Comment by earbitscom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by earbitscom | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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