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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Warner Bros. takes its goods to market on publicly maintained roads, sells its sitcoms and movies to networks that broadcast on public airwaves, and distributes its movies to theaters and homes through fiber-optic cables that run over and under public land. The company is bound up in our shared history, and it has produced a great deal of art that is essential to that history.

This argument suggests that anything you do partially belongs to the author, as well; airwaves aside, all of us are enabled in some way by public investments.

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Do you disagree?

I was educated at a public school, went to college on tuition funded by scholarships, where I learned things written in public libraries by people studying with public funds, now I commute physically on public roads and digital cables...

Anything I accomplish is tied up in our shared history. To say that the unique things I built are attributable to me and me alone is to ignore that someone else with the same knowledge and the same problems would likely come up with the same ingenious solutions.

You can attribute your success to that, but that doesn't mean anyone gets ownership over a thing.

How much ownership though? 50%? 1%? 0.05%?

I don't want to nerd out on this too much and, like, come up with a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook-style answer to this problem, but we could do something like: if you make up to, like, $10,275, we could ask for 10% of that, and then if you make up to $41,775, we could ask for 12% of that extra money, and then up to, I don't know, $89,075, we could take ownership of maybe 22% of it, and if you're making a cool $170,050, 24%.

I know this seems a little fantastical and engineering-brain-y but it also means we don't have to spend much time thinking about how much of Obi-Wan Kenobi the state of Oklahoma owns; we can just settle the whole obligation back to society in dollars. I don't know, seems simple to me.

> I don't know, seems simple to me.

I think it’s already covered by a system called “taxation”, in which the government requires we pay for our income, the right to own the house we bought, the amount we made on retail sales, the right to live in our state, the right to live in our county, etc.

whoooooosh

Public school wasn't a choice.

Further not everyone learns so much from it. I learned to read before attending public school and was mostly meh at it. I learned math in spite of it (my math teachers would be schockedto learn I use it daily.)

That said the internet is where I learned most things and it exists thanks to the DOD and ISPs have a lot of subsidies to thank for their existence (at least the ones in the rural area I grew up in)

I agree it is tied up in our shared history. I hope you take that fact as reason enough to share your work in a reasonably accessible manner. But I cannot compel you to do so, at least not in most circumstances, exceptions being inevitable of course.

I agree with the essential point that no one exists in isolation, we all build on the work of others, but I don't see how your last sentence follows from the previous statements. We can all have the same background, but that doesn't make us all the same. There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.

> There's strong evidence, for example, that genes play a large role in how we behave.

I’ve heard this said before. Can you link to some science about this please?

https://www.livescience.com/47288-twin-study-importance-of-g...

Ok. Genes play a large role in how we behave.

But we are reacting to society. Hence, clone versions of you living 100 years ago, in current times, and 100 years in the future are going to react differently because there are different inputs and different accepted outputs to their behavior. They all are going to have different assumptions about the world around them because they live in worlds with different sets of knowledge. Schooling would be different (I'm assuming things continue to improve/change over time in the future). Nutrition, healthcare, transportation, communication... all has changed so much.

And this is the same when comparing current times. Three clones of you might act similarly in some respects, but vastly different in others. We've studied this exact thing by studying identical twins, actually, and even growing up in the same country doesn't even out the differences.

At the end of the day, it does mean that even though genes might affect the way we act, the comment you are replying to is absolutely correct.

I don't understand your reply. I didn't say that people growing up in different times would act the same or that people with identical genes would act the same. I'm arguing that different people will act differently in the same circumstances. If you want to establish that OP is absolutely correct, you need to show that people with different inclinations and abilities act the same way as each other when in identical circumstances. This seems self-evidently incorrect to me. People have varying amounts and types of mental faculties and so make different choices, even when presented with the same situations.

I think the stronger argument here is that Warner Bros. has profited from a legal regime that prohibits unlicensed distribution of their work. It's not unreasonable to suggest that they have some kind of reciprocal responsibility to the commons.

The way to really enforce this is to reduce the copyright protection period from essentially forever (thanks to Disney) to being more like patents, ~20 years.

