10 ms·

Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and

Aside from the particulars of this case, I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking, as codified in the laws and time limits being inflated grossly to suit copyright holders in the current era. In my opinion, the argument that copyright extension incentivizes authors/creators doesn't hold much water. I generally observe that there are plenty of people willing to create and publish things with absolutely no hope of profit or legal protection, and yet we bend over backwards to extend our protections for the lucky few to the tune of the author's life + 70 years. Even more if for hire. Tell me how that's in the public interest.

zzo38computer 7y ago
I agree with you. I don't like copyright either. I think it should be abolished, but would also accept to greatly reduce the duration and scope of copyright. That is why I write stuff to be public domain instead.
bgorman 7y ago
Intellectual property is the probably the number one way the western world oppresses the poor.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Intellectual property monopoly oppresses everyone, not just the poor.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  I assume you’re referring to drug patents with that remark?
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  Your own post is "intellectual property." Can you be a bit more specific?
  - bgorman 7y ago
    Sure. Most of the world does not live in western countries (As a simplification think Europe, Australia, US, Canada etc). In general, most of the world's valuable intellectual property has originated from Western countries. What intellectual property law does is provide a monopoly on selling/producing something to a company or individual. The thing that is interesting about intellectual property is that it is not tangible. If someone is assaulted, or their physical car is stolen- the damage is very real and tangible. However with intellectual property we have a worldwide system where copying intellectual ideas is equated to the same thing as physically stealing. For example, imagine I setup a factory that outputs clones of the "Land Rover Range Rover" in East Timor. I may be allowed to sell the vehicle domestically, but exports of the vehicle to "advanced economies" will undoubtably blocked due to IP infringement. This is a highly questionable practice for a few reasons. 1. Worldwide consumers would benefit for lower prices on Range Rovers 2. The production of Range Rovers in my knock off factory does not prohibit Land Rover from producing their vehicles 3. The special interest groups who benefit from the Range Rover monopoly are much wealthier than the rest of the world, and the monopoly only serves to reinforce that. Intellectual property is fundamentally a way for the wealthy (people who can afford lawyers) to prevent potential competitors from implementing ideas. There is no monopoly on differentiating mathematical functions, or calculating the current in an electric circuit. Yet somehow there are laws prohibiting copying designs for integrated circuits. It is all nonsense and the only winners are IP holders and lawyers.
    - LaEc 7y ago
      World with IP: Expensive Range Rovers. World without IP: No Range Rovers. Your imagined world of cheap range rovers if we suspended IP only works once but destroys all future incentive to create.
rayiner 7y ago
How is copyright anti-competitive? If you come up with an original work independently, why do competitor principles require ever letting someone else copy that work? We aren’t talking about limited resources here.
- gowld 7y ago
  One example is derivative works. Fanfiction runs into legal trouble with copyrights.
  - majormajor 7y ago
    Are derivative works competitive or anti-competitive? Truly original ideas could plausibly find it harder in that market.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  "Competitive" in the context of IP laws means competing to sell exactly the same thing (not 2 different books, or even 2 books from the same genre, but the exact same text). Copyright laws prohibit you from selling a thing I hold the copyright to, so they are by definition anti-competitive. We otherwise might be able to compete on price or availability, for instance.
scoopertrooper 7y ago
If you want to retain a professional creative class then you must implement a system that allows them to benefit from the works they produce. To rely on people producing things producing things without economic incentive is essentially the argument for anarchosocialism. It might work to some small degree for passion projects, but what the overall volume of creative production would collapse as creatives would have to find other ways to support themselves.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  > producing things without economic incentive is essentially the argument for anarchosocialism. Which could work if we were to implement something like universal basic income, or progress to an agalmic economic society. I'm not optimistic on either of those.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  As usual, we can look at history for answers. In the 19th century in Germany, Germany had no copyright or patent laws. There was an explosion of creativity and technological progress, and Germany became the European leader economically and technologically.
  - azernik 7y ago
    The lack of patent laws was very clearly a positive for Germany; the argument for those is IMO much weaker than for copyright. Especially for developing, backward economies (early-19th-century US, late-19th-century Germany, and contemporary China), ignoring foreign patents is very useful for speeding up technology transfer from more advanced economies; within 19th-century US there's some limited evidence for patents being useful as a way of paying local, small producers to publish their innovations widely, but the domestic Chinese quasi-open-source "shanzhai" electronic ecosystem produces quite a lot of its own innovation while completely disregarding patent rules. But the evidence for lack of copyright being useful in that period is very weak: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/copyright-germany-britain/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/copyright-germany-britain/ Most of the great German authors of the period had to hold other jobs to support themselves, which made completing works slow and halting. Goethe supported himself as a courtier/bureaucrat/officer of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar until his mid-40s, Hegel was a teacher and academic administrator, Kleist barely made a living off of of publishing a magazine and stints in Prussian government service, etc.
henryfjordan 7y ago
IP laws are anti-competitive and rent-seeking, that's exactly the point. I agree that the amount of time copyrights are good for is ridiculous, but I still think it's better than not having them. Imagine if J.K.Rowling wrote the first 3 Harry Potter books but didn't see a dime because the second they got popular everyone with a printing press started selling them royalty-free. Would she have finished the series? I got to read all 7 books because J.K.Rowling was incentivized to write them by her copyright.
- gdhbcc 7y ago
  You're assuming that copyright is the only way to make money out of writing, which is simply untrue.
