In my opinion, the ideal length (if we are to have copyright) is between 10 and 15 years, at least if a work is already monetarily successful. If a work has yet to be monetarily successful, then we can allow up to 25 years for it in particular.
Any excess revenue could, theoretically, be redistribute as grants for the arts.
Big coporations like Disney can hold on to the material and pay the sum with profits from other ip if it's fixed.
I think that's okay, Disney has lots of money but they aren't stupid, i.e. they won't spend money unless they expect a return on investment.
What you really want to prevent are orphan works which are copyrighted but no one can get a copy of.
There's lots of works from when I was young that nobody is interested in publishing, even though I would like to see them again. They make zero revenue now (and probably didn't make much before), so I suspect the rights holders would abandon them if they had to pay any fee, especially an escalating fee.
I'm personally less worried about works that remain in print.
Wouldn’t that just put the works in the public domain, allowing others to legally publish the works? What would be the downside?
If it's revenue based and there's no revenue, then the rightsholder will renew to protect their options.
While it is likely legal for me to go through all that effort for myself, it isn't legal for me to share the fruits of my effort with someone else who wants a copy so they need to do it themself. Even if they have a worn out copy themself it isn't clear that I can print them a new copy. If I want to share this work with someone else who might want it I'm stuck - I can only do the above for personal use.
With exponentially increasing fees, the copyright holder can decide for themselves if it's economically worthwhile to pay the renewal fees or release it into the public domain. If the cost to extend copyright another 5 years after 50+ years is $1B, for instance, very few copyright holders will bother with that unless it's a highly profitable property.
Assuming some nominal or zero starting fee. The author can choose to sell his rights at the beginning, or can choose to keep the rights.
If x years later, the renewal comes up and isn't worth it, then he doesn't have to pay it. the value to the author isn't worth the value to the public. If a mega corp comes along and buys it, they have taken on a risk that it will be worth more in the future, and the author has gained some extra income.
If the mega corp think its worth buying the rights, theres probably a good business case for the property, so the author should be able to get the money somehow. If not, the mega corp is giving the author a nice bonus.
It's also possible that you could set up a smaller fee for a news article, etc.
There are lots of implementation details that make "just charge fees" work.
So I use a 4 year old work, that I assume is public domain, and then the creator, pays his back fees and sues me?
alternatively, a creator creates a work, gets 5 years of protection, and never pays the fees that he owes.
The alternative is that everyone's blog enters the public domain immediately upon writing unless they want to pay $XXX per article, which also seems wrong to me.
Does Jackson own the IP? Do actors own part of the IP for every scene they're in? What does Jackson offer to investors, to get the backing he needs to hire loads of horse riders or whatever? Do we do it Star Citizen style, giving Jackson a few hundred million upfront with no obligation to deliver anything?
On the other hand: if an artist produces something that slumbers in anonymity for decades before it suddenly explodes into popularity and becomes part of the cultural canon, then I'd want the artist to reap whatever benefits possible. That is: if anyone is making big bucks off of that, it first and foremost should be the artist, for as long as they're alive.
I'm against long term copyright, because things become part of the 'cultural canon'
Why should I pay George Lucas because I want to say "use the force luke"*
'Cultural Canon' shouldn't be owned by anyone, because it, by definition belongs to everyone.
*Yes I know thats a misquote.
This is also the core reason why tax systems should be simplified simplified simplified.
has 4 pages of prices
Seems like it's the US that has doubling fees, doubling every 4 years.
In my opinion, it doesn't. In creative and entertainment industries, the idea of practically indefinite royalties has been normalized, but no other industries has this*. For example, it would be strange to continue paying a construction company after your home has been built.
*As far as I can remember. I'm open to correction here.
Probably floorplans would be a closer comparison - and I believe they are licensed IP?
You might pay the construction company again for the identical 2nd house, but you're not going to pay the architect again.
Imagine that you've paid the construction company after it finished building your house. You then go and live in it. One year later you get an invoice because you're living in the house they built.
That's what doesn't happen and what (I think) GP means with indefinite royalties: the person who owns the house has to keep paying the company which built the house.
The problem with that analogy is of course that royalties are based off profits, but there are ways to consider a home to have its own sense of profit (like the Belgian legal term 'cadastral income':
> Cadastral income is not an actual income. It is a notional value that we determine for an immovable property (building or land). This corresponds to the average annual net rental income you would receive in 1975 for your leased out property.
).
A closer analogy would be rent. Why do we allow a builder to collect rent a year after building a house.
Libraries certainly do in basically every country in the world apart from the US.
