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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

I don't know Fables, but I'd love to see more things going to public domain. All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. All software stuff, API/ABI, formats, UI and leaked source code, you should be able to use it, modify it, or even sell it. Everyday products like a washing machine, or a microwave, someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. Produce and sell an iphone, a compatible, a partially compatible, an improved version, or whatever you want. And so on.

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10 years is nothing. I'm against copyright maximalism and would love to see copyright terms whittled down, but 10 years is a non-starter.

For every Stephen King that has a massive following and would easily earn enough in those 10 years, there's 100 mid-tier and lower-tier creators that need any income they can get from works still earning in some fashion.

Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."

Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

Yes, it's more complicated than that, but... an arbitrary 10 year limit wouldn't fix things or make the world substantially better and might make things worse.

Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.

We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

> Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely.

Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.

> bands play each others songs without asking

Live performances are a different act than recording and selling albums. Live performances are always (?) allowed, but IIRC, the songwriter/composer is due a royalty.

How often that happens in real life is a question, but live performances (currently) have a different set of rules.

Have you asked indie bands? Cause... I'm skeptical they're going to be happy with your proposals given that they're already hanging by a pretty thin thread.

Playing songs live != repackaging recordings. Not even in the same ballpark. Venues of size pay licenses to ASCAP, etc. for the rights to let cover bands do this -- but it's also a usage that requires a lot more factors than just copying the song. At least in the U.S. these uses are pretty much automated vs. negotiating rights to reproduce a full album or even a single.

(Tribute bands are another animal entirely - I'm not sure how or if the various Pink Floyd tribute bands, for instance, negotiate deals with the original bands since they're not just covering the songs - they also get into likeness rights and trademark, etc.)

It might improve thr situation a lot for Spotify etc. because without a legal instrument determining ownership, they might just let the first poster of a song be the owner of a song - which means anyone tries to post their song asap, even if they don't believe in Spotify.

> Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."

They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).

It cuts both ways.

> Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.

There is no legal distinction here, and there can't be. Even individuals will spin up an LLC which has ownership of that stuff, for tax/bankruptcy/whatever reasons. Do they lose copyright because they were business savvy?

> We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

I'd go the other direction. 18 months, no renewals, and no criminal charges for infringement without proof of infringement for commercial sales, and most of all any works with DRM left out in the cold and can never get copyright protection (not even if they later release a version without DRM).

> They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).

What does copyright length matter to people who wouldn't respect any of it?

My respect for copyright is proportional both to its duration and the propensity of corporations to try to use it to cheat creative people.

Define it then in terms of "10 years or an X amount of revenue generated, whichever is achieved later" where X is defined in terms of the country's economic performance.

Of course there is no reason, but 10 years seems about right to me for all of them. You create something, you get revenue for it for 10 years, now that's enough, stop hogging the art, invention, standard, whatever from the society.

I think it is a fair amount of time, I don't get the arguments that they 'deserve' more.

Also please notice, that the current copyright laws are made by the society and not by God, not a law of Nature, not a Human Right or such. We made the laws to support artists and research, but I think it restricts both culture and both the quality of life too much.

Why does Wintel 'deserve' several hundreds of billions of dollars, just because they managed themselves into a rent-seeking position and we must pay them to run any software? Why there is no gold standard of microwave oven or a washing machine that everyone can produce, so a competition could push down the prices, and you could buy replacement parts for it? Why can't I pay very talented writers to write my little pony stories? I want to. Also why is it illegal to live on writing of my little pony stories? Why can't I buy a T-shirt with a custom my little pony image I like? Or why is it illegal to maintain and modify a 10 year old version of photoshop? Sure, then their own 10 year old versions would appear as a competition to Adobe, and that would hurt a lot compared to the current situation, but then it is their job to be better. Etc. How do all of this benefit the society?

Copyright laws were created originally by the society to support artists and research, but they are way too long, mostly are just used for rent-seeking, and they restrict our lives. I don't think creators 'deserve' anything, but I think a hard 10 year period is about okay to the original creators or the publishers to monetize the product, then move on to an another product, or do whatever they want.

> I don't think creators 'deserve' anything, but I think a hard 10 year period is about okay to the original creators or the publishers to monetize the product, then move on to an another product, or do whatever they want.

