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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit amusing that copyright law supporters always go to the 'think of the authors who need to get paid' when at present, copyright extends to 70 years AFTER the author's death IIRC, or 95 years after date of publication if it was a contract job.

In contrast, patents are only valid for 20 years after patent publication, for good reasons (a limited period encourages technological development and prevents patent squatting).

Right now, we have large corporate publishers squatting on copyright to prevent dissemination of works that should really have been in the public domain decades ago. Cutting copyright periods in half (at least) makes a lot of sense.

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> should really have been in the public domain decades ago

A good occasion to note the parallel context of books not being reprinted.

Last time I wanted to buy copies of works of a prominent author to gift them around, and was told "Impossible - out of print": weeks ago.

Texts which are not protected by "pre-emptive" availability (esp. electronic) somehow disappear - Michael S. Hart (Project Gutenberg) was right.

I recently wanted to look something up related to Mesopotamia. Well into the weeds of scholarship. The only transcription of the text I wanted as far as I could determine was in a book written in the 1930s of which there are only a handful of copies. A local university library had it thankfully. The author died half a century ago.

While it would technically be legal here for a library to copy one of their copies for archival purposes should it finally disintegrate, the knowledge is on the precipice of being lost. There's absolutely no justification whatsoever for that book still being under copyright.

I doubt harms like that were even considered at all by my own government here in Canada when the copyright term was recently extended 20 years. For some reason when people think copyright they think pulp trash of the last few years. Maybe copyright should only be a few years then?

Recently I found that John C. Wright's fantastic Golden Age trilogy has gone out of print, and the Kindle version is no longer available either. I know it used to be available because I have the sample; I went to purchase the full copy on kindle and that's no longer possible. Why publishers would do this is beyond my understanding.

I think at some point it's simply cheaper for them to let the book vaporize.

Which counts as destruction of global wealth - and in the age of reproducibility -, on the ground of "rights" (making works private and not accessible) and "potential eventual exploitation of rights".

My brother and I wrote a silly little book and put it on Kindle. It sells very few copies but costs us nothing at all, in either money or time.

Books can be "discovered" quite a bit later in a way that patents generally are not. That said, cutting copyright length significantly makes sense to me whatever the details.

If the motivation of copyright is to make it worthwhile to write then being discovered later isn’t really a factor

Apply the same logic to any kind of asset. Why should real estate, ownership of land, or any other material posession be inherited through generations? Why not let it revert to the public domain upon the death of the owner?

This actually would solve a lot of problems also. Rent-seeking isn't very productive compared to what removing it enables.

IP exists to encourage the creation of ideas that are easy to copy.

Land is neither created nor easy to copy.

>Land is neither created

Speaking very pedantically, it can be.

While this is true, I don't understand how it supports or detracts the parent comment.

Because land is actually real, physical, naturally finite. It's actual property in the simplest most intuitive sense. Intellectual property is just the whole world pretending it can't produce an unbounded number of copies at negligible costs. If we had planetary scale Star Trek replicators there'd be no need to have physical property either.

land is also usually taxed. Squatting on it, at least the most desired/valuable kind, has a cost.

Good point.

Hey at first blush I’m really liking the idea of taxing copyrights and patents, just like land. If you want to maintain them over the duration allowed you pay yearly tax, just like property. Wether it is valuable or not, wether you monetize it or not, the tax is the tax. You want the ongoing protections the legal system affords your copyright? Pay the tax. to avoid payment you can sell or renounce the copyright/patent.

For random “copyrighted” content like say my blog scrawlings, it would by default be under a CC attribution license unless I paid copyright tax on the content. Ie: default open not default closed.

Curious if any country does this?

> taxing copyrights and patents

It's an interesting point. I believe (chatGPT4 agrees) that taxes on IP occur via licensing deals, on transactions, and/or through registration fees. But not through anything resembling a RP wealth tax. There are probably some corner cases though.

This is a good argument for making real estate ownership temporary and non-inheritable. For a finite resource like land, ownership is literally depriving the land from everybody else.

Ownership of creative works you create yourself does not deprive anybody else of anything, so is less problematic.

