Why wait? How Congress could fix copyright now
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is plenty of time to exploit the financial possibilities of the initial release of a creative work, and it still allows remixes and adaptions in a reasonable time frame.
In a perfect world, copyright produced by big name corporations such as Microsoft would last 5 years or so, so that a product they make can mature, take market, they can make their profit, and then it goes public domain. They can still sell licenses for the automatic updates and such, and they don't need to make the source available - they just can't sue for duplication anymore.
Likewise, I would like to see independent content creators given a means to extend copyrights on things they keep iterating upon. An example would be Penny Arcade - it started as a small venture and has since matured to a recognizable standard amongst game circles. However, Tycho and Gabe continue to make comics and have been doing so for ~15 years. I figure their early work should be public domain by this point (consider how few people read the entire archive of their comic that far back) but they should be able to file a renewal after 5 years to double a copyright to 10 if they are actively iterating on a copyrighted product or concept.
I could settle for a blanket decade copyright if it included patents. Everything copyrighted expires after 10 years without exception under any circumstance and after expiration duplication and reproduction is no longer restricted to the copyright holder. Reproducing content and material becomes the responsibility of the one seeking it or someone else providing it, such as when the patents on some car engine expire after a decade of being on the roads, you can reverse engineer that engine without fear of patent infringement but you still need to take the steps to actually rebuild the thing.
That last point is important to understand. Just because something goes public domain doesn't mean that the original manufacturer (example, the car engine) can't continue to sell that engine. They can sell it for whatever they want. Having patents expire just means their competitors can copy design decisions in that engine after 10 years to improve their own engines and sell them competitively.
Same thing with media. Piracy only exists because the cost of reproduction is near 0 for almost any digital data. But people would still pay for features - Steam games could sell for a dollar or two to have cloud saved games, screenshots, built in recording features, etc.
And then when the steam platform passes into public domain, that doesn't mean Valve can't sell games with it - it just means people can alter or reverse engineer the software if they have it and if they want to and sell it however they want. But Valve would still have all the servers, and would be selling the usage of them - and they don't just become public goods. They are always private property.
The legal part is important , because there would be a good business model in simply taking all of the copyright expired works and creating a download/streaming website for it all and charging basically for the bandwidth and easy UI, not to mention that every TV manufacturer would want to integrate this.
That would be a massive library of stuff, far more than you could watch or listen to in your lifetime, would you really be worried about seeing the newest blockbuster the day it came out?
I think a lot of people want to keep up with the latest media, and there are lots of social reasons to do so. The latest TV shows, movies, and books will be the ones your friends are watching/reading. As xkcd eloquently put it: http://xkcd.com/606/
This points out one more factor: content prices decrease dramatically after several years. Videogames go from $60 to $10 on Steam; Movies end up in discount bins; books end up cheap on amazon or from used bookstores.
Books are an interesting example: when they are first published it is difficult to acquire them at a local library (because lots of other people want to read the same new book), but after some time (usually much less than a year), they are easily acquirable for free. If the library model works, such that authors are satisfied with the profitability of writing books, then reducing copyright term to a few years is probably reasonable.
EDIT: I personally think somewhere around 10 years is probably more reasonable, but I think the discussion around a more extreme 2-5 years is interesting, and the current term length is ridiculous.
I suspect the business model that is most likely to work is an extension of the current one.
Larger multiplexes with more screens, when you go to the cinema you have a wide choice of movies to see.
Movies would no longer drop out of the cinema within a week or two.
In this controlled environment it is easier for the cinemas to prevent copying.
Only after a long cinema run would the film be released on DVD, after which point the copyright expires and you can copy to your hearts content.
I can even see this business model perhaps working for music as well.
It seems the problem is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution to intellectual property rights, despite our best efforts to try and fine one.
People would hold copyright as long as it made financial sense, and orphaned works would rapidly drop to Public Domain.
What about a collection of blog posts?
But the current limits are indeed completely out of whack.
> Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly.
It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art.
I highly doubt there is any significant number of independent artists who depend on copyright for their income. Most will have already realized that it's better to seek new ways to make ends meet.
The argument is bullshit. It wouldn't be any different than now. Probably better, because people would stop relying on an entirely broken system of controlling the uncontrollable (the sharing of information).
Oh, and copyright was never meant for the "small, starving artist". It was made by distributors for distributors. That's historical fact, and hasn't changed in the ~450 years this nonsensical system has prevailed.
Or in HN fashion engineers are protected and other creatives are left out in the libertarian cold?
I think going back to 14 years and one renewal is more than fair. It's far longer than all but the most popular works are profitable for but gives the creator a generation of control over it. No one can feel cheated.
In the old days, most people didn't even renew after the first term expired. You wouldn't have seen Star Wars enter the public domain after 14 years but most of the movies in MST3K, books about certain time periods written at the moment, software that won't sell another copy would all be there.
This would allow the top % of copyright works that remain profitable to be held by their creators, while the vast majority of work would quickly pass into the public domain. Plus, the larger fees on ridiculously long copyrights (Mickey Mouse) would help pay for the officials who oversee the whole thing.
I'm not sure whether it's the right approach for patents -- pharmaceutical companies for example would just keep cranking up the prices until they reached the maximum economic return.
The original term of copyright was 14 years, with one extension. This has grown to the current ~105 years.
Economic present-value analysis shows that the present value of an additional year of copyright past a couple of decades is virtually nil. As an incentive to create NEW works, global copyright extension makes zero sense. This argument hasn't been tested by SCOTUS, though Lawrence Lessig has stated that he might have done better in Eldred v. Ashcroft if he'd made that argument rather than claiming continued extensions violated the "for limited terms" Constitutional clause.
7HOHEP was published in 1989, giving it a 22 year life to date. Frankly, I don't think it's all that outstanding, but that's another story.
This is a much more complex question, and I'd argue the answer is probably yes, even if copyright was as short as 2-3 years. The writer of '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' didn't know ahead of time that it would become a perennially popular international bestseller, so the potential revenue from 50+ years of copyright protection likely played a small role in his motivation.
No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be available from any source, because it would never get written at all. There's only so much time people are willing to put into an unpaid hobby.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely, Louis C.K.
If you were somebody creating lowest common denominator entertainment for an unemployed mother to put their kids in front of do you think you would get the same results?
I doubt anyone would be buying music if Napster hadn't been shut down.
Did you actually use Napster during its heyday? Of all the P2P software I've ever tried, it was probably the worst--or perhaps just the one most poorly suited to casual piracy. The search system was a joke. Even when your search turned up results, it was hit or miss whether they were actually what you were looking for. My favorite example was a file named "Beethoven's 9th symphony - by Mozart" (it was actually a Handel piece).
Now it's easy to find private torrent trackers with huge, well-maintained collections in very high quality. Comments and ratings make it easy to decide which of several versions to download, and moderators will even help look for rare files if someone can't find what they want.
I think the death of Napster was a big favor to pirates everywhere.
You simply typed in what you wanted, waited for the search to finish and clicked to download rather than found an indexing site, selected a torrent based on "seeds" and "peers" and then worried about things like magnet links.
Many people who are not tech savvy and want to pirate either get their friends to do it for them or are still using kazaa and friends.
Or what about people who write books? Shouldn't they get money if their book is turned into a movie? With only 2 to 3 years of copyright, many books will go public domain long before a major movie can be put together.
Copyright of 2-3 years is better than no copyright at all, but it's so short that it's basically useless.
Besides, you really don't think there would be a market for taking less well known songs, rebranding them to make them palatable to the masses, and selling that? I can't imagine that if it were completely legal, they wouldn't try.