  - SeanLuke 7y ago
    Okay. So using the J.K. Rowling example: provide a plausible way that she could make money off of her writing, and particularly her first risky book, in the absence of copyright.
    - FlyMoreRockets 7y ago
      There are a number of cases where creators of popular works have been granted substantial sums to create subsequent works through crowdsourcing. Edit for examples. Cyan, creator of Myst and Riven, had two very successful Kickstarter to fund new works. First, they raised $1,321,306 to make Obduction, then $1,433,161 for Firmament. Elite: Dangerous raised £1,578,316 for a modern remake. Yes, it works for books, too: https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=18&sort=most_funded&seed=2646719&page=1 https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=18...
      - SeanLuke 7y ago
        Cyan had already made Myst and Riven. This is close to the opposite of what I was asking for. So once again: you seriously think that J.K. Rowling, a completely unknown author with a manuscript repeatedly rejected by publishing houses, is going to be able to raise sufficient funding on Kickstarter for her first work?
javajosh 7y ago
You make two arguments here, one about degree and the other about kind. As for kind, as others have pointed out, the intent of IP law is to create artificial scarcity. The marginal cost of information is 0, so you have to put turnstiles somewhere. Society has kind of blundered and stumbled into the mishmash of enforcement measures we have today, but the intent is to reward content creators. If you accept this is a good thing, then the degree problem becomes one of proportionality. I agree that life + 70 years is exorbitant, but that particular formula is relatively easy to change legally. Practically, you have to fight powerful interests (Disney) to change it, but it can (and IMHO should) be done. One interesting notion is to fully privatize the problem of artificial scarcity. This might look something like leasing a Disney device (for example) to watch Disney content. This seems like something of a nightmare, until you realize that you don't really need to watch movies.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The problems with the DRM route are ... well known. See the EFF (https://www.eff.org/issues/drm https://www.eff.org/issues/drm) and FSF (https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/drm.html https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/drm.html) especially. Among other matters: - Your devices are no longer fully under your control, and don't answer to you. - Even where DRM isn't itself directly. malware (Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), it inevitably creates backdoors for APTs. - The legal proscriptions on analysing and assessing ADRM mechanisms create both minefields for researchers and multiply the existing security threat risk. But most critically, and pretty much fully torpedoing your voluntarism argument, device vendors may be contractually or legally prohibited from producing non-DRM-afflicted devices in their own relationships with DRM gatekeepers, meaning that there are no (or very crippled or expensive) DRM-free alternatives. Witness ongoing efforts to plug the "anologue hole" (https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole) in various devices and software. FWIW, my complete crap Chrome browser on my complete crap Samsung Android device refuses to allow me to screenshot this HN thread claiming it is a "DRM protected page". I'd love to replace the device with something vaguely comparable. Between licensing restrictions, monopoly coercion, and market dynamics, there is literally nothing available. Or more briefly: Your assertion is absolutely unsupported by empirical experience.
vmception 7y ago
Maybe Congress should delegate the time of IP rights to the agencies, and then we can just worry about regulatory capture, but not the insurmountable nature of getting Congress to listen to the people instead of Corporate IP aggregators
2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago
An author's children shouldn't get jack unless the author saved royalties for them.
- airstrike 7y ago
  > An author's children shouldn't get jack unless the author saved royalties for them. This is such an obvious notion and it's not discussed nearly as often as it should. It's not like my employer will be sending my last paycheck to my children 70 years after my death...
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    On the other hand, your employer does not have the opportunity to accumulate your work without paying you while you are alive, then apply that accumulated work for fun and profit after your death. The "life plus X" is a Chesterton's Fence - it was originally there for a reason. The length of X has since grown to be ridiculous, yes, but posthumous publishing of works for which the creator received nothing was a thing.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Copyright in unpublished works is an entirely different matter than in published ones. Unpublished works get much stronger protection, that can extend for as long as 120 years from creation in the U.S. So I don't think your scenario is very relevant.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Copyright is abused, yes. People want to write anyway, yes. But you need time and resources and space to write, review, edit. Some novelists spent years collecting rejection slips (e.g. Stephen King; Larry Niven did it full time with a trust fund), which is probably irrational. But with no pot of gold at the end, only the properly delusional or wealthy could justify that investment. OTOH copyright enforcement isn't that effective, so publishers meaninglessly vary textbook editions yearly, with expiring access to essential online content.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking Property rights in general are anti-competitive and support rent-seeking. That's actually very much the point of them; to insulate a particular interest from those who would compete with the person to whom the right is granted and enable the grantee to reliably extract value from the subject of the right, including by monopoly rents.
Taniwha 7y ago
Originally copyright was a bargain between the creator and the government (originally the Crown, but now the people) - essentially it's "we give you a fixed term monopoly, and in return you turn your creation over into the public domain afterwards". Two things have messed with that deal - corporations are now treated as people, who live forever, and copyright extension allows corporations to extend copyright past the lifespan of the public they've made that bargain with. I'd argue that a bargain that you can never collect on is not a valid bargain - the whole basis of copyright has been undermined - now it's just a monopoly.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  For patents, part of the deal was also that the inventor should clearly describe how the invention works. Modern patents, however, are drafted to be so obtuse that they’re basically impossible to learn from.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I agree with you. I don't like copyright either. I think it should be abolished, but would also accept to greatly reduce the duration and scope of copyright. That is why I write stuff to be public domain instead.