No, it's not a good argument for that. Hell yes my ownership of my house deprives others of access to it. Obviously. That's by design and absolutely how things are supposed to be. And you'd have to be a literal communist to believe otherwise. People cannot have my house because I'm living in it, and my family will get my house in the future when I die because they will also be living in it.

Because land is real property. Unlike the made up BS that is intellectual property which is just like trying to own numbers.

We should absolutely do that. If you want the public to respect your claim over an overly large piece of private property. Being your rich uncle's favorite nephew shouldn't suffice.

You should have to do something that benefits the public in order for the public to grant you that right. And if you want the property to land in your nephew's hands, they too should have to contribute.

> You should have to do something that benefits the public in order for the public to grant you that right

In our corner of the world we call that "taxes".

What proportion of property comes from "Being your rich uncle's favorite nephew"

Where do you propose we stop? Do we reevaluate your assets every day and expropriate them if some bureaucrat deems you are not "contributing" to society. Who makes that determination?

Why stop at property? If humans are deemed not beneficial maybe the state can take over your body and donate your organs?

Think that is hyperbolic? Nope. CCP started with property and is now doing forced organ harvesting.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...

The problem with continual taxation like that is that the kind of entities that collect taxes become less trustworthy over time. So maybe the expenditure starts out as beneficial to the people, but over time it fails to corruption.

So then you get this situation where everybody knows that the taxes are doing more harm than good, and somebody really ought to do something about it, but nobody wants a discontinuity of government because their property is justified via taxation by the old corrupt one.

Setting one’s kids up well is one of the primary motivators to work an outsized amount.

This is part of why I can see copyright extending past an author's death. For many it takes a lifetime to pay off monetarily. For some artist's they don't see any success until death.

I see a society where one's kids have to put in their own effort in order to do well as more egalitarian, productive, and democratic. Parents of means who want their kids to do well can't do so with material possessions, but have to take exceptional care in their upbringing and skills.

It correctly dissuades parents from working to the point of alienation and unjust negligence of children attempting to set their children up for success (which presumably increases the chances of maladjusted children), and presumably will result in more productive labor from the child.

I see that society when I'm being optimistic.

Usually I see one where the parents' efforts end up contributing to zero-sum games such that they set their children up for success at the expense of their peers, which creates wasteful conflict down the line and ends up being negative-sum in the long run.

Presumably parental involvement in their children to set them up for success inherently makes lives more worth living than, say, excessive work to the neglect of children.

It's not as though private corporate competition isn't at times wasteful and destructive effort anyway.

Well yeah, working too hard and neglecting your children is obviously the worst of both worlds. But I don't think anybody is shooting for that outcome.

I'm worried about the cases where the parents are working hard, for instance, to be able to afford property in the good school districts. In aggregate this widens class strata and creates preventable problems that the children will have to address (e.g. now you have to pay cops to keep the riffraff in its place when you could've just not had riffraff).

Better to invest in solving problems that everybody shares, because your kid will be part of that everybody. Though I admit that that's easier said than done.

Asset owners aren’t always human, they’re very often companies. How would you deal with that?

HOO.

Human ownership only.

if humans can't pool their resources via companies, then I don't see how we would have factories, banks, car manufacturers, home builders, computer companies, etc.

The Constituion says Congress has this power in order to promote the progress of "Science and useful Arts." If it doesn't fulfill this purpose then there's no entitlement of the power.

The fact that people want to copy things tells us that it’s fulfilling its purpose.

In the context of this subthread, you're talking about copying land..?

I would download a car.

Clearly the logical conclusion of this argument is that the concept of number zero and The Pythagorean theorem are both still currently patented, you pay a monthly fee to license the wristwatch patent and are thinking of switching to a sundial to save money, you have to pay separate royalties for using the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals, and you cannot be on television because your famous great-great-grandpa sold his likeness rights to a company and you look too similar.

And the whole after death is really weird one to me. That really doesn't work with anything else we do.

I would be ready to accept something clear and simple. 50 years from publication. Should cover most of the revenue and also reasonably cover the off-spring in unfortunate cases. For digital media like games maybe 25-30 years would feel better for me, but I'm somewhat ready to trade it bit up.

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