Canada extends copyright protection another 20 years to meet trade obligation | Hacker News Reader

Canada extends copyright protection another 20 years to meet trade obligation

theglobeandmail.com

228 pointsperihelions127 comments

Terrible how commercial lobbies are now able to hurt populations like that so easily to defend their own interests with very little oversight.

It is not like a decision of the citizens that was debated in an assembly, just we do things because they were decided in secret international meetings or corrupted politicians.

> Mr. Geist also accused the government of burying the change, by putting it near the bottom of a nearly 450-page budget bill last spring. The government didn’t highlight the copyright act changes in any of its documents about that bill.

So it looks like it was "debated" in an assembly. I'm using scare quotes because I'm not a big fan of burying potentially controversial changes in giant budget bills. I'm also not a fan of giant budget bills or giant bills at all for that matter.

It's weird to me that the budget of a government is a bill at all. A budget is a budget, and a law is a law.

Who should decide how things are spent?

My wife and I vote on our personal budget all the time.

I think their point is the budget should be passed seperate from any other laws. You don't say "we'll splurge on this vacation only if we agree to split washing the dishes. It's both or neither."

Why do you imagine that non-budget-related issues must be packaged with the budget into the same bill? Parliament may pass as many bills as it has time to.

So politicians can say "I didn't want to extend the copyright, but the budget needed to pass." Plus, passing more things at once limits the average person's ability to take in what they are doing.

Do you have a child as a tie breaker? Or do you mean more discuss with each other potential purchases rather that literally vote on it, which doesn't work very well with two people.

> Do you have a child as a tie breaker?

Thunderdome:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max_Beyond_Thunderdome

The budget is implemented with a law. There's a good reason for that. Parliament passes laws. And the budget is decided by Parliament. So they implement the budget with a law. The mechanism is fundamental to the Canadian (or UK) political system. The government, the executive branch, must have the confidence of the legislative branch, the authority to rule, which means having the support of a majority of Members of Parliament. The budget is a confidence bill; it must be debated, voted on, and pass. If it does not pass, the government has lost confidence, has no right to rule, and an election must be called.

It's conceivable Parliament could implement a law that allows taxation and spending to be discretionary within a range, by the executive -- they in fact do that to give departments some emergency room. A large such allocation happened during the COVID crisis budget. But the overall year-to-year tax levels are debated and argued anyway in Parliament, so they might as well just write it directly into a new law.

> If it does not pass, the government has lost confidence, has no right to rule, and an election must be called.

Generally an election is called, but theoretically the Crown may ask another political party to see they can get enough votes together to pass legislation.

If the current governing party has a majority of seats, then there is obviously no way that any other party can. But if (as now) the currently governing party does not have a majority of seats and are part of a coalition/agreement, then another party could try forming a coalition.

Minority governments have been relatively rare in Canada, and so the 'proper' actions on what to do during them aren't part of the cultural zeitgeist, which can lead to drama:

* https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/king-byng-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King–Byng_affair

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–2009_Canadian_parliamenta...

Hence the existence of "confidence and supply" agreements where a party agrees to a loose coalition whose only pledge is to support the main party therein by voting for budgets (supply) and against no-confidence motions.

> There's a good reason for that.

ok?

> Parliament passes laws.

Ok? So? They also have to go to the bathroom once in a while. They can do more than one thing.

> The budget is a confidence bill; it must be debated, voted on, and pass

Sure.. but again, why can you put NON-budget stuff in there? Because it's a hack. It's not a budget, it's a law.

This is not at all how it works in Sweden. The budget is a budget. It doesn't sneak in laws from the side. We also don't have government shutdowns, because if a new budget doesn't pass the old is in effect a year on. We even had a situation where the opposition got their budget passed instead of the government, and that was annoying as hell to them of course, but we didn't need to call elections.

This "budget" isn't a budget in the sense of a limit on spending. In a parliamentary system, the budget is a set of proposals for what to spend money on and how to raise it. So it involves a piece of legislation to adjust the government's taxation powers.

Well.. no? Because the state have other sources of money than the taxes: previous budget surplus, and loans being the most obvious ones.

Taxation is one thing, the budget is another.

This could just be an annoying issue of how a word is used. Words pick up multiple meanings over time. Certainly "budget" can be used in the sense you say, but "The Budget" is a term for a political event, in the UK and probably Canada which includes other things - much as those of us who like cleanly defined terms would prefer it otherwise...

This actually makes it worse, I think.

