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Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

Without copyright, moneyed interests would be able to simply wait for promising new artists to create something that resonates with an audience, then copy that thing and aim their massive marketing budgets at dominating that audience with the new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc].

Similar to how going viral with a new mobile game as an indie dev means you will almost immediately be cloned and pushed out by King et. al., removing copyright protections would mean that only the largest and wealthiest artists' and corporations' versions of art dominate the market. Creating something truly new and interesting would become simply a donation of that idea to the powers that be.

The main problem with copyright isn't it's existence, it's that technology has allowed the wielding of it to become too quickly and brutally applied a la youtube's automated DMCA system.

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I get your point i think.

But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit the "little guy" or indie artists.

There have been many many instances of big record labels or game producers ripping of small artists and I have yet to see 1 (one) instance of a small artist going against $bigcorp and winning.

Copyright is broken; it only protects those already moneyed and in power and savagely attacks small artists, destroys the basis of creativity (sampling) and blocks access to vital research.

It must be abolished.

Copyright has transformed many poor people into multimillionaires. The Music world is full of artists going huge but it extends to other areas. J.K. Rawling for example didn’t have any significant leverage at the beginning but is wealthy by any reasonable metric.

Was that a typo? Joanne is pretty rich by Scottish standards.

Ops, was going for not just just a multimillionaire but actually yacht wealthy but messed up the edit.

Beware the abolishing of existing legal systems, because our status quo 'powers that be' will infiltrate the creation and managing organizations of whatever comes next to ensure the new situation is better for them than the old.

A problem relevant to this case directly is why works can be under copyright after the passing of their creator. There shouldn't be an Andy Warhol Foundation licensing works. This is purely a rent seeking behavior. The money made from licensing Andy Warhol works does not fund further output by the artist. They are dead. You just have some randos extracting wealth from society for the privilege to use something that the creator profited from long ago. The work of dead artists should be in the public domain.

> The work of dead artists should be in the public domain.

“Murder of popular musicians and artists up 1000% this year… news at 11”

Joking aside, if I am the artist, shouldn’t I be able to give those rights to my children to provide for them after I’m gone? I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying but I think a reasonable threshold after death is appropriate (20 years maybe instead of 70?)

No, a reasonable threshold is 10 years after creation.

The question is to what time threshold does society need to pay for police/courts/lawyers to enforce copyright law such that people are sufficiently incentivized to create whatever.

For example, if copyright law were 10 years from date of creation, would we see too little in the way of creativity? Would singers still sing and writers still write and artists still paint/draw/whatever?

I can see a viewpoint proposing 10, 15, even 20 years, but 100+ years is beyond the pale. That is just a handout from taxpayers to people that own the copyrights.

I saw an interesting suggestion that copyright should just be for a given period at a given cost of registration... say first 10 years as-is, but if you want it longer, you pay X for N years, and it doubles each time you pay. I mean if Disney wants to pay $1B+ every few years to keep "Steamboat Willie" under copyright, let them. Eventually it will be cost prohibitive and enter the public domain.

Any such scheme immeasurably benefits large corporations over individual creatives. Disney's lawyers have no issues dealing with copyright frictions. Individual authors do.

I agree - basing it off creation could make sense but then I’d argue for maybe more like 50 years. Plenty of works take decades in and of themselves. George RR Martin started Game of thrones 27 years ago. Should HBO just have been able to take his work and make millions without paying him a dime? It would just turn into corporations exploiting popular public domain works.

Yes, that is what public domain is. What reason is there for society to give RR Martin more than 10 years of copyright protection? He is free to shop around his story to movie makers in that time. And if it is so good, someone will jump on it.

After that, it is not “exploitation”, it is using something in the public domain.

> And if it is so good, someone will jump on it

No they will just wait for the timer to tick away and monopolize on a community that someone else spent years building. Just because you change the law in your thought experiment for it to be legal doesn’t make it not exploitative. If we legalize slavery you can’t just say, “well its no longer exploitative, its the law”

People do not “own” communities that they have a right to profit from indefinitely.

And yes, if it is good, people will jump on it. Evidence being that HBO did not wait 170 years to start making game of thrones. They saw a story they could sell, so they paid the author to make it. If they did not, another media maker could and would have. Warner brothers did not wait until Harry Potter copyrights expire. I am sure other media makers were bidding for Harry Potter rights too.

Of course, Martin and Rowling have been paid less if copyright was 10 years. But would they have written the stories if they earned $10M instead of $100M or $1B or whatever they earned? I would err on the side of yes.

People can pass other types of property to their heirs, including recently-generated wealth. You can certainly argue against that. But it goes beyond IP property specifically.

The commercial work of many (most? all?) commercial artists is fundamentally a product, not different from any other item where distribution in a market or consumption is concerned. These art products are often sponsored by organizations who collect revenue from sales and in turn provide distribution or promotion, so they have a reasonable argument that they should continue benefiting from the work if the artist dies. This sounds heartless and I am not generally a supporter of "art is product" (I find it exhausting, to be honest) but it's unavoidable for professional artists.

On a human scale, this might just be the artist's family who supported the artist during life (think: a partner whose full-time job provided funding and health benefits while the other sweated it out in a studio) who relied on their income during life. Or the foundation might collect royalties to pay the staff who assisted with the work (essentially co-creating it) per contracts established at the time of its creation.

