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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45

Write more best sellers then.

> So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me.

Yeah, of course a life+20 year monopoly on bits is great. For you. Instead of sitting down and working on more books so humanity can benefit, you get to sit down and collect rent from your past successes until you die. And then your children get to collect that rent for 20 years. You only need to strike gold once to be set for life and provide for children too.

Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? It shouldn't. The social contract was "we'll pretend we can't easily copy this stuff so you can make money for a few years before it enters the public domain". This life time monopoly bullshit is a clear violation of this contract. A society whose public domain rights were robbed has zero incentive not to use libgen for everything.

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> Write more best sellers then.

Come on, that’s flippant response to a valid point. Best-sellers are a function of luck. Copyright laws are intended to encourage more creative output by offering original work some protection. Suggesting that individual authors should have less protection and pump out more work and just get lucky isn’t realistic.

> Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking?

Calling it absurd and being outraged and incredulous weakens your argument here, when this has been established over centuries (millennia arguably) by many many smart people.

The rent-seeking, as you call it, provides two functions: 1) to allow time for authors to collect returns on their creativity and time investment, and 2) to act as a force to encourage more creative output from society. The limited time monopoly that authors enjoy is the reason that it becomes an incentive to create new work. It should be attractive to author new things and unattractive to steal and publish others’ work. If you make the protection period too short, it won’t work, it won’t be an incentive, it will become a disincentive and we’ll get both artists going broke and less creative work and more stealing. (There are countries in the world today with weaker copyright laws than the US that already exhibit high rates of IP theft and low rates of original creative output.) I don’t know what social contract you’re referring to, but since copyright is the law, it is the de facto contract today.

> Come on, that’s flippant response to a valid point.

It's the best I can do when faced with people who feel entitled to lifetime and posthumous rent for doing a bit of intelectual work. I mean, there's an artist in the comments lower on this page who wants up to lifetime+100 years of rent seeking for him, his children and his grand children to enjoy.

Keep working if you want to keep making money. That's literally the most polite way I can put it.

> when this has been established over centuries (millennia arguably) by many many smart people

Well, those smart people didn't exactly count on computers existing. It was easy to enforce copyright when you needed to be a major industry player owning expensive printing presses to infringe copyright at any appreciable scale. Now copyright infringement is trivial, people do it without even realizing it simply because they can. People infringe copyright every single time they download a random picture off of some photographer's website or something.

The world will never be like it was before and it's time to accept that. Copyright is a thing of the past. To put that genie back in the bottle, you'll need tyranny the likes of which really ought to offend every single user posting here on Hacker News. It's simply not possible without destroying everything hackers stand for, the computing freedom we cherish. And of course it's exactly what the copyright industry is lobbying for.

> The limited time monopoly that authors enjoy is the reason that it becomes an incentive to create new work.

I have no idea why you think a lifetime+posthumous monopoly can be considered "limited time" in any way. You'll be long dead by the time it expires. It is functionally infinite.

Limited time is 5 years, 10 at most. Then the cultural works I grew up with would be public property by the time I'm an adult. That's limited time. You can observe its duration being limited. That's tolerable.

> If you make the protection period too short, it won’t work, it won’t be an incentive

And making it too long creates rent seeking and robs us of our public domain rights.

> There are countries in the world today with weaker copyright laws than the US that already exhibit high rates of IP theft and low rates of original creative output.

Oh please. The countries you speak of? Many of them don't even have universal basic sanitation. They have better things to do than police the imaginary property of americans.

The US Trade Office being a mouthpiece of US "stakeholders" is straight up offensive. US corporations using the might of the US government to sanction sovereign countries. The only possible reason not to be outraged is you're profiting off of this.

> I don’t know what social contract you’re referring to

The one that expects us to believe we can't just go to libgen literally right now and download a copy of your book for free.

Always extending copyright durations until it's functionally infinite. You're not keeping up your end of the public domain bargain. Why should we keep ours?

> Keep working if you want to keep making money.

FWIW, this is literally what copyright law is saying. Instead of copying someone else, seeking rent for something you didn’t invest in, taking away from someone else’s investment, go make your own stuff to copy & distribute & sell.

Sure, as long as the copyright term is valid. After that, the works are in the public domain where there are no restrictions to what we can do with our shared culture.

Why do you conveniently forget that the law also talks about public domain? The same public domain that contained works that artists like Walt Disney drew from in order to strike it rich, only to subsequently lobby the government to rob us of the same rights he enjoyed time and time again?

These functionally infinite copyright terms rob us of our rights and turns copyright infringement into civil disobedience.

> as long as the copyright term is valid.

No, the whole idea behind copyrights of any term length is to provide and incentive for people to make something new instead of copy someone else’s work. The retort you used, “Keep working if you want to keep making money” applies to people who seek to copy or remix work as much as it applies to people who seek to protect their work from copies or remixes.

I really would love to hear a compelling argument that convinces me, I want a stronger argument for a reduction in term length (and I do think it should be shortened), but this hyperbole isn’t doing it. You’re complaining about rent-seeking, but failing to understand that this isn’t an argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not. This is an argument about who gets to seek rent, the person who did the creative work, or someone else who ‘borrowed’ the work without adding value. Personally, I’d certainly rather default to giving creators money over copiers, wouldn’t you? Copyright was established to avoid the second kind of rent-seeking, which has historically been a real economic drain.

