6 ms·

Japan too. Copyright shall be abolished now or our generation's precious culture will be lost forever.

by ezoe 8y ago

Crosseye_Jack 8y ago
I don’t believe copyright should be abolished, I believe an Author of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work and exploit it for profit how they see fit. I also don’t believe that copyright destroys culture. But I will agree that the time limit on such copyrights has gotten out of control and should be rained in. Disney had and exploited the benifits of copyrighted works entering the public domain. It’s only fair (IMO) they allow others to have such benefits available to themselves too.
- Just_Smith 8y ago
  I don't believe that copyright destroys culture, but I definitely believe that it limits it. Increased copyright policing in Japan could have an effect on a lot of dōjin circles, where a lot of derivative artwork occurs. I find dōjin artwork to be quite enjoyable, as it reminds me a lot of the Star War EU or mod communities for some video games that I play.
- emn13 8y ago
  If copyright lasted (say) a year or two - maybe. But even then, it's a terrible tool with huge social costs and limited upside. In any sane world, given the increased pace of information exchange and cultural change, copyright terms should have decreased over the years. That's not exactly what happened, now is it? It's completely laughable to assume human culture would cease to develop in the absence of copyright; which is essentially it's stated aim. Evidence: the entirety of human history. The idea wasn't the brightest from the get go: this was lawmakers simply trying to be too clever. But what bothers me most is the framing of "authors of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work"; when in fact it means "anybody or any organisation who made even rudimentary changes to almost any kind information can limit the rights of every other human on the planet". It's an absurdly blunt regulatory tool that's eminently vulnerable to regulatory capture, and oh hey; that actually happened many times over the centuries - and not just in terms of durations; it was expanded to corporations; penalties became more severe; exclusions were reduced; scope crept in the form of anti-circumvention measures; reach expanded by population growth and international cooperation. Copyright and derivative laws in its modern form has to be up there as one of the worst forms of regulation, with huge economic and social costs, yet no good way out and no practical sunset clauses because of extremely entrenched habits and vested interests.
  - dtech 8y ago
    Copyright is there to help the creation of new works. Why should an author write a book or a studio produce a movie if literally everyone can freely copy it? (i.e. Book printers, DVD producers, Cinema's wouldn't have to pay the original producers). Producing creative work would be economically unviable. That said, that's also its only justification, and current terms have long reached beyond that. There isn't a book that wasn't written in 1923 because it would be freely available in 2004, and if we shortened terms to 50 years it would have zero effect on the production of new works. Not a movie less will be made because its copyright expires in 2068 instead of 21xx.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      10 years would be enough. Every single movie, book, song created this year would still be here if its copyright would expire in 2028.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      That argument was blown out of the water when copyright started to be retroactively extended.
    - emn13 8y ago
      And it's really much worse than that. The aim should never be for maximum production of IP "at all costs" - it should be for maximum benefit at minimum cost. So if an IP horizon of (say) 30 years started to make a tiny but measurable impact on the kind of IP produced - then that's a sign that 30 years is likely waaaay too long! because the benefits are virtually nil, yet the costs are huge - not just culturally, but even economically, due to lack of competition (being an exclusionary right and all). Not to mention there's this straw-man that the alternative to copyright is assumed to implicitly be a complete free-for all. I mean you could think up at least a dozen alternatives - like region limited copyrights; mandatory limited-price licensing; copyrights only for human beings, not legal entities; continually rising registration costs; production subsidies; citation and consumption based subsidies; retrospective rewards based on popular vote or a council of experts, etc etc etc - and you could easily use many of those ideas simultaneously - potentially including a very short old-style copyright term. Also, technology has advanced somewhat since copyright came to be. Numerical models that would have been heinously impractical hundreds of years ago may now be trivially practical; i.e. accounting for each and every consumer of a piece of art may now actually be practical. TL;DR: If society wants to support creators even at the cost to others - an entirely reasonable aim - it's a fallacy to compare copyright-as-is-today to anarchy.
- wnkrshm 8y ago
  It's not only what is classically seen as creative work (visual art, music, movies, writing) that would be affected. Any non-physical product is affected: CAD files, chip layouts, code etc.
- drieddust 8y ago
  Culture and sciences have survived and flourished for centuries by doing the exact opposite. Imagine Einstein or the organization he worked for copywriting and then charging money for every single use. Money is only one aspect of copyright. Not able to work freely is the real problem which actually kills the culture. Nothing flourished under fear of getting sued.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I believe an Author of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work and exploit it for profit how they see fit. Only if it's completely original. In other words, in no case at all.
mikro2nd 8y ago
How, then, do you propose I pay the rent when I write books for a living? Stories, not non-fiction stuff with a short lifespan.
- avar 8y ago
  Japan extended the copyright term from 50 to 70 years after the author's death[1]. So this change would only help someone pay for rent if you, in this example, had written a book in 1968, had a child at the same time and then promptly died. That child would now be 50 and somehow hadn't managed to do anything worthwhile with their life to pay their own rent, but had been living on the proceeds of your book published in 1968. Now they'll be able to extend that into their 70s. And that's in the very best case. This could also be a written in 1918 by someone that was 20, died in 1968, and whose copyright would only now just be expiring. 1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/10/national/japan-extend-copyright-period-works-including-novels-paintings-70-years-dec-30/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/10/national/japan-...
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    That's an argument for why copyright terms should be shorter, not for why they should be abolished entirely.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I suppose book authors could use the same model as musical performers, in that the record company takes the lion's share from the recordings, and the band has to sell live performance tickets and tour merchandise. You write the book to build the fan-base, and draw your living expenses from signings, convention panels, t-shirts, collector's edition packages, etc. It sounds like a perfectly awful model for promoting the arts, of course. Perhaps a gallery model? Write just one copy of a book, sell it for thousands of dollars, and let the one that buys it decide whether to unleash it on the world or not. It'd be like that Wu Tang Clan record that Shkreli bought. Acquire a patron? Allow a rich fan to pay all your living expenses, and in return you put their name in the acknowledgements. Or crowdfund it, and expand the acknowledgements to more pages than the story. There are a lot of possible models. The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018. There are barely even enough people that value skilled labor enough to pay for it. If art were valued more highly, artists wouldn't even need to figure out how to be paid, because middlemen would be scrambling over each other to skim off some of the cash flowing from audience to artist.
mathw 8y ago
No, because a lot of artists can only earn enough to survive because of copyright law. A new songwriter can only get their royalties because of copyright law, otherwise you can bet the big studios would just lift the songs and record them however they liked. Copyright is a valuable tool to protect creators, but it does need to be measured properly because in its current form it becomes more about protecting giant international beasts like Disney (who hardly need it with all the new stuff they're producing, surely). The term lengths are ridiculous. I don't really know what they should be, but I'm pretty sure you could make a reasonable stab at it by looking at some statistics about how revenue drops off from works as they age.
MereInterest 8y ago
Honestly, it already happened. Books from before copyright became effectively infinite are widely available. Recent books are widely available. Anything in between (1930-1980) is a gulf of missing books. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-hole-in-our-collective-memory-how-copyright-made-mid-century-books-vanish/278209/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h... I like reading old pulpy science fiction. They are typically out of print, and will never have a reprint. I'll find a reference online, but won't be able to find a copy. There might be a plot summary, or a listing of which out-of-print magazines initially carried the story, but no copies. As another example (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.
- robterrell 8y ago
  Thanks for this link. It explains what just happened to me last night -- I went to Amazon looking for Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" for an xmas present for my son. It's simply not available anywhere new.