Why any copyright at all? Humanity did perfectly well building modern civilization without it; it’s only been within the last couple hundred years that we have had copyright to any degree, much less it’s innovation-stifling modern format.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

So I don’t know if there’s any good answers to this but in a world without any copyright today you would have some $tech_giant scooping all copyrighted content in real time and streaming it for pennies. There would be no avenue at all for someone to make money on the actual content. It would all have to be side-channels like merch and product placements. Distributors would make money on ads and subscription dollars but none of it would get back to the creators. Musicians at least have live performances but the spiritual equivalent, theaters, are no different than the streaming service and wouldn’t pay either. Nobody would have to license art for prints, shirts, use by other businesses.

Copyright sucks in so many ways but replacing it with nothing at all would actually kill creative industries. My personal ideal solution is copyright with fair (as to be determined by courts so you can’t charge $1e100) mandatory licensing. Wanna make a derivative work, use someone’s art, show a movie, have a show on your streaming service? As long as you pay the royalties nobody can tell you no.

>There would be no avenue at all for someone to make money on the actual content.

Except this is trivially disprovable by simply looking at YouTube.

Copyright plays essentially zero role in the business models of the vast majority of sucessful youtubers, and it is arguably a platform that is far more sucessful than traditional media at producing high quality, relevant content.

Sure, if you get rid of copyright some business models will no longer be possible... but some new business models will now be viable.

You wouldn't argue "we have to protect the baby crushing machine industry because if we don't then the baby crushers won't have a job", so why are you making that argument for copyright?

Copyright hasn't stopped rampant piracy and bootlegging either, but a lot of that is due to super annoying or unavailable legal ways to stream/acquire the same content.

I don't think you'd be able to support with evidence the argument that copyright has stifled innovation, given that the "modern format" of copyright tracks an extraordinarily innovative period.

Even you aren't identifying cause and effect though. Copyright postdates the printing press. Is it copyright or the printing press that led to the explosion in books?

Then if you look at technology like the internet, there's plenty of people creating things, not for monetary reward, but because they enjoy it.

Not that I'm necessarily on the same /page/ as the parent. I would defend copyright as a tool to enable new works to be created and allow creators to make a living, and ultimately get works into the public domain. As such I would limit copyright to a much shorter period.

I am certainly against the continual copyright extensions where things now need to be almost a century old before they enter the public domain (at least in the US), but limited copyright has purpose -- it created the possibility of professional authors, for example. In ancient times the Romans who wrote things were almost entirely noblemen who did it as a hobby and didn't need to support themselves. And the Middle Ages a lot of authors were monks who were likewise supported by their monasteries. But in the early modern era authors were able (through copyright) to make a living doing that. And things like invention of the novel as we know it are from this period. Going back to life + 25 or life + 50 would still allow authors to make money, support their loved ones after their death, and still put things into the public domain while they are still more culturally relevant. Obviously, publishers wouldn't like that of course.

That's less than half the copyright term we had before Disney even existed.

20 years is still roughly a third of someone's working life. I'm not sure what the argument is for longer, even 20 years seems too long personally.

Again with this lifespan stuff. The term of copyright determines much of the value of the work, the very moment is put on the market by the author. The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell.

There are other reasons to argue the term should be shorter, or that creators should be granted a less valuable right for their works. But "the current term doesn't track the lifespan of the author well" seems facially nonsensical. I mean, just to start with, there's the difference between John le Carre, whose last book (before he died) was published when he was 88 years old, and someone like Christopher Paolini, the Guiness record holder as youngest author of a bestseller. How does lifespan even make sense here?

I made no suggestion of a term that ended on the author's death in my previous post. I was simply pointing out that even a span of 20 years is a significant proportion of the period we expect someone to be a productive member of society. I believe it reasonable to require that someone competes with others at least three times in their working life.

Although, now that you've brought it up, 10 years with expiry on death of the author sounds fantastic. Authors are incentivised to create new works and companies are incentivised to purchase them. A balance must be struck between rewarding individuals for their work and preventing corporations from monopolising cultural touchstones.

I feel like you're overestimating the financial longevity of the overwhelming majority of works. Most are forgotten about a few years after their release. The ones that aren't will typically have made more than enough money for the author to live lavishly for the rest of their life.

