So many ideas better than the current regime.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.
“The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by [E. L.] James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’.”
Edit: according to [1] 93% of users are 44 or younger, and women outnumber men 10:1
[1] https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3/
So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming that they can thrive in a shared space and then discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason, they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by employers despite having the same skills as successful male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to have a place of your own.
My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the community, which means everyone migrates to the next site which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3 run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of them
The whole purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of new works after all. In GRRM's case, the more successful his works became, the less he wrote which is kind of the opposite of what copyright was intended to do.
Let's assume the 1st book goes public. I should be able to use those characters and their known relationship in any which way, no? What's wrong with that, copyright wise?
Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid. Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.
Your opinion does not make that fact.
IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.
Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.
Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
You can also have people who do both plumbing and electrical work or electrical work and home Ethernet wiring...
Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
LMAO the serie would not even exists if not of his books
The author’s book got popular based on the efforts of others based on the author’s book.
What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.
Unlike, for probably the only example, Harry Potter, which was already a cultural phenomenon when the first film was announced.
Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.
I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?
The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.
I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
Making money means running a business, and running a business requires more than just creating something. You also have to identify a good market for that creation, and find a way to distribute to them, and provide a viable model for them to pay for it, and (the hardest part) out-compete all the other businesses who are doing the same.
This is true for cooks. It's not good enough to create a meal. You have to also scope out the local market, find a good location, build a restaurant or a stand, attract customers, and sell your meals. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept cooking for free, or going to work for a restaurant who's going to do all those hard parts and take the bulk of the profits.
This is true for computer programmers. It's not good enough to write a program. You also have to build a business, find customers, attract them through ads or marketing or viral growth, collect credit carts, and sell your product. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept coding things that make no money, or go to work for corporation or startup who will pay you a salary while collecting bigger profits.
Etc.
For some reason artists are the only group that makes a big stink about this situation, and feels that they should get the benefits of running a business without doing the work or taking the risk of running a business.
But with artists, there's a particular extra wrinkle, in that the law created a middle tier of reward specifically for the efforts of creative workers. Copyright was specifically intended to allow authors to have their own business ventures without necessarily having to share in the same risks that equity owners do. So, naturally, those equity owners all colluded with one another to steal this other form of equity and wear it as a second shell.
I would argue that it's not solely the law rewarding that kind of risk, it's the market. There is no law that says that only equity owners can enjoy massive profits. Some employees get paid 7 figures, 8 figures, or more, even without equity.
Generally speaking, the rewards go to the hardest parts, the riskiest parts, the parts with the least supply and the most demand.
You are taking far more risk by being a business creator and blazing a new trail, than you are by studying a fixed set of knowledge and techniques to train to become a Front End Software Engineer or some other kind of well-defined high-demand pre-defined role. And the evidence for this is the fact that there are millions of people who've shaped themselves into that safer mould, and very few who have done the former.
And this doesn't just apply to owners vs employees, it applies within each group, too. There are far more restauranteurs than search engine founders, as the former is simply a less risk and less competitive endeavor. (Competing with your local market vs competing with the world.) And artists who create unique works tend to earn a lot more than copycats. Artists who master rare skills tend to earn a lot more than people generating stuff off Midjourney. Etc. Risk tends to go hand-in-hand with reward.
Of course there are exceptions, e.g. rent-seeking, sabotage, monopoly, collusion, etc. that can earn you a lot without you providing a lot of value or taking a lot of risk. And a huge role of the law is to make as much of this illegal as possible, to force people into more value-creating activities by process of elimination.
Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
This still seems very reasonable to me.
Meanwhile they are currently buying up IP and locking it up for decades in such a way that no one can build on it.
Sherlock Holmes, who was created in the 1800s, only became public domain (but not all of it) a few years ago:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/sherlock-holme...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/01/how-sherlo...
BigCorps could do a lot of things under a new regime, but they are already doing shitty things. I'd rather deal with the current problems and then see if/what kind of new issues crop up, and then course-correct then.
Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never the intent.
Similar to the Patriot act.
IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).
It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.
The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.
The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.
If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.
And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.
Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.
An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.
It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.
Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.
They are a capitalist.
Artists create, despite the destitution, because they want to create and feel strongly compelled to create. Art is about that compulsion.
An artist wants enough money to pay rent/mortgage, raise a family, have a hobby, not be in debt, etc. But when Daniel Hardcastle received 0 pounds from his book because the publisher was a scammy cunt, he doesn't stop writing because there's no money in it, he continues to write despite the lack of profit. Because that's what he feels compelled to do.
