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> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.

Not so, because of net present value.

The return from investing in normal stocks is ~10%/year, which is to say ~670% over 20 years, because of compounding interest. Another way of saying this is that $1 in 20 years is worth ~$0.15 today. A dollar in 30 years is worth ~$0.05 today. A dollar in 40 years is worth ~$0.02 today. As a result, if a thing generates the same number of dollars every year, the net present value of the first 20 years is significantly more than the net present value of all the years from 20-120 combined, because money now or soon from now is worth so much more than money a long time from now. And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.

The reason corporations lobby for copyright term extensions isn't that they care one bit about extended terms for new works. It's because they don't want the works from decades ago to enter the public domain now, and they're lobbying to make the terms longer retroactively. But all of those works were already created and the original terms were sufficient incentive to cause them to be.

> And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.

For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true. Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever. Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.

If Star Wars were in the public domain now it would be making even more money. Money that would go into the general economy and not just into a single studio.

Also copyright duration when Star Wars was created was a maximum of 56 years, and obviously George Lucas felt that was sufficient incentive to create it!

I wonder if there is value in splitting copyright into two parts and keeping a longer duration on the copies of the original work, but shortening the duration on the concepts in that work. That is, allow an author / studio to retain a long duration ownership of the original movie or story, so no one else can just start distributing copies of their VHS tapes after a few years. But at the same time, after 10 or 20 years other people can start making new Star Wars universe movies and books without licensing it from the original artist/author. If the original was good enough, then the rights to be the sole distributor of that original material should be plenty worthwhile, and in the mean time, just in time for the generational “nostalgia bump” a whole new set of related properties can come out, reinvigorating interest in the original.

Maybe even some sort of gradual opening of the IP, where after say 10 years, broad categories are opened (think things like “the Jedi” or “the Empire” or “Endor”), but specific characters and their representations aren’t (so no Darth Vader or Luke Skywalkers), then after 20 years you open the characters themselves but only derivative works. And then finally after 30 years or so you open the originals as well for things like translations or “de-specialized” editions or what have you. Then finally 50 years puts the raw originals in the public domain as well.

Your analysis misses the incredibly important caveat that revenue rises with inflation – or sometimes even faster.

50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue. Today, it’s $25. That’s a 50x increase… a dollar in 50 years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50 years is worth about a movie ticket today.

And surprise movies are a rip off and people have stopped going.

Plenty of crowds at my local theaters.

No, that's just the difference between real and nominal dollars. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar 30 years from now even after adjusting for inflation, because the dollar you have today could be invested, or the dollar you don't have today has to be borrowed until you have it, and investments and loans both have interest rates in excess of inflation.

> 50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue.

he average price in 1975 was $2.05 [0], which is ~$12 today [1]. That is not so different from most movie prices today, excluding concessions.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cost-movie-ticket-were-born-1...

[1] https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1975?amount=2.05

> I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.

That would be fine, if the studios didn't want to have it both ways. They want to retain full copyright control over their "asset", but they also use Hollywood Accounting [1] to both avoid paying taxes and cheat contributors that have profit-sharing agreements.

If studios declare that they made a loss on producing and releasing something to get a tax break, the copyright term for that work should be reduced to 10 years tops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Next, they'd switch to from Hollywood Accounting to Oilfield Accounting. Oh that wellhead is actually owned by this other company over there, we just purchased their product at a fair market rate while they were still in business, but now it seems that other company is going bankrupt and cannot do the environmental cleanup to even seal the wellhead, much less remove it.

IIRC, of works that bring in any money to their creators, the vast majority is returned, for almost all works, in the first handful of years after creation. Sure. the big names you know have value longer, but those are a miniscule fraction of works.

Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every subsequent decade) and people—and studios—would have essentially the same incentive to create as they do now, and most works would get into the public domain far sooner.

Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had firmer deposit requirements for works with extended copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund preservation) with other works entering the public domain soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that happened.

The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies released in 2001, made $887 million in its original theatrical run (on a $93 million budget). It would absolutely still have been made if copyright was only 20 years. And now it would be in the public domain!

