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> So if the usual suspects had pushed for another copyright extension, they would have had a serious fight on their hands. Digital rights groups, online activis

• CM30 8y ago
  Agreed. What's more, this is exactly what the 'left' wing political parties should be doing about now. They always say they can't get young people to vote. They always complain about losing to their opponents or what not. Well, maybe actually saying they'll fix copyright laws, throw large corporations to the curb and actively fighting to reduce the term to a reasonable length may help with that. Show they're not corporate shills, and do something that younger people may actually support them with. Is that enough on its own? Hell no, there are tons of things these parties need to do to win trust back. But it would be a great rallying point for them, and get a decent amount of support from internet folks and younger people.
  • shmerl 8y ago
    What's the story with the Pirate Party in US? I wouldn't call this a "left" or "right" issue even. Those terms aren't descriptive of this problem.
    • MaulingMonkey 8y ago
      The story is that there is no story. They have no seats, no news, I don't really hear about them at all, good or bad. People just pirate instead of making a political statement out of it. Sometimes they justify it in terms of how they're broke anyways, or support creators in other ways, or in terms of how ridiculous copyright law has gotten... but none of it really rises to the level of a significant political movement. Maybe it's the usually toothless enforcement, or the general lack of will to sue 5 year olds for millions over singing happy birthday, or just enough settlement NDAs to hide the lawsuits under the rug, but I guess it just isn't seen as much of a political issue. I suspect it's seen as a theoretical problem more than a practical one. When specific instances of draconian abuse of IP law do rise to being a visible practical problem (company vs company doesn't count), eventually enough political pressure mounts that one of the parties might fix it. But there are "bigger" issues, so it's usually pretty quiet, with neither party having clean enough hands to score any easy points, so they just settle for not kicking any more puppies. While copyright reform gets little traction, mucking with the ability to pirate will stir up enough of a hornets nest to actually be a political issue (cough Net neutrality cough), which is currently generally "fixed" by the more regulation-happy Democrats than the business-friendly Republicans.
      • shmerl 8y ago
        > The story is that there is no story. Exactly the point. Why is that? In Europe they exist.
        • duncan-donuts 8y ago
          We really only have 2 parties here. Sure, independent parties have held office, but the people in the US really only vote red or blue. Other parties don’t really get national coverage either. When it comes time for presidential debates you’ll only ever see 2 parties represented. No one can take a different option seriously because we’re not really giving a different option ground to stand on.
          • shmerl 8y ago
            So this needs fixing first then.
          • millstone 8y ago
            "Red or blue" is too reductive. Trump and Romney were both "team red" but could not be more different as candidates. While the US has only two major parties, these parties are unusually flexible and can accomodate major shifts: the Reagan revolution, "third way" Bill Clinton, Trump... The intra-group conflicts do get played out in the primaries.
  • brobdingnagians 8y ago
    The problem is that they are corporate shills. There are quite a few things I wish the Democratic party would do that I'd support, and lots of them they did historically. Even if they were still actually pushing anti-war, freedom of speech, and related things then that would be fantastic, but lately they seem to tow the same line as the Republicans on those issues.
    • bootlooped 8y ago
      I think the focus on extremely divisive issues like abortion, lgbt, climate change, etc... has brought the two parties more into line on most other issues, to the delight of many low key interest groups.
      • trophycase 8y ago
        It's insane, why not give ground on relatively unimportant wedge issues to fix real problems like inequality, climate change, etc...
        • astrodust 8y ago
          You really don't follow politics, do you?
        • tangent128 8y ago
          Because if you put the elimination of marriage and gender equality on the table, nobody's going to believe you're remotely interested in fixing inequality.
        • Consultant32452 8y ago
          Those are important issues for progressives. The right and middle share common most important issues: jobs, border, security. Progressives make up only about 8% of the population, and they're overwhelmingly white and wealthy. Here's a video discussing the relevant study. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1TrY-t0ng https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1TrY-t0ng
  • acheron 8y ago
    You mean the “left” parties that are bankrolled by Hollywood and media companies? That’s who you want to roll back copyright terms?
    • ahoy 8y ago
      There is no left party in America.
      • arcticbull 8y ago
        This is correct; the options in the US as of the last election cycle are center-right and far-right. A Sanders type party would be left or probably more accurately center-left. That’s not a value judgement (you’re not a bad person for picking one or the other) just an assessment relative to world politics. Obama was a pretty center-right politician, and Hillary would have been also. He didn’t support socialized medicine, didn’t support socialized education, didn’t push for a $15 minimum wage, didn’t really bolster unions — though didn’t try and demolish them either — and didn’t really tax the wealthy. He was also fairly supportive of the surveillance state. To his credit he did a lot of good work bolstering environmental regulations and pushing forward climate science. I’m a leftist by Canadian standards and I liked and respected Obama and I can confirm he was no leftist.
