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Comment by qwytw | Hacker News Reader

Well imagine you write a book in your 20s or 30s and it only becomes popular after a couple of decades. The publisher gets to pocket all the money.

Somebody decides to make a movie based on your book? You get nothing at all from it... The movie bit would be problematic even for books that were reasonably popular at the time. e.g the Witcher adaption came out almost exactly 20 years after the last book, for GOT it wasn't that far from being the case as well (at least for the initial volumes). Studios would be incentivized just to wait a couple of years to avoid paying anything.

I think it could be reasonably to have a fixed limit if the rights are held by corporations, though.

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This is an edge case. The vast majority of intellectual output loses value extremely fast. If a new Kafka comes along and their writing becomes popular 30 years after publication, they will have 0 issues getting a fat contract for a new book.

Justifications for copyright are always built on edge cases, seemingly moral justifications of an empirically immoral practice. Yes, it'd be nice if a single handicapped mother of 2 coild see her children rise out of poverty thanks to her writing talent after 50 years. In practice, this person doesn't exist and building society around that scenario is not a good thing.

These 'what ifs' have the same value and do the same damage as 'who will think of the children' do for human rights.

> seemingly moral justifications of an empirically immoral practice

How is it empirically immoral? Historically it was one of the best things to have have happened to creative professional in history. Before it writer could make a living by publishing books unless he was independently wealth or had wealthy patrons to support him.

> Justifications for copyright are always built on edge cases

No they are based on the assumption that humans are generally rational and more likely to create content if they can make money by doing that.

> The vast majority of intellectual output loses value extremely fast.

Well that's great.. but then it means that your argument is mostly pointless since if that content has no value why are you bothered by the author retaining the ownership of it. Who would benefit from it entering public domain?

You're strawmanning, or having difficulty reading.

Whatever my personal opinions about copyright, this whole thread is about copyright set at 2000 years vs 20, so that answers your first 2 points.

For the last one, 'losing value' obviously doesn't mean they can be safely binned, but that the publisher has no return on keeping it in publication. Again, this is what the entire thread is about.

So? Imagine you build a house and it only increases in value after you sold it?

Imagine you invent a new kind of computer memory and it only becomes wildly profitable after the patent expires.

The purpose of copyright is NOT to let the original author capture all value of their creations.

And even independently of copyright "with the blessing of the original author" IS a selling point that will give authors ability to market their past works without restricting everyone else's speech. And any new works they create will automatically gain much more attention after their past works become popular - encouraging them to keep creating, just as copyright should.

> So? Imagine you build a house and it only increases in value after you sold it?

How is this relevant? We are not talking about the author selling the copyright of their work and then someone making more money than they did from it...

> The purpose of copyright is NOT to let the original author capture all value of their creations.

What is it then?

> And even independently of copyright "with the blessing of the original author" IS a selling point

Well that gives way less bargaining power to the author and even if they get paid anything by the corporation profiting from their work it would be much less than if they retained copyright.

> And any new works they create will automatically gain much more attention after their past works become popular

Well if you are happy to work for free while someone profits from your effort for "exposure" that's something you are free to do.

> without restricting everyone else's speech.

How is copyright restricting anyeone's speech? Everyone is free to create original content if they want to.

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