrudes into the free market, allowing emerging monopolies over content, and allows content to be weaponized to manipulate other parts of the market. It also restricts the collective autonomy of a culture to define itself and and to define its own cultural language.
However, despite all of these problems copyright is also a very convenient way to make sure artists get paid for the things they make. This is why humans invented it.
So the question becomes: given that copyright is a pragmatic restriction of both individual and cultural rights, are we going just far enough to make sure that artists get paid and that they're incentivized to make new art, or are we going farther than that and restricting people unnecessarily?
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> The less loaded way to phrase what you’re saying is that without copyright, there’s nothing preventing someone from copying my work, not that it’s somehow inherently everyone’s property (which is literally to say that it’s no-one’s property.)
To be clear, I am not in the first camp. I would say that no one has a moral claim over an idea, you can not logically own a thought or a story, and I don't think that is a way of looking at the world that stands up to scrutiny. I would not say copyright is just the way that society protects your idea, I would say that an idea is literally "no-one's property", the latter part of your sentence is correct.
I'll kind of issue the same challenge back to you in the opposite direction: I have heard moral arguments for copyright based on ideals of fairness or out of people deserving compensation when they help society. Some of those make sense, that's stuff we care about. However, I have never heard an internally consistent explanation of how someone can inherently own an idea that stands up to scrutiny in the real world; IP as a natural property right doesn't make sense either from a Libertarian/Anarchist perspective or from a Collectivist/Communist perspective, it's kind of amazing how many different worldviews it clashes with.
There's a huge amount of work that has been put into the phrasing of copyright and IP as "property" and "right", the names aren't accidental. But it's just pure propaganda, it's phrased that way so it sounds better to you. Copyright is a purely pragmatic invention designed to encourage production and to compensate artists. It has the same moral weight as any other administrative law we've invented: that is to say important and beneficial and worth having around, but only important in so-far as it accomplishes its original goal. Past that point, IP is an abridgement of actual natural rights to things like free speech, cultural exchange, and even (when we get the DMCA involved) actual property rights to tamper with and inspect products that people actually own.
There are decent arguments for multiple different copyright policies in multiple directions. But most of the decent arguments are based around pragmatism and policy (whether or not copyright is actually accomplishing its goals in its current form); they're rarely based around some kind of mythological right people should have to control everyone else's ability to imitate them or share information freely.
What we're discussing here is a right that's been baked into American law since its creation; it's not a random idea Sonny Bono had in 1997.
Also, IP law is relatively recent in American law which originates from England and France. Originally copyright only protected works from authors inside the country was only extended to foreign works in 1891 making it roughly half the age of the US.
To say that in the natural world people don't always have their rights guaranteed does not mean that Senator age requirements are in the same category of Right as a Right to a fair trial. One of those is a moral right and one of them is an administrative policy.
The age of copyright in the relation to the US is kind of weird debate to have, because in general we would want to look considerably earlier than the formation of the US to talk about moral rights, or at least we would want to look at arguments outside of the Constitution to try and figure out whether Copyright is a moral right or a pragmatic policy.
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All we really get from the Constitution is:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Which just leads to more endless debate over what "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" actually means, and whether a government right to regulate something is the same as an individual right/entitlement to a specific regulatory outcome (usually we don't treat those two things as the same). And we can go down that rabbit hole of what the founders intended, but in some ways that debate almost doesn't even matter when we get into what people are morally entitled to, because if the argument is that copyright is a natural property right that people are morally entitled to, that argument shouldn't boil down to "Jefferson thought so."
Looking at what the founders intended really only matters if copyright isn't a moral right, it matters if it's a policy designed to produce an outcome because then we can look at intent and see if the policy is producing the desired outcome. If people want to argue that they're morally entitled to a monopoly on pieces of culture, then they need a much stronger argument for that position.
What does that mean though? If you want to claim that copyright is a moral right, saying that it was invented early on in American history isn't a good enough argument to justify that. Lots of things were invented early on in American history that are not moral rights, they're just useful policies.
