10 ms·

I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous. Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care

I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous. Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger. It shouldn't last indefinitely. Maybe only 10 or 15 years. I believe 99% of all works make most of their money in the first few years. Having copyright last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy. Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same papers. Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.

contravariant 10y ago
> I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous. I disagree, scientists generally aren't seeking to get money by people buying a copy of their paper (if anything they're currently paying so people can read it) there's no need for them to invoke copyright law at all, in fact that would be against their own interest. The problem is that the current system forces scientists to publish in journals, which will happily charge an arm and a leg for the privilege, and invoke whatever law they can to make more money, even if this goes directly against the interests of the scientists who wrote the papers.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  The Journals wouldn't be an issue in the first place without copyright law. And fixing copyright solves problems beyond scientific Journals. You could have nonfiction books in general, textbooks, etc, all available to the public domain.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  You're pretty much entirely missing the point. 1. Scientists aren't at the heart of the scientific Open Access problem. Journals are. 2. The fact that copyright exists means that journals can then request it be transferred (or licensed) to the journal. For what's effectively forever. 3. Journals exercise gatekeeper access over scientists' careers, in that publishing in prestige journals is how scientists advance academically. This is de facto* coercive control over scientists. 4. With that control, journals compell publication of articles in controlled journals, for scientists to advance, require subscriptions of libraries (who otherwise forgo access to the material), and maintain a bank of virtually all scientific papers published since 1924 as an absolute monopoly. Hence: no copyright, or a far-less-rediculous copyright, say, 14, 28, or 54 years (as was historically the case, via registration(s) and/or renewals), and much the problem would disappear. The additional factor of deadweight costs of denied access to virtually all of humanity for this material is the other cost.
rflrob 10y ago
> And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. As much as I feel that science---especially publicly funded science (which almost all of it is)---ought to be freely available fairly quickly, I think making a distinction for the purposes of copyright law between fiction and non-fiction is fairly hairy. Clearly "A Streetcar Named Desire" is fiction, but what about memoirs? Poetry? The Onion? Dianetics? The output of human writing spans a continuum of factual-ness, and it's not obvious to me that there's a good way to draw a line. Even in the hardest of sciences, it's often underappreciated how much interpretation and creative energy goes into a paper.
- 100ideas 10y ago
  I wish copyright was more limited with regard to scientific works. But how to define them? In a conservative sense, perhaps works that are 1) a technical or research article 2) produced with public funding Could receive more limited (shorter-term) copyrights etc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works. Is anyone really going to argue that scientific papers are works of fiction? Would any reasonable court hold that up? All laws have to deal with the natural fuzziness of concept space. But if libraries can manage it successfully, surely the copyright office can.
  - jobigoud 10y ago
    What about allegories and thought experiments? Two examples on the top of my head: 1. The strange cave of Ali Baba (or how to explain Zero-Knowledge protocols to your children) - Jean-Jacques Quisquater - Advances in Cryptology - 1990. 2. The fable of the Tyrant Dragon - Nick Bostrom - Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005¹. This is a work of fiction designed to make a statement about the stance of society towards fighting aging. ¹ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf ² http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
zanny 10y ago
Fictional works are not a special case. I'd personally argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least functioned. Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane. I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.
- dnautics 10y ago
  To help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the "Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral argument against copyright. There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with rivalrousness (that is a very subtle distinction): http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalrous/ http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro... You may find it interesting.
  - zanny 10y ago
    That is an excellent argument from what I would also call the big picture perspective. I just usually use the utilitarian one because it just seems any time you want to argue about social fundamentals - be it anything from segregated bathrooms (of all varieties) to street naming to intellectual property, people get incredibly defensive about the status quo as if their livelihood depended on it - as if culture / information cannot be made without IP, rather than the reverse. I do think at some point in the future historians will look back and see the catastrophic death of culture permanent copyright wrought throughout the 20th / 21st centuries as a huge crime against humanity. We are sad we have few historical recounts of ancient Egyptian / Greek / Roman living, or even moreso ancient Mesoamerican peoples, or the Babylonians, but we seem perfectly complacent in how some ~95% of all music, film, photography, writing, and even probably code is lost forever because of copyright meaning if the owners take it to their grave it stays dead with them. It is just a tremendous disservice to humanity to just let so much creative work die like that, and how generations have now grown and died without any of the commercial works of their childhood ever being accessible to their own creativeness in their lifetimes.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I think in general scientific discoveries (pharmaceuticals, algorithms etc) should not be granted monopolistic production rights, but rather monopolistic royalty rights. So, for example, if you invented Viagara, and every pharma company in the world figured out how to make it cheaper in their own way, they're free to make it but they have to pay the creator (individual or corporation) a royalty fee to do so. I think royalties are a better way to incentivize innovation while not allowing patent protections to stifle the market as a whole.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  The problem is there is no objective way to set the price of the royalty. Pharma companies won't invest in a drug that is only worth $1 per pill. And some pills will need to be taken for a lifetime, while others only need to be taken once - but the value of curing a disease is the same.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Yeah that's a good point. Maybe instead it could be a fee you could have to pay the creator to sell the same thing up to some limit, maybe determined by the creator's market price?
- dreamdu5t 10y ago
  So we should pay royalties for using Calculus? Do we need to pay royalties everytime we use certain equations? Ridiculous.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Patents expire.
m1sta_ 10y ago
Copyright only covers expression. It doesn't cover the content of a scientific paper. One effort of paraphrasing a paper and we're good to go.
qmr 10y ago
> Maybe only 10 or 15 years. That's 10 or 15 years potentially holding back humanity and preventing Shit Getting Done.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Of course. I'd prefer that journals switch to open access, and that governments demand publicly funded research to be released in the public domain. My proposals are independent of that policy.

contravariant 10y ago

> I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous. I disagree, scientists generally aren't seeking to get money by people buying a copy of their paper (if anything they're currently paying so people can read it) there's no need for them to invoke copyright law at all, in fact that would be against their own interest. The problem is that the current system forces scientists to publish in journals, which will happily charge an arm and a leg for the privilege, and invoke whatever law they can to make more money, even if this goes directly against the interests of the scientists who wrote the papers.