When youtube made it impossible for animators to make money on Youtube, Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) started paying people to make animations out of his content, including people who started out doing it entirely without their permission. When many channels make pure profit from creating clip shows or compilations of their content, instead of throwing lawyers or the Youtube machine at those people, he paid someone to make official versions.
Compare how those two jackwads acted (the fine brothers), trying to trademark the concept of a "reaction video", to all the different channels and groups that do "Power Hour" or variety content like Good Mythical Morning. They even joke about how they are all stealing from each other. They know that their audience is looking for their unique output, not a specific format, and that protecting such a format would be a waste for everyone.
Because a real artist does not say "How dare you make better product with my formula", a real artist says "Aww man they used my formula to make something great, I should figure out how to make something great and up my game".
The sin in artistry is someone taking your style or content and shamelessly stealing it because it's a profitable business, rather than riffing on it or iterating on it.
Weird Al generally gets permission to do his work despite the law being clear that he does not have to because artistry is about respect and effort and collaboration.
More importantly for copyright law, despite no legal protection for a "Power hour" format, many groups are able to profit off it simultaneously, because art is not some winner takes all market. Copyright is not about enabling you to profit off of a work indefinitely, copyright is about ensuring that Greedy McBusinessman cannot take your book and sell it for cheaper because he doesn't have to pay your rent and does that for a hundred other artists. It's about who owns the Rights to Copy a work.
Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)
Well, independently coming up with the same solution to a given problem is a lot more likely than independently writing the same novel. Personally, the chilling of independent invention is the thing I find most obnoxious about patents.
Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they never automatically time out as a mere function of the calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse, they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney Company.
The addition of copyright makes it all a double-whammy. Trademarks can already last as long as time itself; copyright doesn't also have to be that way at all.
14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose, if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well, and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.
(Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of those is timing out soon and I really should check on it.)
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.
But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.
Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
1: The formula dictates what you pay.
2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow account.
At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is forfeited.
(What happens to the money at that point? I think this is a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of us get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
(Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
How do I claim it?
How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)
What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?
What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?
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I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
Copyright only works if you have faith in your government to create and enforce laws.
Otherwise, if you don't have faith in your government, you have bigger problems than a poor system of copyright.
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Anyway, all of your points are wonderful things to argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need. When we argue about details like this, we can assume that compulsory licensing is a good concept overall.
The floor of copyright reform is set by TRIPS and the WTO. That's 50 years. If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that. Setting an floor that expires sooner is likely a non-starter given concerns about things getting slurped up into AI models.
Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
Much of the suggestions of copyright reform would involve the relevant country to leave the WTO and withdraw from the TRIPS agreement. That is unlikely to happen.
Resetting copyright to the floor dictated by TRIPS would be a possibility that a country could entertain.
You just made the argument for mandatory licensing.
Why?
Piracy is about to become a lot harder to prosecute. (See the news coverage of the Cox case in the Supreme Court.) All those usages of your work that you object to (which many people consider fair use), are about to become much harder to prosecute.
Thus, shortening the period of exclusive control and introducing a period of mandatory licensing allows you to get paid in situations where it is extremely hard to prosecute for copyright infringement.
Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
(In general, my proposal is more in context with things like movies, TV shows, music; situations where in the past anyone could make a DVD/CD player that could play any DVD/CD, anyone could sell any DVD/CD by buying into the patent pool. No one could sell a DVD/CD that could only play in a specific model, and a CD/DVD player maker didn't have to negotiate with every studio. So my licensing model isn't quite the same situation that you're talking about.)
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In this case, the problem is that fair use is eroded. The questions are:
> Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
1: Once you make information available to the general public, how long do you retain exclusive control of that information? At what point is the general public's fair use eroded?
> Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
2: That's really the formula. It's a wonderful thing to argue about. Again, though, it's about making sure that fair use is preserved.
> Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
3: (Please also see answer 1) Why do people still flock to the Lourve (sp?) to see the Mona Lisa? That being said, copyright isn't intended to support artificial scarcity, and I think breaking down artificial scarcity makes popular items more valuable. (IE, the knockoff prints, that you collect royalties from, make the limited "artist made prints" more valuable.)
> Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Fair use. (Sorry, running out of time, see my example about the DC/DVD market. Also, radio stations used to be able to play any song and follow a formula to pay the right holder. The artists couldn't refuse a station from playing their song.)