> You’re complaining about rent-seeking, but failing to understand that this isn’t an argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not.

It absolutely is. Copyright in its current state is the epitome of rent seeking and its ever expanding lengths are the perfect example of regulatory capture. Copyright is people and corporations collecting rent from works they made over half a century ago and using the profits to lobby governments into extending their monopolies even further.

At some point it stops being about fair incentivization of creators and it became about rent seeking. I really have no idea what's controversial or "hyperbolic" about this statement.

> Personally, I’d certainly rather default to giving creators money over copiers, wouldn’t you?

For five to ten years, sure. After that much time, works belong in the public domain.

> It absolutely is [rent-seeking].

I agree, and I haven’t argued against that anywhere in this thread. You seem to have missed my point entirely. The part you’re not addressing is that copying others’ work is also rent-seeking, it’s trying to take value for yourself that someone else created.

> For five to ten years

So you’re okay with rent seeking for authors for a certain period of time. Good, we agree there. Now, how did you come up with five to ten years? What justifies that term? Does it work for all creators? How do you know?

> It absolutely is [rent-seeking].

That's not what I meant. What I wanted to say is that it absolutely is an "argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not".

Copyrights, truly time limited, are a lot of things but not rent seeking. Rent seeking is when you just collect rent from existing successful properties without having to create new works. If the copyright terms are short and limited, creators have no choice but to create new stuff or lose their revenue.

> So you’re okay with rent seeking for authors for a certain period of time.

I'm not okay with any rent seeking at all. I simply don't think it is rent seeking if the duration is short enough.

Copyrights, even short ones are rent-seeking. That is the explicit and more or less stated point of the law. They don’t use that word, so your terminology and framing is slightly hyperbolic and negative spin. It’s a bit more common to say copyrights grant a “monopoly” over a work for a period of time, or simply that the work is protected for some time. I really don’t have a problem with calling it rent-seeking, and I think it’s inaccurate to claim that a shorter term makes it not rent-seeking. It’s still rent-seeking, for a shorter time, nothing more and nothing less.

Why do you claim copyrights aren’t “truly” time limited? That’s not factually correct. We’re commenting on the batch of material that enters public domain. Yes the time limit is long, yes it has been extended, but it is not “infinite”. I said it before, but exaggerating isn’t helping you. Your argument could be more compelling if you stuck to facts.

> I simply don’t think it is rent seeking if the duration is short enough.

It’s less time rent-seeking by the creators, and more time rent-seeking by the copiers. The problem that led to copyright laws existing is unscrupulous copiers who seek rent for something they didn’t create. It happened before, and would happen again if copyrights were abolished. It would be even worse today with companies like Google and Amazon, because they have de facto monopolies on the digital distribution channels, and they can steal and promote content made by individuals without giving them any slice of the pie… even more than they already are.

> If the copyright terms are short and limited, creators have no choice but to create new stuff or lose their revenue.

And if they’re longer, then copiers have no choice but to create new stuff or lose their revenue. There’s a symmetry here you keep trying to avoid. Every argument you have so far in favor of shortening copyright has an analogue argument that would favor increasing the term length. The law currently acknowledges this and is trying to balance these two forces. It might well be off balance today in favor of creators, but if you want to get copyrights shortened, it will require demonstrating a better balance point. What won’t work is trying to claim there isn’t one.

Not everyone can consistently write books that get popular. Most authors only have a single book or series get popular and the rest of their books do not sell anywhere near as well.

That doesn't justify giving them lifetime government enforced monopolies. If they want to keep getting paid, they should have to keep creating new works. Anything else is rent seeking. Having to give them monopolies at all is bad enough but the current state of copyright is completely unacceptable.

Also, their children are owed exactly nothing by society. At most they should be able to inherit still valid copyrights with no change to their durations. Heirs getting a completely new two decade monopoly just so they could "benefit" is absurd and intolerable.

How long have you lived in your house? Can I have it now?

Really? You're gonna compare artificially scarce imaginary property with real property on the real world like land and physical possessions?

> real property on the real world like land and physical possessions

That's "real" only because the government enforces it. My point was that the comment I replied to was ridiculous.

It's "real" because it exists in the real world. It's naturally scarce as a result since two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. There's only so much land available.

It's a completely different matter compared to imaginary artificially scarce cultural property which boils down to ownership of unique numbers. That's what's ridiculous.

You're free to make an exact copy of it whenever you like :)

At least where I live, copying a house would not be allowed since the specification falls under copyright. So no?

Nope, but you can download it.

Most authors have zero big hits. But authors that get one hit are more likely to get future hits.

Most people have to work until retirement age. If you happen to get a big hit that earns you enough money to retire at age 28, then congratulations, you're one of the lucky few. But society doesn't owe you the right to make a lifetime worth of money off of a single book. You can work until retirement age like everyone else.

Also, long copyright terms only affects retirement age for a very small percentage of authors. Most authors aren't well known, have no big hits, and each of their books gets most of its sales in its first few years. These authors have to work their whole life regardless. Authors with a really big hit, like J.K. Rowling, have enough money to retire after that one book, regardless of whether copyright is only 20 years or longer. It only makes the difference for those authors who have a small hit that won't quite earn enough to retire in 20 years, but will earn enough over 40-60 years. That's rare. Books usually earn the vast majority of their profits in those first 20 years.

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