Japan too. Copyright shall be abolished now or our generation's precious culture will be lost forever.

by ezoe 8y ago

Japan too. Copyright shall be abolished now or our generation's precious culture will be lost forever.

I don’t believe copyright should be abolished, I believe an Author of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work and exploit it for profit how they see fit. I also don’t believe that copyright destroys culture. But I will agree that the time limit on such copyrights has gotten out of control and should be rained in. Disney had and exploited the benifits of copyrighted works entering the public domain. It’s only fair (IMO) they allow others to have such benefits available to themselves too.

Just_Smith 8y ago
I don't believe that copyright destroys culture, but I definitely believe that it limits it. Increased copyright policing in Japan could have an effect on a lot of dōjin circles, where a lot of derivative artwork occurs. I find dōjin artwork to be quite enjoyable, as it reminds me a lot of the Star War EU or mod communities for some video games that I play.
emn13 8y ago
If copyright lasted (say) a year or two - maybe. But even then, it's a terrible tool with huge social costs and limited upside. In any sane world, given the increased pace of information exchange and cultural change, copyright terms should have decreased over the years. That's not exactly what happened, now is it? It's completely laughable to assume human culture would cease to develop in the absence of copyright; which is essentially it's stated aim. Evidence: the entirety of human history. The idea wasn't the brightest from the get go: this was lawmakers simply trying to be too clever. But what bothers me most is the framing of "authors of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work"; when in fact it means "anybody or any organisation who made even rudimentary changes to almost any kind information can limit the rights of every other human on the planet". It's an absurdly blunt regulatory tool that's eminently vulnerable to regulatory capture, and oh hey; that actually happened many times over the centuries - and not just in terms of durations; it was expanded to corporations; penalties became more severe; exclusions were reduced; scope crept in the form of anti-circumvention measures; reach expanded by population growth and international cooperation. Copyright and derivative laws in its modern form has to be up there as one of the worst forms of regulation, with huge economic and social costs, yet no good way out and no practical sunset clauses because of extremely entrenched habits and vested interests.
- dtech 8y ago
  Copyright is there to help the creation of new works. Why should an author write a book or a studio produce a movie if literally everyone can freely copy it? (i.e. Book printers, DVD producers, Cinema's wouldn't have to pay the original producers). Producing creative work would be economically unviable. That said, that's also its only justification, and current terms have long reached beyond that. There isn't a book that wasn't written in 1923 because it would be freely available in 2004, and if we shortened terms to 50 years it would have zero effect on the production of new works. Not a movie less will be made because its copyright expires in 2068 instead of 21xx.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    10 years would be enough. Every single movie, book, song created this year would still be here if its copyright would expire in 2028.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    That argument was blown out of the water when copyright started to be retroactively extended.
  - emn13 8y ago
    And it's really much worse than that. The aim should never be for maximum production of IP "at all costs" - it should be for maximum benefit at minimum cost. So if an IP horizon of (say) 30 years started to make a tiny but measurable impact on the kind of IP produced - then that's a sign that 30 years is likely waaaay too long! because the benefits are virtually nil, yet the costs are huge - not just culturally, but even economically, due to lack of competition (being an exclusionary right and all). Not to mention there's this straw-man that the alternative to copyright is assumed to implicitly be a complete free-for all. I mean you could think up at least a dozen alternatives - like region limited copyrights; mandatory limited-price licensing; copyrights only for human beings, not legal entities; continually rising registration costs; production subsidies; citation and consumption based subsidies; retrospective rewards based on popular vote or a council of experts, etc etc etc - and you could easily use many of those ideas simultaneously - potentially including a very short old-style copyright term. Also, technology has advanced somewhat since copyright came to be. Numerical models that would have been heinously impractical hundreds of years ago may now be trivially practical; i.e. accounting for each and every consumer of a piece of art may now actually be practical. TL;DR: If society wants to support creators even at the cost to others - an entirely reasonable aim - it's a fallacy to compare copyright-as-is-today to anarchy.
wnkrshm 8y ago
It's not only what is classically seen as creative work (visual art, music, movies, writing) that would be affected. Any non-physical product is affected: CAD files, chip layouts, code etc.
drieddust 8y ago
Culture and sciences have survived and flourished for centuries by doing the exact opposite. Imagine Einstein or the organization he worked for copywriting and then charging money for every single use. Money is only one aspect of copyright. Not able to work freely is the real problem which actually kills the culture. Nothing flourished under fear of getting sued.
coldtea 8y ago
>I believe an Author of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work and exploit it for profit how they see fit. Only if it's completely original. In other words, in no case at all.

