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Comment by rickmb | Hacker News Reader

The problem once again is copyright. If copyright hadn't been in the way, there would no DRM, and plenty of neutral services to solve this problem.

Right now, if you can't even freely share stuff between the living in your own household, you don't really "own" it, and you can forget about a way to pass it on to your heirs.

You don't own stuff you merely rent, and you can forget about passing it on.

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> The problem once again is copyright.

I disagree. There is no difference, with respect to copyright, between a vinyl record of the Beatles and the iTunes equivalent. It's not copyright (which is an agreement between you and Apple Records) that is keeping you from bequeathing the iTunes copy to your heirs, it's the licensing terms (which is an agreement between you and Apple Computer).

Don't confuse the two!

No; with the vinyl record, you don't need a license at all, since the first-sale doctrine gives you the right by law.

Also, copyright is not an agreement between me and Apple Records. I've never agreed to anything, yet I'm still bound by it. The agreement is between society and/or the state and Apple Records.

Fine, its not an agreement, but it is a legal relationship between you and the rights-holder. When things go south, you get sued by Apple Records, not indicted by the state.

To call it a "legal relationship" is even stretching it. Would you say that I have a "legal relationship" with every other person on the planet because if I make up mean stuff about them, they can sue me for defamation?

And the first-sale doctrine is a restriction on contracts that is not inherently tied to copyright. We need a digital equivalent to it.

Edit: better wording

Another example i belive is similar was patent "exhaustion" in the apple/samsung case. If apple buys the chips from qualcom, and qualcom has a licensce, samsung can't double-dip and accuse apple of infringing on things they bought from qualcom.

You don't own stuff you merely rent

This is the crux of the issue. I don't know if the general public doesn't understand this (because this "indefinite lease" is a relatively new business model), or if they think it is so laughable that when they paid $13 for a "book" on their Kindle, they only really bought a license to lease the book under Amazon's terms, they figured the law will work itself out somehow & "common sense" will prevail...

I'm not holding my breath...

Or they know and don't care. Buying a trashy novel isn't normally considered a form of estate planning. I know I've purchased books with the expectation of reading them once and then forgetting about them. I've also purchased a few or online readers that in principle I'd like to reread but in practice seemed more fun to have on a device. I'm certainly aware of the licensing issues (though to be honest I wasn't considering the interests of my heirs!) but I did it anyway.

Many purchases are disposable, and it seems to me that this is the realm where digital media is aimed right now. If you think about it, this is always the way we've bought some media, like newspapers and magazines.

People have traditionally tended to collect music, however, unlike newspapers and magazines. Coming in contact with someone's interesting record collection used to be a memorable event. Piracy has made music less scarce, though, and the mystique of music has lessened because of it.

Actually I deliberately skipped music and movies. These are areas where DRM has tended to work very badly. Basically, people still like to collect music. And those who do do it in archivable form, overwhelmingly so. The "problem" there isn't that they're unknowingly buying in to a bad license regime, it's that they're knowingly evading the license regime entirely.

A collection can be a collection of references. You don't need the music now to put it on your list of favorites and conversation topics.

Yes - my music collection is entirely in mp3s from various sources, but it is still a good get-to-know you area.

They don't know, from my personal observations. Sometimes I think that they to be required to label the "buy" button as something else other then buy.

Even worse is that Big Media uses the very same misleading words in their advertisements, and that reinforces the consumer misconception of ownership.

How many times have you heard the announcer on a tv ad say "Own it on Blu-Ray or DVD now"? So much for truth in advertising.

You own the right to watch that film in the privacy of your own home.

You do own DVDs and Blu-rays. The problem is with the other stuff.

> you merely rent

Sadly, that seems to be the actual situation. It is therefore reasonable to demand that the word "buy" not be used to refer to those transactions ...

On the other hand, I expect that, under EU consumer law, that single "buy" word has dire consequences (on the ground that, when selling to consumers, the buyer should get what he expects to get, based on what was advertised)

I really would like to see that tested in court.

Why would anyone put in years to write a novel if a big printing house could just copy the text and sell it for their own profit, cutting out the author. This would be the world without any copyright at all.

This is clearly a problem that needs to be worked on, and people are working on it. But the answer is not the elimination of copyright.

There was at least some thought put into this: time contraints. Unfortunately, these have all but disappeared from most copyrighted items indefinitely by means of extensions.

I would definitely be in favor of reducing copyright duration. But, that would not solve every problem of inheritance. I could "buy" a copy of The Dark Knight on iTunes tomorrow, then die on Friday. Even if the copyright expired in 10 years that would not help me pass it on to someone in my will.

Because the problem is so specific though, I would think it could be addressed by a few precedent-setting court cases, or perhaps legislation.