Had the decision been taken as a result of "secret" meetings set up outside the purview of elected politicians one could have at least used the discourse that the OP uses: "They're taking these acts behind our backs!".

But when burying these type of nefarious acts in a 450-page budget bill the people responsible for it all can now get back to us with: "your elected politicians voted it into law, it has all been done by the book, no nefarious act in there". And that's how trust in democracy and in the power of the people, for the people, takes another big hit.

> trust in democracy

My favorite part is where the millionaire-billionaire politicians (that do this exact thing themselves) use this opportunity to vilify their opponents and then push for something else they want as the solution.

X does something wrong, Y calls it out and raises support and then sneaks in something wrong.

So the citizens get fleeced and then become pawns. It seems like this is visible in every. single. bill. that gets passed by either party in the US.

This is why all bills should be single issue, with a public comment period of 1 day per page of text before a vote is allowed

How do you define single issue? Take a budget bill. There can be hundreds of line items in the budget. Are you saying every line item should be its own bill? That would take all year just to do one budget.

If not, where do you draw the line?

Well I would start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_rule

From there (since I am in the US) I would look at the decades of jurisprudence at the state level where most states have already adopted a Single Subject rule for their legislature's and have not seemed to gotten bogged down by it. it is not a new concept.

here is a pretty good overview from the MN legislature:

https://www.house.mn.gov/hrd/pubs/ss/sssubtitle.pdf

Then I could look to the Proposed law in Congress (https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/872/...) which addresses your budget concern by adding "An appropriations bill shall not contain any general legislation or change of existing law provision, " meaning a budget is about a budget not about passing new laws or changing laws / regulations.

That is just a start of where one could go for this topic

How does this deal with issues where a particular regulation needs funding to have any force (such as funding a regulatory agency to enforce the regulation) and opponents of the regulation might choose to defund the agency (by removing its funding in the budget) to prevent enforcement?

Do you have any experience with the legislative process at all? Because that is pretty common tool (defunding a program or agency) used today and has no relevance to the single subject rule

"An appropriations bill shall not contain any general legislation or change of existing law provision”

If you can defund an agency to prevent the enforcement of a law, you can effectively use a budget bill to change an existing law provision, even without changing the law itself. This defeats the spirit of that statement above.

I think you are stretching now, further nothing is ever perfect, the question is would Single Subject bills be better or worse then the current system

By all objective measure they would be better for public policy

I've seen enough examples go past to think that single subject rules tend to be honoured in the letter but not the spirit, but equally if a frankenbill can pass without a single legislator invoking that rule, then it's entirely possible its components were all sufficiently popular the outcome was fine.

So I think it's entirely possible that you could come up with a single subject rule that was enough of a net win I'd be in favour, but I suspect you'd want to look at how the existing ones have been gamed and work out which those cases want to have an official way to do them and which you want to reword things to make harder.

> How do you define single issue?

- Everything in the bill should be able to be summarized by a one-paragraph, three-sentence, no-semicolons abstract relating the purpose of the bill. None of the content of the bill should be surprising given that abstract — it should "follow from" the abstract.

- The abstract's sentences must all be logically connected, able to be diagrammed as a causal network. There can't be one sentence that introduces some completely independent purpose from the purpose discussed in the other two sentences. You can't say "We want to build a bridge. Also, we want to buy some tanks." — nothing connects those two concepts into a single coherent purpose. But you can say "We want to buy some tanks. We also want to build test ranges for those tanks." — the two concepts are connected and form a single coherent purpose.

> Take a budget bill.

No, don't take "a budget bill." The whole purpose of Congress as a social technology is to output a budget; every bill Congress evaluates is for the purpose of defining the budget. Congress should not be passing "a budget" through one bill, any more than a software company should be making a release every few months that entirely rewrites their whole product line from scratch with no code reuse.

Bills should represent discrete patches to the budget (implying also: to the executive departments and regulations funded by said budget), and should be debated the same way that e.g. Linux kernel patches are debated on LKML — including being rejected as "too big to be debated"!

And this perspective — of the whole of the legislative process being "about" the creation of a budget — should be burned into the process itself: no bill should be allowed to be introduced that "defunds" something without also excising the law that defined that thing; no law should be allowed to be introduced that "creates" something without also appropriately funding that thing. The legislature should be ACID — a bill should never leave the law in an inconsistent state (inconsistent between the set of laws, and the budget defined to "power" those laws.)