The US Constitution includes language like:
> [Senators and Representatives] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
No one would seriously claim that this means the Constitution is arguing that people have an inherent right not to be prosecuted while they're at a government job. It's a practical policy we put in place for practical reasons that should be examined through that lens.
And copyright is the same. The fact that the US Government reserves for itself the right to regulate commerce/sharing around ideas/inventions does not confer any moral right to any individual to have a monopoly over ideas. It merely gives Congress the right to establish that monopoly as it sees fit.
And as I just said it only recognized works created in the US and therefore didn’t represent any recognition of copyright as some universal fact. It was a relatively ad hock compromise extending some at the time recent developments in English law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...
The article explained how limited copyright is a useful incentive apart from any moral view. And it explained how the term affects the costs.
You describe this as something positive without considering that it was basically impossible to survive as an author (or any other creative professional) before copyright existed unless you had a rich patron sponsoring you (who obviously had his own agenda) or were independently wealthy. It wasn't really feasible to make a living by selling your work to actual consumers. I mean just look at Cervantes one of the most popular writers in Europe at the time who died in relative poverty and obscurity and who was basically only able to write and publish what he did because he found a rich nobleman willing to finance him.
Because Mickey mouse is just a mouse and Frankenstein is "the modern Prometheus" and Star Wars is a western movie where "Lucas has said that the plot and characters in the 1958 Japanese film The Hidden Fortress, directed by Akira Kurosawa, was a major inspiration" (Star Wars came out only 19 years later, in 1977)
nothing we create is "ours" let alone forever...
There's an argument on incentives, if copyright ends after say 20 years, media companies could simply wait 20 years to use the content for free, it's possible, but I don't think it's probable.
I imagine a system where if the publisher makes a lot more money (with a lot to be defined) than the original author made before the creation went public domain, then they could be forced to compensate the original author.
I would thank the Gods because they gave me a second chance when nobody, including me, expected it and probably other books of mine would be rediscovered as well and I would be contacted to write something new.
The point is that after 20 years of producing zero income, anyone would lose interest and if it gets a sudden popularity it's probably someone else's merit.
But we are talking about extremely rare conditions.
What if you buy a house and sell it the day before its price skyrocket?
What if you buy stocks and the day after you sell them they go up 10x?
You the author have moral rights over the creation, you'll always be the author, but your rights to an economic compensation over something you created should be limited in time.
Especially because most of the time economic rights are sold to entities that only care about profiting from the IPs and nothing else.
Publishing a book it's much like publishing an opensource projects, once it's out, it's out, it's no longer yours.
A friend of mine is a popular comic book writer in my country, he has been publishing comics for over 20 years, growing his audience over a long span of time. When he suddenly had a spike in popularity, the first thing he did was to publish a collection of all his past works, sell it and make a profit (the comics are all still free on the web for those who wonna read them without paying)
He is the author and controls the source material, he owns all the originals he owns (and wrote) all the scripts, they have great value even if the copyright was hypothetically expired.
But let's look at it from another angle: what if an unknown book becomes popular 25 years after the author wrote it, because someone saw a great potential in it, a potential that 25 years before wasn't even there and adapted it to make it resonate with the present?
Think about disaster stories about climate change or a pandemic, they are much more popular now than 25 years ago.
Isn't it the person who did the research and found the book in the first place the real protagonist of this story?
Should the author be compensated because there was an outbreak?
On the other hand, if you want to adapt a story, wouldn't you contact the original author first?
Publishing something that becomes a hit it's always worth it, even if your economic rights on it have expired.
I don't see how are these in any way equivalent unless I made an explicit choice to renounce (e.g. by selling it) the ownership of my work unless I was actually legally forced to sell my house 20 years after I bought regardless if I want to or not.
> Publishing something that becomes a hit it's always worth it, even if your economic rights on it have expired.
But the the author would likely not be the one profiting the most or at all in this case compared to large publishers and other corporations.
