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Comment by chipdale | Hacker News Reader

> There's zero benefit to society

Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?

In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.

How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?

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> Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?

I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.

I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"

Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)

The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.

i understand your logic , but there's a problem with that assertion.

the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value . That thinking is flawed. If anything, the copyright owner contributed to the equity accrued to the copyright. They should be able to pay the high price to keep adding value to it. This does not discriminate. IN fact, i would say the opposite, what you are proposing, feels like stealing.

If i dump millions into developing a copyrighted work, why could any random artist with nothing to lose be able to exploit the work by paying a small/no fee? This seems incredibly unfair. Do you agree?

> the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value .

The owner deserves to make as much money from their product as they can, but they should only be able to exclusively profit from that work in any form for 10 years. That's entirely fair.

Copyright isn't the natural order of things. It's an extraordinary restriction on our freedoms. If I hear a song, there's no kind of natural law making it wrong for me to sing it while out in public the next day. There's nothing morally wrong with that either. It's a massive imposition for the government to tell a free person that they can't share certain stories with others.

For almost all of human history copyright did not exist. The stories that were told, and which became foundational to all stories being told today, were not protected by copyright. People who heard those stories just retold the ones they liked again and again making whatever changes they felt like making and the most popular versions of those stories spread and gained a foothold on the culture. That is the natural order.

The reason copyright law was created was not so that people can profit for as long as possible by restricting everyone else's ability to retell stories or sing the songs they've heard. It was created to promote the creation of new creative works. That aim can be easily accomplished in a single decade.

Locking up vast amounts of our culture behind copyright for ~100 years or more is what sounds like theft to me. Not only are copyright terms of that length excessive, but they are so prohibitively excessive that they actually hinder the creation of new creative works as well as the ability for people to profit from those newly created works.

For example, consider the problems encountered trying to make and sell Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_The_Blues). The artist behind that project went to extreme efforts to put her work out into the universe. It's easy to see how many others in her situation would have been forced to give up or could become disheartened enough to abandon the project after realizing that there could be no monetary profit in it.

When a work enters the public domain that doesn't even mean that the original author or previous owner of a copyright can't continue to make profit on that work. It just means that other people can build off of that work and/or can publish/sell/distribute that work to others. That's perfectly fair too. I've personally paid for works that were in the public domain on multiple occasions.

You are conflating copyright with free expression.

That's not correct and the law is clear on this respect. No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song. However, the moment you start selling tickets to the presentation, that's something entirely different.

You are literally leveraging the fact that someone put that song on the map. You didn't create it. You didn't promote it. You didn't do anything, in fact, except try to profit from it.

Libertarians still believe in property rights. Property can be tangible or intangible.

The point can easily be made with a simple peek into history. No one that recorded anything intangible, like a song, was selling it to others for commercial use because they didn't understand that intangible they had just created had value, but the moment they did, morally, they felt it was wrong and sought the courts for redress. There are examples in history:

In fact, the oldest documented examples of creators pushing back against unauthorized copying predate any formal copyright laws by centuries anda few stretch back to over a millennium! [1] [2]

[1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/04/the-world%E2%80%9...

[2] https://course.oeru.org/oerdsc/copyright-and-licensing/copyr...

Why is this important ? Because the oppression you mention of freedom, in order to happen, must be codified by government. If you have this issue going so far back in time, when government hadn't codified anything, its a clear indication that the issue trascends code and goes to the heart of what is moral and inmoral.

This debate of whether you own an idea, trascended the codification of the idea in government "repressing your freedoms" . The fact of the matter is, we believe strongly in freedom, as long as it doesn't transgress the freedoms of others. This is key. In this case, the freedom to reap the rewards of your hard work should not be infringed by the work of another. You are not more important than someone else. This is a basic tenet of liberty

> You are conflating copyright with free expression.

No, copyright is a direct infringement on free expression. We've just tolerated it because the trade off was worth it. Not worth it because people would get rich and that was import to us. Worth it because having a chance to make money on a creative work encourages the creation of more creative works and having more creative works was important to us.

I'm sure that there were many times in history when someone came up with a good story and got mad that somebody else told a version of that story that others liked better. Not only is the ability to share stories more important than that one guy's feelings, but the result is better stories for everybody. Once people starting selling their creative works and it became easier to copy them we agreed that it was important that people had an opportunity to make money off their efforts so we'd have more works and that's where we started limiting people's freedom. When those limits are reasonable, it's a good deal. A balance where briefly people wouldn't be able to copy someone's work so they had a chance to make money and then later everybody could do whatever they wanted with it.

Recently the media industry has bribed their way into making the restrictions increasingly unreasonable, but we still want people to be able to have a chance to make money on their work so we just need to readjust to something more like what copyright started out as and less like what it's become.

> No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song.

That's wrong. There are performance rights (see https://copyrightlately.com/glossary/public-performance/) and it just requires you to have a public "audience". This is an issue that cover bands (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rocking-without-regrets-truth...) and karaoke singers run into and the way it's handled is that the venues are typically licensed to allow it.

Performance rights were what kept restaurants from singing happy birthday to their customers or paying Warner/Chappell for the privilege until a lawsuit clarified that they didn't have the rights to the song in the first place. By that point they'd already collected 50,000,000 in license fees though because performance rights are real and enforceable.

Realistically, nobody is going to sue you for singing a copyrighted song in public around others, but they could and there's a decent chance you'd lose that legal battle. Similarly, many small businesses will have a radio on or a CD playing that their customers can hear. They can be sued for that as well. Enforcement in that setting is rare enough though that small players take their chances, but big companies with fat wallets are prime targets for lawsuits so they tend to have a licensed solution to avoid massive fines.

>Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them.

Society would work a LOT better if there were a lot more rent-seeking against extremely wealthy people and companies.

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