        • TomMckenny 8y ago
          I might add that even California, one of the "left" most states, still has a death penalty.
          • bruceb 8y ago
            Only 13 men have been executed since 1978, none since 2006. Isn't really a good measure of being "left" or not.
            • malnourish 8y ago
              They also have solitary confinement
  • SkyAtWork 8y ago
    Hollywood and associated content creation/monetization businesses are historically strongly aligned with the Democrats - though I agree with your ideal, it is not likely that the party will bite the hand that feeds it.
  • walshemj 8y ago
    Really you think with all the challenges that the young generation rent faces copyright extension is going to be the key motivator to vote out trump etc?
  • dgzl 8y ago
    You're talking about the "left wing" as if has any real meaning. You should use better political terms.
    • mindcrime 8y ago
      Sad that you got down-voted, because you're 100% correct on this point. "Left wing" and "right wing" are totally meaningless terms in modern times. Neither describes any consistent, principled ideology, but rather they each just refer to a cribbed together hodgepodge of different ideas, loosely related at best, and contradictory at worst. Mostly "left wing" and "right wing" exist now just to serve as pejoratives to refer to people in "the other camp" relative to whichever label an individual has chosen to identify with. A simple one-dimensional model like "left <-> right" cannot adequately represent the varieties of political thought in existence.
      • incompatible 8y ago
        I don't think they are completely meaningless: Wikipedia manages to give a definition. However, I think they are often misused, misunderstood, and not very useful in practice.
        • shmerl 8y ago
          Which is to say, they are useless :)
        • mindcrime 8y ago
          OK, to be fair, maybe I should have said "almost totally meaningless". But I still contend that they are terms that convey very little intrinsic meaning, and have become pejoratives more than anything else.
          • incompatible 8y ago
            They can be used as pejoratives once "extreme" is added.
      • 8y ago
  • ndnxhs 8y ago
    This is no left-right issue. This is billion doller CEOs vs the rest of society.
    • ahoy 8y ago
      Billionaires vs regular people is explicitly a right vs left issue.
      • shmerl 8y ago
        Right and left are so diluted and ambiguous terms these days, to the point of being meaningless. Using them doesn't help any conversation.
        • nicklaf 8y ago
          On the other hand, perhaps it provides an opportunity for people to learn what the terms actually mean. (It took a Canadian to help me realize just how confused we Americans are on this topic.)
      • jedmeyers 8y ago
        Yet most billionaires and multimillionaires support Democratic party. Go figure.
        • astrodust 8y ago
          A lot of high-profile ones do, but "most" is probably not true. There are a lot of very quiet, very angry billionaires out there.
        • claudiawerner 8y ago
          The US Democratic party, going by its principles, is center or center-right by most standards outside of the US.
          • naniwaduni 8y ago
  • eloff 8y ago
    Something something about biting the hand that feeds you. Not a critique against the left, more like the system as a whole seems more and more about pandering to special interests and corporations.
  • Svoka 8y ago
    if only left didn't have enough people calling 'em communists. I'm all for rolling back copyright extensions waaay back, but politically this will draw a giant target on your forehead, and aiming assist powered by Disney's billions. From other hand, deep frustration with such situation leads to the populism we see around us.
  • cabalamat 8y ago
    > this is exactly what the 'left' wing political parties should be doing about now I could imagine someone like Trump, but smarter, doing it. Big tech and big content are aligned with the Democrats. So why should the Republicans care about pissing them off?
  • briandear 8y ago
    Nobody would have ever heard of, nor care about Mickey Mouse if it weren’t for that evil Disney corporation. Those corporations often fund and create the very IP you want to copy. If someone creates something, it’s weird that people feel entitled to it.
    • claudiawerner 8y ago
      I think a point to make here is that the creative output of someone is often unrelated to other aspects; I know of many artists online, for instance, who are very skilled but have insane (relative to modern Internet conventions) restrictions, such as that you can't even re-share the picture with credit and a link to the artist. I also take issue with framing this as entitlement, since copyright only exists due to the idea that content producers are 'entitled' to restriction on what they release to the public. I'd also argue that all members of society should have some entitlement to re-use and re-mix the social product. This isn't such a popular idea in late hyper-commodification, but I think it's an important one nevertheless, just as the creators of the material felt entitled to use society's abstract product (ideas and support) maybe it's right for me to feel entitled to use their abstract product - the idea of Mickey Mouse and Batman.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    They always say they can't get young people to vote. They always complain about losing to their opponents or what not. Rolling back copyright is not exactly a great rallying cry for a politician. Out of all of the things that most young voters care about, that’s not on the top of their list.
