16 ms·

The Pirate Party on Copyright Reform (2010)

81 points by allenleein 7y ago

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
> But today’s protection times — life plus 70 years — are absurd. No investor would even look at a business case where the time to pay-back was that long. This is something that should resonate with the HN crowd. The heart of the problem is that the law treats big media and the independent artist the same way. Instead of the flat 5 year copyright term for every piece of work, I think a system that works better is that after 5 years, the copyright on an item can be annually extended by an year using a small fee - say the original sale cost x 10. The independent artist can renew the few items he has created easily at this small price. But Big Media houses, who own the copyright of tens of thousands of items will have to release any items that no longer sell and do not directly compete with their current offerings.
- Spivak 7y ago
  But all these reform schemes assume that copyright expiration is the end goal when it's really there to allow the creator of a work to extract pretty much all the value from their work -- the expiration is really an afterthought. I think expanding fair use makes sense in a lot of cases but I also think that harping on copyright expiration terms generally miss the point. Copyright expiration should protect against works being abandoned but those are the exceptional cases. I think my ideal copyright system would be indefinite but you can make a case before a court if you think a work has been abandoned and you want to pick it up. All of these systems that are clearly designed to burden copyright holders and make it harder to maintain copyright are silly.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
    I would love to see an explanation of why you think putting the burden of proof on the new creator to prove that their new work does not violate copyright is advantageous to an auto-expiry approach. I can think of thousands of situations where what you propose would stifle innovation. Why is this way better?
  - admax88q 7y ago
    > you can make a case before a court if you think a work has been abandoned That's an absurd amount of additional work to put on the legal system.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      It's actually not a bad idea if you tweak it a little bit. Move it out of the court system and into a computer in the copyright office. You upload a work and claim it's abandoned, they publish the claim and the copyright holder has e.g. six months to dispute the claim or it proves that you're right and the work becomes public domain. No human involvement, simple automatic process. Then works that have been registered/renewed in the last 14 years (or were created in the last 14 years) can't be claimed to be abandoned, so copyright holders that don't want to have to deal with policing abandonment claims can just register their old works instead.
  - chrismcb 7y ago
    Copyright expiration IS the end goal. And, at least constitutionally, the goal of copyright was to encourage creation of works, not to extract every last cent. Expiration isn't an afterthought of the process. Without copyright, everything would be in public domain. So public domain is essentially the default. Copyright was created to allow the artist to make some money, for a time, before returning the work to the public domain, so that others can build of it. Giving an entity, forever, to enjoy the Monopoly is just absurd, and unconstitutional. Five years is to short, but 75 or 90 is to long. Based on the fact that most books on Amazon are less than 25 years, I think 25 is a good term length.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  There should be a centrally agreed fair use license (regulated marketplace). No restrictions on copying and no negotiation on price. Works must be derivatives and not 1 for 1 copies. For artistic works this could kick in after 3 (or some other short time frame) months of release and last forever. For other IP this should kick in after 3 (long enough to realise the gains) years. For other IP a provision to change the fair use price in court would be provided. It's not right that private individuals and organisations can steal from the future due to greed. Every innovation is a derivative of what came before. As a society we should embrace and encourage sharing and derivation.
- rhino369 7y ago
  And this point isn't even up for debate. Present value calculations essentially prove that a copyright long-tail provides minimal benefit to a corporation. Especially since long-tail sales are incredibly rare. So it a 1/200,000 shot at making a classic that will actually sell 100 years from now. And even for that one shot, the discount rate says a million dollars of sales 100 years from now is worth a couple thousand dollars now. There is no way 100-year copyright incentives art now. Every 5 years is annoying short though. I'd say 20 years automatically, with 5 year extensions up to 40 years. I'd probably also allow copyright-lite protection after 40 years. You would lose protection against direct copying and sales of your work. But you'd keep protections against derivations. This would allow an author of a long-running book series to keep his rights to his characters and "universe" for future works. I'm not sure how long I'd let those copyright-lite rights run for, but at least 70 years. Maybe with a trademark like a requirement for consistent usage.
  - OscarCunningham 7y ago
    Does the same reasoning also imply that the government should get all physical property 100 years after its creation? If not, what makes that case different?
    - black_puppydog 7y ago
      The same that makes copyright violation different from theft: you can "take away" information from the owner and still have them keep it.
    - tordanik 7y ago
      The ability to create infinite copies for essentially zero cost changes the utility calculus significantly. If we're talking about physical property like, say, a single-family home, the only question is which family is allowed to live in it. If the physical world worked like copyrighted creations, we'd be able to give every family on earth a copy of that home to live in, for free. And while that would still have downsides for the heirs of the builder (with infinite supply, they could no longer rent out their own copies of the home for a profit), the total utility gained by humanity would easily justify that step.
- echelon 7y ago
  If you offer extension for a nominal fee, those with big pockets will always opt to do it. Domain registration fees are supposed to combat squatting, but look at where we are. Any good domain name you can think of is probably owned by a squatter. And there's a similar situation in the media industry right now. Before Fox got bought out, they were churning out Marvel films in order to keep their license. It didn't matter if the films were any good or made a profit. Sony is in the same boat. I'm not sure if changing copyright is good or bad, but if we do move to a world with temporary copyright, it needs to expire uniformly for all parties.
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    So simply price ownership at market value. Of course price control distorts the market, we know this.
- dijksterhuis 7y ago