Talking about the rarity of such situation the Witcher series is a pretty good example. The books were modestly successful in Poland and other Centre or East European countries and only became internationally popular after the video games released. While it did not took exactly 20 years (between 18 and 23 years for individual books) for the series to be translated to English let's assume for the sake of argument the copyright would had expired by then. So the publishing companies that published these books in English would have been able to keep 100% of the profits and wouldn't be required to compensate the author in any way. How is that fair? And how does that benefit anyone besides the international corporations which own these publishing companies? Especially considering that it inherently disadvantages authors writing in languages other English (or any other language with a huge market). Publishers could just wait 20 years before copyright expires before translating anything and avoid paying royalties to the author.
Basically how I see it, you're proposing that companies or individuals that are better capable at monetizing someone else's work should have the right to not compensate the author and keep all the profits for themselves. Which is both unfair and disincentivizes creating new content in the first place. Why create something new when you can take something someone else wrote/created in the past improve it and/or invest more into marketing or distribution mechanisms than the original author was able and sell it for a profit. I mean Disney is successful not because they own the copyright of some old movies featuring Mickey Mouse but because they have the capital, the brand and know-how required to create successful new movies and these factor would make large corporations even more dominant if they could just legally make movies/other content based on books or script for free as long they waited for 20/X years (instead of having to wait until the Author dies + X years).
you asked WHAT IF
it is not like that right now, and it's wrong IMO
> But the the author would likely not be the one profiting the most or at all in this case compared to large publishers and other corporations.
so, what are you exactly arguing about?
> Basically how I see it, you're proposing that companies or individuals that are better capable at monetizing someone else's work should have the right to not compensate the author and keep all the profits for themselves
That's exactly how it is now.
And it lasts a century (more or less)
Do you really think that authors are paid in percentage of the publisher's profits?
The majority of them get paid once when they sell their rights, and that's it.
Usually it's not even a large amount.
But you got it completely backwards, what I wrote is
I imagine a system where if the publisher makes a lot more money (with a lot to be defined) than the original author made before the creation went public domain, then __they could be forced to compensate the original author__
> So the publishing companies that published these books in English would have been able to keep 100% of the profits and wouldn't be required to compensate the author in any way. How is that fair?
That's exactly what everyone gets wrong.
They bought the rights for a relatively unknown story paying peanuts, made it big and profited.
Do you really believe they paid a lot of money for something that was relatively obscure even in Poland?
Do you really believe that the Witcher could become a HIT on its own merits?
Shortening the life of copyright would make this hoarding practices useless, because everybody could make a Witcher after 20 years, now nobody can, because whoever bought the rights will keep renewing them for a century.
> I mean Disney is successful not because they own the copyright of some old movies featuring Mickey Mouse but because they have the capital
No it's because Mickey mouse is a trademark and they will sue everyone who tries to create whatever fictional mouse.
So other large corporations will make a pre-deal with Disney to be safe and smaller ones will avoid the mouse thing entirely.
If it really wasn't so important, why spend so much money to defend it?
Life long copyright is the root of all evil in the publishing/entertainment business.
For books authors generally get a percentage of revenue (with some caveats) which is even better.
> They bought the rights for a relatively unknown story paying peanuts, made it big and profited.
I assume the the author still made a lot of money from increased book sales.
> Do you really believe that the Witcher could become a HIT on its own merits?
If it was written in English then perhaps.
> I imagine a system where if the publisher makes a lot more money (with a lot to be defined) than the original author made before the creation went public domain, then __they could be forced to compensate the original author__
Sorry I think I missed this bit. However again this would only benefit the publisher and not the author until the threshold is reached. After it's reached I assume authors would get something similar to what they get under the current system?
I'm not completely against having some compensation mechanism similar to books royalties for derived works like games or movies under which would be entitled to receive some % of revenue as opposed to whatever they have negotiated with the studio in advance. However I'm afraid this would disincentivize studios from making on movies based on less successful/well-known books altogether.
> Shortening the life of copyright would make this hoarding practices useless, because everybody could make a Witcher after 20 years, now nobody can, because whoever bought the rights will keep renewing them for a century.