To be clear, that debate would not be line-item level — five fighter jets, three waste-treatment plants, twenty FDA auditors, etc. But it should be confined to a set of things that, as above, can be summarized coherently; and which can also be discussed and debated coherently, with the same set of experts needed to read and analyze the validity of every line-item involved in the bill.

Compare/contrast the court system: nobody involved would think that doing a single court case that evaluates 1. whether a company is committing accounting fraud; 2. whether its founder assaulted someone, and 3. whether another founder should get custody of their kids, would be a good idea. Those three questions each imply separate judges with different specialties, separate sets of expert witnesses, separate jury selection processes, and separate lawyers that each side would want to retain. (And, in fact, separate defendants!) And yet, in legislature, we see bills that do exactly this.

This will just result in extremely large page sizes and extremely small font sizes.

Good. The public can reject it for obvious manipulation quickly.

Sure they will. Now look at a picture of this kitten.

Who wouldn’t vote for the Covertly Undermining Transparency and Expanding Key Invasive Tracking Targeting You (CUTE KITTY) Act? Seems harmless enough.

If only we could regulate the size the page and the font in the law / amendment that would create the single subject rule and/or the waiting period law

450 pages in one page would surpass printer DPI limits I would hope

I think the only way to change it is for the change to come from within the industry.

As the factions that get hurt by this get stronger the more likely they succeed.

Democracy is compromised by commercial institutions because they can afford resources that no public or independent organisation can afford.

This is why I support NGOs like EFF.

Doesn't Canada have to ratify international treaties/agreements in an assembly? I assume joining NAFTA was debated, right?

Edit: Ah, it looks like it's fully up to the executive branch. https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...

In Canada, signing treaties is a matter for the executive. However, the terms of the treaty are not automatically incorporated into Canadian domestic law – the words of a statute win out over a treaty.

Sometimes a treaty can be implemented with just regulation, or it provides a statement of principles that helps interpret legal ambiguities. However, on matters such as the copyright term length discussed in this article, the trade treaty required explicit implementation by statute.

I don't think you need to invoke the power of evil corporations to explain why this gets so little pushback in the public discourse.

Matthew Yglesias did a tweet thread a while back arguing that copyright terms should be shorter and the responses were instructive. People -- regular people -- have a pretty deep intuition that if you create something, then it belongs to you -- forever. The Jeffersonian notion that copyright exists only to incentivize new works is to most folks an odd one. His mentions filled up with authors arguing that their great-grandkids should enjoy the fruits of their labor, sentiments that garnered broad support from basically everyone except copyright law nerds (like myself).

But regular people don't own any copyrights worth mentioning. Sure, there are people who have built their livelyhoods on copyright and they will of course try to extend the benefit as much as possible - after all, the benefit is a lot more visible and direct than the costs. These are the authors in your example. But the vast majority of people are not authors. They are not musicians. They are not artists. 99% of people do no create any "IP" worth anything outside of their workplace. So maybe your example is more than anything a reminder that twitter polls are not representative of the population at large.

Most people receive a salary. They don't own their work. No different from the people who work at Disney studios.

That has not been my experience; I've brought up copyright a fair bit in conversations over the years (much to the chagrin of my friends, acquaintances and coworkers, I'm sure). I've literally never met anyone who thinks the great-grandchildren of an author should be financially compensated for their great-grandparents' work. That very scenario is usually the example I bring up -- the old "If I built and installed a plumbing fixture, should my great-grandkids be able to collect licence fees on its use?" analogy is persuasive. I do agree people generally think that an intellectual work created is rightfully the property of the creator -- but most don't extend that much past death.

It would be unsurprising to discover that M. Yglesias attracted the attention of a twitter cluster that holds a fairly specific niche view very strongly and lots of that cluster piled in to the thread in question.

This is not, after all, a particularly rare event on the platform in general.

The plumbing fixture analogy only stretches so far, though, because installing a fixture takes a few hours at most, so paying for the plumber's time in a one-and-done lump sum is an entirely feasible affair for a lot of people.

Writing a book on the other hand usually takes weeks, months or even years, so only the richest of individuals could afford to pay an author's living expenses for that period in a similar one-and-done lump sum.

Plus people that read books want to likely read new books more frequently than they need their plumbing fixed, again exacerbating that problem.

So consequently you need some sort of arrangement that allows for splitting the necessary payment to the author up across multiple people and/or over time.