  A) You’ve made a massive assumption here in regards to the sale price. Sales prices vary depending on a multitude of factors. There’s no single sales price that exists for one album/track/etc. iTunes charges differently to Beatport. Beatport charges differently to direct to fan over Bandcamp. B) Furthermore, you’re assuming independent artists earn in a linear fashion which is just not the case. I have been toiling away for 10 years making music. I don’t earn enough to pay original sales price x 10 every year to keep my work in copyright. So 50% of my work is now public domain. Now let’s suppose I “make it big” tomorrow. 50% of my hard graft over the last 10 years was for nothing. Everyone can get my work for free. Maybe my recent album makes me a few bucks. But now I can’t re-copyright those earlier works. As an independent artist, I’ve just been screwed by your proposed system. Edit1- C) you’re assuming that everything that any musician does is released as an album. And sold to the public. How would you set the rates for something that only gets broadcast on radio and never sold? Edit2- D) my point regarding B is actually one of he fantastic things about copyright existing for my lifetime +70 years. If, at any point during that period I “make it big” then either myself, or my estate, are able to be paid for my hard graft. ————— Music is inherent to our society, even our humanity. Personally, I think we should place appropriate value on it. Lifetime +70 places a good value on the work musicians do in my opinion.
  - abdullahkhalids 7y ago
    I have never thought of B before, so thanks for that. Let me challenge you by with one problem with the whole copyright system. Right now there are many works that were produced decades ago, are still under copyright, but cannot be bought at all because its not economically valuable for the copyright owner to produce a few dozen/hundred copies a year. Society is worse off because the above is true for possibly millions of works, and while not having access to one individual work is not that concerning, in the bulk it is. A significant part of the cultural heritage of our society has been lost because of the intersection of copyright law and economics. One reason many people support short copyright periods (5-10 years) is because they want to prevent the loss of cultural heritage. Not to mention most of these copyrighted works at this point are held by Big Media companies and not the actual creators of the work. Do you see this as a problem? If yes, do you have a proposed solution?
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
The current lifetime + 70 years is overkill. Releasing one's works under CC or GFDL is surely good, CC-0/PD is better, but it doesn't always practical/persuasive to everyone/everything. And it requires personal evaluations and actions. Perhaps we also need a Voluntary Copyright Sunset Movement. It can persuade many people to waive their copyright earlier without author's own actions after its publication: > Copyright Sunset License > All Rights Reserved, (C) 2019 John Doe > An irrevocable, unconditional license is hereby granted: XX years after the initial publication of the first revision, the Work is automatically made available under the terms and conditions of CC-0. See CC-0. (another variation can be CC-BY v4) It can be applied to the majority of someone's works without major considerations. If you are just writing a random essay or taking a random photo, it's unlikely you still care after, let's say, 20 years. But meanwhile, you may still want to retain your copyright (and possibly, release it under a free/non-commercial/proprietary license before it expires, or upload it to your blog, forget it and do nothing), but no matter what you do, the copyright sunsets automatically some years later, long before the legal validity. And I think it can be a fairly influential movement and can persuade many authors to join: do you really need/want to lock a piece of your random work for your entire lifetime + 70 years? If the work is special, you may want to do so, but more likely not, can you waive your copyright earlier to benefit the public? If so, use this license to publish your work. The problem of this movement is, of course, nothing would happen during the first 20-40 years, making the movement be perceived as useless, and difficult to gain support. Meanwhile, the movement would also fail to solve any of the changing landscape of copyright issues developed during these years. Who knows what the world we're living is going to be in 40 years, and there's risk of our efforts becoming irrelevant. But I think it's still a big positive move. We can also encourage short expiry for things you don't care about, such as blog posts or small programs: 5-10 years may be enough.
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  An overwhelming majority of "useful" copyrighted works is owned by Big Media. By useful I mean works that provide large value to society, compared to say this comment, which is technically copyrighted, but fairly low value to society. Big Media are the ones who have been influencing lawmakers to extend copyright terms. They are never going to voluntarily give up their own copyrights.
stesch 7y ago
Our political systems in the free world are very resistant to change. A party can be founded to further an important topic but people demand that they have a broader program and address all kinds of topics. And then you end up with another copy of some party.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  Then, you should allow to have more than one party together, so that if some party is some issues and other party can then make the other issues that they are more knowledgeable about. (Maybe the result is that there is no single prime minister, but maybe that isn't the result; I don't know.)
zzo38computer 7y ago
This ideas is good, I think. However, there are some of my opinion: 1. You should be allowed to waive the right to be recognized as the author. Also, if someone uses your stuff in the way that you do not like, then you should not force to remove the picture but are allowed to require to know that you do not endorse the use of it. Also, should still be prohibited to claim that someone else wrote something even though actually you did and they didn't write it. 3. Possibly, copyright could be shorter for practical works than for artistic works. I see other comments disagree about what the length should be. I think twenty years is too long even for artistic works; one possibility (although I am not sure what is best) might be: For artistic works, five years automatic and five years requiring payment. For practical works, three years automatic and three years requiring payment. (But, then, you have to define this properly.) 5. Perhaps the ban on DRM should be, instead of a total ban, a combination of: (a) A prominent warning label is required. (b) Some rules similar to like what the GPL3 has about DRM is required ;for example, maybe any DRM system would be required to make available that the user is able to use the rights that the GPL3 provides for the user (such as availability of source code, Installation Information, can share the corrected version, etc). (c) Requirement that the companies do not try to work together to enforce the DRM. Also, I think patent should be abolished entirely so that you are not restricted to do some thing just because someone else patented it. (With the possible exception of "design patents", which perhaps should still be allowed to exist, but limited to a lesser duration and only applicable to commercial use, maybe. And it should not apply to screen layouts that do not include graphics.) (Also, any patent explaining an invention would still be allowed to be published, although it would have no legal value; it is simply one kind of archive.) They also mention, "how should the artists get paid?" I think that, even if it doesn't restrict you from copying it, does not prevent you from selling books.