Is that a necessarily positive outcome? Even if you don't believe that authors should have the right to excise creative control over their work why is it any better for the society if anyone can freely make movies, games or sequels based on the Witcher universe?
Even if is, wouldn't it better to ban or limit the exclusivity clause in contracts rather ban copyright all together? (e.g. Authors could have the right to sell their rights to multiple companies or any contract would legally be limited to fixed numbers of years after which the author would be able to resell them someone else)
>No it's because Mickey mouse is a trademark and they will sue everyone who tries to create whatever fictional mouse.
Unless you're suggesting that trademarks should be abolished as well Disney will still be able to do that.
>Life long copyright is the root of all evil in the publishing/entertainment business.
I disagree, I think overall it's one of the main reasons the current publishing/entertainment industry even exists and the world would have been a much bleaker place without it. I mean yes corporations often abuse the current system and it's flawed in many ways but throwing it out of the window and introducing an arbitrary 20 year (or any other fixed limit) would just further disadvantage individual authors without solving any actual problems.
Yes and it's very small.
Like less than 10%
You make more money by autoproducing.
Very few authors make money with books.
> Is that a necessarily positive outcome? Even if you don't believe that authors should have the right to excise creative control over their work
Please, stop using this false dichotomy and to pur words in my mouth.
You have to stop talking like what you're saying is true, what is true and what usually happens is Felix Salten that sells the story of Bambi to a movie director for a thousand dollars, the director then sell it to Disney, Disney wins 4 oscars and makes a pile of money out of it while Salten dies alone in Zurich few years later without even being mentioned in the Disney movie.
The English translation has also a complete different meaning than the original German one. Talking about creative control...
The story of the copyright of Bambi is interesting because after Salten death his daughter fought for the rights and after a few controversial rulings, her husband, that continued after Salten's daughter's death, won.
But that means two things
- nobody knows what the original author would have wanted, but others that never wrote a single line of the book claimed the rights
- with that ruling the US courts basically said that as long as someone renew the copyright, it can well be ethernal, there is no need to be authors, there is no right to creative control (which is granted BTW for being the author, that has nothing to do with copyright, you conflate the two things constantly) it's all about the money
In the end those holding the copyrights most of the times are not the authors, Disney wrote none of the stories that made him rich and famous.
So the rethoric about poor authors not being compensated it's completely fabricated, it's already happening, it always happened.
It's the "think of the children" of the publishing world.
Yes and it's very small.
Like less than 10%
You make more money by autoproducing.
Very few authors make money with books.
> Is that a necessarily positive outcome? Even if you don't believe that authors should have the right to excise creative control over their work
Please, stop using this false dichotomy and to pur words in my mouth.
You have to stop talking like what you're saying is true, what is true and what usually happens is Felix Salten that sells the story of Bambi to a movie director for a thousand dollars, the director then sell it to Disney, Disney wins 4 oscars and makes a pile of money out of it while Salten dies alone in Zurich few years later without even being mentioned in the Disney movie.
The English translation has also a complete different meaning than the original German one. Talking about creative control...
The story of the copyright of Bambi is interesting because after Salten death his daughter fought for the rights and after a few controversial rulings, her husband, that continued after Salten's daughter's death, won.
But that means two things
- nobody knows what the original author would have wanted, but others that never wrote a single line of the book claimed the rights
- with that ruling the US courts basically said that as long as someone renew the copyright, it can well be ethernal, there is no need to be authors, there is no right to creative control (which is granted BTW for being the author, that has nothing to do with copyright, you conflate the two things constantly) it's all about the money
In the end those holding the copyrights most of the times are not the authors, Disney wrote none of the stories that made him rich and famous.
So the rethoric about poor authors not being compensated it's completely fabricated, it's already happening, it always happened.
It's the "think of the children" of the publishing world.
