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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

by 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.

by dtech 8y ago

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.