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It's strange that we accept a copyright system that allows a show like Seinfeld to remain outside the public domain over twenty years after it ended. Intellect
by jlmorton 7y ago
It's strange that we accept a copyright system that allows a show like Seinfeld to remain outside the public domain over twenty years after it ended.
Intellectual property exists to encourage science and the useful arts. It doesn't exist to extract every last penny of value out of a show for its owners.
In a world where copyright existed for twenty years, rather than 95-120 years, Seinfeld still would have been made. No one is green-lighting a television show with the expectation of huge distribution agreements decades later.
I'm not generally one to bash corporations, but US copyright law is among the clearest examples of corporations writing our laws to the detriment of consumers.
- ww520 7y agoThank Mickey for that.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y agoThe insane amount of time that copyright persists is almost surely due to Disney. Every time their copyright is about to expire, congress extends the duration. You can be pretty sure that the copyright duration will always be today’s date minus the date Disney first copyrighted something.
- whamlastxmas 7y agoI hate supporting Disney with annual trips to Disney World because of shit like this, but it means a lot to my family :(
- brokenmachine 7y agoI've been to Disney World exactly once and I plan to keep it that way. Not because it was bad per-se, it was an experience but I don't need to repeat that experience. With so many great and interesting places to visit in the world, why would you want to go over and over to a tacky manufactured landscape like that?
- whamlastxmas 7y agoI guess tacky is subjective. It's largely fun because my family loves it so much and makes it fun. I love the attention to detail, the rides are fun, the food is good, the resorts are nice. It's all stress free and easy and everything goes right and there's very little planning needed. Meeting the cast members is silly and fun. Having a meal plan and everyone just getting to stuff their face is great. The downside of course is that it's all tremendously expensive. But more than anything I view it as quality time with family in a way that I generally otherwise never get to have (they live across the country). It's more about family time and doing what they love more than it is about anything Disney Also it helps I've traveled a lot to most everywhere I've ever had interest in traveling to. I'm not really sacrificing trips somewhere else in favor of Disney
- brokenmachine 7y agoI didn't even know Disney did a meal plan... Not sure that makes it any more tempting to go back, however. :-)
- sjs382 7y agoI love linking this old Slashdot comment[0], as it's still a fair approximation: > In the USA Copyright lengths are very simple. Anything older than Mickey Mouse is public domain and everything else is still copyrighted. [0] https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306857&cid=28736323 https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306857&cid=2873632...
- maxwell 7y agoI wouldn't be so sure about "always". Disney Fatigue has already set in: https://fictionphile.com/disney-marvel-superhero-fatigue/ https://fictionphile.com/disney-marvel-superhero-fatigue/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2019/07/20/disney-remake-fatigue-lion-king-little-mermaid/1741525001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2019/07/... https://fortune.com/2019/07/20/live-action-disney-lion-king/ https://fortune.com/2019/07/20/live-action-disney-lion-king/ https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/21/spider-man-out-of-marvel-cinematic-universe-after-disney-split-with-sony https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/21/spider-man-out-... https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/with-solo-has-star-wars-fatigue-set-in/561416/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/wi...
- rkuykendall-com 7y ago"Fatigue" is just a genre of article that is easy to write and gets clicks while whatever they're complaining about breaks a new box office record.
- skinnymuch 7y agoI went to a few links and they were ridiculous untrue articles. We need a bullshit meter for articles that purport to be legitimate. None of the three I clicked were. Disney with Fox (who will only have contributed 15% of their percentage or 4% overall) have a 40% box office revenue percent this year. That is absolutely insane. I’m not sure when the last a company had that much of the box office. But it hasn’t been done for a while. Lion King grossed $1.6B. $1B outside the US and $500M+ in the US/CA. Yet one of the articles was trying to use the movie as an example of Disney’s decline? I can’t come up with words to describe how silly that is. I personally do not like Disney controlling the media market so much and do not like most of what they put out. But I’m not going to straight up lie and say their dominance isn’t there.
- rhacker 7y ago> No one is green-lighting a television show with the expectation of huge distribution agreements decades later. Really that seems like such a strange viewpoint. All of these shows that Netflix is creating right now, they are definitely value adds that will carry them forward well into the future. If it wasn't for the huge success of old shows, Netflix wouldn't have gotten into this game.
- Retric 7y agoIt’s a question of time value of money. Use say a 5% annual discount and 20 years out you’re down to 36%. Today a few shows are valuable decades after they aired, but as a percentage of value at creation it’s a drop in the bucket. Even in Seinfeld’s case the show was already into the multi billion dollar category. It’s revenue today adds the equivalent of less than 1% of it’s total.
- rhacker 7y agoEvery percentage counts. All of that is revenue applied to the company. Multiply it by 15 shows, you have residual income in the billions per year. That may be money to sneeze at, but at the end of the day, a billion dollars or not may be the difference between having the funding to launch 10 more shows or not.