Additionally, artists often speculatively create works without knowing for sure whether the public will take any interest in their work, or not. Copyright certainly has its faults, but it does cater for precisely that scenario by ensuring that you can insist on getting paid afterwards if people enjoy and want access to your work, and you don't need to acquire all the necessary funding up front. If you can't come up with enough money, you can even "just" invest your spare time instead and still get paid back if the work turns out be successful.

Plumbers on the other hand I assume rarely have the desire to speculatively fix up other people's plumbing and then hope to get paid afterwards if they did a good job.

Rewarding artists after they've already produced the artistic work if they're successful also makes sense in that the quality of artistic output can vary, and so there's a bigger risk of disappointment if you need to pay far in advance, before the work has possibly even been produced.

And because the quality of an artistic work is also very much a subjective matter, it'd also be much more difficult getting your money back in that case, whereas plumbing can mostly be judged according to much more objective standards, so getting your money back – through the legal system if required - is again a more tenable affair.

Of course the existence of Kickstarter and the like or even just plain old pre-orders show that to some extent people are willing to take that risk of paying in advance, but whether that would be enough if it was the only reasonable source of funding for artistic works? It'd also mean that if you can't convince people to pay you in advance (and good luck with that if you're some unknown newcomer), then good luck getting any more money afterwards, even if the book/… then turns out to be wildly popular afterwards.

Fwiw, I've seen the Hollywood-ish copyright-maximalist community comment to itself about Yglesias posts, and so can easily imagine a post drawing comments representative of that community, rather than of "regular people".

> Terrible how commercial lobbies are now able to hurt populations

You make this sound like it's about legalizing a dangerous chemical or something. It's extending copyright limits. I don't feel particularly "hurt" by not being able to legally publish Mickey Mouse fan fiction.

I do. We should be incentivizing useful economical activity, not people sitting on their asses, earning from the actual work their grandparents did.

IMO, the right length for copyright is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, give or take. If you've proven you can create something useful once, you should have a reason to repeat the feat.

> an artistic work won’t join the public domain for the life of the author plus another 70 years.

> "Canada will continue to do its part to protect the interests of artists, creators and rights holders, while continuing to balance the needs of industry"

Well no, an artist's interests disappear the moment they die, this is only to protect the interests of the rights holders, most likely only the big ones. At least be straight about it.

You are failing to consider scarcity.

For example, if the artist is 70 years and someone is thinking about buying the rights to their work, how long after death the work is protected is a big deal.

In this example, if the copyright ended immediately upon the artist's death, then a lot of potential buyers may decide that it is worth it to just wait for the artist to die, and either not make an offer or make a much smaller offer than they would have under the current situation of 70 years after the death of the author.

Artists have to make art, not shovel money.

This is an argument to simply not consider the date of death of an author at all.

For example, 70 years since the work was first published seems reasonable. Then most people's descendants will see some revenue from dad's work, and there won't be a sudden cliff date, assuming dad produced works all through his life.

An investor who buys the rights no longer has to consider the age and health status of the author while deciding how much the rights are worth.

I also like excluding the authors lifetime because it makes it easy to determine when works are public. There is no need to track down who the author is, if it has been around for X years it is now public. It gives a definite endtime.

That's a fair argument

Why not "the author's natural lifetime or 23 years, whichever is longer"?

An artist's interests disappear after their family is reasonably compensated after they die, in many cases.

While I completely disagree with "Life of author + 70 years", I'm very much a fan of 20 + 20 and other platforms, where things are protected for, for example, 20 years and then if the author is still alive, or recently passed, they get another 20 for their lineage.

Imagine an author finishes a book as their way of securing their family's future.

Why do artists families deserve that kind of compensation compared to everyone else? What makes them so special that they can't just just use a pension or investments like everyone else?

A book is not like a statue with one large patron; or a piece of software they were commissioned, in the past, to write and have no promise of gain in the future.

A book is written for hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of tiny, future patrons.

Further "starving artist" isn't just a trope.

An author probably wasn't being paid for a given book for the months or years until the book was produced. It was made on a promise that some day it would be paid back. That's what makes it different.

>or a piece of software they were commissioned

What about software that wasn't commissioned? Many programmers are kind of an artist too.

All what you mentioned is also valid for a programmer writing a game or application.

Sure is! I would say their work should be protected the same way.

When I was mentioning the programmer above, I was definitely not clear. I should have been more clear. The difference I was trying to portray is that artist work tends to come in two forms:

  * pay ahead of time
  * pay in the future

I was speaking mostly of the contract workers that work for another company and could be fired "tomorrow" and never see another penny - their pennies were earned in their salaries.

