Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

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The fact that copyright protection is far too long is entirely separate from the need for some kind of copyright protection to exist at all. All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period, with the possible exception of performance art (music, theater, ballet).

A writer or journalist just can't make money if any huge company can package their writing and market it without paying them a cent. This is not comparable to piracy, by the way, since huge companies don't move into piracy. But you try to compete with both Disney and Fox for selling your new script/movie, as an individual.

This experiment has also been tried to some extent in software: no company has been able to live off selling open source software. RedHat is the one that came closest, and they actually live by selling support for the free software they sell. Others like MySQL or Mongo lived by selling the non-GPL version of their software. And the GPL itself depends critically on copyright existing. Not to mention, software is still a best case scenario, since just having a binary version is often not enough, you need the original sources which are easy to guard even without copyright - no one cares so much for the "sources" of a movie or book.

> All evidence suggests that it's completely impossible to live off your work unless you copyright it for some reasonable period

Which evidence?

Chinas’s accession to the Universal Copyright Convention, and an alleged desire to comply with international IP law, led to an influx of OECD IP and foreign direct investment(FDI).

In hindsight, China wasn’t diligent in the enforcement of IP violations. However, it’s clear foreign presences and investment grew substantially in China during the early 90s upon the belief IP would be protected, or at the very least there would be recourse for violations.

The fact that it has never been done successfully outside performance arts.

I used to work as a computer programmer until I retired. Nearly always, my work was part of a collaborative effort, and latterly didn't include any copyright claim. My income was never impacted by unauthorized copying. Until the 80s, there was no copyright on software, and yet even then people made a living programming.

Craftsmen don't claim copyright on their artifacts. Furniture designs were widely copied; but Chippendale did alright for himself. Gardeners at stately homes didn't rely on copyright. Vergil, Plato and Aristotle managed OK without copyright. People made a living composing music, songs and poetry before the idea of copyright was invented. Truck-drivers make a living; driving a truck is hardly a performance art. Labourers and factory workers get by successfully. Accountants and legal advocates get rich without copyright.

None of these trades amounts to "performance arts".

I very much doubt the company or foundation you were working for was selling the non-copyrighted software. If it was, it probably only worked on very specific hardware that you also produced and were selling, and thus copying it was largely useless. If you were working for a university, than the university obviously doesn't make money from selling software, and thus doesn't care for copyright as much.

Also, craftsmen rely on the fact that the part of their work that can't be easily copied, the physical artifact they produce, is most of the value (plus they rely on trademark laws and design patents quite often). Similarly for gardeners. The ancient greek writers were again paid for performance, typically as teachers. Literature was once quite a performative act. And again, at that time, physical copies of writings were greatly valuable artifacts, not that much different from the value of the writing itself, since copying large texts was so hard.

Similarly, the work of drivers, labourers, factory workers, accountants is valuable in itself and very hard or impossible to copy (again, the physical world is the ultimate copyright protection). The output of lawyers is in fact sometimes copyrighted, but even when it's not, it's not applicable to others' cases, so copies of it are not valuable: no one is making a business that replaces lawyers by re-distributing affidavits.

> I very much doubt the company [...] was selling the non-copyrighted software

Well you'd be mistaken. Lately, it was custom software, for a particular client, and of no interest to others. Earlier, it was before software copyright was a thing, and computer manufacturers gave software away to sell the hardware.

At the very beginning, yes, it was "very specific" hardware; it was Burroughs hardware, which used Burroughs processors. But that was before microprocessors, and all hardware was "very specific".

> (plus they rely on trademark laws and design patents quite often)

Craftsmen and labourers were earning a living long before anyone had the idea of a "trademark", still less a "design patent".

> The output of lawyers is in fact sometimes copyrighted

You're right. That's why I didn't say "lawyers", I said "legal advocates". Those are people who speak on your behalf in courts of law, not scribes writing contracts. Anyway, the ancient Greeks and Romans had written laws, contracts and so on; they managed without trademarks and copyrights.

> Well you'd be mistaken. Lately, it was custom software, for a particular client, and of no interest to others. Earlier, it was before software copyright was a thing, and computer manufacturers gave software away to sell the hardware.

Then I am not mistaken: the company was initially selling hardware, with the software being just a value add as you say (no copyright: no interest in trying to sell, exactly my point). Then, you were being paid for building software that (a) was probably not being made public anyway, and (b) would not have been of interest to others even if it were.

Even so, if someone came to your client and offered to take on the software maintenance for a much lower price, you might have lost your client entirely. This has very much happened to contractors in the past.

And my point is you couldn't have a Microsoft or Adobe or possibly even RedHat if you didn't have copyright protecting their business. So, you'd probably not have virtually any kind of consumer software.

> offered to take on the software maintenance for a much lower price

We didn't charge maintenance for this software. We would write it to close the sale of a computer. It was treated as "cost of sale". I'm sure it was cheaper (to us) than the various discounts and kickbacks that happened in big mainframe deals.

As far as Microsoft and Adobe is concerned, I wouldn't regard it as a misfortune if they had never existed. I'm not convinced that RedHat's existence is contingent on copyright.

That's a large category that includes everything from YouTubers to furry artists to live concerts.

Yes, but it's still a subset of the arts - it doesn't apply to movies, literature, nor even to the scripting for any of these.

And I should mention YouTubers wouldn't be making that much money if YouTube weren't enforcing copyright, as you could just upload their videos and get the ad money. Without copyright, you could also cut off their in-video promotions and add your own, including your own Patreon - so you would get 100% of the money off their work if you can out-promote them.

It's only live performances which are protected by the physical world's strict no-copying laws (the ones that don't allow the same macro object to be in two places at the same time).

So basically, no medium which allows copying of the works in whole or nearly whole has been successfully run with public works.

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