8 ms·

50 year copyright term extended to 70 years

aequitas 7y ago
70 years _after_ the author's death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... Imho it's absurd copyright should still be applicable when the author is gone. Only to the benefit of those who arguably contributed nothing to the creative work.
- ownagefool 7y ago
  Maybe, that's fair. But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I'd probably go with a N years since creation or until transfered (either by death, or sale, etc), whatever is longer. This would give the author the ability to sell their creation, but it'd also let those that want to keep their baby do so, but my N years would likely only be around 20.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    You family will still get a part of what you earned thru inheritance. What else is needed??
    - kd5bjo 7y ago
      Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves. Does the publisher owe anything to the author’s estate? Can another publisher immediately issue their own edition because it’s now in the public domain?
      - microtherion 7y ago
        Or passes away before even getting accepted by a publisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces
      - roenxi 7y ago
        No, they don't owe an estate anything. We should be steering society away from entrenching intergenerational wealth transfers, not towards them. We want people to be wealthy roughly in proportion to how much they contributed to the economy. The author's heirs can go stand on their own two feet. Life + 70 is about making it attractive to big firms or other organisations to buy the rights to copyright; it removes the risk of the author dying suddenly. The idea is still absurd, as classics that should be generally available are still under this bizarre lock & key system. Tolkien only died in 1970; his legacy should be part of the public system by now. 1970 was a different time and era. Good stories are dying die because nobody can print mass copies of them.
        kd5bjo 7y ago
        So the publisher just gets to keep the author’s share of their joint contribution to the economy simply because it hasn’t been realized yet? If you want to stop inter generational wealth transfer, work to limit that directly. This is just moving the profits away from an individual (the author) to a corporation (the publisher).
        roenxi 7y ago
        No, because the idea is that the right to a special monopoly would disappear. So the price of a book would drop from print costs + copyright to print cost only via the magical hand of the market. The "authors share" is a wholly legal idea that exists because everyone agrees the authors should get something for their work. There is a reason my fiction bookshelf is 60% 1700s/1800s classics like Wilde or or Austin instead of authors I prefer like Tolkien or Mervyn Peake. Books out of copyright are cheaper (less margin to be extracted) and more easily available from a local bookshop, so I've bought more of them over the years.
        nothrabannosir 7y ago
        Not if copyright expires at the author's death; then it transfers to society at large because the publisher doesn't have the sole right to publish it anymore. (Not advocating for this per se, just pointing out copyright expiration doens't necessarily transfer wealth to the publisher)
      - DennisP 7y ago
        So don't base it entirely on the author's lifespan. We could go back to the original terms: a flat 14 years, plus a 14-year optional extension if the author is still alive.
      - ashelmire 7y ago
        > Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves. Why not ~20 years of rights to it like patents? Does the family really deserve to enjoy sole rights to someone else's idea for 70 years?
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    > But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I think it should be like patents. You get it for twenty years, then it's in the public domain. I don't think people are making TV shows and books because of the money they might make 21+ years from now.
    - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
      Friends first aired in 1994 and recently Netflix paid $100 million to keep it through 2019. There's also a number of musicians that are still getting paychecks because of a song written in the 60's. To say no-one creates art/tv/music with long term income in mind seems a little simplistic.
      - mcv 7y ago
        Money may still be made from it, but that doesn't mean they were originally created with the idea that today they'd be making money this way. Most of the money is generally made within the first couple of years after release. My preference for copyright would be 30 years or until death of the author, whichever is longer. If there's no living author or the rights have been transferred, then it's simply 30 years. This gives plenty of time to make money from it, it means the author never loses control over their own thing during their lifetime, and their family can benefit from it if the author dies shortly after publication. More than this is just corporations milking creations from the past.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        I am fairly supportive of IP law in general, but I don’t believe that the creators of Friends would have passed on making on the series if they were only going to able to monetize for 20 years. 20 years out at only a 5% discount rate pa is a 65% discount. At a more reasonable 15% discount rate for a proven show, you’re left with under 4% 20 years out. For an unproven pilot, you probably handicap that significantly more.
      - greatpatton 7y ago
  - peterbraden 7y ago
    The family get the joy of the work. It's worth noting that copyright here is only talking about the monetary legacy of the work. Value exists in many dimensions. There's also value in work that society owns.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    > But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I deem it unfair that the family of a rich person gets anything at all, through inheritance or otherwise, so my answer would be yes.
    - eteos 7y ago
      Whats wrong with inheritance? It is a big drive for economy. Or is it just that you don't like rich people?
      - rocqua 7y ago
        The argument against inheritance is one based on meritocracy. Specifically, the idea is that money should be gained based on how useful you are to society. Being the child of someone who was rich does not automatically mean you are useful to society. Hence, by this argument, it should not automatically mean you get to have your parents money.
