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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

The issue with lifetime (vs something like lifetime + X years) is that of inheritance.

Assuming you agree with the idea of inheritance, which is another topic, then it is unfair to deny inheritance of intellectual property. For example if your father has built a house, it will be yours when he dies, it won't become a public house. So why would a book your father wrote just before he died become public domain the moment he dies. It is unfair to those doing who are doing intellectual work, especially older people.

If you want short copyright, is would make more sense to make it 20 years, human or corporate, like patents.

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Then make it the greater of 20 years or the lifetime for humans.

Comparing intellectual property to real or physical property makes no sense. Intellectual property is different because it is non exclusive. If you are living in your father’s house, no one else can be living there. If I am reading your fathers book, that has nothing to do with whether anyone else can read the book.

That intellectual property is non exclusive doesn't change the inheritance problem.

If you consider it right to get value from the work of your family, and you consider that intellectual work (such as writing a book) to be valuable, then as an inheritor, you should get value from it. And since the way we give value to intellectual work is though copyright, then inheritors should inherit copyright.

If you think that copyright should not exceed lifetime, then the logical consequences would be one of:

- inheritance should be abolished

- intellectual work is less valuable than other forms of work

- intellectual property / copyright is not how intellectual work should be rewarded

There are arguments for abolishing inheritance, it is after all one of the greatest sources of inequality. Essentially, it means 100% inheritance tax in addition to all the work going into the public domain. Problematic in practice.

For the value of intellectual work, well, hard to argue against it on Hacker News without being a massive hypocrite.

And there are alternatives to copyright (i.e. artificial scarcity) for compensating intellectual work like there are alternatives to capitalism. Unfortunately, it often turns out poorly in practice. One suggestion is to have some kind of tax that is fairly distributed between authors in exchange for having their work in the public domain. Problem is: define "fairly".

Note that I am not saying that copyright should last long, you can make copyright 20 years, humans or corporate, inheritable. Simple, gets in the public domain sooner, fairer to older authors, already works for patents. Why insist on "lifetime"?

Agreed. I think it should be the greater of 20 years or the lifetime of the original authors.

20 or 25 years from publication. Enough for anyone inhering it to exploit if they are children. No need to have more. It is not like house builder keeps getting paid after house has been build.

The issue with that is that inheritance only makes sense for tangible, scarce resources. Having copyright isn't easily analogous to ownership of a physical object, because an object is something you have and if somebody else has it, you can not have and use it.

Copyright is about control. If you know a song and you sing it to yourself, somebody overhears it and starts humming it, they have not deprived you of the ability to still know and sing that song. You can make economic arguments, of deprived profit and financial incentives, and that's fine; I'm not arguing against copyright here (I am not a fan of copyright, it's just not my point at the moment), I'm just saying that inheritance does not naturally apply to copyright, because data and ideas are not scarce, finite goods. They are goods that feasibly everybody in the world can inherit rapidly without lessening the amount that any individual person gets.

If real goods could be freely and easily copied the way data can, we might be having some very interesting debates about the logic and morality of inheriting your parents' house and depriving other people of having a copy.

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