Actual copyright laws made nothing to prevent it while also making it close to impossible for many authors to innovate over the existing material, that's why we see only (kinda boring) superheroes movies nowadays and to see something different we have to watch South Korean productions
I'm also not hurting anyone by making copies of things, the only negative side-effect is that the creator might make less money. On the other hand, the fact that it's illegal to make modified versions of copyrighted works, or to send them to my friends, has been a significant inconvenience in my life and to my creativity. Money for the author is important, and we make concessions for that by having copyright, but in the absence of anything else the default ought to be freedom, not copyright.
I'd go for 20 years of copyright by default, with the option of renewing up to 50 years, which ought to be long enough for the creator to make their money.
As an aside, I don't care if others sell copies of my work, that's why I prefer to release it under open-source licenses or into the public domain directly.
This is not true, and this is codified into copyright law already. A discussion of copyright cannot continue past this point until it’s understood and agreed that using others’ work without permission comes with multiple kinds of social harm. People can be and have been sued for breach of copyright without either making a financial gain nor taking away from the creator’s financial gain. It’s fundamentally damaging because it’s not yours to copy and distribute, and there are reasons beyond money why, including a variety of ways it can affect your reputation. The law has only been getting more clear on this point that nobody should have to justify why they wish to reserve all rights and not allow others to take their work, which is why copyrights became default-on for everything created, and no longer requires registration.
> I don’t care if others sell copies of my work
This is great! This must mean that your income doesn’t depend on your creative work, right? It’s important to fully understand that many people do care, not only if others resell their works, but they care deeply if others even redistribute their work.
20 + 50 seems like it could be reasonable-ish to me but how do you arrive at that “ought to be long enough to make their money”? How long does it take, on average, for creators including all the non-Disney entities? Given that this has to work well on balance for everyone. Why should it even matter how long it takes for a creator to “make their money”?
I don't think I understand in what ways it can be damaging to reputation. Maybe you mean if I pretended to be the original author? Because in that case I think it's a different issue than copyright. You can have no copyright but still have laws about proper disclaimers and proper attribution, and I'd be in favor of that. I don't care if I have to clearly and explicitly label all my derivative works as a "fanwork", so long as I'm allowed to legally make and distribute them at all.
Other than that, you mentioned "multiple kinds of social harm". But I'm looking through your other comments on this submission, and the only other place where I've found where you explicitly state a harm is here:
> That claim doesn’t hold water when the pirate is enjoying the value of the work, and is ignoring the costs of it’s creation including time.
Which as far as I can tell is just the money issue again. Sorry if I missed another harm that you mentioned, but for now as far as I can tell every harm is either money, or a harm which can be addressed by much less restrictive laws than copyright.
Now, assuming that money is the only harm of copying, which is what I believe, then it's the only issue that copyright needs to deal with. And given that copyright has harms of its own, both socially and with respect to freedom*, then once money is dealt with I think the copyright should be removed.
So then it becomes a debate on what would be a "reasonable" copyright, which would mostly avoid the "money" harm, while also mostly avoiding the harms of copyright itself. I don't think it makes sense to reward children for their parents' creation (except insofar as they might inherit money that the parent has already earned), so I think anything longer than life is already much too long.
I think 50 is more than enough, since someone making a work at 20 will be able to receive income from it until they're 70, which is almost their entire life. I think it's very rare that a work will make no money for the first 50 years but then suddenly start making money, but even in that case the author will probably have already moved on, made more works and/or made money in other ways by then, so at that point the monetary harm is less important.
I'm in favor of requiring manually registering to extend copyright past 20 because I think most works will never make money and are not intended to make money (most memes, for example), so those works should become public domain faster. I also think that most works that make money will have started doing so in the first 20 years, so it will be rare that a money-making work will unintentionally enter the public domain after 20 years.
I'll note that I'm less confident about registration than about shorter copyright. However, I view the "manual registration" as a compromise, so if we removed it and just went for a flat number of years, I would advocate for less than 50 years, maybe 30 or 40.
(*I think it's a restriction on my freedom that I have things in my head which I can't use. It wouldn't be realistic to argue that I should avoid looking at any copyrighted material my entire life, and as long as I can't feasibly do that and still take part in society, I will have ideas derived from copyrighted works and be unable to legally act on them)
Edit: I should also address startups and corporations making software. In that case, 50 years is already quite long, and the software almost never stays exactly as it is, it evolves. And every new change will last another 20-50 years. So you'll only be able to use version 20-50 years out of date, so in almost all cases the corporation will still have their competitive edge.