        bzbarsky 7y ago
        This presupposes that all money, and in general all resources, including labor, belongs to the state (or society) except that which is explicitly allowed to people. While that is a coherent point of view, it has some really unpalatable implications. The first one is that the assumption that society owns everyone's labor until proven otherwise is a great justification for various forms of effective slavery. The second one is that taking your "useful to society" statement at face value leads to things like the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, withholding (or confiscating) resources from those deemed "useless" to society, etc. But even within this framework, making more money than you spend corresponds to producing more resources for society's benefit than you consume, and thereby building up a sort of "social credit". You then draw on this credit later in life (e.g. in retirement). It seems like the main claim you are making regarding inheritance is that this sort of social credit should not be transferable, right? But that raises the question of whether people be able to give gifts to someone else at all. In this framework the answer is basically "no", because that would represent a transfer of the non-transferable social credit. But if they _should_, then should there be a substantive difference between a gift given 10 minutes before someone has a heart attack and receiving the same gift 20 minutes later? From an ethical point of view, I have a hard time with there being a difference between those two cases.
  - ashelmire 7y ago
    > But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? No. This is the heart of the problem with the capitalist economic system. The vast majority of wealth belongs to people who inherited it, not the people actually creating all the value in society today.
    - dexterdog 7y ago
      Um, citation please.
- davidweatherall 7y ago
  If copyrights disappeared after death, from a business standpoint it would become much harder to value a copyright when you also have to factor in the chance of the author dying and you immediately losing the related IP.
  - clinta 7y ago
    The fact that the authors death factors in at all automatically makes a young person's IP more valuable than an old person's. That's a really dumb system. It should expire x years after creation and the author's death should be irrelevant.
    - dannyw 7y ago
      A more harmonious option could be X years or until the authors death, whichever is higher. It preserves the “you own your work for your natural life”. Whether that’s what copyright should be is a separate question, and I think the answer is absolutely not, but easier to change gradually than all at once.
    - davidweatherall 7y ago
      If X in death + X years is big enough, then age becomes less of a factor. Most IP's value drops as time goes on. In the majority of cases, after 70 years the value of IP is approaching zero, a further 10-50 years dependent on the creator's age won't have much more of an affect on the value that IP can create. I agree X years after creation sounds like a much better system though.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    Well, you could do 20 years after publication or 10 years after death, whichever comes sooner. Or maybe 10 and 5. I think most books make money only in the first few years anyway (but you want to make the term long enough that people aren't going to wait it out). Depending on the length of the term, this may not work so well for types of books that have a longer tail (e.g., sheet music), but the current system has drawbacks too.
- sshagent 7y ago
  Imagine the new business line of having to arrange accidents for someone who holds a patent you wish to utilize. "Whoops they died, looks like we get to press a head" Its indeed awkward to get this right, but i agree 70 years is nuts.
  - vincnetas 7y ago
    why the complications, just go straight to robbing a bank. after all end result that you aiming at is money. "whoops, i have lots of money"
- jstummbillig 7y ago
  All of us greatly benefit from things that were created without our contribution, and I agree, often times it's both absurd and perverse. To this end, I don't think copyright warrants special attention, over, say, immigration or inheritance law.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  If I have a long and successful life and decide to write my autobiography in my last year, my dependants should get almost nothing? What of the 95% manuscript I had in my drawer that my wife or child gets published after I am gone? The greater point that copyright terms are out of control and absurd, I wholly agree with. Family interests controlling rights of a windfall legacy (e.g. Tolkien etc) for decades is crazy. Fifteen or twenty five years after first publication seems nearer the right mark to me.
  - DennisP 7y ago
    Which is what we started with: a flat 14-year term to start with, regardless of whether the author is living or not, and a 14-year renewal allowed if the author is still living.
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      Then you get people that are lucky (author died 1 week after renewal) or unlucky (the opposite). But instead of proposing another competing proposal, this is reasonable enough that I can get behind it.
- sha666sum 7y ago
  If the copyright expires on author's death, then you're incentivizing convenient accidents and straight up murder.
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    Maybe a marginally higher incentive to murder people to get works into the public domain, I guess? If only society had some other, competing set of incentives in place to disincentivize murdering people.
- contravariant 7y ago
  At this point I just find it weird it's tied to the author's death at all. It's not going to incentivize young people, to either live longer or produce more material.
eteos 7y ago
Do you guys know this doesn't count for corporations (which I presume you have the most aversion against)? For example, it's irrelevant how long mr Disney has been dead because the company still exists.
- icebraining 7y ago
  I assume you're talking about work-made-for-hire? As far as I know, that's mostly a concept in common law countries; I'm not sure it applies to Switzerland. In most European countries, as far as I know, the rights of authorship always belong to natural persons.
  - lambertsimnel 7y ago
    How does that affect works exported from common-law countries to civil-law countries? Does the same work have different copyright holders in different jurisdictions?