mikro2nd 8y ago

How, then, do you propose I pay the rent when I write books for a living? Stories, not non-fiction stuff with a short lifespan.

avar 8y ago
Japan extended the copyright term from 50 to 70 years after the author's death[1]. So this change would only help someone pay for rent if you, in this example, had written a book in 1968, had a child at the same time and then promptly died. That child would now be 50 and somehow hadn't managed to do anything worthwhile with their life to pay their own rent, but had been living on the proceeds of your book published in 1968. Now they'll be able to extend that into their 70s. And that's in the very best case. This could also be a written in 1918 by someone that was 20, died in 1968, and whose copyright would only now just be expiring. 1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/10/national/japan-extend-copyright-period-works-including-novels-paintings-70-years-dec-30/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/10/national/japan-...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  That's an argument for why copyright terms should be shorter, not for why they should be abolished entirely.
logfromblammo 8y ago
I suppose book authors could use the same model as musical performers, in that the record company takes the lion's share from the recordings, and the band has to sell live performance tickets and tour merchandise. You write the book to build the fan-base, and draw your living expenses from signings, convention panels, t-shirts, collector's edition packages, etc. It sounds like a perfectly awful model for promoting the arts, of course. Perhaps a gallery model? Write just one copy of a book, sell it for thousands of dollars, and let the one that buys it decide whether to unleash it on the world or not. It'd be like that Wu Tang Clan record that Shkreli bought. Acquire a patron? Allow a rich fan to pay all your living expenses, and in return you put their name in the acknowledgements. Or crowdfund it, and expand the acknowledgements to more pages than the story. There are a lot of possible models. The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018. There are barely even enough people that value skilled labor enough to pay for it. If art were valued more highly, artists wouldn't even need to figure out how to be paid, because middlemen would be scrambling over each other to skim off some of the cash flowing from audience to artist.

mathw 8y ago

No, because a lot of artists can only earn enough to survive because of copyright law. A new songwriter can only get their royalties because of copyright law, otherwise you can bet the big studios would just lift the songs and record them however they liked. Copyright is a valuable tool to protect creators, but it does need to be measured properly because in its current form it becomes more about protecting giant international beasts like Disney (who hardly need it with all the new stuff they're producing, surely). The term lengths are ridiculous. I don't really know what they should be, but I'm pretty sure you could make a reasonable stab at it by looking at some statistics about how revenue drops off from works as they age.

MereInterest 8y ago

Honestly, it already happened. Books from before copyright became effectively infinite are widely available. Recent books are widely available. Anything in between (1930-1980) is a gulf of missing books. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-hole-in-our-collective-memory-how-copyright-made-mid-century-books-vanish/278209/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h... I like reading old pulpy science fiction. They are typically out of print, and will never have a reprint. I'll find a reference online, but won't be able to find a copy. There might be a plot summary, or a listing of which out-of-print magazines initially carried the story, but no copies. As another example (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.

robterrell 8y ago
Thanks for this link. It explains what just happened to me last night -- I went to Amazon looking for Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" for an xmas present for my son. It's simply not available anywhere new.