If we're going to use terms like "deserve", then why are you deserving of someone else's work? It doesn't sound like you're even arguing that you could build upon that work, you just don't want to have to pay for it. Having some third party selling other people's art work without licensing them isn't exactly the proliferation of the arts typically argued for with lowering the copyright duration.

You're also severely downplaying just how hard it is to earn money from a creation. Bootstrapping a business is a lot of work. It can be years before you earn even a paltry sum. A good chunk of that 10 years is spent earning nothing. Maybe an established player like Disney can turn on a spigot and cash comes out, but that's not how it works for most people. I also don't see how investing in the creation of something that others find valuable is "rent-seeking". You're completely free to ignore that body of work. Nothing is restricting you from creating your own.

You see the free exchange of art without remuneration in this hypothetical future as a way to drive down costs. I see artists saying "why bother?" and an inevitable stifling of art. Most of us aren't independently wealthy or magnanimous enough to work for free.

> If we're going to use terms like "deserve", then why are you deserving of someone else's work?

Let's be honest, copyright is unnatural. Without copyright if I hear a story, what right has anyone else got to tell me I can't tell my version of that story as I remember it to someone else? If I hear a melody, what right does anyone have to tell me that I can't sing it?

That's literally how society and art has worked for as long as humanity has existed. Hearing and retelling. Seeing and replicating. Re-interrupting and re-envisioning.

The idea that certain ideas are forbidden, or that certain notes are owned is ridiculous. It's not normal. It's an invented legal restriction we put on ourselves. Copyright is an imposition on some very basic freedoms, we just all agree that some amount of imposition is worth it to support artists and their art. Art is so valuable to us that we censor ourselves for it.

What I'm seeing with our current copyright system is that it's hurting a lot more than it's helping. Artists are routinely getting screwed over by large corporations, while other artists are silenced entirely. Amazing creative works are prevented from being brought into the world, and have been prevented from even being preserved. We need to strike a better balance between our freedoms to share and use our own culture and supporting artists and supporting art because our current copyright system is doing a terrible job at all of it.

I think there's two different arguments going on. A key difference between today and the two thousand years that came before is you can make a perfect replica of the source material. Selling a bit-for-bit copy of a song or book is fundamentally different than oral traditions of story telling or an acoustic cover of a popular song.

I'm not saying copyright is perfect. DMCA takedowns for songs playing in the background of live newsworthy events or video game play throughs aren't helping the author/creator. Legal battles over songs that coincidentally sound the same are silly to me as well.

I'm less sold on the value of remixing art. It can be done well, but often feels like a lazy attempt at capitalizing on the original creation.

We don't have to agree on any of that. The person I was replying to seemed to be making the argument that copyright terms were bad because he/she/they wanted to buy a copy of whatever on the open market where hypothetically everything is public domain. I can't comprehend the level of entitlement that leads to someone saying they should have free access to another person's work and then claims without evidence that this will spur innovation or creativity. To me, it seems clear the lack of copyright would just rapidly accelerate the decline of the humanities. Artists struggle enough. The patron model of the Renaissance is gone. The modern day minstrel can't afford rent and food. Copyright is central to how they earn a living and about the only protection they have against parasites that add nothing from taking everything.

I'm all for revisiting and revising modern copyright law. I just think tossing it all together is going to hurt society. Whatever new duration we choose should reflect the reality of just how long it can take to build a business/following/audience. Ten years seems way too short; I see artists deciding the risk:reward ratio makes it not worthwhile.

Maybe that means only the "true" artists will persist, but my experience with open source software suggests otherwise. There's some remarkable open source software out there given away freely by volunteers, but there's also a whole body of software that benefits society that only gets written because the rights holder can afford to make an investment that volunteers can't or won't. That works because there's a potential to earn something when all finished.

>The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

The story is that most bands don't make anything on residuals and so have to tour to make money.

But, in any case, one can already get the work for free, people choose not to.

I have an idea on Origin Marks [1] that works here, only one source will be the lead singer, only one source will be the songwriter, buy from them _if_you_want_to_.

[1] the reverse of Trademarks, kinda, they would show not the seller per se, as Trademarks do, but the physical origins - and all historic details would attach to the mark. Change the factory, OM shows it, sell your Trademark, OM shows if it's still made in the same place or not; buying an article, OM shows which of your options are made in the same place. OM would show not just so sold it to you, not where they got it from -- cut out middlemen and optimise supply chains, that's capitalism, right?