A rich author can retire, and not write any more books. From an encouraging creativity POV, copyright length should be set at about the amount of time it takes to create a followup.
But, as open source software, and most authors and musicians demonstrate. People will create without any financial incentive.
So ultimately copyright is there to allow an industry that can actually find and distribute these works.
For the record, I'm not suggesting that creators should be decently rewarded for their works.
To start, royalties have nothing to do with copyright. They are simply an agreement between an author and a publisher. I give you the exclusive right to publish my book, and I get a cut of every sale.
Royalties extend far beyond creative fields. Any deal where someone gets a percentage share of the sale of a product or service on an ongoing basis is a "royalty". E.g. in manufacturing or even software.
Meanwhile one does not pay for continuous updates to a particular novel or a movie. Even if they do pay for new installments in a series, they do so separately.
And the per-second pricing is even less!
I suspect you're just paying a monopoly tax.
That said, I believe the security of UBI to be a stronger enabler for creativity than gambling you'll write the next great American novel in-between shifts at the fish cannery.
That hasn't been true for fifteen years.
I dont think any streaming service would be viable with a catalog of only original productions <1 year old.
Releases of "The Mandalorian" got people subscribing to Disney+, and new seasons of "Game of Thrones" had the same effect for HBO, for example.
In other words, a bundle of 100 movies for $10 million could be attributed as "$100k per movie," but that's almost certainly wrong. More likely, that bundle is a combination of something like $5 million for one movie, $1 million for a few others, $100k for a bigger set, and all the way down to $1000 or less for the remainder of the catalog.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/south-park-deal...
I wonder if you could have a system that captures that sort of thing. Something like 10 years exclusive + if you register the copyright you can get 10 more years of a standard royalty + limited right of refusal and another 10 years of just standard royalties. That way you could benefit from the nostalgia bump but also society can benefit from easier access to build on your IP.
I'm not sure its even the relevant question.
What length of time does a film studio, or book publisher look at for payback?
If everyones calculating their return on the first 12 months, setting copyright to 12 months obviously isn't going to impact any industry investment decisions.
Film studios only existed because (1) distribution used to be hard and (2) films were financially and logistically difficult to make. Netflix and YouTube slayed the first challenge, and now GenAI will fell the latter and give indie directors the same kind of platform that indie game and indie music folks currently have: true one person studios.
I came across the following recently. I think a casual viewer would assume it was just Bakshi-style rotoscoped animation without a major AI component.
Very much no throughline of concepts from one shot to the next. You never see the same character twice. No foreground dynamic action.. not even simple walking except one far-away character directly away from the camera which means that their silhouette hardly changed.
This all comes from the current generation of video diffusion models that basically just generate an image like they always have except with a hint of temporal coherence they expand that into a short shot with no types of movement except those seen a million times in their training set.
Getting gen models to be able to reason better about motion and to build mental world models of the 3d scene they are managing a 2d window into is going to be a big challenge, and require some additional breakthroughs on a par with the original GPT and stable diffusion breakthroughs that currently act as a foundation to a majority of modern AI innovation.
You say this like Stable Diffusion isn't a 2022 technology. And not early 2022, but quite late (August). ChatGPT is younger.
I mean sure we need more breakthroughs, but we've barely even seen a new hardware generation since those things came out and the researchers are really only getting started with the new capabilities of generative tech. If we don't get more breakthroughs in short order then that would be a stunning halt of progress, a breaking stop the likes of which we have almost never before seen. More breakthroughs are a given.
If I were to watch 90+ minutes of that with dubbed voices on top of it, absolutely. There's practically zero cohesion between any of those shots. No real action, no real narrative. It's a collection of non-cohesive stills that were stretched, not any bit of a story at all.
AI is pretty clearly advancing orders of magnitude faster than CGI has. Just because it sucks now doesn't mean it's going to suck in another 5 years.
We will see. Some flaws might be baked in, like LLM's halucinating. That won't go away, unless we invent a new tech. So here with generating videos, will morphing objects for example ever go away? I am sceptical with the current approach.
I know the work I'm doing is valuable and that this field is the future. I'm sure it'll click for more folks soon.
A series that is a variant of the stories of “The Wire”, but taking place in the Harry Potter universe? Coming right up.
Obscure prog rock band from the 90s put out one album? Now its two.
I can understand people their apprehension, feeling like art is losing something essential without the human touch behind it, but I saw an article a few days ago where people thought generated Shakespeare was better than actual Shakespeare. Until it was revealed which was generated.
If AI can generate me another, better Illmatic, I’m all here for it.
'Ah ha! LLMs are better than Shakespeare!' is a meaningless statement.
Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure; there is no need to generate more. ;)
> Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure
Exactly (kind of). Lots of rewarding works take effort to learn to appreciate, for a bunch of reasons that may include (as in Shakespeare's case) that they're old and their context and vernacular is not ours. Lots of people (I'd say a large majority, in my experience) dismiss entire genres and forms of art that they weren't heavily exposed to as children, often going so far as to judge them bad, simply because it would take some time and effort to learn how to enjoy them and to be able to discern what's good or remarkable about a given work.
What proportion of the population has ever in their lives enjoyed the experience of reading a Shakespeare play? Even once? It's gotta be tiny. Of course you can get them to choose AI junk over Shakespeare, it's not a kind of thing they understood or enjoyed to begin with, in most cases.
Maybe because not everyone shares your opinion? Having an LLM generate art isn't necessarily a net benefit for society. Computers were supposed to improve our lives but instead of robots to perform dangerous menial work it's taking the creativity out of humanity.
Hey guys you no longer have to do fun things, tech bros have that covered. Now get back down the mine.
eg somebody uses it to illustrate an article there will always be somebody who complains.
So anything that enough people see will generate at least one complaint.
The creativity has already gone sideways for most of this. I can with a few simple sentences create an acceptable picture (in some cases a short film). With a AI pipeline I can make some pretty cool scenes. Instead of having to know how to properly draw an s curve with a nice gradient bit of layered colors over it and 14 meticulously created layers. I tell the program to do it for me. It does an acceptable job in a fraction of the time. People can complain all they want but the rest of us are already using these tools and will continue to do so until something better comes along.
Maybe it'll get to the point where it's good enough to have on as background television - not everything needs to be great, after all - but what's the point of that? We already have far more high-quality television shows and movies than most people can ever watch.
It's also funny to see AI turn people who normally dislike copyright into die-hard copyright lovers.
My wife and I both work in the field, I on the tech side, her on the creative side, and she's been in it since the earliest days of industry trying to adapt these tools. There's a lot (like, holy shit, so much) of effort and money going into it, but so far it's only marginally helpful for non-evil jobs.
It would be nice if you didn't assume that anybody who doesn't share your opinion is mindlessly regurgitating slop.
It’s also a matter of fact that we have the copyright we have that’s prohibitive to people and favors corporations. It’s upsetting to see how a bunch of Silicon Valley companies stomps right across those lines with impunity, while people like Aaron Swartz are persecuted and threatened with decade long prison sentences for crimes that in my mind ought to be much less upsetting.
If copyright was fair, training of AI intended for non-personal use ought to be a sufficient commercial activity to require a license. That would stiffle the development of AI, which is what I’d argue happens to human creators under our current system.
If we had a 25 year copyright, we could easily make useful AI trained on the sum of human creation until 1999, _and_ have badass human made remixes of 80s and 90s songs — we wouldn’t have to do legal gymnastics to allow the development of useful AI, as it’d have access to quite substantial training material from the 1900s, and unlock relatively modern training material year-by-year.
So yes, I dislike AI for infringing on copyright and I dislike copyright (in its current state).
Those make up an infinitesimally small portion of the total output, which is largely a deluge of crap, certainly. But, generally, rarity makes something more valuable and beautiful by comparison.
What about Shakespeare.
What about the Brothers Grimm. Should Disnay have to pay for those fairy tales?
In the end every creative work stands on the shoulders of giants. We should reward creators for contributing to our culture but this notion that they should be able to own their creations way past when they become popular is absurd.
It can take a long time for certain works to find their wings or true market potential, especially books and music.
Some examples of music: "Take On Me", "Running Up That Hill", "Bohemian Rhapsody", or even bands, like Neutral Milk Hotel
It was far more popular in the recent revival!
yes and it's possible someone could have done it even better, had they not been required to convince investors to purchase copyright. GoT was a masterpiece, don't get me wrong, but it's a fallacy to think it couldn't have been better, or that other book adaptations could have been as good or better, without copyright being in the way.
It's a minor issue in the grand scheme, but my pet peeve is with "synch licenses" (not sure if that's even the right term), but where sitcoms can't go to home video because of stupid disputes about shitty songs that happened to be included. Did anyone watch "Married With Children" because of Frank Sinatra's song "Love and Marriage" in the intro? It's a catchy song, and I'm sure it lured people in who might have otherwise changed the channel, so yes it has value. But it should only be a tiny fraction of the royalties for a full performance of the song. doubly so for home video releases. Would anyone buy even 1 season of MWC just to hear the Sinatra song? I say no. And therefore should not be required to pay any royalties.