> But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit the "little guy" or indie artists.

> There have been many many instances of big record labels or game producers ripping of small artists and I have yet to see 1 (one) instance of a small artist going against $bigcorp and winning.

So your solution to small artists getting ripped off is to take away all the rights those small artists now enjoy, so they get ripped off harder and faster by "those already moneyed and in power"?

Ok then.

> Copyright is broken; it only protects those already moneyed and in power and savagely attacks small artists, destroys the basis of creativity (sampling) and blocks access to vital research.

> It must be abolished.

That's foolish radicalism. Progress doesn't happen by over-reacting to some problem and calling for the abolition of the whole system because it's imperfect. In all but a few rare cases, it happens by reforming things to solve the specific problems while preserving the other benefits. Copyright isn't one of those rare cases. Reform is in order, not abolition.

> So your solution to small artists getting ripped off is to take away all the rights those small artists now enjoy, so they get ripped off harder and faster by "those already moneyed and in power"?

Yes. Those "rights" are not free. They have an immense cost to society. If we want to collectively support artists we can do so without stifling creativity.

But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit

Fully agreed, and I would drastically curtail it. But complete abolition is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, ignoring the problem copyright was established to solve in the first place.

I have yet to see 1 (one) instance of a small artist going against $bigcorp and winning

Just did, in this very news story. It's happened on multiple occasions, it's just that such cases are weighed on their individual facts and don't lead to any change in the basic idea. Of course, big corporations always have a starting advantage because they can hire expensive legal teams and weigh down their opponents, but this is a general flaw in the adversarial litigation culture of the UK/US which is unabashedly pro-capitalist.

I would assume that there was some legal financing behind this lawsuit. It's pretty easy to get if you have a decent case, and while they do take a decent chunk of your winnings, it's a lot better than nothing.

> ignoring the problem copyright was established to solve in the first place

Maintaining copy quality and providing a single point of contact for censorship?

You probably mean some other goal people gave it by the end of the Modern Age.

Tendentious nonsense. Copyright was instituted by the same people that came up with the first amendment. Publishers ripping off authors was a well-understood problem at the time, and even before; Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe and many other successful books) wrote an essay addressing both freedom of the press and copyright in 1704: https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecor...

>But copyright as it exists now does not protect or benefit the "little guy" or indie artists.

Yes it does and I'm a plaintiff's attorney that works in copyright and patent for small-time artists and inventors. You could not be more wrong.

I have obtained settlements for my clients from some of the biggest media corporations in the US. You have NO IDEA what you are talking about.

Can you give specific cases for people to reference?

They settled before going to suit, I didn't say I obtained verdicts, I said I obtained settlements. Verdicts aren't how most copyright infringement works (more evidence that you have no idea what you are talking about, at all).

You do not have to file suit to assert a copyright. You just need the authority to file that suit, in order to have a meaningful threat from which an infringer (especially a large media company) will settle.

If this is too hard for you to believe, I'm not sure what to tell you but to spend more time in the real world, and less on whatever media you are reading to engender these thoughts.

Agreed - to an extent. IMO the current term of copyright is the primary issue - and the balance has tipped too far in favour of copyright holders; This case is a good example of the ridiculousness of that state - the artist has expired and is no longer able to enjoy the benefits of his work - yet he descendants expect to continue to profit from his work - which seems unreasonable and detrimental to society.

> Without copyright, moneyed interests would be able to simply wait for promising new artists to create something that resonates with an audience, then copy that thing and aim their massive marketing budgets at dominating that audience with the new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc].

Copyright doesn’t mitigate this risk, for if it did, it would do the same thing for the example you cite in the second paragraph. (Software and game assets are also protected by copyright. . .)

Simple answer to begin discussion: copyright owned and controlled wholly by the people who actually created the art gets life+70 protection, with specific requirements (to be discussed) for the stewards of that copyright post-death. However, copyright owned or transferred to a corporation gets 28 with a 14 renewal.

This would get you contracts for licensing rights to exploitation to corporations instead of an outright transfer of copyright to circumvent the different length of protection.

That would be absolutely fine, as long as those rights don't prevent the actual rightsholder from doing anything (past the "normal" corporate copyright length, in this hypothetical scenario). So such an "exclusive" license should max at 28 years, with a 14 year extension (requiring appropriate consideration, not some $1 backroom deal).

I'd add the duration of the copyright as another issue. The incentive to create would exist even with a much shorter copyright duration.

The main issue most people have with copyright relates to duration. Most don't have an issue with the basic concept.

> the new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc]

Without copyright, what would corporation/famous artist ‘own’?

Yeah... Although the current situation where large communication companies have to be proactive and steal the great content with some unfair contract before the artist releases it is much better, it is still far from optimal.

> The main problem with copyright isn't it's existence

I disagree. The main problem with copyright is its existence. It cannot be logically explained as anything other than microslavery.

If we think the world is a better place with microslavery, than that's an honest debate to have. But the current debate simply is not honest.

Stephan Kinsella (a patent lawyer who is against IP) is the best thinker on the subject currently, IMO.

> new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc].

Owned? Without copyright?

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