Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.

If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.

View on HN

This is actually a fairly well studied area and surprisingly even a term as short as two years would likely be enough to ensure that a profit was returned on the investment. Most media including books, movies, music and video games earns the overwhelming share of its profits in the first 4 weeks after its release and sales decay quickly in the first year hitting single digit percentage by year end. At two years out you'd be approaching zero. The curves differ between the media types (movies and video games decay fastest, music decays slowest) but they are close enough to generalize. The only major complication for an extremely short copyright length would be media that experience a resurgence due to developing a cult following, going viral or some other form of mass interest later on.

Personally, I'd still prefer a term of 10 years since it is psychologically more appealing and allows for the rarer cases where a work becomes popular well after its release. It would also be a better fit for music so it would avoid the complication of having different rules for different media types.

Lack of protections didn't stop Homer and a "few" others.

Unless you were paid during those five years

Who's going to pay you to work for five years for a book that has a two-year commercial window, and even for that many people won't buy it until another company that just does printing sells it for half price two years from the first published date?

Well, if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit, it would make sense to pay you a reasonable salary for the five years it takes you to write it. It's not completely implausible that people would pay for something that could be had for cheaper soon, considering that there are grifters selling "new editions" (with a publication date in the future, to game recency-biased search algorithms) of out-of-copyright works that are available for free elsewhere.

The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.

With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.

> if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit

This is madness.

> With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.

Even then - who would buy it if they could just wait two years and read it for much less?

You are thinking in reverse, think it more like a kickstarter, you sponsor the author, at that point the author would probably just release as public domain and you could buy a physical "official" copy on kindle or whatever, but you think it as just a tip/convenience or a merchandise, not the product.

I’m pretty sure they meant the “post death” copyright, considering the context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com