81 points by allenleein 7y ago

> But today’s protection times — life plus 70 years — are absurd. No investor would even look at a business case where the time to pay-back was that long. This is something that should resonate with the HN crowd. The heart of the problem is that the law treats big media and the independent artist the same way. Instead of the flat 5 year copyright term for every piece of work, I think a system that works better is that after 5 years, the copyright on an item can be annually extended by an year using a small fee - say the original sale cost x 10. The independent artist can renew the few items he has created easily at this small price. But Big Media houses, who own the copyright of tens of thousands of items will have to release any items that no longer sell and do not directly compete with their current offerings.

Spivak 7y ago
But all these reform schemes assume that copyright expiration is the end goal when it's really there to allow the creator of a work to extract pretty much all the value from their work -- the expiration is really an afterthought. I think expanding fair use makes sense in a lot of cases but I also think that harping on copyright expiration terms generally miss the point. Copyright expiration should protect against works being abandoned but those are the exceptional cases. I think my ideal copyright system would be indefinite but you can make a case before a court if you think a work has been abandoned and you want to pick it up. All of these systems that are clearly designed to burden copyright holders and make it harder to maintain copyright are silly.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
  I would love to see an explanation of why you think putting the burden of proof on the new creator to prove that their new work does not violate copyright is advantageous to an auto-expiry approach. I can think of thousands of situations where what you propose would stifle innovation. Why is this way better?
- admax88q 7y ago
  > you can make a case before a court if you think a work has been abandoned That's an absurd amount of additional work to put on the legal system.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    It's actually not a bad idea if you tweak it a little bit. Move it out of the court system and into a computer in the copyright office. You upload a work and claim it's abandoned, they publish the claim and the copyright holder has e.g. six months to dispute the claim or it proves that you're right and the work becomes public domain. No human involvement, simple automatic process. Then works that have been registered/renewed in the last 14 years (or were created in the last 14 years) can't be claimed to be abandoned, so copyright holders that don't want to have to deal with policing abandonment claims can just register their old works instead.
- chrismcb 7y ago
  Copyright expiration IS the end goal. And, at least constitutionally, the goal of copyright was to encourage creation of works, not to extract every last cent. Expiration isn't an afterthought of the process. Without copyright, everything would be in public domain. So public domain is essentially the default. Copyright was created to allow the artist to make some money, for a time, before returning the work to the public domain, so that others can build of it. Giving an entity, forever, to enjoy the Monopoly is just absurd, and unconstitutional. Five years is to short, but 75 or 90 is to long. Based on the fact that most books on Amazon are less than 25 years, I think 25 is a good term length.
rorykoehler 7y ago
There should be a centrally agreed fair use license (regulated marketplace). No restrictions on copying and no negotiation on price. Works must be derivatives and not 1 for 1 copies. For artistic works this could kick in after 3 (or some other short time frame) months of release and last forever. For other IP this should kick in after 3 (long enough to realise the gains) years. For other IP a provision to change the fair use price in court would be provided. It's not right that private individuals and organisations can steal from the future due to greed. Every innovation is a derivative of what came before. As a society we should embrace and encourage sharing and derivation.
rhino369 7y ago
And this point isn't even up for debate. Present value calculations essentially prove that a copyright long-tail provides minimal benefit to a corporation. Especially since long-tail sales are incredibly rare. So it a 1/200,000 shot at making a classic that will actually sell 100 years from now. And even for that one shot, the discount rate says a million dollars of sales 100 years from now is worth a couple thousand dollars now. There is no way 100-year copyright incentives art now. Every 5 years is annoying short though. I'd say 20 years automatically, with 5 year extensions up to 40 years. I'd probably also allow copyright-lite protection after 40 years. You would lose protection against direct copying and sales of your work. But you'd keep protections against derivations. This would allow an author of a long-running book series to keep his rights to his characters and "universe" for future works. I'm not sure how long I'd let those copyright-lite rights run for, but at least 70 years. Maybe with a trademark like a requirement for consistent usage.
