The $621M Legal Battle by Record Labels Against Internet Archive

I think the parent refers to this [1]:

"All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law (17 USC section 407).

This law requires that two copies of the best edition of every copyrightable work published in the United States be sent to the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress"

I don't know how/if it works in practice, but if the copyright is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", I think that it is perfectly fine for the LOC to guarantee that when the copyright expires at least a copy is still around.

This doesn't mean that it should provide universal access though, especially while the copyright is still valid.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/

The Copyright Office is and always has been an arm of the Library of Congress.

So “supposed according to whom” is according to law and all of history.

Your distinction between commercial use and things like meme culture doesn’t hold up. For example, memes can harm creators too, like Pepe the Frog being co-opted by far-right groups. If you want to protect creators, there’s no simple solution, as both can distort their intent.

I agree that we're probably giving up something culturally and socially important by restricting the telling and remixing of stories, myths, characters, etc. As for co-opting work to spread a message the author wouldn't necessarily endorse, that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission. In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.

> While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing ...

... you still require a winning strategy and winning execution, or you've only done harm.

> Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are.

Well, I made my distinction, which you clearly read and were aware of but made this post anyway.

Agreed - but societal interests are a mix of the constituents within the society which can be in conflict as a well as the overall society as a whole. We want to protect the rule of law, both legal and social norms surrounding property rights, we want to enable the free expression and production of cultural goods, we want to ensure artists can profit off their work. My take is that amongst people discussing this there is a rough agreement that IP rights (both copywrite and patents) should be weakened at least in duration, but no consensus on the specifics, and their is a concentrated lobby of rights holders that wants to maintain their legal ability extract rents from their collections. We wouldn't be served well be crashing the whole system (not implying the parent comment suggested this) but that means we need to figure out how to change things at the margin within the current political climate. One compromise I've been trying to push is to require payment to continue to maintain the exclusivity. Shorten the default timeframes, but require fees to relicense the material. Perhaps we could also require that the material get sent to an archive as part of this to ensure it kept (at the right's holders expense). If the LoC isn't up to it, they could authorize third parties. Make the fees higher (and increase them over time) to disincentivize extension of everything. This tradeoff means that the biggest properties - Disney films say - do get long extensions, but that doesn't lock up everything else. Same thing with patents. Also we can get more creative with mandatory licensing. The main innovation here is to stop making the cutoff such a hard boundary which makes things more contentious.

It's a congressional law like any other congressional law. Needs to be passed by the house and the senate.

Or like most laws, an interested group find a way to get an audience with lawmakers to brief them on their concerns, help build consensus amongst their peers and staffers, and after work in non-publicized committees the main the details of the law get tacked onto some bigger bill and passed. Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.

Time to lay RIAA to rest. A message needs to be sent: orgs that go after archival efforts like this get smote to death.

Well... for me "New Music" is anything I haven't heard before... there is a lot of amazing stuff recorded over the past 150 years. and so much of it is still "New!"

As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.

The problem I have is with trademarks being used as nouns but somehow not becoming generic. I searched "Velcro" on Amazon.co.uk. The best selling item is Velcro branded "Stick On". What even is a "stick on"? No reasonable consumer would identify that as a hook and loop fastener without context. "Hook and loop" isn't even written on the front of the packaging. The "Velcro" trademark is clearly functioning as a noun, which means from an ethical point of view it should be generic.

It sounds like the only companies you are familiar with are ones large enough to capture markets, bribe politicians, and write regulations in their favor.

Well, small and mid-size businesses are easy to miss if you work from home or live in a big city. They don't wield anything like the kind of power you describe. But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs. You may want to stop and consider the value of multi-generational family-owned businesses.

Most companies don’t live forever. But I don’t see any value in having a mandatory expiration for trademark, and several downsides. If the TM expires on a popular brand of beer, for example, then there will be competitors flooding the market with other beers that may or may not actually have the same taste or quality. How does that benefit the public? It sounds more punitive against companies than positive for the public.

because of the fraud that enables. If I'm used to getting quality widgets from bob's widget factory, I don't want to go to the store one day and buy a bob's widget and have it be something completely different.

Like.what. I hear this a lot but not much way of real examples.

You hold on to.copyright of.a song you sang when you were 8 and isnt making any money? So what ?

what's the downside here?

I think that for the person who suggested the idea, this would be considered success--creative products that aren't being actively used should revert to the commons.

But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.

Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.

Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.

The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.

On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.

Why? Shouldn't that be the dream for anyone with a family, and is indeed the case for many people?

I don't have any copyrights or trademarks or anything, but if I did I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo who only wants to use my work to pad their own wallets.

They’re “good” because they’re associated with a company or product people are positive about. How does it help me if the trademark expires on a brand I like and ten other companies push out similar but not the same product? All the IP expired, so they use identical names, art, etc. How do customers distinguish?

> No, not in a direct sense anyway. It should be a tort.

For any particularly good reason, other than, "piracy is a cultural norm?" Kind of tautological.