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> The minute dead authors could earn anything from copyright, the system should have been considered broken

The system was created to encourage people to invest in the creation of new ideas and products. It's not always just an investment of time, which means you have to make it property that can be owned, traded and sold, with a known term. In your system where copyright dies with the author, the interests of others who might invest in a project or stand to gain from it (like a creator's children) are not looked after. By this mindset, everything Steve Jobs helped to create would now be free for "the public" to do with as they wish, and I imagine a lot of people would have stopped funding Steve's ideas when they found out he was sick.

> You could really turn your proposition the other way around: if someone doesn't want non-paying readers to read what they write, then they should refrain from writing anything.

I could, but it makes no sense to me to tell people who want to be compensated for making something valuable to stop doing it so that we can make whatever remaining works there are public domain.

> it makes no sense to me to tell people who want to be compensated for making something valuable to stop doing it so that we can make whatever remaining works there are public domain

It would be an interesting experiment, but I don't think people would stop putting out original ideas if they were to stop being compensated for it. People produce original ideas and original works of art because that's what they do, not because they hope to become very rich doing so. (And it could be argued that the best works of mankind have been produced before copyright was invented.)

The point of copyright was to prevent authors from starving; I think we're well past that point.

(There's a secondary argument in favor of copyright that's often aired by movie studios and the like, that it costs a lot of money to produce works of art, and that if there were no copyright then there would be no economic rationale to create new things.

I think that argument is flawed in principle ("so what? do we need expensive works of art so badly that we're prepared to alienate our freedom for having them?"), but more interestingly, it's also becoming false in practice: it used to cost a lot of money to produce a music album, or even simply to print a book; it will eventually be cheap to produce a movie.)

My general point is that copyright was an interesting idea that has gone much too far; we're not getting our money's worth and we should push back (i.e., make it much shorter).

> My general point is that copyright was an interesting idea that has gone much too far; we're not getting our money's worth and we should push back (i.e., make it much shorter).

That's a fair point, and one that I agree with, but it is a compromise: if there were no legal protection for "intellectual property", the only people who could afford to produce it would be independently wealthy "amateurs". I'm not sure that that is an optimal state of affairs either.

> In your system where copyright dies with the author, the interests of others who might invest in a project or stand to gain from it (like a creator's children) are not looked after.

This is the problem, I think. If a product requires investors, then I can accept that their interests should be looked after. Not for the ridiculous term that copyright currently allows, but it is reasonable that their protection should not be strictly limited to the life of the author.

However, the current system goes to great lengths to protect the interests of people merely because they have something to gain, not because they actively contributed anything. If I make cars for a living, I don't expect or demand that my children continue to receive a royalty for each mile driven in one of my cars after i die (or just retire). They are taken care of through my estate, insurance etc, not by perverting the market.

I don't think author's children are inherently more deserving of social protections than anyone else. Jk Rowling's kids would be just fine if copyright lasted only twenty years. If they want a secure income after that, they should be able to do some productive work of their own.

> I don't think author's children are inherently more deserving of social protections than anyone else. Jk Rowling's kids would be just fine if copyright lasted only twenty years. If they want a secure income after that, they should be able to do some productive work of their own.

You could say the same about any kid who inherits wealth, and while you might be right, this just encourages people to focus on short term wealth creation, which also has implications for society.

> You could say the same about any kid who inherits wealth

No, you couldn't. If your dad is a car salesman and makes a fortune, you can inherit his wealth, but not his recurring revenue (once he's dead he's not selling cars anymore).

Harry Potter books will continue to earn money for their author's descendants after her death, in addition to all the money they earned for the author directly (and which will have been inherited by her kids). That's a unique feature of intellectual property.

That's exactly the point. Why do we want to let one person pass the value of what they've done along to their children and not another? One man sells a car and generates $1000 in value for his family, he dies, they get it. Another writes a novel, dies 3 weeks before it's published, it is a masterpiece, but his family doesn't earn a dime. Sounds pretty lame.

It sounds lame, but it in no way reflects reality, so i don't understand what your point is. Under the current system, the recently deceased authors book would earn royalties for his estate for 75 years. Grand children he's never met will benefit financially from his work. We grant them a monopoly, and get no social benefit. This is a perversion of the intent of copyright, which was to promote more creative work.