The success that we can now measure through hindsight wasn’t assured at the time of greenlighting the film. They took a huge gamble:

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-peter-j...

It would have been an even bigger gamble if they weren’t able to bank on any long term revenue (I’m certain Netflix continues to pay for the rights to stream the trilogy after 2021).

This argument works against you. The probability of a long tail of revenue is even less likely than a major hit, so it necessarily has less weight in any decision to swing for the fences.

Producers don't invest in movies for hypothetical revenues in 20 years time. If it doesn't pay off soon after release, it's written off as a loss. Revenues in 100 years time are completely irrelevant.

Yeah, we live in a world of "That's next quarters problem" is the de facto standard but on HN we regard the 120th year as the true icing on the cake of the pudding lol

How many movies did you see last year that is more than 10 or 20 years old? Or 50, for that matter?

Also, in what other industries are 100 year old designs/products/tech/standards/stuff relevant and hold up like the golden standard worth dying for?

Actually I think long tail revenue is quite well correlated with a property being a hit. Netflix paid $500m for the rights to Seinfeld 20 years after the show ended. Star Wars is still huge, nearly 50 years after the release of the original. Disney in general has ruthlessly mined its back catalog; they just printed another $700m from a Lion King prequel, whose value lay largely in the good will still hanging over from the original, which they still own, and which is still absolutely a valuable asset despite being 30 years old. Back catalogs are huge deals. Amazon paid $8bn for MGM to boost its Prime Video content library. Streaming has opened up long tail revenue opportunities beyond the box office that never existed before.

Are the people better off because of these properties? What about the counterfactual, where there are more Star Wars stories by more varied producers?

That they are valuable speaks to market inefficiency. Where is the consumer surplus?

Seinfeld wasn't greenlit due to Netflix streaming rights. Better Lion King adaptations might have been made instead.

And the book it is based on would have been written had there been no copyright at all.

For movies in particular the tail is very thin. Only very few 50 year old movies are ever watched. Was any commercial movie ever financed without a view to making a profit in the box office/initial release?

With books it's even worse. Movies might get a trickle of revenue from TV licensing but once a book is out of print (which usually happens very quickly, and most never go into print again), that's it. No more revenue from that book, it continues to circulate in libraries and used bookstores but the author and publisher gets nothing from that.

According to Matt Damon (in one of many interviews) a lot of movies were produced with the second revenue stream (vhs/dvd) being part of the calculations, that is why we now get a lot less variety and alternative movies made, that second revenue stream doesn’t exist any more (I assume streaming pays very little in comparison).

True, but how much of that second stream exists after say 5 years? For most movies it is zero - they aren't pressing the DVD anymore and all stores that once had no longer do (except for second hand stores which don't give money to the studio)

> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years

Movies for instance make most of their revenue in the 2 week following their release in theater. Beyond, peoole who wanted to see it had already seen it and the others don't care.

I'd argue it's similar for other art form, even for music. The gain at the very end of the copyright lifetime is extremely marginal and doesn't influence spending decision, which is mostly measured on a return basis of at most 10 years.

> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years

Due to the fairy high cost of capital right now, pretty much anything more than 5 years away is irrelevant. 10 years max, even for insanely high returns on investment.

This line of reasoning doesn't make sense for retroactive lengthening of copyright though, as the author is not gaining anything from that anymore.

Seems to me most of that inflated budget is needed for the entertainment role of films, not the art in them, which a low budget can often stimulate rather than inhibit. In which case nothing of importance would be lost by a drastic shortening of copyright terms.

You are putting a pretty blatant cap on what constitutes "art"...

OK? So we wouldn't have $100m movies, the vast majority of which are forgotten about in a few months. I don't think a $100m movie is ten times better than a $10m one, so I think I'd be fine with movies with much smaller budgets, if they meant that LotR (the books) are now in the public domain for everyone to enjoy.

Lower-budget movies are probably a good thing. Force a return to practical effects instead of CGI.

If movies had a payoff curve like rents, this would be more true, but they're cultural artifacts that decay in relevance precipitously after release, and more permanently after a few decades, where they become "dated", outside a few classics.