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> Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
This isn't a copyright / fair use issue
Such a proposal needs to take into consideration everything that is copyrightable rather than just literature or film productions... but also software and photographs.
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50 years after publication date. If you want to license it before then for some other purpose, that's something that depends on your use of it and what I'm willing to accept.
If you have a formula, put it on the table. How much should it cost for me to commercially license some open source software?
How much should it cost you to license my photographs for fine art replicas? for placemats?
My contention is that any price that is legislated is wrong for the majority of the use cases. Any attempt to make it right gets into absurd nuance.
It is the same copyright laws that frustrate people for getting literature or movies into the public domain that also protects open source.
The alternative to copyright isn't "everything is free" but rather "everything is locked up."
The GPL was created because Stallman wanted to be able to modify printers. Getting rid of copyright (or making it very short duration) wouldn't have changed his experience with printers. What it would have changed would have been that that the GPL would lose all its teeth to compel people make their software licensed the same (under copyright law!).
People are upset about content they created two decades ago being incorporated into an AI model ( https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moonrise-over-San-Fran... )... without copyright I would have no right to complain about this.
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However, all of this is pretty much moot and performative. If you want to change it to something shorter than 50 years - get the WTO to renegotiate TRIPS.
That ain't happening.
Spending effort to say "this is how it should be..." go write a story and release it to the public domain about that utopia of copyright freedom.
Speaking for myself, if I lost the rights provided by copyright to my photographs after a decade and half or so - I would not have posted them.
I do not want art locked up behind patronage and restricted to those few... though if that was the only alternative to being able to make some money off my photographs, then that's what I would have done.
Then perhaps let me explain what I mean by fair use:
For example, I'd like to write an ebook reader that can give me an AI summary of the last chapter that I read, or give me a quick AI based summary of who a character is on the page that I'm reading.
Fair use means that I don't need to negotiate with every publisher and every author, or negotiate with Kindle to be able to access their content.
This is why we need compulsory licensing; it makes a middle ground between the exclusive control that you have when you create something, and the eventual entry into public domain.
Current system: exclusive control for a period of time, then public domain.
My proposal: exclusive control for a period of time, then compulsory licensing (for fair use), then public domain.
Makes sense?
The point of compulsory licensing is to preserve fair use.
This is less of a tough sell than you think. In pretty much every IP-related trade negotiation, you can divide the world into two categories:
* Ultra-rich countries that want to push through every insane IP idea they have (life+50, DMCA 1201, etc) onto as many other countries as possible
* Everyone else
Notably, the ultra rich are all "dealmaker countries". They're the ones dictating the terms of international trade to everyone else and whatever terms they insist upon will be accepted without question. So yeah, if, say, South Africa or India want shorter terms, they still have to respect America's terms, at least up to life+50. But if the US wants shorter terms out of India, they will get shorter terms out of India, come hell or high water.
Conversely, Mexico has life+100 terms, but nobody is trying to use them to ratchet up terms elsewhere. They're a deal taker.
The real question is if another ultra-rich country will stop one that tries to lower the Berne minimum. Keep in mind that the ultra-rich subdivide into groups that, in order of relative IP insanity, are: Europe, Japan, and then the US in the crazy slot. If the US were to, say, repeal DMCA 1201; Europe would cheer and Japan would grumble.
Actually, the Berne convention happened during a time when Europe was the copyright basketcase and America was in the "everyone else" category[0]. The US had 28+14 terms up until 1976, and we didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988 - almost a hundred years late[1]! So if the US were to drop the Berne floor, you could totally imagine the EU going insane and trying to trade war the US out of it. But at the same time, the EU isn't very good at fighting trade wars with other ultra-rich blocs. Or at the very least, they fold very easily.
[0] For exactly the same reason why China is today. China is in the same position America was a century ago, where it had a huge manufacturing base and basically no cares about copyright.
[1] In particular, the US really, really hated automatic registration. While it is true that you don't have to register copyright and users of creative works have to treat everything as copyrighted; creators still have to register anyway if they want to actually enforce their rights. And if they don't do it right away they don't get statutory damages, which are almost always the only damages that matter. So you get all the problems of automatic registration with all the problems of copyright formalities.
Going to anything less than 50 years would entail leaving the WTO and backing out of TRIPS. That in turn would be disastrous to the companies that work with information (music, movies, microcode (software), and ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶y̶).