Simple inheritance is categorically different. Your inheriting money from your family has no negative impact on others. But if you inherit an intellectual monopoly, it is taking something away from the public good for no benefit. That may be acceptable for a reasonably limited term. But how anyone can imagine a copyright term that extends across multiple generations is reasonable is beyond me.

it's not illegitimate to consider that if someone says something, I have a right to know what they're saying

How do you feel about privacy?

? I'm not talking about privacy here; if I made you think I wanted to know everything that was being said in the privacy of one's home then I didn't make myself clear and I'm sorry.

I'm talking about contributions to the public debate. If someone wants to contribute to the public debate, then that contribution should be available to all -- and the fact that it's available to all should be rewarding enough to the contributor.

You may find this to be an extreme position; when looking at what copyright has become, I think it's useful to consider the other end of the spectrum (at least as a thought experiment).

You're talking about the control of information, of which privacy is just another facet. Hence I asked. But you also seem to be treating copyright (rights) and publication (intentions) as synonymous, which is confusing.

Suppose I create a film. I screen the film in the privacy of my own home to anybody that gives me a hug. One day, somebody brings a video camera. They record the whole thing and puts it on the Internet for all to see.

At what point would you say my actions indicated a desire to contribute to the public debate?

The US Copyright Law comes to the rescue; it defines public performance thusly:

> To perform or display a work “publicly” means (...) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered

See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf, middle of page 5.

"Any place open to the public" includes your home if anyone can come in and watch your movie in exchange for a hug. So I would argue that the difference between "private" and "public" is well established, by copyright law itself.

Now for my opinion: if any and all public performances end up on the Internet, it's a good thing. (It's a good thing for "information" in general, and it's also a good thing for the economy. The economy benefits from goods being cheaper.)

You may want to argue that posting the video on Youtube deprives you of many hugs, and that you should be compensated for that fact; or maybe you'll ask for Youtube to be simply taken down, to avoid such problems in the future.

But society doesn't owe you the ability to get hugs in exchange for the screening of movies. (What if you decided to provide services for the blind. Then, after an initial success, you come to the conclusion that the only way to grow your business further is if there are more blind people. Should the US Government help you poke the eyes of your neighbors?)

I believe you greatly misunderstood what I was getting at. I only said "hugs" because I'm tired of people assuming it's all and always about money whenever anybody says anything short of stern opposition to copyright, because that leads to infectiously stupid comments about the government poking people in the eyes, etc.

It's not about the hugs, or money or compensation of any kind. If it were about compensation, then under your scheme[1], I would be better off screening films that other people made. (Profiting from other people's work you seem to have no issue with.) But that's not what I want. I want to be able to share things I created, where I want to share it, with the people I want to share it with.

Again, it's not about the hugs. It's about your claim of public ownership extending into my private life because I didn't adequately secure my creative work against that kind of intrusion. It's about having to treat my work like a secret if I don't want someone else's hand in it or name on it.

[1] To be explicit: I presume a world in which you're allowed to own a theater you did not create yourself but where the public owns a film you did create yourself.

So, although it's currently illegal, and I don't approve of "piracy", it's not illegitimate to consider that if someone says something, I have a right to know what they're saying (especially if that doesn't cost them anything to let me hear it).

The speech analogy is pretty insidious considering we are talking about multi-million-dollar games and movies.

Maybe games are more "things" than "speech" (although they are protected as speech by the First Amendment; see the recent decision

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf

It would be pretty ironic if in order to free games from the demands of public domain advocates, you also stripped them of free speech protection).

But how is a movie not speech? How is it not a work of art, how is it fundamentally different from a book or a song, or a painting?

Because it costs a lot of money to put together?

For one, this argument is not going to hold for long, as producing a movie at home for next to no money is becoming not only possible but commonplace (The Blair Witch project was shot in 1999 and at the end of principal photography the total cost of production was under $20k (not a typo)).

But secondly, just because the form of art one decides to express themselves with is costly, doesn't justify that the public domain be amputated, or that the public abandons its freedom, more than is strictly necessary for a functioning society.

The right of the public to be informed or educated, or simply to have any conversation they please, should come before the "right" of individuals to make a living in a manner of their own choosing.