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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

I hope the future of copyright is the dustbin of history.

All things in moderation. It seems to me that a flat 30-year term would be fine; would provide sufficient incentive to authors, artists, etc. Life + 70 is patently absurd, of course.

Producing new things is happening faster every year. Literally a book can be written in a day, published electronically the same day and published overnight.

30 years longer than the term when the country was founded.

Surely the term should be going down, not up.

I have three ideas:

1. A short flat term, say 3 years, after which the work becomes public domain

2. Copyright is not automatic. You have to publish the work to the Library of Congress and the publication fee is $1000 for one year. You can extend as long as you like but each additional year costs 10x what the previous year cost (pick your favorite exponential values)

3. You get your choice of copyright as we have today XOR non-discriminatory non-DRM distribution. That is, you can choose copyright protection under todays laws, but if you do, you may not use any form of DRM or exclusive licensing and you must make your content available to all distributors at the same price. Or, you can distribute however you want and DRM however you want, but your content will not receive copyright protections.

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These all balance the enforcement costs and societal costs of copyright with the right to be remunerated for creative work, and take into account that creation is faster than ever before.

I think only allowing DRM xor copyright would result in the most interesting outcome—not necessarily ideal, but certainly interesting.

Just for context, the language in the US constitution said "limited time" and was codified as 14 years in 1790 [edit: hey, 14 years after the declaration of independence, never noticed that before [subedit: just a coincidence I guess, UK statute from 1710 was also 14 years.]]

Personally I think that's pretty good and anything longer IMO is unconstitutional. If you're making royalties off something published before 2010 I'd say that's actually helping you sit on your ass as opposed to encouraging creativity.

On one hand I don't love putting a paywall on legal protections, but it's not without merit. I think it's neo-georgism that holds that you should pay for the right to monopolize - whether that's land, natural resources, or intellectual property. If you're keeping something walled off from the public, then you should be taxed so the public still seems some benefit from it. Encouraging only monopolizing the truly profitable.

I'll also add that copyright was intended to protect publishers until they could recoup their investment in the printing of some work. Now that they cost of publishing is zero I don't really see the point.

Back in 2011, the UK Government commissioned an "independent review" of copyright etc (The Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property").

It broadly agrees with your ideas - at least in terms of the fact that copyright is far too long (the report thinks 20 to 30 years would be long enough, possibly in two phases with a renewal needed in between) but notes that the UK is bound by international law to keep copyright longer than that.

It also recommends on weakening copyright with more exemptions...

...and in the case of patent law, making it more expensive to renew patents to encourage people to not just renew by default, and not allowing any additional things to be patented (cf US software patents).

It's also very grumpy about the way copyright law just happened whenever a wealthy industry asked for it

Excellent reference and apparently the first time it's been cited at all on HN.

> Literally a book can be written in a day, published electronically the same day and published overnight.

Hard disagree. Nothing good can possibly be written that fast, even with an army of writers.

>Surely the term should be going down, not up.

IP today is far more expensive than in the past, so going down is not reasonable. 3 years as you suggested is laughable. Some books don't even hit multiple markets in that time. Would any publisher pay an author if they could just wait the author out for 3 years???

>You get your choice of copyright as we have today XOR non-discriminatory non-DRM distribution.

This sentence doesn't make sense. Nor does the idea. What is the point of having any right if your only enforcement mechanism is one that literally loses you money? There would be no party for consumer-grade IP that would be a suitable target for a lawsuit. Maybe a publisher might be able to raise a case against a solitary infringer, because they own enough individual IPs to add up to something against another business. But the people actually consuming IP could never be sued this way.

I actually hate DRM and avoid it. But it solves a real problem and I can't deny that.

>Copyright is not automatic. You have to publish the work to the Library of Congress and the publication fee is $1000 for one year. You can extend as long as you like but each additional year costs 10x what the previous year cost (pick your favorite exponential values)

This has to be a joke. Have you heard the term "starving artist"? Do you realize that some copyrighted work (such as code) is constantly being updated, so it would be overwhelmingly stupid to have such a policy? Then there are news reports and blogs, etc., which cannot possibly be registered fast enough, and also would not necessarily generate $1000 a piece.

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