Houshalter 10y ago
The Journals wouldn't be an issue in the first place without copyright law. And fixing copyright solves problems beyond scientific Journals. You could have nonfiction books in general, textbooks, etc, all available to the public domain.
dredmorbius 10y ago
You're pretty much entirely missing the point. 1. Scientists aren't at the heart of the scientific Open Access problem. Journals are. 2. The fact that copyright exists means that journals can then request it be transferred (or licensed) to the journal. For what's effectively forever. 3. Journals exercise gatekeeper access over scientists' careers, in that publishing in prestige journals is how scientists advance academically. This is de facto* coercive control over scientists. 4. With that control, journals compell publication of articles in controlled journals, for scientists to advance, require subscriptions of libraries (who otherwise forgo access to the material), and maintain a bank of virtually all scientific papers published since 1924 as an absolute monopoly. Hence: no copyright, or a far-less-rediculous copyright, say, 14, 28, or 54 years (as was historically the case, via registration(s) and/or renewals), and much the problem would disappear. The additional factor of deadweight costs of denied access to virtually all of humanity for this material is the other cost.

rflrob 10y ago

> And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. As much as I feel that science---especially publicly funded science (which almost all of it is)---ought to be freely available fairly quickly, I think making a distinction for the purposes of copyright law between fiction and non-fiction is fairly hairy. Clearly "A Streetcar Named Desire" is fiction, but what about memoirs? Poetry? The Onion? Dianetics? The output of human writing spans a continuum of factual-ness, and it's not obvious to me that there's a good way to draw a line. Even in the hardest of sciences, it's often underappreciated how much interpretation and creative energy goes into a paper.

100ideas 10y ago
I wish copyright was more limited with regard to scientific works. But how to define them? In a conservative sense, perhaps works that are 1) a technical or research article 2) produced with public funding Could receive more limited (shorter-term) copyrights etc.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Houshalter 10y ago
Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works. Is anyone really going to argue that scientific papers are works of fiction? Would any reasonable court hold that up? All laws have to deal with the natural fuzziness of concept space. But if libraries can manage it successfully, surely the copyright office can.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  What about allegories and thought experiments? Two examples on the top of my head: 1. The strange cave of Ali Baba (or how to explain Zero-Knowledge protocols to your children) - Jean-Jacques Quisquater - Advances in Cryptology - 1990. 2. The fable of the Tyrant Dragon - Nick Bostrom - Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005¹. This is a work of fiction designed to make a statement about the stance of society towards fighting aging. ¹ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~mkowalcz/628.pdf ² http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

zanny 10y ago

Fictional works are not a special case. I'd personally argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least functioned. Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane. I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.

dnautics 10y ago
To help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the "Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral argument against copyright. There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with rivalrousness (that is a very subtle distinction): http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalrous/ http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro... You may find it interesting.
- zanny 10y ago
  That is an excellent argument from what I would also call the big picture perspective. I just usually use the utilitarian one because it just seems any time you want to argue about social fundamentals - be it anything from segregated bathrooms (of all varieties) to street naming to intellectual property, people get incredibly defensive about the status quo as if their livelihood depended on it - as if culture / information cannot be made without IP, rather than the reverse. I do think at some point in the future historians will look back and see the catastrophic death of culture permanent copyright wrought throughout the 20th / 21st centuries as a huge crime against humanity. We are sad we have few historical recounts of ancient Egyptian / Greek / Roman living, or even moreso ancient Mesoamerican peoples, or the Babylonians, but we seem perfectly complacent in how some ~95% of all music, film, photography, writing, and even probably code is lost forever because of copyright meaning if the owners take it to their grave it stays dead with them. It is just a tremendous disservice to humanity to just let so much creative work die like that, and how generations have now grown and died without any of the commercial works of their childhood ever being accessible to their own creativeness in their lifetimes.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

I think in general scientific discoveries (pharmaceuticals, algorithms etc) should not be granted monopolistic production rights, but rather monopolistic royalty rights. So, for example, if you invented Viagara, and every pharma company in the world figured out how to make it cheaper in their own way, they're free to make it but they have to pay the creator (individual or corporation) a royalty fee to do so. I think royalties are a better way to incentivize innovation while not allowing patent protections to stifle the market as a whole.

Houshalter 10y ago
The problem is there is no objective way to set the price of the royalty. Pharma companies won't invest in a drug that is only worth $1 per pill. And some pills will need to be taken for a lifetime, while others only need to be taken once - but the value of curing a disease is the same.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Yeah that's a good point. Maybe instead it could be a fee you could have to pay the creator to sell the same thing up to some limit, maybe determined by the creator's market price?
dreamdu5t 10y ago
So we should pay royalties for using Calculus? Do we need to pay royalties everytime we use certain equations? Ridiculous.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Patents expire.

m1sta_ 10y ago

Copyright only covers expression. It doesn't cover the content of a scientific paper. One effort of paraphrasing a paper and we're good to go.

qmr 10y ago

> Maybe only 10 or 15 years. That's 10 or 15 years potentially holding back humanity and preventing Shit Getting Done.

Houshalter 10y ago
Of course. I'd prefer that journals switch to open access, and that governments demand publicly funded research to be released in the public domain. My proposals are independent of that policy.