You could swap `book' and `author' with `code' and `programmer' and you get the open source model.

What about passion? Sense of accomplishment?

Perhaps the author could make money on book signing, interviews, or even donations. Writing a good story could open doors to writing a movie scenario...

To be honest I don't really care how the authors can get some revenues, nor the programmers.

Data must be free, and this is far more important than how someone can make money on it.

Actually the opposite is true, copyright protection is the legal power behind licenses like the GPL.

Do you know of any coders who survive off of signing things at trade shows and doing interviews? I, for one, want there to continue being art, so I want some copyright protection. I think the US got it right at the start: 14 years was about right.

Remember, there will be no data if people can't make some money off of it.

Of course there will be data even if people cannot make money with it. Just less data, and sometimes of lower quality. There are plenty of examples of people writing novels in their free time. Or people writing free software as a hobby, while working in a company developing internal software for which copyright is irrelevant.

But anyway copyright is just one way of monetizing one's creation. People will pay to see their favorite bands, or to have the original of a painting or sculpture even if copies can be freely made. There are free ad-supported newspapers. Many artists get public funding. Many projects are supported by donations, and so are some individual programmers[1].

I'm all for deprecating copyright-dependent business models and encouraging the development of alternatives. Kickstarter has some good examples of what can be done through donations, and I can see similar models replacing much of the copyright-based economy.

[1] See http://ardour.org/node for an example.

Almost all of software work is done on products that aren't sold to consumers and for which copyright is irrelevant - for every developer working on products like MS Office or Angry Birds there are 9 developers working on company internal, custom, business-specific software. The products that consumers know and buy are just an insignificant tip of the iceberg. B2B giants such as Oracle or SAP can easily extend their licencing&support contracts to be watertight even w/o copyright laws. Even the large consumer companies such as Google and Facebook don't particularly need copyright protection to distribute their products.

Eliminating copyright wouldn't destroy the software creators jobs, only the industry of consumer retail software products would need to change (i.e, a rapid move to SaaS), and that is just a minor (although very visible) part of the industry. Almost all other industry would be ok and workers can make their money.

    You could swap `book' and `author' with `code' and `programmer' and you get the open source model.

Except that typically programmers write open source code which they then use directly themselves to do other things they want to do. An author probably doesn't get much pleasure or utility out of reading their own book.

    Writing a good story could open doors to writing a movie scenario...

Except that presumably you want that to be given away for free too.

    Data must be free, and this is far more important than how someone can make money on it.

A book is not "data".

While for the majority of authors open source would be a poor deal, for some authors, open sourcing their work is still financially viable. I think to argue that either extreme is necessarily true would be foolish.

Can't agree with this enough. I think most people believe that there is a need for copyright in some form. In it's current form, especially because of the ridiculous cases of people being sued for millions because they downloaded a few songs, it's just gotten a bad reputation.

The comparisons to open source software never do much to convince me. Many people think that it is a good model and make money through it sure, but I believe commercial software makes more money and that money is easier made (for example money from a sale instead of money from support seems much easier to do and scale).

The digital music space has been improving (iTunes has been DRM free for a while now) and it's hopefully going to get better - probably as more of the old media people retire and the companies enter the control of people who have grown up with digital content. The only way things will move forward is if both sides compromise but the mentality some people have of 'I want it now, I want it in the format I want, and I want it free' doesn't do much to convince music/movie/book companies. It makes them want to lock things down tighter, not open them up.

I don't think people want it now, in the format they want and free. Sure, when I was younger that seemed reasonable but for a long time I've been happy to pay for it.

Here's the bit distributors haven't figured out yet, I want it now and I'm willing to pay. Hell, I've literally just infringed copyright today because my only legal alternative is to wait 12 months for local release (and I do it every week). There's a missed opportunity.

" Many people think that it is a good model and make money through it sure, but I believe commercial software makes more money and that money is easier made..."

Making money out of it is irrelevant.

Whether or not you can copy a file is a moral question, and this has a higher priority than how to make a business model out of it.

You can't argue about if something is good by checking if you can easily build a business around it.

I will take an extreme example here (just so we get out of the copyright environment): What if I want to make money by kidnapping children? I believe I could make a descent living out of it (especially if I have some kind of law on my side). However this 'business' aspect is never considered, because it doesn't pass the morality check, and thus is irrelevant.

I know it's an extreme example, but this shows there's a hierarchy when we need to determine if something is acceptable. Making money ISN'T among the firsts.

I'm not saying you can't make money without copyrights, but it simply can't be an argument.

No one has ever been sued for downloading a few songs. The suits have purposefully been against people who have distributed via uploading, either willingly or not (e.g. Kazza) hundreds or thousands of songs.

