3 ms·

Just to play devils advocate: Hollywood and the games industry pump out a lot of shovelware. If there are millions or billions in profits available for making w

Just to play devils advocate: Hollywood and the games industry pump out a lot of shovelware. If there are millions or billions in profits available for making worthwhile IP of lasting value, they might fund riskier, more worthwhile 'art' projects (taking video games to be an art form in this context). It encourages thinking longer time horizons than 'opening weekend' or 'initial Xmas sales', even if just to have an opportunity to make a series of sequels. That said, 100 years is a bit crazy. Nobody actually plans on that scale, and nobody's bonus depends on projected sales 87 years from today. I think 20-40 years would be equally effective in practice.

0815test 7y ago
> If there are millions or billions in profits available for making worthwhile IP of lasting value There aren't - not through increased copyright length, anyway. The value of proprietary IP decays very quickly over time, until the vast majority of works entirely falls hostage to transaction costs of all kinds (see the whole issue with "orphan works", which may or may not be copyrighted but no one knows for sure, and thus no one can effectively make use of them) and their value is entirely destroyed as long as copyright protection persists. The Mario Bros game is actually a very rare exception, and even then its value is really only as a representation of Nintendo's best known franchise, i.e. nobody really cares about the game itself, and there are comparable-quality games that are totally free these days.
aasasd 7y ago
Waiting for Marvel and EA to fund riskier projects.
WorldMaker 7y ago
That is the point of copyright, yes, that a limited monopoly on an intellectual property provides benefits to the creator to tackle other risks. It's definitely the question of how limited that monopoly is that is at hand. Scale is exactly the question. The current copyright terms are outside of human scale in that they extend past a human lifecycle (explicitly in the case of single, clear authored works as the current copyright is author life plus it's number of years). The original US copyright allowed for 7 years with one possible extension for an additional 7 (for a total of 14 years). That's relatively a lot more human of a scale. (That scale still covers the current 10 year scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, for example. That's 3 MCU planning "Phases" of 3-5 year planning horizons. Imagine if it were only roughly four more years before, say, Iron Man 1 might expire from copyright.) It doesn't seem likely that we will see copyright terms reduced back down to human scale, but it's a shame.

0815test 7y ago

> If there are millions or billions in profits available for making worthwhile IP of lasting value There aren't - not through increased copyright length, anyway. The value of proprietary IP decays very quickly over time, until the vast majority of works entirely falls hostage to transaction costs of all kinds (see the whole issue with "orphan works", which may or may not be copyrighted but no one knows for sure, and thus no one can effectively make use of them) and their value is entirely destroyed as long as copyright protection persists. The Mario Bros game is actually a very rare exception, and even then its value is really only as a representation of Nintendo's best known franchise, i.e. nobody really cares about the game itself, and there are comparable-quality games that are totally free these days.

aasasd 7y ago

Waiting for Marvel and EA to fund riskier projects.

WorldMaker 7y ago

That is the point of copyright, yes, that a limited monopoly on an intellectual property provides benefits to the creator to tackle other risks. It's definitely the question of how limited that monopoly is that is at hand. Scale is exactly the question. The current copyright terms are outside of human scale in that they extend past a human lifecycle (explicitly in the case of single, clear authored works as the current copyright is author life plus it's number of years). The original US copyright allowed for 7 years with one possible extension for an additional 7 (for a total of 14 years). That's relatively a lot more human of a scale. (That scale still covers the current 10 year scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, for example. That's 3 MCU planning "Phases" of 3-5 year planning horizons. Imagine if it were only roughly four more years before, say, Iron Man 1 might expire from copyright.) It doesn't seem likely that we will see copyright terms reduced back down to human scale, but it's a shame.