> The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell.

I sincerely doubt that for the vast majority of works publishers are signing contracts based on anything other than how much they think it'll sell in the first year at most. Given that authors struggle to be paid at all unless they've already found massive commercial success, it seems obvious that the only party benefiting from longer copyright terms is the company.

There seems to be a belief that the expiry of the copyright period precludes the author from monetising the work further, whereas it simply means they will begin to compete with others for that monetisation. With a 10+ year head start and humans typically preferring to reward the original creator they should do okay for themselves.

Our current intellectual property regime is fundamentally opposed to how human culture has developed and progressed. It's difficult to imagine how barren a world we'd live in if our predecessors had sought to limit any retelling of a story that wasn't approved by the original author. It's a condemnation of our society that the retelling of many of these stories has been criminalised by a company that found much of it's success in retelling the very same.

Sounds good to me!

And....?

And at the very least you can factor Disney out of your argument if you think copyright terms should be less than half of what they were in 1909.

I don't think they were. They were blaming Disney for ever increasing copyright terms. Then suggested their own copyright term.

Just because the copyright wasn't (someone's idea of) perfect prior to Disney, doesn't absolve Disney of responsibly when they start shifting the term in entirely the wrong way.

Why even 20 though?

Over what period of time do new works make most of their money? Over what period are production companies their payback over when deciding whether to invest in new works?

I would suggest 5 years more than covers the above.

To me the point of copyright, and the only way you can defend a state sponsored monopoly is to encourage creation of new works. If 5 years does that, any more just prevents derivative works, which are new creations in their own right.

I'll grant that perpetual copyright is at least logically sound, but once you move away from that I don't see how you can make an argument for anything more than a minimal (enough to encourage creation) copyright term.

The classic answer to ultra-short copyright terms, and one that I think has some legitimacy, is that short really decreases the cost of just waiting you out.

Let's say you write something brilliant, the next Harry Potter in financial terms. You shop it around but none of the big publishers will touch it, of course they're all owned by 2 or 3 companies. You self publish and it sells a couple hundred copies; 5 years later, bang, a major Hollywood blockbuster and media blitz. No need to pay you a cent.

We've just had a thing with Sherlock Holmes.

2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.

So that would tend to disprove the thesis. Plus it suggests that having the author on board is valueless. Would you want to pay the author a fee and get them on board, or do you want them bad mouthing your new film?

Further, any author that writes a book with any legitimate expectation that it's going to be made in to a film is probably successful enough already.

JK Rowling probably wasn't expecting a film deal. She wrote the books without that expectation. I'm interested in a copyright that encourages and allows her to write books, not make her into a multimillionaire. If anything her success means she can write less books. Is that a good thing? I'm not in favour of keeping her in penury, but copyright should be about allowing them to work, not make it so they can stop.

> 2 films, the Sherlock and elementary series and now enola Holmes, despite Sherlock Holmes being near (in copyright terms) the end of copyright.

He was already mostly public domain, with only a few stories still copyrighted. (And his estate claims that some character traits like "having emotions" are part of those stories.)

Some companies at least have paid for the rights recently though, which still argues against your stance.

Then there's the seven percent solution which came out shortly before Sherlock Holmes went public domain.

The price doesn't matter much vs the annoyance of them suing you for putting emotions in your show.

The most streamed TV IP on the whole Internet is The Office, whose first episode was shot 18 years ago. Seinfeld is closer to 35 years old.

Houses of the Holy is 50 years old. So is Innervisions. There's A Riot Goin' On? 52.

If you're trying to argue that success at the scale of Zeppelin or Seinfeld isn't somehow an incentive to creation, I mean, OK, but I guess I can rest my case, too.

Define 'success'? Financial or something else?

Yes people do want their work appreciated. I dispute the fact that anyone makes something today based on the financial worth of it 70 years down the road.

Pointing out examples that just so happen to have lasted a long time doesn't mean they made it with that expectation.

Further if that is provably the case, you still have to answer why they have a right to a state sponsored monopoly. And after all that my second suggestion is to have an annual increasing fee. So that only things that the owners are willing to actually make use of and pay to maintain stay copyrighted. That would seem to answer your objection

Do you feel that if you produce work you are later ashamed of that you should be forced to sell it against your wishes, if others demand it?