This is exposing your assumptions, biases, and lack of complete understanding of copyright and the history of copyright. It doesn’t take long to find examples of reputational damage if you search it, nor is it hard to imagine some, so it seems clear you haven’t even tried.
Reputational damage that can affect a creator’s entire business includes, but is not limited to: someone distributing lower quality copies, leading to a reputation of low quality; someone distributing cheaper copies, leading to a reputation of being too expensive; many people distributing slightly changed works, leading to a reputation of stylistic abundance, non-exclusivity, or non-uniqueness. Plagiarism is different than copyright, but there absolutely is overlap, and making derivative works that contain large sizeable portions is a gray area where the derivative author can legally take credit and give the impression that they authored all of the work when they didn’t.
The rest of your comment is elaborating on your opinions without providing any of the justification I asked for. What makes you qualified to opine on how long it takes for a creator to make “enough money”? What makes you qualified to decide that a certain amount of monetary harm is “less important”? I don’t care how many years you think feels good to you; I’m asking for an evidence based demonstration that it’s the right number for society, or a strong argument for why that shouldn’t be the criteria. Neither of those is easy, but you haven’t even broached them.
And someone selling copies cheaper might give you a reputation for being too expensive, but a) that's the money issue again, and b) this can only happen after 20-50 years, at which point you've had plenty of time to build your business, and c) even after 20-50 years, you only have a problem if you were completely stagnant, because any new changes you made to the work will last 20-50 years after the most recent change.
If you don't think that this solution is sufficient, then it would seem that we've found the main point of disagreement.
You also asked:
> What makes you qualified to opine on how long it takes for a creator to make “enough money”? What makes you qualified to decide that a certain amount of monetary harm is “less important”?
The way I answer these questions is by viewing money as a means to an end. I think money only matters insofar as it positively or negatively affects someone's life, so to me the question is, "to what extent is this person negatively impacted by less money 20-50 years later, compared to everyone who is negatively impacted by the restrictions on their actions?"
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As for the rest of my comment, I was elaborating on my opinions, yes. And yes, these opinions are largely based on what seems reasonable to me. I don't have the desire nor time to do a thorough study to find the actually correct number of years, and even if I did, the question is sufficiently complicated that I expect that there would still be a lot of uncertainty left even after thorough research. In addition, since it's partially a moral issue, gut feeling will always be a necessary component of this.
Finally, your original question wasn't about concrete numbers, merely persuasiveness:
> But, devil’s advocate, I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive. Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it?
So I don't feel bad about explaining my own point of view, which is persuasive to me even if not to you, as an attempt to answer that question.
In actuality, the reason it doesn't work like you'd expect is because "the people" are separate from "the government", and it doesn't actually cost much to maintain copyright. But there are a bunch of interested parties in getting to keep monopolies on copying for long periods of time.
But yeah, the reason they shouldn't last forever is because they are relatively expensive to maintain, and some great works can come from public domain stories (case in point, the lovable Mouse who used Grimm's fairy tales as the basis for all of it's most profitable works). Life of author? Definitely. But if the author assigns rights to a corporation? Probably shouldn't allow it to extend 200 years or whatever Disney is up to. Disney won't die, so there is no natural end to the monopoly, and Disney has also proven that they aren't interested in branching out to new stories (perhaps because us humans like the old ones so much).
A reasonable copyright in a digital age is probably something like life of the author, or 25 years after transfer to a corporation. This still effectively provides 75+ years of protection for most works, but then the author gets more say (because transfer of ownership can't happen without giving up monopoly rights sooner), and things like film and games and such aren't locked up for hundreds of years, as it would be surprising to have them owned by a human.
You have! Then just don't publish/share/release it. Take it physically to your grave.
