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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

I think that we should change copyright law such that

1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.

2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.

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> Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.

Isn't the current system setup around the idea that the company gets the rights, and in return the workers get a basically risk-free salary? Wouldn’t your proposal undo that, so then workers took on the risk of whether they got paid, based on whether the game ends up being profitable?

In theory, the financier or team of financiers would be added onto the list of creating individuals. I suppose some sort of fractional representation might be worked out.

Would you still allow transfer of copyrights? Otherwise 1) would really make things more difficult in this case, because you're gonna need to deal with far more people (and potentially far more complicated contracts to try to work around this problem). A shorter expiration period would definitely help, at the very least a 'use it or lose it' provision that would remove the protection from works that are no longer being sold.

I would not. I'm far less concerned about the rights and profits of copyright holders and far more concerned with society and civilization having access to the art that's produced within it.

Since I'm just pitching wild ideas on the Internet of course I have the freedom to make any suggestion I want, but I would like to live in a world where (a) no companies or rights owners are able to play bullshit games with gating access to art that can be reproduced at trivial cost and (b) we can consume all the art we want that's past its sell-by date. It's insane to me that we don't have free, legal databases of every work of art created before, say, 2006.

I don't disagree with the goal, I'm just saying that having more copyright owners in a given work is likely to make the licensing more complicated and opaque, not less.

That would be a tough change... An easier one, which is how things used to be, that everything enters public domain IF not renewed after X years (let's say 20). Abandoned or complex IP would just become public domain unless the owners themselves figure things out and demonstrate interest with the renewal process. Even a modest fee would lead to a huge gain without much friction for the true rights holders.

Alternatively a "use it or lose it" requirement that the company must use the IP in a significant way. Either by proving that the sales of the product is still significant (like GTA V) or provide a meaningful update within X years (unlike GTA 6)

Legal would remember to pay the fee for their abandoned works, just in case, while the rest of the company does nil with them. I'd rather address the issue directly and expire the copyright after X years since it was last published.

Then again Disney's old "vault" strategy would counter it, and Nintendo is already toying with it to sell through FOMO. How can it be this hard to make companies keep our digital culture available for sale? It's not even charity.

We'll do it ourselves! People are natural hoarders and archivists, as should be effortlessly proven by custom wikis.

It's okay if Legal does that. The idea isn't to prevent companies from owning copyrighted works long-term, it's to prevent the waste of abandoned works. There are thousands, if not millions, of works that could be cleanly reused under my proposal.

I don't disagree with the spirit of your argument. I'm just saying that my proposal would be a lot easier to put in practice than anything that hurts companies. The strength of the proposal is exactly that companies will mostly shrug while creating a very clear legal separation of what's "active copyright" and what's an "abandoned work".

By the way, this would also apply to the GPL (and other copyleft licenses).

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