    • shmerl 8y ago
      Enough do though, in order for the Pirate Party to become big enough in Europe.
      • kodablah 8y ago
        Switching the context of the discussion by an entire continent might as well be a different discussion.
        • reitanqild 8y ago
          Also unlike American/UK first-past-the-pole voting most(?) of Europe uses a fairer (IMO) approach with multiple representatives from each district meaning more opinions gets heard instead of just two parties like in US. The pirate party wouldn't stand a chance in the US IMO.
    • Aeolun 8y ago
      The only thing you need to give me is affordable housing. But nobody seems really interested :/
  • DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
    I do think think young people care very much about copyright.
• api 8y ago
  Now that Mickey is out it should be easier. Disney was one of the most powerful lobbies for extension largely because of the mouse.
  • jedmeyers 8y ago
    They are still going to enforce trademark on the Mickey, so it wont be easy to use it everywhere.
    • justadudeama 8y ago
      How are they going to enforce it if you don't mind me asking? When it expires doesn't that mean they can't enforce it? Edit: Ah, trademark, not copyright, sorry!
• est31 8y ago
  It's worth to point out that there is a great focus on Disney lobbying and Mickey mouse and so on, and of course these were major factors in getting the Sonny Bono passed, but originally one of the motivations was to harmonize the US copyright terms to the european ones which were already 70 years back when that law got passed. It's not the US where this term increase originated but europe. Now in 2018 we are in a similar situation: again, europeans are passing new legislation that gives teeth to copyright by introducing censorship machines.
  • shmerl 8y ago
    All this "harmonization" is simply a corrupt trick, driven by the same Disney and Co. See also: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...
    • chimeracoder 8y ago
      > All this "harmonization" is simply a corrupt trick, driven by the same Disney and Co. Disney might be a force behind it, but it's literally true that Europe has been the leader in extending copyright terms, both the original extension last century, and then the most recent push as well.
      • fattire 8y ago
        The "harmonization" thing is a racket. In short, the corps pass the most restrictive copyright laws they can in whatever country they can pass it. Then they "harmonize" the other countries to that most restrictive policy, usually in the form of trade agreements which becomes domestic law everywhere. Rinse and repeat.
        • chimeracoder 8y ago
          > The "harmonization" thing is a racket. In short, the corps pass the most restrictive copyright laws they can in whatever country they can pass it. Then they "harmonize" the other countries to that most restrictive policy, usually in the form of trade agreements which becomes domestic law everywhere. Rinse and repeat. Okay, based on the history and timeline of copyright law, that means you're saying that the corporations pass the most restrictive copyright laws that they can in Europe, and then US law is lengthened to harmonize with Europe through trade agreements (except most recently, where the US declined to participate in the trade agreement with Europe which would have adopted an even stricter copyright law).
• paulie_a 8y ago
  The amount of effort to know what can be done with trademarks, copyrights etc makes it just easier to blatantly ignore it all. Because of the gaming of IP law, I have zero respect for it. I'll do whatever I want at this point. Legally buy stuff or pirating it. Sure I might get a dcma notice that has no teeth. Sometimes I'll just buy it and sometimes it's easier to pirate it. Why bother to worry about copyrights?
• Animats 8y ago
  Now it's time to push for copyright term reduction. Back to 50 years from first publication.
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    It should be 20.
    • gweinberg 8y ago
      Do I hear 14?
      • chrisdbaldwin 8y ago
        12
        • ndesaulniers 8y ago
          Ok, 4.
          • dane-pgp 8y ago
            Are we talking months, or hours?
            • majewsky 8y ago
              While it sounds nice (from a consumer's perspective) to have no copyright at all, it would prevent a lot of media from being made, e.g. expensive movies. Movies for well-known franchises could possibly be financed through crowd-funding, but that would make it hard for production companies to make bets in new franchises or directors.
              • skookumchuck 8y ago
                If you can't make money in 20 years for a movie, it's never going to make money.
• readbeard 8y ago
  > The fight now should go the other way - reverting current insane copyright term to its previous lengths. Copyright lobby might not be able to extend it more, but it doesn't mean that the current one is acceptable. This proposal is not only just, but feasible. The left should get on-board, since the retroactive copyright extensions effectively took away property that was promised to the public and reassigned it to media companies for a certain amount of time. Constitutional conservatives should get on-board, since Congress's authority to establish a copyright office is rooted in the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," and excessively long copyright terms stifle progress rather than promoting it. I posted a while back advocating for a coordinated reform effort [0], and I still think we can get this done. Who’s in? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18016752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18016752