Once you publish it, I also have the "natural ability" to record it. Copyright limits my ability to record/reuse what I technically can by what is allowed. Copyright, and other IP rights have been sold as to give the original creators some head start which would make investing in such works more easy, in the end leading to a more rich commons for everyone.
That means short copyright, just enough to increase innovation.
> but here have somehow derived an innate right to record and reproduce anything you technically can
No, that's not a right, that just a technical ability. Copyright outlaw that ability.
> to artificially restrict that innate right in order to incentivize people to author new works.
Exactly that is what all IP law does imho.
Your special effort or unique inspiration may indeed produce something valuable - and it is just that you, the individual, be rewarded for that value.
But it is also just to recognize that your ability to produce anything useful is built on the efforts and insights of countless others, most whom you have long forgotten or are long dead. The vast majority will receive no recompense for their part in your success, particularly (in my experience) the most deserving.
So it seems to me that to demand a reward at the moment of inspiration may be fitting, but the longer a society enforces an exclusive reward for ideas inevitably built on the back of the entire community, the more likely that enforcement has made the transition from something just to something unjust.
Pontificating aside, the current system makes me sad.
The big extensions came in the mid-70s and late 90s, well within living memory. According to your own link they nearly doubled the average duration and pushed it over 100 years.
> What’s the compelling argument for them to exist as is?
You’re asking why does copyright exist?
I don't see why being the first to come up with something means it has to be yours infinitely. Most research can be duplicated. 10, 20, 30 or more years of exclusivity, sure, I see the logic in that. But if you truly invented something novel and can't monetize it within a few decades, you're doing something wrong.
I also think about the electronic music scene and how it freely remixes older songs from the 1970s etc. Imagine if that never existed.
Let’s not pretend that Star Wars is as important as the Polio vaccine, or that we aren’t able to differentiate between artworks and medical technology. We can and do already have exceptions to the copyright law that allow for important social uses, so I don’t buy this argument.
> I don’t see why being the first to come up with something means it has to be your infinitely.
This doesn’t answer the question of why someone else should be able to take what I created for their own personal gain.
A lot of song remixing falls under Fair Use Copyright Law. Some of it doesn’t, and even if we like it, maybe shouldn’t be allowed. The question at hand is at what time can I just copy your entire album verbatim and sell it for my own profit, unmodified. That’s what copyright expiring enables.
I think this misses the point that parent is making. The ordinary protection period of a patent is just a couple of decades (not only for specific exceptions), and that seems to be sufficient. The goal of each system is to encourage creative qodk. We still get plenty of inventions. So why should the ordinary term of copyright monopoly be so much longer than the term of patent monopoly?
> This doesn’t answer the question of why someone else should be able to take what I created for their own personal gain.
This feels like a shifting of the burden. Shouldn't the system of intellectual property be the thing that needs to justify itself, rather than the other way around? Copyright isn't a natural state, it involves paying the courts and police for enforcement, giving them additional powers, criminalizing additional activities, etc... People can go to prison for violating the set of rules copyright sets up. Every such system needs to have good reasons for it's existence that outweigh the problems caused by the system, so the conversation should be more nuanced than "why should you get to copy X without paying for it?"
I don’t, it’s important to clearly differentiate between patents and copyrights, and parent’s example was discussing patents and not copyrights in the context of a discussion purely about copyrights. The reason patent terms are shorter is because patent inventions are considered more important to release into society in a timely manner than works of art. It makes plenty of sense that the business case for music and books and other individual personal or creative works might often take much longer than for, say, industrial corporations. There are hardly any solo inventors actively getting patents compared to the vast number of people creating music and art.
> Shouldn’t the system of intellectual property be the thing that needs to justify itself
It already is justified, and the article re-iterated those justifications while arguing clumsily (IMO) for shorter terms. I’m not debating whether we should have copyrights. I’m just exploring and curious about how to justify any given balance point, and how to reason more clearly about terms. It’s not that easy, and can’t be as quickly stated as many many people seem to assume. People are just throwing around numbers that “feel” good to them, not because they’re aware of the history of media and IP and the many varied problems and experiences people have had.