If you release what you create out into the world, that’s already the way it works. Copyright gives you a monopoly for a while (a long while currently), but ultimately ownership is passed onto the public.

Which is exactly why we pay taxes, go for jury duty, get conscripted in the army and lots more. Individual labor belonging partially to the state isn't some crazy concept but the core idea behind every major political and economic system.

yes, most things should be for the commons. it's unfortunate that we have so few reliable ways to monetize creative output that don't involve fabricated scarcity

I think it has something to do with creators needing to, like, eat and protect themselves from the rain.

Dead people are not known for their appetite, yet copyright lasts 70 years after death.

It's particularly egregious when copyright to some of the most popular works of all time is inherited by people who had nothing to do with the author in his/her lifetime or had not even been born then:

> The composer died unmarried and childless in 1937. His heir was his brother Edouard, who died in 1960, leaving the rights to his former masseuse, Jeanne Taverne, who died four years later. A tangled legal battle in following years saw the rights divided between a number of claimants, including Ms Taverne’s husband’s second wife Georgette. -- https://archive.ph/NOLb7

I've never been able to understand how this is even a colorable argument, and yet it comes up all the time. Yes: the term of copyright lasts long after the death of the artist. But it's that term that gives value to the work in the first place; it's what enables artists to sell their work to distributors.

It doesn't, because nobody knows what works have commercial value 70+ years into the future and thus current business is not conducted on that basis. That's how many popular works end up in random hands in the first place, like in the case of Ravel - they aren't seen as particularly valuable at the time, but become sleeper hits when they earn a special nostalgia or new technologies emerge (television, internet, etc).

Good luck selling a movie to Warner Bros on the premise that it'll be a real money-maker in 2090s on telekinesis-vision platform.

I can make you a list. Cinderella, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Superman, Batman, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, Game of Thrones... You could sell WB the 2090 rights to any one of these, except the ones that are going into the public domain (and those they already own of course). Look at that, the system is 'working'.

This argument requires me to believe that Warner Bros would see no difference in value between a property that becomes public the moment the author dies and a property that has 70 years of exclusivity after that point. Obviously, the difference in value between those two properties is immense, and that value is realized during the author's lifetime.

Only the first few years after publication matter, because that's when virtually all of lifetime revenue is earned. Revenue earned beyond that is usually not enough to even justify proper preservation, leaving huge archives to rot away.

Do you buy anything based on what it may be worth 70 years after your death? Do you think any company thinks that long term?

1 year probably. 5 years pushing it. 10 years is basically off any reasonable financial projection any company is going to make.

Yes, clearly they all do. Media companies don't push for extended copyright terms just to spite you. They have easier ways of spiting you than that.

They push for extended copyrights because of a very small number of valuable assets that are nearing expiration, not because they care about increasing the value of content being churned out anew. A prospective term extension's marginal increase in the future present value (FPV) of new works is a rounding error at this point.

Now, for those small number of extremely popular works, an extension does ensure continued investment, at least in the same manner of previous investments. But that has to be weighed against the unfathomable amounts of other content that will continue to rot.

Defenses of patents and copyrights always discuss the theory--how in theory they promote investment. They rarely if ever discuss the empirically proven results. "Against Intellectual Monopoly" does explore the empirically proven results, though they do so more persuasively for patents than with copyrights, if only because there's much more data with patents, and the argument against copyrights is strongest as it concerns reducing terms, not eliminating copyright altogether, IMO. (Also, in their accounting the evidence does justify pharmaceutical drug patents as necessary for recouping costs to overcome other extreme regulatory burdens.)

The marginal value of any random piece of content is a rounding error. It's a hitmaker business; the winners pay for the enormous number of losers.

That's not how that works. Jerry Seinfeld's impressive car collection isn't paying writers' salaries. Which isn't to say he isn't reinvesting some of his windfall, but his dollars don't travel as much as if they otherwise could. It's like the difference between the marginal value of $1 to a pauper vs $1 to a prince; that $1 has much more worth to the pauper (i.e. the struggling artist who could benefit from public domain assets) than it does to the prince, even if the prince spends it on the poor.