- Retric 7y agoThere are not 15 shows with that kind of residuals 20+ years our.
- DanBC 7y agoWhich show created by Netflix will we still be watching in 2039?
- libraryatnight 7y agoYou're asking us to play fortune teller, but I suspect you're trying to imply that Netflix hasn't done anything of sufficient quality to warrant rewatching? I'd say they've made some stuff that has a shot of being rewatched: Master of None, Love, Russian Doll, and I'm sure more. And then there's their additions to already popular things like their installments of Wet Hot American Summer, Dark Crystal, Black Mirror etc. Netflix is making some decent content. Lots of not so great stuff, but some good in there too. Just like TV.
- pastor_elm 7y ago20 years is not unreasonable. The creator is likely still alive. Why shouldn't they get paid? Why should they see their creations get tarnished by spin offs they had no control over?
- dnautics 7y agoPerhaps spinoffs should be the domain of trademark law and not copyright law.
- whamlastxmas 7y agoReasonable depends on how much you view copyright laws to be a burden versus being something that encourages creation. There's no end to the list of reasons why copyright laws are shitty and really serve no purpose to anyone other than the extremely wealthy. I find it very reasonable to say that 80% of that shitty purpose is accomplished in the first 20 years. I personally have no moral issue with pirating because I believe anything put out for public consumption is just that - in the hands of the public. I think copyright law is about as dumb as me saying something in public and then charging people to quote me. Even with zero copyright law we'd still see a tremendous about of money and investment into media. Even with piracy we rarely see movies of a watchable definition on torrent sites while still in theathers, people (including me) would still pay for music streaming, ad-free Youtube, and so on. There's still plenty of money to be made without ridiculous lawsuits and bullying and harassment and exploitation.
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoOn the other hand, why should the next generation of artists be prevented from building on works that have been iconic parts of culture since before they were born, just like artists always have in the past?
- derekdahmer 7y agoBroadly agree BUT there are still advantages to copyrights on works that are still commercially viable. Seinfeld was made on film. Without copyright, someone would have to be incentivized to acquire the original reels and pay to digitally scan all 180 episodes of film, knowing that the resulting scans would also be in the public domain and thus very difficult to recoup their investment on. So in an alternative reality where Seinfeld's copyright expired, its possible that SD TV captures of all the episodes would be free and publicly available (great!), but an HD conversion would never be made (not great).
- mprev 7y agoWould a new HD version have a new copyright date?
- shakna 7y agoNot normally. Film restoration isn't currently considered innovative enough for the output to be cobsidered a new work. However if you create new credits, titles, interstituals, etc. then it generally does qualify as a new work.
- criddell 7y agoAs a company that both owns a bunch of copyrights and has to pay fees, I wonder what Netflix's opinion would be on copyright law?
- awad 7y agoI'm curious how you define useful arts?
- edanm 7y agoI would offer a different perspective. For shows like Seinfeld, sure, you might be right. But think of copyright in the context, not of the top of the food chain, but for, say, a mid-level author. Not Stephen King - but someone who makes their living by writing books. A sometimes big part of their total compensation is the royalties their works generate, sometimes many years into the future. Authors will often have an entire back catalogue of books that are still out there generating money, which is what always them to continue working on writing new books. Or take for example the indie game developer that was featured in HN posts for a few weeks. He lays out the calculations for how much money his games make, and a significant part of it is a calculation of how much the game will make over its lifetime - not in the first two years, but over many years. And this includes e.g. spinoffs. Now, I'm not saying 95-120 years is the "correct" duration - I'd probably say less, as well. But it's not obvious at all to me that 20 years is enough time - it's probably not.
- shakna 7y agoI would also say TV has a significantly different timeline to books and games. Different mediums can expect vastly different audience retention. Outside of the biggest hits, most TV won't be attracting attention 10-15 years down the line, but books are probably more in the 20-30yr dropoff. Copyright lifetimes simply don't reflect the profitable lifetimes of most products.
- behringer 7y agoDisney movies are as old now as the stories that they're directly lifted from were when the movies were made. The brothers Grimm have never seen a penny from the movies, yet we're still paying for Snow White.
- gamblor956 7y agoNo one is green-lighting a television show with the expectation of huge distribution agreements decades later. This has actually been the state of tv licensing economics for decades, since I Love Lucy popularized reruns. That show has never been off the air since it first aired. Other long-running shows longer-lived than the proposed-20 year term include anytime soaps still on the air today, The Simpsons, Law & Order or its spinoffs, CSI, NCIS. Indeed, potential longevity is one of the metrics by which shows are scored when determining whether to buy or renew them. Firefly, for example, had no potential for distribution when it came out and was unceremoniously cancelled at the turn of the century, but today would have likely lived many seasons on Amazon or Netflix. Basically, a long-running franchise like Seinfeld is the TV equivalent of a FAANG-era tech unicorn. It's what every showrunner secretly hopes for.