Artistic work regularly comes in the "pay in the future" form. We see that all the time with books, songs and yes, indie game or other software developers working on passion projects.

Having copyright immediately end at death harms the desires for those creators to do work, especially later in their lives, where they personally won't reap the benefits of it; but, their children could. "Plant a tree for your grandkids to swing in" and all that.

But yes, you are entirely correct with regards to developers working on passion projects.

I still don't get it. Why should they profit off the work of someone else?

The author is dead, they don't need to sustain themselves.

Their family are adults and can sustain themselves. If they can't, then that's why the author invested and got a pension or life insurance for. One extra book at the end wouldn't make a difference.

Unless, of course, the author is very successful and wealthy and their family isn't concerned with survival, just with profits.

Because collectively, as a society, for a long, long time and a long time ago too, we've thought that they should profit off that work; and, in general, the consensus is that they should.

That's not really a reason, and it's not even true. Some people a long time ago decided that. "We" didn't decide that, and certainly not collectively. I don't think the popular consensus is that copyright is good either.

Why are their family adults?

Because the implication in this thread is an author dying of old age, therefore their kids should already be adults

Why do children deserve to receive support from the work of their parents? I don't know.

That is what pension or life insurance is for.

The whole concept that copyright should be for the life of the author (or even life plus) came as a shoe in for pensions from a time where pensions weren't a thing.

Personally I don't think they should after they're adults. You gotta contribute to society to earn your keep

I'm not sure I understand what exactly you mean with "20 + 20". What is the difference with a fixed copyright duration of 20 years (which would be passed on to the estate if the original author(s) pass away during the 20 years)?

"20 + 20" is really a 40 year copyright with an early release if the artist passes away, basically.

I am probably misremembering. I think the US was originally 14 + 14, which is really 28 with a quick release in case of early death, etc.

I'm also amiable to a 20 + (exponentially increasing yearly price to maintain copyright manually) pattern. Actually, that's probably my favorite form. Then Disney can retain their copyrights .... by paying a _whole lot of money_ and stop all the harm they've caused society at large by extending copyright duration far beyond anything reasonable.

Ah, right.

I'm not sure why death of the author should really be a factor; why not just a fixed period, whether that's 20 years, 40 years, or something else?

I don't like "20+ increasing yearly price to maintain copyright"; the basic idea behind copyright is that authors or their estate will be able to make a living from their creative works. I'm not opposed to people or corporations make truckloads of money if their work is successful, but under this scheme the more successful your work is, the longer you'll be able to afford renewal fees and the more money you will be able to make off it. An author who made a slightly successful work that still rakes in some money after 20 years (say, €50/month) won't be able to afford the renewal fees, but if something is wildly successful (say, Harry Potter) then they'll be able to afford the renewal fees for a lot longer.

The more successful a work is, the more it's part of our culture. Things like Star Trek or Harry Potter are just as much part of our culture as the Homeric stories were part of Greek culture, or Shakespeare is part of English culture. As far as I'm concerned the biggest reason why we should limit copyright at all is that culture belongs to everybody and that everyone should be able to contribute to that in their own way.

YouTube channel with publicly-funded restorations of Canadian content was deleted, https://playbackonline.ca/2022/11/21/cmf-to-shutter-cancon-y...

> The channel had nearly 200,000 subscribers and more than 50 million views ... Over 3,000 pieces of Canadian content were digitized and restored through the project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Media_Fund

> The fund is composed of contributions made by Canadian broadcasting... and the federal government. It funds roughly $750 million annually... On November 17 and 18, 2022, official platforms announced that after more than five years of availability, the service... was to shut down on November 30th. All media was wiped from both YouTube channels on that date, and the Twitter account and Facebook page with lists of content and discussion were made unavailable.

That was six months ago, content has not (yet?) been published elsewhere, https://cmf-fmc.ca/news/encore-to-explore-new-avenues/

> made possible through a collaborative effort between CMF teams and the industry (Telefilm, unions and guilds, producers, creators, distributors, etc). In total, the project helped preserve our cultural heritage by digitizing and restoring over 3,000 pieces of content that directly contributed to Canada’s audiovisual legacy. In addition, the project resulted in some global sales of the newly digitized Canadian content, new opportunities for fans to see older works that had not been available online, and renewed interest in the content and creators that the CMF (and former CTF) proudly funded.

No indication where the content can be purchased. Not even a historical list of the content that was restored and digitized.