In this case, you buy a download, who did they get the TM rights from, ego did they get the cover art rights from, who did they buy the license for the music track from? Seller would be obliged to tell you, and there sellers too ... no money going to the band, don't use that supplier, go elsewhere.

> 10 years is nothing

It depends on how much was invested up front.

Spend a couple hours recording a joke song on your phone that happens to become a viral hit? Ten years of monopolizing it seems more than fair.

Spend millions of dollars hiring a research team and running gene sequencers for years to develop a state of the art drug? Maybe 10 years isn't enough.

The drug stuff is covered by patents - they last 20y

I've thought about this quite a bit. I think one fair approach would be to have a 2 tiered copyright release, where there's still a pretty long time before a work lapses into the public domain, but before that, a relatively short amount of time after the release of the work (say, 10-15 years) the original owner loses the power to dictate who uses their work. Basically, between that point and the public domain lapse, anyone would have the option to accept a default contract of paying the creator some standardized % royalties. The creator would still have the option to accept explicit contracts with weaker terms, for example waiving the royalties for projects they want to give away.

This is my view as well. Compulsory licensing after a period of exclusivity, then public domain, would be a good deal for everyone. I think this would additionally work well for patents.

14 years was good enough in the 1700s, when it was prohibitively expensive to publish anything and global distribution was effectively impossible. Today, those things are basically free and happen at close to the speed of light. If you can't make money off of something published globally after a decade, you fucked up. 10 years might even be too long.

It's 100% fine if disney wants to wait a decade to make a movie about something. After that 10 years so can everybody else! There's no amount of time disney couldn't hold out for anyway. What matters is that artistic works get into the hands of the public faster, not how much money an author might lose out on in licensing deals. Copyright doesn't exist to protect possible film deals for authors. It exists to promote the creation of new works. If disney waits 10 years and makes their film then without a license fee, mission accomplished. That's a new creative work. They can then compete with every one else making new works based on that property.

Well life expectancy was only 37 years in the 1700s as well. So for an adult, 14 years was basically the rest of their life.

For an adult, life expectancy then was 55 or better!

See, infant mortality was shit back then which accounted for a big bias in that lifetime '37'. If you survived childhood then you did pretty well.

https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...

Good point.

If Disney makes a movie about your IP you'll immediately become famous and everyone wants to make deals with you. It would be a lottery ticket.

I wonder if tax policy could be used to encourage placing content in the public domain. This could especially be useful for software, since there probably isn’t much money to be made in selling Windows 3.1 licenses, but a nominal tax credit could encourage Microsoft to put it in the public domain and let the public play around with it, inspire them, etc.

How about an exponentially growing copyright relicensing fee

Copyright should be 30 years for free, then 1 dollar doubling annually thereafter. 40 years of copyright should cost $2047, while 49 years costs a little over a million. So does the 50th year. Pay the public for your monopoly on publishing.

Copyrights should be more like trademarks. Use it or lose it.

Put a limit of 10 years if the work is not available for purchase by the general public, so any work that goes out of print becomes public domain 10 years after the last copy was sold.

But... Only for works owned by _corporations_. For works still owned by the original artists, works would enter public domain on the artists death or if the artist had under-age children at the moment of their passing, when the youngest completes 18.

I think this is the best way to ensure that corpos can't sit on works for eternity while allowing artists to have an income for life, with some protection for their children in case of untimely death.

In any case, any law that implements such limitations should mandate a complete removal of any DRM involved, or at least publication of the private keys needed to decrypt any work, once they become public.

The result of that will be that Nintendo will sell exactly 1 cartridge of every game a year.

Let me recommend Japanese way: it is impossible to sold copyright. so publisher always need to negotiate with authors.

The Telltale Games serial "Wolf Among Us" is based on Fables. I enjoyed it, definitely.

The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.

That was such a good game. Also RIP Telltale Games.

There's a new company of the same name continuing work on a Wolf Among Us 2, which is one of Bill Willingham's complaints that led to the public domain PR release because Willingham still believes he was severely underpaid for his property for the first game, and that DC licensed it without his permission in the first place.

Telltale is more or less reincarnated, and [actively working on WAU2](https://telltale.com/the-wolf-among-us-2/)

> All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years.

Girl Genius has been publishing a page of their comic three times a week for twenty years, and the story is not yet done. I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.

> I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.

I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years.

Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.