As other people keep pointing out, investment decisions don't much care about what might happen 50 years in the future. Windfalls that happen in the future increasingly inure haphazardly; they don't actually figure into the finances of how the industry works, not even as magic helicopter money.

Economists have run the numbers. They have models for this. That's why extension advocates principally hide behind theory, not empirical evidence, because the empirical support is poor at this point.

Jerry Seinfeld's impressive car collection isn't paying writers' salaries; it was rather the other way around. Seinfeld (and Larry David) were the lead writers for the series.

My point is that his car collection isn't paying writers' salaries today. He's not investing all of his windfall back into the entertainment industry. I'm sure he's doing alot of good work, but you don't build an economy around philanthropy; you build it around economic incentives. And Seinfeld and David didn't need the incentive of the multi-billion dollar windfalls, above and beyond what they might have made with shorter terms, to take the risks they took; ditto for NBC's decisions to invest.

EDIT: Let me put it a different way. If all that matters is any marginal effect (and especially if we ignore opportunity costs in the public domain, which is admittedly difficult to quantify), why not make the copyright term 1000 years? Or in perpetuity? If every time someone says, "let's extend it by 10 more years, and here's a hypothetical by which it might incentivize someone in theory", by what principle are you prepared to put your foot down? My principle would be evidence-based, and what evidence exists favors stopping terms extensions, and probably rolling them back somewhat. And fortunately that evidence is also consonant with economic theory, no less so than the hypothetical arguments for continued extension.

Why would Seinfeld's compensation for work he produced in the 1990s be compensating writers today?

I was responding to your retort,

> the winners pay for the enormous number of losers.

The original point from someone else way upthread was that the vast majority of revenue streams from published works, especially film and TV, are front-loaded. Yes, most works don't return much value; and, yes, the big winners cover the losers. But the context of this whole subthread is prospective marginal values of copyrights decades in the future (including windfalls in the distant future--I'm trying to strongman your argument) and the degree to which they incentive production of more content.

Your original point (AFAICT) was that people ignore the prospective value of extended terms and its effect on pricing and incentives in the present. And my point was that the FPV of such marginal returns are de minimis, even taking as a given that they're positive and include huge windfalls. Your point makes most sense as a retort to people wishing to roll back copyrights to, say, 20 years or especially 0 years--i.e. only have the right of first publication.

The more meta point is that we could argue hypotheticals all day, but what matters most of all is the quantifiable. Arguments from strong patent and copyright advocates are often analogous to, e.g., the shoe bomber hypothetical in security theater--yes, shoe bombers pose a hypothetical threat, and in fact a shoe bombing incident has even come to pass, but that alone doesn't necessarily justify the airport security regime established in response. To justify it we must look (as best we can) at the quantified costs + benefits, and then make judgements accordingly. So the fact that, hypothetically, marginal returns from copyright extending past 50+ years in the future might effect pricing regimes in the present--or even if we know they in fact do--doesn't resolve the question; it only begs the relevant question: does that value exceed the costs?

I think you're talking past each other.

The parents point I think is that if you make 100 films today you don't know which will be hits but you can expect X to be and they will pay for the losers.

I don't think that requires the trickle down effect that you seem to be referring to with Seinfeld.

Would you support a copyright term where fees increase exponentially then?

'worthless' copyrights could expire after a year. Copyrights after 50 years can be maintained for X million?

Of course you do, because even if you're gonna sell it in one year, the amount you can sell it for is going to be determined by its long term value.

Ok. What's the long term value of farm land? It's going to last forever so it's value should be approaching infinity right?

Or is it based on a 10 year ish payback, with some modifiers for interest rates, the prospect of getting planning permission?

Companies do not think that long term. They are not basing their investment decision on the residuals after 10 years, much less 70

Further what's the point of copyright? Is it to post hoc reward those that have already made successful things? Or is to encourage the creation of new works? If it's the latter, then the value after a year is entirely irrelevant.

Further most new works basically make all their money in the first 12 months. 95% of copyrighted works are basically worthless after 12 months. So again you're just optimising this for a handful of big companies.

yes, and its unfortunate that they have to fabricate scarcity to take care of themselves

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