One example of classic Canadian content was the 1990s TV series Traders, which won many awards and remains the best fictional treatment of investment banking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traders_(TV_series) & https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115397/reviews

I'm a firm believer that copyright and estate ownership should only extend to the direct descendant of the artist.

No selling estates rights, no letting the great grandkid coast on the ideas of their great grandfather. Copyright is to protect the artist, not landlords.

> Copyright is to protect the artist, not landlords.

But... but Big Mouse!!! /s

Personally, I'd cut the line even closer, for patents and all other forms of intellectual property with the exception of trademarks: 10 years should be more than enough to make back R&D / IP development cost.

And no more "software patents" either, same for all kinds of patents without a concrete, working implementation. No more hoarding of ideas to stifle competition. And if you're not actively using or fairly licensing your patents for a year, instant revocation.

I was trying to play the middle to make folks happy but in general I have zero respect for the industry of IP and really enjoy seeing what comes out of Chinese Shanzai culture. Rather than a handful of worse products protected by a copyright, the rapid pivoting by copying and improving has made a lot of cool tech.

The nature of disrespecting copyrights also allows for niche products to be made for smaller consumer bases, compared to the focus group driven "jack of all trades master of none" products that you see when copyright is stronger.

A few months back I was trying to reverse engineer a small Chinese bluetooth tx/rx device and found myself on the chinese side of the internet. I found many sites/blogs that only did teardowns of consumer devices, analyzing design choices, identifying and sharing datasheets normally kept behind NDAs, etc. These were datasheets of chinese origin mind you.

The openness of information was refreshing because on the english internet, all I could find was press releases with pictures of young couples enjoying their individual bluetooth headphones.

If you're a western engineer and want to make a bluetooth device, you're stuck with a handful of vendors who protect their IP to the extent it makes market research impossible. If you're a Chinese engineer, you've got a bunch of custom ready-to-go chips for various purposes. Yeah the range or quality wont be as good but design start to finish is far quicker.

> Yeah the range or quality wont be as good but design start to finish is far quicker.

The problem with this kind of China "gongkai" stuff is not just the quality but also sustainability. Fly-by-night operations that last a few months may produce innovative stuff indeed - but what value is it when you can't get spare parts or firmware fixes for security vulnerabilities? Or when you can't legally sell it anywhere in the developed world because no one has bothered with certifications? Or when shoddy li-ion batteries make it into the supply chain and suddenly it turns out a couple ten thousand units are effectively time bombs ticking to go off?

Sure, I think those concerns are real, but also not a "stop the presses" issue.

American firms aren't all that concerned with sustainability beyond donations that are tax deductible. No firm wants to seriously end planned obsolescence aside from some indie companies like framework.

I don't need a firmware fix for a 10 dollar bt adapter I cut to bits and soldered leads to traces. Better polish eventually comes from these innovations anyway.

At least the EU is stepping up and actually mandating proper support durations for security firmware. And Apple's stuff at least is supported software-side for many years and, staingate/keyboardgate aside, the build quality is long-lasting as well.

10 years is enough time for a company to screw over an author or other sort of artist by waiting.

And people like to be current on movies (as visual productions are the medium of the day), so the company will still make plenty.

Shouldn’t be protecting either. You don’t have the right to an idea.

Governments enforcing intellectual property in the marketplace after death of the owner is pretty different than gov forcing their grandkids to sell their family home because grandpa bought it before he died and decided to leave it for his family.

I am a firm believer in a 14 year copyright, and 1 extension granted to the human owner for a total of 28 years.

Corporations get only 14 years, and estates only get until the term in place at the time of death

I am a firm believer in 0 year copyright until I see extraordinary evidence that all this mess actually benefits society overall.

What you don't think punishing me for copying the works of someone else is beneficial? /s

I view copyright as an attack on free speech. Another individual is using the government to silence my expression. Doesn't matter if I'm selling or giving it away for free.

I might not even get in trouble for violating the copyright of a written work, it could be the font I used.

I’m a firm believer that copyright is 100% bullshit and nobody should get to own ideas.

Would you feel the same if hypothetically it was 100% proven to stimulate innovation? Or do you think practical benefits are irrelevant?

I don't think there's really anything wrong with selling rights or any of these things. When J. R. R. Tolkien sold the film rights in 1968 I think that was fair. The Tolkien estate selling the rights for US$250 million with all sorts of caveats about what they can and can't write about a few years ago? A bit less so.