They would only lose ownership to their earlier strips by now. Also anything else would be fan fiction. It wouldn’t remove the primacy of author created works. I mean if I create a XXX Fables movie no one will consider it authentic or canon.

"Only" handwaves away a lot. It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips.

"No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. When there's demand for something, people will take what's offered. I would be fine with some sort of easy licensing scheme that would allow others to write stories, etc., in someone else's universe / with their characters... but they should see a taste. Especially when we're talking about mid-tier or lower-tier creators who are probably depending heavily on that large body of work to keep the lights on.

> "No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed.

I'm not saying that you should be able to claim yourself to be walt disney, but you should be able to sell a hand made mickey mouse plushie, or a mickey mouse comic (under your name). That's different.

There's a lot of Girl Genius stuff on AO3. The Foglios (authors) seem okay with fanwork existing (there's even a fanfic-discussion channel on the semi-official Girl Genius Discord server). Of course, stuff on AO3 doesn't make money, which may be a sticking point.

> It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips.

That's not true. It might make it harder to make as much money, but there's nothing that says the author can't still profit from selling something after it's in the public domain. I've paid for works in the public domain multiple times, sometimes directly to the author of the work.

Creators have a massive advantage when selling their own stuff. They can include things like signed copies and extras that no one else ever could. Fans want to support the creators of the things they love because they want more of it.

Maybe not authentic or canon but with proper execution and marketing it could make a profit 10 times bigger than an authentic and canonical movie.

If someone creates a new version so good that vastly outclasses the original version it deserves to make that profit. That's kind of the point. We want more amazing creative works. That's what copyright was for: to encourage the creation of new works.

We've already been robbed of all the amazing creative works that might have been but never were because of excessive copyright restrictions. It's hurting artists and it's hurting our culture.

We want copyright to give authors a chance to profit for a limited time, but it we need it to be much less excessive and restrictive so that new works and new artists can thrive.

They would not just lose ownership of the strips. Ownership of the characters and world setting would also be open. Other people would be free to publish stories using their characters.

10 is a bit hard to bootstrap R&D and regain the invested money (especially when you build something over multiple years). But 20 years .. should work. Was not the original copyright for books something like 30 years.

My qualm is that it can take a lifetime of pushing around a script or a novel before it gets made. Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free… ideally it’d be 20 years after it got big but that’s not enforceable and vague.

That only works if every single publisher and studio are participating in an anticompetitive cabal who are all colluding to prevent the work from being bought, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about.

lol, lmao, even. What do you think studios are doing right now prompting huge strikes among actors and writers in Hollywood?

And yet that has nothing to do with the current length of copyright, so I think you're simply proving my point?

I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists, so assuming it would continue to follow anticompetitive practices is not a leap of any kind.

> I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists,

Of course, they're called _unions_, which prevent companies from hiring or contracting anyone who isn't part of their cabal -- I mean union.

Disney and Comcast and WB/Discovery are _competitors_ who would cut each other's throats for a nickel. Would they collude for profit? Sure, but they treat this as a zero-sum game, so they don't want to help their competition too much.

No, the studios are explicitly colluding in order not to give into the writers and actors unions demands.

> Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free

If publishers and studios refuse to ever publish anything for 10 years artists will be free to publish things for themselves and you can bet that they will. I seriously doubt there'll never be a studio or publisher smart enough to pay for a script or book and bring it to the market first though.

Once a property is out there and has a fanbase they'd be total idiots to wait until every last person on earth can churn out media involving that property because for anything remotely popular the moment the 10 years are up the market will be saturated with new versions and remixes of it. They don't want that kind of competition, especially from people outside of the industry. Copyright has been corrupted into the restrictive vice on our culture that it is today in part because of that fear.

If you are a studio or publisher it'd be far better to pay the licensing fee and rake in the massive profits within the 10 year period before everyone is tired of seeing a billion versions of something on offer everywhere and avoid having to spend the kind of money and effort it would take to differentiate your work and pull attention from everything else springing up.

U.S. copyright was 14 years, renewable once.

Indeed. Here is an excellent & maintained summary of the lengthening terms (from 14 years to more than a century) and its effects: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2023/shrinking...

Now this is really sad. This is why we don't have nice things.

I believe the "natural" state of the society where we can build on each others work, but copyrights make that practically impossible.

It lowers the quality of art significantly (I do believe that most art pieces could be significantly improved, but we can't do that).