I am watching "Murphy Brown" reruns from pirateflix because apparently it never went to home video because of license disputes about the 60's soul songs in the intro. They add character to the show, for sure. But they're not why I watch the show. I watch it for the story and the acting. In this case, actors (who worked extremely hard over 10 seasons of that show!) are being wrongfully deprived of royalties because record execs can't be reasonable about how much 10 seconds of a 60 -year-old song is worth.
If someone writes a book, copyright will begin when they publish the book and the 10-15 years copyright expiration would only be applicable for paper book medium. After the copyright for the paper book medium expires, anybody can republish it. But, only the original copyright owner can "recreate" the work again in another medium - like Games, TV/ Films, Virtual reality etc. Even if that happens after the expiration of copyright on the first medium it originally appeared on.
With the Game of Thrones example, with short copyrights, Martin would lose the copyright on the books (the first original medium it was published on) in 10-15 years. But he would retain the copyright on his work for other medium. So if 20 years down the lane, HBO wanted to recreate his work for TV, they would still have to get his permissions to do so. Once Martin's gives HBO the rights to his work for TV, HBO would own it only for the 10-15 years, and after that, anybody could use it freely too, but only for paper book and TV medium. This means if Meta or Apple want to recreate Game of Thrones as a virtual reality show, they would again have to approach Martin to get his permission. If they do, then they own the copyright to his work, on virtual reality medium, till it expires in 10-15 years.
In this kind of system, the original author would continue to retain the future rights for any new future medium of delivery too.
I think those indirect impacts probably incentivize more lobby groups to keep the status quo.
If so, if they havent done that in the first 10/15 years, why should they get an extra 10/15 years?
Further, another issue of very long copyrights is preserving things you don't really have a right to preserve.
that successful videogame may still be around in 25 years. the one that wasn't so popular has much less chance of surviving.
And then you have the added complication of what was successful? a fixed term means you know when something is in the public domain.
personally, I think there should be registration and fees attached. if you want copyright protection for the first 5 years, pay a nominal fee. if you want more than that, pay exponentially more for each year.
If companies want to pay that tax, they can. if it isn't worth it, then it can go in the public domain.
Either way, at least you have a register of what is in, and out of copyright.
Unless they release new IP with that character every X years, the rights revert back go Marvel (Now Disney).
Same with books. If you have an ongoing series for 20 years, the first books shouldn't enter public domain.
But a book series or TV show with no new content for 15+ years? Public domain.
Is 10 Cloverfield Lane a sequel to Cloverfield? They decided to throw the Cloverfield name onto it shortly before release for marketing reasons, the actual movie has nothing to do with the events and story of the original Cloverfield.
Is the video game Nier a sequel to Drakengard? Technically yes, but the connection is vague and distant. And there's also Drakengard 2 which is the sequel to a different ending for the original game.
How would you count Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off series of The Walking Dead, itself and adaptation of a comic book series. Do the shows continue to get copyright protection so long as the comics are still being published? Or vice versa?
So, probably not more than twenty years. Fifteen would be better.
The US should go with 50 years from first publication. It doesn't have significant financial effect for rights holders. Revenue on content over 50 years old is tiny. Maybe if you're still alive, the sole author, and own the rights yourself, you could apply for an extension for the rest of your life. But no more than that.
Someone with Trumpworld connections could push this, as a way of getting back at Hollywood.
TRIPS requires fifty years for features, but not for various bits of copyright that go into making a feature, where it requires life + 50. There are vanishingly small amounts of films that would be genuinely clear under the TRIPS terms, they'd basically just be performing arts pieces with no script or planning or music.
Brand is valuable for consumers and protecting that brand only makes sense if you continue to have ownership and control over it.
For a non infinite money glitch version of this, see “Calvin and Hobbes”. Would the world be better if those characters could be printed on random merchandise?
I’m not saying specifically USA but also Europe, I can’t see common people fighting over the right of author to hold intellectual properties for 70 years.
Haven’t been trials to shorten it somewhere, either USA or any other developed countries where it’s actually enforced ?
* International treaties make it difficult without buy-in from everyone, or at least the most important countries. The USA is probably the only country that could afford to unilaterally make such a change.
* Politicians are largely beholden to big companies now.
* The average person is distracted with other societal woes, and politicians and companies work hard to keep it that way.
* Some people have been convinced that excessive copyright is a moral good through propaganda.
* Those promoting copyright expansion or the status quo have significant amounts of money; those criticizing it mostly do not (counting groups with real principles, anyway)
* It is suspicious for people who have no personal interest in extended copyright to excessively favor it.