In short, the root of the problem is really the duration; the rest are just things that flow from that.

Why don't the just say "you the people have no rights. Copyright lasts 10,000 years and that is it.".

We all know this was pushed by the US Gov. where their motto should me "Pay our politicians, you get more bang for the buck, and it is legal".

Because the trick is to boil the frog slowly. Even the most dense simpleton understands that having no rights means having no rights.

But if you have some rights, starting next Tuesday, and the government keeps extending the start date, you have something to look up to.

Of course, it will be postponed forever.

> Even the most dense simpleton understands that having no rights means having no rights.

I understand this is exaggerated, but I'm not sure it's true. Plenty of people argue all the time that taking away their own rights is not a problem:

"if you're not a criminal, you have nothing to worry about",

"if you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy",

"we need to give up freedoms for a greater good",

"the government knows best",

"if the government is watching, everyone will behave better",

"if you can't trust the government, who can you trust?",

"the founding fathers didn't prescribe freedom X",

"only terrorists need freedom Y" (like privacy),

"if you give people too much freedom, they will abuse it",

"if you don't like it, you can leave the country",

and the pandemic favourite — "it's only temporary", despite ample evidence in history that temporary stripping of freedoms is almost never temporary.

I don't know... I've heard too many self-sabotaging arguments for stripping away freedoms from ordinary people that perhaps I'm convinced a good chunk of "the most dense simpletons" would be fine with it. Maybe they'd champion it if the right political party proposed the removal of freedoms.

> and the pandemic favourite — "it's only temporary", despite ample evidence in history that temporary stripping of freedoms is almost never temporary.

Which pandemic freedoms have not been restored? I'd argue we've moved on to pretending COVID does not exist any way.

While many of our freedoms have been restored, it is important to recognize that we have also normalized certain forms of government overreach, which may have lasting implications on our liberties in the future. Some of the measures that were introduced include:

- Travel restrictions

- Device-level and biological surveillance

- Mandatory injections/vaccinations

- Suppression of dissent

- Stigmatizing individuals with pre-existing conditions

- Disallowing human contact

- Imposing what is effectively house arrest on a very large part of the population (self isolating)

These unprecedented measures have significantly eroded personal autonomy, and, unfortunately, we have not seen much pushback against them.

I am not necessarily arguing against the effectiveness of these measures in dealing with global crises. However, it is crucial that we remain vigilant and aware of the potential "boiling frog" situation with our freedoms. As a result of the normalization of these measures, we may find ourselves facing mandatory isolation, testing, tracking, surveillance, and travel restrictions more frequently in the future.

Indeed, if we were to look back just a decade ago, the idea of governments exercising such extensive control would have seemed unimaginable to many. Now, I can imagine governments doing this again, even for crises other than global pandemics.

We have always had:

- travel restrictions - mandatory vaccinations - suppression of dissent - stigmatizing individuals

To assert otherwise is ahistorical IMO.

It's unclear to me what device-level and biological surveillance mean. A decade ago Steven Harper was Prime Minister and tried to infringe upon our freedoms much more frequently.

We should recognize that, as you mention, there have always been some limits on our freedoms. However, it's crucial to acknowledge that the pandemic has intensified those measures to a degree we haven't seen before. The issue isn't their existence, but the scale and intensity at which they've been applied.

Device-level and biological surveillance stem from contact tracing and mandatory testing, and the government keeps records from both. In countries with GDPR laws where people must consent to their personal data being retained, the retention periods were often quite long, sometimes spanning decades. In my view, this constitutes surveillance, and the collected data could later be used by governments and courts.

I don't intend to argue that this surveillance has negatively impacted society so far — surely contact tracing and people self-reporting their illness have helped model Covid's spread. Comparing this data to immunization and mandatory testing records was probably useful as well. However, this data has been collected, is now stored, and is accessible to governments, and we didn't have much say in the matter, individually or collectively.

It's important to question the long-term impact these actions will have on our liberties and whether the long-term costs justify the short-term benefits. For instance, many specialists believe that the pandemic would have unfolded more or less the same way, regardless of whether we compromised our privacy and freedoms. Of course, opinions vary, and it's a heated topic right now. But we must monitor it in the long run. Reflecting on the pandemic events currently, my stance is that we have eroded our freedoms more than necessary for effective control of the virus.

As a Canadian, this is why I'm intimately invested in US politics. This is not a Canadian policy failure, but an American one that, due to our dependence on the US as our biggest ally and trading partner, Canada has to go along with

Fuck you,

Sincerely,

The Commonwealth.