Want to do away with registration for punitive damages? Absolutely. On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
> On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
The Berne floor is way longer than "a few years".
I'd like to propose the following additions to help tie it all together:
Copyright must be registered. Registration requires sending a digital copy to some officious government body, such as the Library of Congress, for preservation. (It used to be ~about this way; it can be this way again. Disk is cheap. Git and email both exist. It can be figured out.)
This registration will be open and publicly-available to query (online, of course, but also by phone, and mail, and just by walking in the front door and asking), so the question of "Who to pay" is always easily answered.
All forfeited money from licensing goes to help pay for the preservation of the collected works, and for the ongoing expense of providing the registration database. It won't be nearly enough to cover those expenses, and that's fine: This means that the balance always has a place to land.
Copyright should not span generations. It should still time out completely, and do so after a period that is shorter than a normal human lifespan.
If a person saw a film when they were 5 that they really enjoyed, and if they manage to live long enough, then they should eventually be able to walk into the Library of Congress, give them some money, and walk out with a physical copy of it, and be able to freely upload that copy of it to YouCloud for their great, great grandchildren (and indeed, the world) to see, and be able to do all of this without becoming a criminal.
(How much money? Something in the realm of 15 Big Macs worth of dollars sounds about right.)
https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm
Members shall comply with Articles 1 through 21 of the Berne Convention (1971) and the Appendix thereto. However, Members shall not have rights or obligations under this Agreement in respect of the rights conferred under Article 6bis of that Convention or of the rights derived therefrom.
Author's rights under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration.
Just because I haven't sent the latest batch of photographs to the Library of Congress for registration (so I can collect punitive damages rather than just compensatory damages) doesn't mean that the images that I have created are not copyrighted and protected.
I can't conceive of a way for any of this hypothetical copyright system to work (ie, to not fall completely apart) without requiring registration.
Would anyone be able to license that repository for $(legislated amount) and make it into a closed source product?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-over...
All without registration...
Create a non-government copyright collective[0] that manage copyright unrelated to music (musicians already have their).
Last time I looked into trying to get pricing from ASCAP and BMI so I could legally stream some music for a small number of people, I found the following to be true:
1. There is no public pricing. (Why? Because fuck you, that's why!)
2. If I insisted, then the simplest way to get a price is to stream whatever I want and wait for a nasty letter from one or more lawyers that will most assuredly tell me how much I owe.
3. The only safe way to proceed is not to play the game at all.
That's gonna be a "no" on the cartels for me, boss. We might as well just throw all of the money and all of the copyrighted stuff into the memory hole for all the good they do.
(But don't quote me, I'm not an expert.)
If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.
Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.
>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.
This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.
Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.
> A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work. > This is the entire point of copyright.
Not only is the entire point, it is the thing that matters most when discussing "piracy" productively. Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media. "Consuming" intellectual property can never be piracy by definition because you are not providing anything.
If Netflix screws up their licensing agreements and provides too many seasons of a show and people watch it no one would be considered "pirates". Netflix is simply in violation of a licensing agreement. If they had no agreement whatsoever then they are directly infringing on the "IP holders exclusive right to control the distribution and sale".
I don't know if I go that far, since copyright is literally about the right of exclusive control over copies, and piracy is making a copy without authorization.
However, the advent of computers limited the "literalness" of that interpretation, and my understanding is that even without such consideration, many countries do not consider copying for personal use to be a breach of law. I am not in violation of copyright when copying a program from my hard drive to ram, and I think that would be true even if the proper owner of the copyright insisted otherwise.
That was never the point.
Copyright was invented with the printing press. What was happening was that authors couldn't get compensated, because everyone with a printing press was re-printing their works. It never gave the author control over where their books were ultimately sold; just who could copy it.
Related: This is why the Bible became so popular and well-known. Printers could re-print the Bible because it wasn't protected by copyright.
But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).
And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one.
IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
People aren’t just going to take your word that A outweighs B modulo C, or that B outweighs A modulo C. There needs to be some credible substance.
I thought this was a site where we talk about ideas and see what people's perspectives are. @basilikum asked why on earth @mchusma would advocate "pay to extend" instead of "14+14 no extensions". I gave my own personal take. I'd be totally happy to be wrong about the political viability of "14+14 no extensions". If you have actual data, or even just a different take on the situation, I'm all ears.
Why pretend if there’s no substance at all backing it up?
You can probably see the problem then. How do I know if your random guesses have any meaning at all, couldn’t they just be gibberish?
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.