Eh yes, a book is data. In fact it's nothing BUT data! If it wasn't, I would not be able to download it.

> You could swap `book' and `author' with `code' and `programmer' and you get the open source model.

As someone who has released open source code I don't think this analogy translates very well.

I write code because I need it, I can then release it so hopefully others will use it and make it better.

I can see how maybe a biographer would write a book because they wanted it to exist, but my belief is that the vast majority of authors don't write for this reason.

> Data must be free

I don't think you can just state this as a fact anymore than I can state, no person should be able to own more than $10,000,000.00.

What about passion? Sense of accomplishment?

Neither of which put food on the table.

Guess what? For the vast majority of authors, writing a book doesn't put food on the table either.

And they are free to put their work in Creative Commons.

Yes, but they make a choice about whether to keep writing or how to distribute. If their work is saleable, then they may get an advance from a publisher or some long-term revenue in the form of royalties. On the other hand, if there's no way to protect a written work, it becomes a lot harder to make a living. In previous periods of where publishing was a relative free-for-all, many authors relied either on inherited wealth, the economic extraction of colonial wealth, or the like. Dickens was a rare exception insofar as he was financially successful from exceeding humble beginnings, but he lived in constant anxiety about a decline in his circumstances.

That specific argument has been made a lot of times and overruled as many times. Don't be so naive, a world without copyright could perfectly work. It would just be very, very different. It's not like anyone wants just the complete abolition of copyright law to happen, and nothing else, obviously that wouldn't be very fair. You're misrepresenting the situation by depicting a world just like ours, with the single difference that you'd be free to steal the work of an author.

Think about an analogous situation. If you would have told people 40 years ago that a variant of Unix would be made, completely open-source and free, and with large companies working on it too, not just some hobbyists, would they have believed something like that is possible. And yet, Linux still exists. I know copyright is very relevant for Linux (GPL etc...) but I want to show that it is possible for completely other systems to develop than the traditional, where you pay for an (unexpirable) license on the copyrighted work which is kept completely proprietary with some fair use additions.

In any case, fixing copyright doesn't seem that hard. In a world with copyright, which is perfectly fine by the way, the term could be much much shorter. >70 years is a disaster. 7 years seems fair and I think it would vastly enrich our culture, for a very small price to the creators of original work. Obviously it's more complicated than that, but that seems like a good start.

>> In any case, fixing copyright doesn't seem that hard.

You're right. Sadly, the hard part is making politicians fear enough for their jobs so that they don't bend to the desires of special interests.

Your posting has also written numerous times and yet I have seen no one answer this question:

> Don't be so naive, a world without copyright could perfectly work.

Nobody forces authors to rely on copyright and authors are not all stupid sheep. So why doesn't the market lead to copyright-free books if they are viable?

And even if it works for some books, who says it can work for most (or all) books? Just like FOSS is a good model for Linux and lots of science/enterprise/commodity software, but still hasn't caught on in many other areas. What is holding video games without copyright back from overtaking traditional AAA titles?

A copyright limited to 7 years would be interesting.

>Nobody forces authors to rely on copyright and authors are not all stupid sheep. So why doesn't the market lead to copyright-free books if they are viable?

Huh? Of course people will take copyright if it's offered, because they get it for nothing. Just like most farmers will take subsidies offered to them, whether or not they actually need them. Just because someone retains (and makes money off) the copyright to a novel they wrote doesn't mean they wouldn't have written it in the absence of copyright.

>Just like FOSS is a good model for Linux and lots of science/enterprise/commodity software, but still hasn't caught on in many other areas. What is holding video games without copyright back from overtaking traditional AAA titles?

I think it's a very unusual set of circumstances, and some dedicated idealists, that have lead to the success of OSS. But again, even if there were no OSS programs, that wouldn't mean that a world without copyright would have no programs. People tend to take rewards they are offered.

Maybe I interpreted the grandparent's "perfectly" here a bit too literally:

> Don't be so naive, a world without copyright could perfectly work.

I don't doubt for a second that some music would be recorded and some software be written without copyright. But for it to be "perfect" or anything close to that, it'd have to be of the same amount or at least quality. How is it naive to doubt that this would be the case?

I used the word naive to preemptively deflect the bad argument that I would be naive because I believe in a working world without the current idea of copyright, something which I hear way too often.

If we take the word naive to mean "lacking experience, information or clear judgement", I would say a person is naive is he believes a world without copyright would lead to no creative works appearing at all. You say some works would still be created but the original post I replied to implied nothing would be created at all.

I think it's important to realise, there is no way to know whether a world without copyright would work other than just doing it. But I've heard enough arguments in favour and I'm reasonably sure it would.

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