- OscarCunningham 7y ago
  Does the same reasoning also imply that the government should get all physical property 100 years after its creation? If not, what makes that case different?
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    The same that makes copyright violation different from theft: you can "take away" information from the owner and still have them keep it.
  - tordanik 7y ago
    The ability to create infinite copies for essentially zero cost changes the utility calculus significantly. If we're talking about physical property like, say, a single-family home, the only question is which family is allowed to live in it. If the physical world worked like copyrighted creations, we'd be able to give every family on earth a copy of that home to live in, for free. And while that would still have downsides for the heirs of the builder (with infinite supply, they could no longer rent out their own copies of the home for a profit), the total utility gained by humanity would easily justify that step.
echelon 7y ago
If you offer extension for a nominal fee, those with big pockets will always opt to do it. Domain registration fees are supposed to combat squatting, but look at where we are. Any good domain name you can think of is probably owned by a squatter. And there's a similar situation in the media industry right now. Before Fox got bought out, they were churning out Marvel films in order to keep their license. It didn't matter if the films were any good or made a profit. Sony is in the same boat. I'm not sure if changing copyright is good or bad, but if we do move to a world with temporary copyright, it needs to expire uniformly for all parties.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  So simply price ownership at market value. Of course price control distorts the market, we know this.
dijksterhuis 7y ago
A) You’ve made a massive assumption here in regards to the sale price. Sales prices vary depending on a multitude of factors. There’s no single sales price that exists for one album/track/etc. iTunes charges differently to Beatport. Beatport charges differently to direct to fan over Bandcamp. B) Furthermore, you’re assuming independent artists earn in a linear fashion which is just not the case. I have been toiling away for 10 years making music. I don’t earn enough to pay original sales price x 10 every year to keep my work in copyright. So 50% of my work is now public domain. Now let’s suppose I “make it big” tomorrow. 50% of my hard graft over the last 10 years was for nothing. Everyone can get my work for free. Maybe my recent album makes me a few bucks. But now I can’t re-copyright those earlier works. As an independent artist, I’ve just been screwed by your proposed system. Edit1- C) you’re assuming that everything that any musician does is released as an album. And sold to the public. How would you set the rates for something that only gets broadcast on radio and never sold? Edit2- D) my point regarding B is actually one of he fantastic things about copyright existing for my lifetime +70 years. If, at any point during that period I “make it big” then either myself, or my estate, are able to be paid for my hard graft. ————— Music is inherent to our society, even our humanity. Personally, I think we should place appropriate value on it. Lifetime +70 places a good value on the work musicians do in my opinion.
- abdullahkhalids 7y ago
  I have never thought of B before, so thanks for that. Let me challenge you by with one problem with the whole copyright system. Right now there are many works that were produced decades ago, are still under copyright, but cannot be bought at all because its not economically valuable for the copyright owner to produce a few dozen/hundred copies a year. Society is worse off because the above is true for possibly millions of works, and while not having access to one individual work is not that concerning, in the bulk it is. A significant part of the cultural heritage of our society has been lost because of the intersection of copyright law and economics. One reason many people support short copyright periods (5-10 years) is because they want to prevent the loss of cultural heritage. Not to mention most of these copyrighted works at this point are held by Big Media companies and not the actual creators of the work. Do you see this as a problem? If yes, do you have a proposed solution?