70 years _after_ the author's death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright... Imho it's absurd copyright should still be applicable when the author is gone. Only to the benefit of those who arguably contributed nothing to the creative work.

ownagefool 7y ago
Maybe, that's fair. But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I'd probably go with a N years since creation or until transfered (either by death, or sale, etc), whatever is longer. This would give the author the ability to sell their creation, but it'd also let those that want to keep their baby do so, but my N years would likely only be around 20.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  You family will still get a part of what you earned thru inheritance. What else is needed??
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves. Does the publisher owe anything to the author’s estate? Can another publisher immediately issue their own edition because it’s now in the public domain?
    - microtherion 7y ago
      Or passes away before even getting accepted by a publisher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces
    - roenxi 7y ago
      No, they don't owe an estate anything. We should be steering society away from entrenching intergenerational wealth transfers, not towards them. We want people to be wealthy roughly in proportion to how much they contributed to the economy. The author's heirs can go stand on their own two feet. Life + 70 is about making it attractive to big firms or other organisations to buy the rights to copyright; it removes the risk of the author dying suddenly. The idea is still absurd, as classics that should be generally available are still under this bizarre lock & key system. Tolkien only died in 1970; his legacy should be part of the public system by now. 1970 was a different time and era. Good stories are dying die because nobody can print mass copies of them.
      - kd5bjo 7y ago
        So the publisher just gets to keep the author’s share of their joint contribution to the economy simply because it hasn’t been realized yet? If you want to stop inter generational wealth transfer, work to limit that directly. This is just moving the profits away from an individual (the author) to a corporation (the publisher).
        roenxi 7y ago
        No, because the idea is that the right to a special monopoly would disappear. So the price of a book would drop from print costs + copyright to print cost only via the magical hand of the market. The "authors share" is a wholly legal idea that exists because everyone agrees the authors should get something for their work. There is a reason my fiction bookshelf is 60% 1700s/1800s classics like Wilde or or Austin instead of authors I prefer like Tolkien or Mervyn Peake. Books out of copyright are cheaper (less margin to be extracted) and more easily available from a local bookshop, so I've bought more of them over the years.
        nothrabannosir 7y ago
        Not if copyright expires at the author's death; then it transfers to society at large because the publisher doesn't have the sole right to publish it anymore. (Not advocating for this per se, just pointing out copyright expiration doens't necessarily transfer wealth to the publisher)
    - DennisP 7y ago
      So don't base it entirely on the author's lifespan. We could go back to the original terms: a flat 14 years, plus a 14-year optional extension if the author is still alive.
    - ashelmire 7y ago
      > Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves. Why not ~20 years of rights to it like patents? Does the family really deserve to enjoy sole rights to someone else's idea for 70 years?
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I think it should be like patents. You get it for twenty years, then it's in the public domain. I don't think people are making TV shows and books because of the money they might make 21+ years from now.
  - BuildTheRobots 7y ago
    Friends first aired in 1994 and recently Netflix paid $100 million to keep it through 2019. There's also a number of musicians that are still getting paychecks because of a song written in the 60's. To say no-one creates art/tv/music with long term income in mind seems a little simplistic.
    - mcv 7y ago
      Money may still be made from it, but that doesn't mean they were originally created with the idea that today they'd be making money this way. Most of the money is generally made within the first couple of years after release. My preference for copyright would be 30 years or until death of the author, whichever is longer. If there's no living author or the rights have been transferred, then it's simply 30 years. This gives plenty of time to make money from it, it means the author never loses control over their own thing during their lifetime, and their family can benefit from it if the author dies shortly after publication. More than this is just corporations milking creations from the past.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      I am fairly supportive of IP law in general, but I don’t believe that the creators of Friends would have passed on making on the series if they were only going to able to monetize for 20 years. 20 years out at only a 5% discount rate pa is a 65% discount. At a more reasonable 15% discount rate for a proven show, you’re left with under 4% 20 years out. For an unproven pilot, you probably handicap that significantly more.
    - greatpatton 7y ago
- peterbraden 7y ago
  The family get the joy of the work. It's worth noting that copyright here is only talking about the monetary legacy of the work. Value exists in many dimensions. There's also value in work that society owns.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  > But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? I deem it unfair that the family of a rich person gets anything at all, through inheritance or otherwise, so my answer would be yes.
  - eteos 7y ago
    Whats wrong with inheritance? It is a big drive for economy. Or is it just that you don't like rich people?
    - rocqua 7y ago
      The argument against inheritance is one based on meritocracy. Specifically, the idea is that money should be gained based on how useful you are to society. Being the child of someone who was rich does not automatically mean you are useful to society. Hence, by this argument, it should not automatically mean you get to have your parents money.
      - bzbarsky 7y ago
