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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.

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'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.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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

> 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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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