I guess Micky is getting his pound of flesh in Commonwealth countries later this year.

Most countries that inherited the Imperial Copyright Act extended the copyright term via national legislations decades ago. Canada and New Zealand were notable exceptions.

New Zealand did sign a FTA with the UK promising to increase the copyright term but it hasn't happened yet. I feel emotionally invested in this because if the New Zealand Parliament doesn't pass the legislation this year, Tolkien will be out of copyright next year.

It's a 4D gambit, think of all the lotr movies that will get filmed there without copyright restrictions.

But I don't think they will be able to call them LoTR movies. Trademarks can be perpetual.

Just call it "King of the Rings", starring John Cena as Frodo.

I wasn't able to get to the article for not being a subscriber, but from looking around the web it seems Canada now has a 70 year past the year of death of the author copyright law, just like the US. And not retroactive - anything in the public domain prior to dec. 2021 remains in there.

Yes, because the US forced it as a condition for the new NAFTA. Very few changes between the two except crap like this.

I can't even imagine the mess it being retroactive would have caused.

> anything in the public domain prior to dec. 2021 remains in there.

It's still a retroactive extension for works from authors who died 50-70 years ago.

Those dead authors are really going to be inspired to create more.

I hit ⌘RAC (Reload Select-All Copy) enough times to copy the text to the clipboard and pasted into a text editor.

“Trade obligations” aka international corporations elevating their interests beyond the state sovereignty level.

Welcome to Canada, where successive governments lie down and let foreign interests walk all over them like a doormat. If you want to be disgusted by more "trade obligations", check out what was in FIPA.

I'm wondering what will copyright mean after 20y of generative AI.

Generative AI is only the latest blow to copyright. Initiatives like this are just the death throwes of companies who know their business model is outdated, trying to extract a last little bit of rent before the music stops.

I'd first want to see generative AI trained on 100% non-copyrighted (or properly licensed for the purpose) works. I'm pretty sure that copyright laws will be adapted in the next years to cover AI/training usage, so people will need proper licensing for that. Not saying that copyright is good or bad or anything else, that's just my intuition about the next years...

Excellent. “People” are also folks with mortgages and kids - they need their work protected instead of looted by corporations. Similarly, open source code needs licensing honoured. This way there will be an incentive to pay those who’s intellect is used for training machine learning. A win win situation.

"People" aren't owed an unstainable business model by society any more than companies are. Taxing everybody else with copyright rules is not a clear net benefit for society.

> "People" aren't owed an unstainable business model by society any more than companies are.

True. But society needs to align incentives with its desired outputs.

If original work and creativity just makes other folks (entrenched middlemen) rich, we’ll see stagnation. With capital likely determining even more than before.

If a pursuit can’t make money, it becomes a luxury with all the implications involved.

I'm sure we'll see something trained only on out-of-copyright visuals soon enough. Licensing is a red herring.

A team actually brute-force generated all 68 billions of possible melody combinations for 12 notes in the middle-C octave set back in 2020 [1], essentially trolling/breaking the copyright law as now all these melodies are in the public domain as prior art.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats...

>"Canada will continue to do its part to protect the interests of artists, creators and rights holders, while continuing to balance the needs of industry"

They could have just put "the needs of industry" as the real reason and spare us of their weasel rhetorics.

Not even needs it's wants.

Plausible deniability is often, an effective tactic.

There is nothing plausible about it here. As for "effective" - I am sure it works well for a single cell species.

They don't even pretend to give a toss about the rights of the public.

The primary value of a copyrighted work is not intrinsic, but rather comes from the integration of the work into everyday activity and culture.

Also there should be increasing levels of archival and disclosure requirements:

- before first renewal: no requirement.

- first renewal: must provide a simple no-drm consumer-grade copy to an official archive (e.g. us library of Congress).

- second renewal: provide masters/source-code/assets to the archive.

This raises Canada's copyright term to match that of the US, most of South America, most of Europe, Russia and most former USSR states, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and a few others.

what model does Canada, and presumably other commonwealth nations follow? I suppose it is the same model as the U.S where the purpose of copyright is to foster innovation? That would also explain why it took so long to implement these changes, since this kind of thing seems to go against the purpose of copyright under the 'Innovation' model.

Canada has not much innovation to speak of as the populace is intensely risk averse.

It's crazy , we can vote on HN , but we can't vote on these decisions as citizens. This is not democracy.

More steps backward.

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