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

The current lifetime + 70 years is overkill. Releasing one's works under CC or GFDL is surely good, CC-0/PD is better, but it doesn't always practical/persuasive to everyone/everything. And it requires personal evaluations and actions. Perhaps we also need a Voluntary Copyright Sunset Movement. It can persuade many people to waive their copyright earlier without author's own actions after its publication: > Copyright Sunset License > All Rights Reserved, (C) 2019 John Doe > An irrevocable, unconditional license is hereby granted: XX years after the initial publication of the first revision, the Work is automatically made available under the terms and conditions of CC-0. See CC-0. (another variation can be CC-BY v4) It can be applied to the majority of someone's works without major considerations. If you are just writing a random essay or taking a random photo, it's unlikely you still care after, let's say, 20 years. But meanwhile, you may still want to retain your copyright (and possibly, release it under a free/non-commercial/proprietary license before it expires, or upload it to your blog, forget it and do nothing), but no matter what you do, the copyright sunsets automatically some years later, long before the legal validity. And I think it can be a fairly influential movement and can persuade many authors to join: do you really need/want to lock a piece of your random work for your entire lifetime + 70 years? If the work is special, you may want to do so, but more likely not, can you waive your copyright earlier to benefit the public? If so, use this license to publish your work. The problem of this movement is, of course, nothing would happen during the first 20-40 years, making the movement be perceived as useless, and difficult to gain support. Meanwhile, the movement would also fail to solve any of the changing landscape of copyright issues developed during these years. Who knows what the world we're living is going to be in 40 years, and there's risk of our efforts becoming irrelevant. But I think it's still a big positive move. We can also encourage short expiry for things you don't care about, such as blog posts or small programs: 5-10 years may be enough.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
An overwhelming majority of "useful" copyrighted works is owned by Big Media. By useful I mean works that provide large value to society, compared to say this comment, which is technically copyrighted, but fairly low value to society. Big Media are the ones who have been influencing lawmakers to extend copyright terms. They are never going to voluntarily give up their own copyrights.

stesch 7y ago

Our political systems in the free world are very resistant to change. A party can be founded to further an important topic but people demand that they have a broader program and address all kinds of topics. And then you end up with another copy of some party.

zzo38computer 7y ago
Then, you should allow to have more than one party together, so that if some party is some issues and other party can then make the other issues that they are more knowledgeable about. (Maybe the result is that there is no single prime minister, but maybe that isn't the result; I don't know.)

zzo38computer 7y ago

This ideas is good, I think. However, there are some of my opinion: 1. You should be allowed to waive the right to be recognized as the author. Also, if someone uses your stuff in the way that you do not like, then you should not force to remove the picture but are allowed to require to know that you do not endorse the use of it. Also, should still be prohibited to claim that someone else wrote something even though actually you did and they didn't write it. 3. Possibly, copyright could be shorter for practical works than for artistic works. I see other comments disagree about what the length should be. I think twenty years is too long even for artistic works; one possibility (although I am not sure what is best) might be: For artistic works, five years automatic and five years requiring payment. For practical works, three years automatic and three years requiring payment. (But, then, you have to define this properly.) 5. Perhaps the ban on DRM should be, instead of a total ban, a combination of: (a) A prominent warning label is required. (b) Some rules similar to like what the GPL3 has about DRM is required ;for example, maybe any DRM system would be required to make available that the user is able to use the rights that the GPL3 provides for the user (such as availability of source code, Installation Information, can share the corrected version, etc). (c) Requirement that the companies do not try to work together to enforce the DRM. Also, I think patent should be abolished entirely so that you are not restricted to do some thing just because someone else patented it. (With the possible exception of "design patents", which perhaps should still be allowed to exist, but limited to a lesser duration and only applicable to commercial use, maybe. And it should not apply to screen layouts that do not include graphics.) (Also, any patent explaining an invention would still be allowed to be published, although it would have no legal value; it is simply one kind of archive.) They also mention, "how should the artists get paid?" I think that, even if it doesn't restrict you from copying it, does not prevent you from selling books.