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Comment by guidoism | Hacker News Reader

> Copyright grants a time-limited monopoly to the reproduction of works by their authors

The copyright length is so long and has been extended so many times that it for a long time could have been considered infinite. Maybe with some new works showing up in the public domain on January first now it's true again. But still, the length is looooong. There are books from the 1980s and 1990s that are out-of-print and almost impossible to find. Some authors are able to take back their copyright and release them to the public domain or some CC license after they are out-of-print but many works are just abandoned.

I'm all for people making a living, but man, it's absurd these days. Maybe we should move copyright down to 20 years or something.

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Many authors write for most of their lives before they see success. Who is really suffering from copyright laws being longer than 20 years? Is there a giant void in culture because books go out-of-print? In cases of non-fiction and academics I can see there maybe being an issue with students not being able to learn, but with most fiction it's really ok to have to put some effort into obtaining a copy.

There are always new and amazing books being written. It's ok if some are difficult to obtain or abandoned. It's their creation and they can let it die.

This difference in our perspectives is fascinating. I think of cultural works to be owned by society. The moment you make something public then society can do what it wants with it. We give exclusive rights to the author as a pragmatic step to allow them to afford to spend time creating. We won’t need this temporary band-aid when we are fully post-scarcity.

I think that society suffers when we artificially make cultural artifacts scarce. I don’t know how to quantify that suffering. I feel like there are parallels between the explosion in quality software and what we can do with it and the availability of open source software (including the languages, documentation, and discovery/distribution).

> The moment you make something public then society can do what it wants with it.

Very strongly disagree with this. If Stephen King decides no more printings of any of his books he's is well within his right to do so. He can share it with the world or not.

> I think that society suffers when we artificially make cultural artifacts scarce.

I agree with this only if it's the intent of the creator. For instance, putting a Picasso painting in a billionaire's office / yacht / warehouse and locking it away is probably wrong in the sense Picasso most likely didn't want his paintings under lock and key. And although I love Picasso I don't know if there's suffering in society when there's so much other art available. It's a loss for sure, but I don't know if society is any worse.

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