        This presupposes that all money, and in general all resources, including labor, belongs to the state (or society) except that which is explicitly allowed to people. While that is a coherent point of view, it has some really unpalatable implications. The first one is that the assumption that society owns everyone's labor until proven otherwise is a great justification for various forms of effective slavery. The second one is that taking your "useful to society" statement at face value leads to things like the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, withholding (or confiscating) resources from those deemed "useless" to society, etc. But even within this framework, making more money than you spend corresponds to producing more resources for society's benefit than you consume, and thereby building up a sort of "social credit". You then draw on this credit later in life (e.g. in retirement). It seems like the main claim you are making regarding inheritance is that this sort of social credit should not be transferable, right? But that raises the question of whether people be able to give gifts to someone else at all. In this framework the answer is basically "no", because that would represent a transfer of the non-transferable social credit. But if they _should_, then should there be a substantive difference between a gift given 10 minutes before someone has a heart attack and receiving the same gift 20 minutes later? From an ethical point of view, I have a hard time with there being a difference between those two cases.
- ashelmire 7y ago
  > But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success? No. This is the heart of the problem with the capitalist economic system. The vast majority of wealth belongs to people who inherited it, not the people actually creating all the value in society today.
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    Um, citation please.
davidweatherall 7y ago
If copyrights disappeared after death, from a business standpoint it would become much harder to value a copyright when you also have to factor in the chance of the author dying and you immediately losing the related IP.
- clinta 7y ago
  The fact that the authors death factors in at all automatically makes a young person's IP more valuable than an old person's. That's a really dumb system. It should expire x years after creation and the author's death should be irrelevant.
  - dannyw 7y ago
    A more harmonious option could be X years or until the authors death, whichever is higher. It preserves the “you own your work for your natural life”. Whether that’s what copyright should be is a separate question, and I think the answer is absolutely not, but easier to change gradually than all at once.
  - davidweatherall 7y ago
    If X in death + X years is big enough, then age becomes less of a factor. Most IP's value drops as time goes on. In the majority of cases, after 70 years the value of IP is approaching zero, a further 10-50 years dependent on the creator's age won't have much more of an affect on the value that IP can create. I agree X years after creation sounds like a much better system though.
- gpvos 7y ago
  Well, you could do 20 years after publication or 10 years after death, whichever comes sooner. Or maybe 10 and 5. I think most books make money only in the first few years anyway (but you want to make the term long enough that people aren't going to wait it out). Depending on the length of the term, this may not work so well for types of books that have a longer tail (e.g., sheet music), but the current system has drawbacks too.
sshagent 7y ago
Imagine the new business line of having to arrange accidents for someone who holds a patent you wish to utilize. "Whoops they died, looks like we get to press a head" Its indeed awkward to get this right, but i agree 70 years is nuts.
- vincnetas 7y ago
  why the complications, just go straight to robbing a bank. after all end result that you aiming at is money. "whoops, i have lots of money"
jstummbillig 7y ago
All of us greatly benefit from things that were created without our contribution, and I agree, often times it's both absurd and perverse. To this end, I don't think copyright warrants special attention, over, say, immigration or inheritance law.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
If I have a long and successful life and decide to write my autobiography in my last year, my dependants should get almost nothing? What of the 95% manuscript I had in my drawer that my wife or child gets published after I am gone? The greater point that copyright terms are out of control and absurd, I wholly agree with. Family interests controlling rights of a windfall legacy (e.g. Tolkien etc) for decades is crazy. Fifteen or twenty five years after first publication seems nearer the right mark to me.
- DennisP 7y ago
  Which is what we started with: a flat 14-year term to start with, regardless of whether the author is living or not, and a 14-year renewal allowed if the author is still living.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    Then you get people that are lucky (author died 1 week after renewal) or unlucky (the opposite). But instead of proposing another competing proposal, this is reasonable enough that I can get behind it.
sha666sum 7y ago
If the copyright expires on author's death, then you're incentivizing convenient accidents and straight up murder.
- chucksmash 7y ago
  Maybe a marginally higher incentive to murder people to get works into the public domain, I guess? If only society had some other, competing set of incentives in place to disincentivize murdering people.
contravariant 7y ago
At this point I just find it weird it's tied to the author's death at all. It's not going to incentivize young people, to either live longer or produce more material.

eteos 7y ago

Do you guys know this doesn't count for corporations (which I presume you have the most aversion against)? For example, it's irrelevant how long mr Disney has been dead because the company still exists.

icebraining 7y ago
I assume you're talking about work-made-for-hire? As far as I know, that's mostly a concept in common law countries; I'm not sure it applies to Switzerland. In most European countries, as far as I know, the rights of authorship always belong to natural persons.
- lambertsimnel 7y ago
  How does that affect works exported from common-law countries to civil-law countries? Does the same work have different copyright holders in different jurisdictions?