It lowers the quality of cars, electronics, and other products, also their reparability from 100% to 0% or so, as they constantly discontinue past products, and make them shittier, and they prohibit 3rd party to make replacement parts, and we can do nothing against it.

And it allows rent-seeking behaviour, for example we gave Intel a hundred of billions of dollars or so, because the prevented other companies to produce x86 compatible chips, and they could get away with ridiculous profits. This would be illegal if Intel was a 'monopoly', but the same rent-seeking and abusing the market is not illegal since Intel is not a monopoly. Or countless other examples.

The article states that we almost developed a sane society where we could build and sell whatever we wanted, and use whatever we found (even if it was made by an other person), but the exact opposite happened. The article does not mention the reasons.

> Now this is really sad.

Yes. The worst part is our current effectively-infinite copyright length is a very recent invention, but it's already taken root as the-way-things-are. Imagine a world where copyright lasts 28 years max. How different would our culture be? All of our early computing history would be 100% freely available, no questions asked. Windows XP would be nearing the end of its copyright term. This is the way things were for centuries, right up until 1978 when things started going off the rails.

Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain?

> Why isn’t there a charity that specialise in “liberating” IPs & patents into public domain?

Google for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, ... ;-)

Legally speaking this would involve actually purchasing those outright. Sidestepping any questions about copyright assignment and rights reversion, the main problem here would be cost. Most companies that own works anyone of us care about significantly overvalue their ownership in the work, like to the point where ownership is either not for sale or would only be offered for a ludicrous price.

You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends.

Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls.

Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off.

[0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks".

[1] Repair Preservation Group

[2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business

[3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.

That was basically what happened to Blender, I think? I have been thinking it would be nice if someone was organizing crowdfunding and taking care of all the legal work to buy out old works properly. Thinking mostly of stuff with little value, that ought to be cheap. The rights to records released on small labels a long time ago that never sold very well to begin with. Obscure comicbooks. B horror movies. Low-budget video games. Old boardgames and tabletop-RPG books (illustrations included, ideally). Things that no one is making any money off anyway. Maybe something more high profile now and then.

But on the other hand if that was done on a large scale it might set an expectation that old things are bought out, or even that anyone ought to be paid to release anything free at all, and that sounds very bad.

To some extent I think that was always an early aim of Creative Commons. I don't think Creative Commons ever saw their job as being a charity owner of IP, but they certainly tried their best to provide as many tools as possible to liberate IP and patents to either copyleft or the public domain (CC0) as they could.

I could certainly imagine an alternate future that if CC got enough donations to back a big enough budget they could help pay for lawyers to full time help creators claw back IPs from major corporations with the hopes to CC or CC0 license the rights that they win back. I also imagine that would cost a lot of money and that hypothetical arm of CC would need a huge budget to win the legal fights it would want to take on.

A friend of mine worked for a while as part of the team building http://unglue.it, which IIRC is a pretty close match to what you're envisioning.

As I understand United States copyright law, it is impossible for an author to voluntarily enter something into the public domain. They can license it to whomever they like, of course, on any terms that are legal within a contract (including creative commons licensing), but they can't just say "this is public domain".

It is especially true when they fail to give license terms. People using it as if it were public domain don't have a license, or any proof of having a license, and if the author dies tomorrow, his or her heirs inherit the copyright (which will still last for another 75 or 95 years, I forget which). They now own it, and can go after those who use it for copyright infringement, with all the penalties that go with that. If the heirs were particularly powerful or have political influence, they might even manage to get the DOJ to pursue the matter as criminal.

Thought I've never watched the show, doesn't one of the characters in The Office start talking about how he's "declaring bankruptcy" by saying those words emphatically, where the other characters try to explain how it doesn't work that way? He then goes on to say "I'm not just saying it, but declaring bankruptcy" as if this is somehow a legally important distinction?

That's what this guy is doing.

Relevant wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_t...

This is partly why the CC0 license exists, with Creative Commons lawyers putting some thought into how to actually make a legally recognizable declaration of public domain: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...

> someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper.

What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?

You are only allowed to produce and sell an existing product, if the original creator allows you to do. In theory you can message LG that you'd love to sell one of their older models for a fee for every sold piece, but I theorize that it would be a much better world if you wouldn't need their permission for this.

It’s one of the best comic series I’ve ever read. I’d recommend reading through them.

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