> I don’t, it’s important to clearly differentiate between patents and copyrights
Why?
The distinction seems quite artificial to me -- "intellectual property" is "intellectual property", isn't it? -- so IMO its proponents own the burden of justifying it.
Then surely the protection for silly Western-in-space films should be shorter than that for important medical breakthroughs, not considerably longer as it is now?
Those exceptions only cover a small fraction of the important social uses you get from public domain works.
To take thing further, there are various takes on personal property, with broad acceptance that yes, personal property should (gradually) revert to the public (taxes), otherwise very bad things happen (see inequality). Some societies do not have personal property beyond some personal items. Property/ownership has vast negative consequences (exacerbating greed, poverty, starvation, mass suffering; many wars are fought for property), though I'd agree it is in many ways better than alternatives, especially if the state and taxation dulls some of the sharp edges.
¹ By default. We may argue to what extent some restrictions may be reasonable as an imperfect way to achieve a certain goal.
It is, and not just because it is in the name. It is the right to exclude people from a defined set of actions with regard to a defined subject, which is exactly what property is.
(Now, you may think it is not, in your value system, the kind of thing in which property rights naturally exist, and it's pretty clear that the authors of the copyright clause were at least sympathetic to this for the kinds of IP it authorized, which are limited in scope and to advance a defined public purpose.)
That is not what property is.
Ownership of property is the right to decide how a good will be consumed (i.e., used up). It means that the property owner can consume the good without needing anyone else's permission, and conversely that anyone else requires the owner's permission to take any action with regard to the good which would result in its consumption—whether temporarily or permanently. However, this limited exclusivity is a consequence of scarcity, and not central to the definition of property. If someone else can can derive some benefit from the property—for example, by painting a picture of someone else's house—without interfering with the owner's use, they are perfectly free to do so, as this does not involve consuming the good, and the owners' rights remain intact.
Only scarce, rivalrous goods are subject to being used up. Superabundant goods, which includes everything to which copyright and patent rules might apply, cannot be consumed, even temporarily. One person's use of or benefit from the copyrighted work or patented process does not interfere with anyone else using or benefiting from the same work or process. As such, there is nothing here to which the concept of ownership may be applied.
No, the ability to exclude others is exactly what property is.
> Ownership of property is the right to decide how a good will be consumed
Exclusivity is the defining feature of property interests. It's true that there is a common view of rights to consumption and alienation as dividing those property interests that constitute “ownership of property” (that is, ownership of the subject of a property interest) from those that are mere “ownership of an interest in property”, but that's not germane to whether or not IP is property though it might be to whether the subjects of IP are genuinely “owned” by the private holders of IP rights.
Even if you do stretch the definition of property to include copyrights and patents, however, the fact remains that these are non-rivalrous goods, which implies that you are not harmed when someone else ignores your claim to exclusivity. No response involving force (including fines, imprisonment, etc.) could ever be proportional to the supposed offense, which means this is a "right" you cannot justly enforce.
Exclusivity, and the ability to justly enforce it, are common characteristics of property exactly because most of the things people try to classify as property are scarce and rivalrous. You can try to extend the definition to include things which are neither scarce nor rivalrous, but if you do so then the justification for enforcing property rights no longer applies to all such "property". At that point you've accomplished little beyond turning the word "property" into a useless label that could be applied to almost anything and which does not imply anything about the rights of the property owner.
Overlong copyright terms lead to what we have now, where digital libraries either ignore copyright law (libgen, scihub), or have the best features of ebooks (easy copying and transmission, access from all regions of the world, unlimited simultaneous readers, etc.) crippled by DRM, or have limited collections of works by living authors, or are locked behind paywalls (Elsevier.)
Copyright law could provide a time-limited monopoly on copying that is a reasonable balance of public benefit with incentives for authors to create additional works, but currently it does not and harms both purposes.
I expect many authors are less concerned with verbatim copies of their works being distributed than for derivative works or adaptations being distributed. Perhaps copyright should be split a bit more finely.