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Comment by reorder9695 | Hacker News Reader

No, but the current system is totally idiotic. Why not have a fixed timeframe i.e. 30-50 years to make money? Life of the author + x years is stupid not only because it's way too long, it keeps going until way after the creator is no longer benefitting, and it can cause issues with works where you don't know who the author is so you can't cleanly say it's old enough not to have copyright.

I'm not sure for most (specifically smaller, who need the most protection) creators this would actually change very much. Media typically makes money in it's first few years of life, not 70 years on.

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If you change it to 30-50 years then nothing changes for Sora.

Most of the (obviously infringing) video I've seen is stuff well within the past 30-50 years.

Also, no copyright doesn't mean information free for all.

I still can't generate a fake video, pretend it's real, and then claim you're a criminal or you eat babies or something. Because that's libel.

Why do we have libel laws? Because the alternative is that you piss off Walmart or something and then they go and tell all employers that you're a pedophile and then you starve to death, with the cherry on top of having a tainted legacy. So we definitely need the libel laws.

But that's a problem. The whole premise of Sora is that it generates fake video with the intention of making it as real as possible.

No matter how you cut it, Sora's business model, and moral model, is on shakey grounds.

Then the solution is fixing the problem, not removing any protections at all.

In fact, copyright should belong to the people who actually create stuff, not those who pay them.

The shareholder class would demand rapid fire exploitation of © the moment it expired and the resulting media would be a soup of mediocrity. The idea is to recognize the highly creative have unique imaginations that invent paradigms that propel culture. Excluding that for 70+ years generates that. Had Lucas gained the rights to Flash Gordon (DeLaurentiis beat him to it) he'd never been forced to create the SW universe. Think about constraints as the path to progress.

This does not demonstrate a sound understanding of how the public domain works, why copyright lengths have been extended so ferociously over the last century (it's shareholders who want this), nor the impact it has both on creative process and public conversation.

This is a highly complex question about how legal systems, companies, and individual creatives come in conflict, and cannot be summarized as a positive creative constraint / means to celebrate their works.

I develop copyright material from the letter and the images that I've both sold to studios and own myself. Copyright lengths are there to prevent the shareholder class from rapid exploitation. Once copyright declines to years not decades, shareholders will demand that be exploited rather than new ideas. The public conversation is rather irrelevant as the layperson doesn't have a window into the massive risk, long-term development required to invent new things, that's how copyright is not a referendum, it's a specialized discourse. Yes the idea of long-term copyright developed under work-for-hire or individual ownership can be easily summarized. License, sample, or steal. Those are the windows.

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