bgorman 7y ago

Intellectual property is the probably the number one way the western world oppresses the poor.

zozbot234 7y ago
Intellectual property monopoly oppresses everyone, not just the poor.
DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
I assume you’re referring to drug patents with that remark?
CamperBob2 7y ago
Your own post is "intellectual property." Can you be a bit more specific?
- bgorman 7y ago
  Sure. Most of the world does not live in western countries (As a simplification think Europe, Australia, US, Canada etc). In general, most of the world's valuable intellectual property has originated from Western countries. What intellectual property law does is provide a monopoly on selling/producing something to a company or individual. The thing that is interesting about intellectual property is that it is not tangible. If someone is assaulted, or their physical car is stolen- the damage is very real and tangible. However with intellectual property we have a worldwide system where copying intellectual ideas is equated to the same thing as physically stealing. For example, imagine I setup a factory that outputs clones of the "Land Rover Range Rover" in East Timor. I may be allowed to sell the vehicle domestically, but exports of the vehicle to "advanced economies" will undoubtably blocked due to IP infringement. This is a highly questionable practice for a few reasons. 1. Worldwide consumers would benefit for lower prices on Range Rovers 2. The production of Range Rovers in my knock off factory does not prohibit Land Rover from producing their vehicles 3. The special interest groups who benefit from the Range Rover monopoly are much wealthier than the rest of the world, and the monopoly only serves to reinforce that. Intellectual property is fundamentally a way for the wealthy (people who can afford lawyers) to prevent potential competitors from implementing ideas. There is no monopoly on differentiating mathematical functions, or calculating the current in an electric circuit. Yet somehow there are laws prohibiting copying designs for integrated circuits. It is all nonsense and the only winners are IP holders and lawyers.
  - LaEc 7y ago
    World with IP: Expensive Range Rovers. World without IP: No Range Rovers. Your imagined world of cheap range rovers if we suspended IP only works once but destroys all future incentive to create.

rayiner 7y ago

How is copyright anti-competitive? If you come up with an original work independently, why do competitor principles require ever letting someone else copy that work? We aren’t talking about limited resources here.

gowld 7y ago
One example is derivative works. Fanfiction runs into legal trouble with copyrights.
- majormajor 7y ago
  Are derivative works competitive or anti-competitive? Truly original ideas could plausibly find it harder in that market.
henryfjordan 7y ago
"Competitive" in the context of IP laws means competing to sell exactly the same thing (not 2 different books, or even 2 books from the same genre, but the exact same text). Copyright laws prohibit you from selling a thing I hold the copyright to, so they are by definition anti-competitive. We otherwise might be able to compete on price or availability, for instance.

scoopertrooper 7y ago

If you want to retain a professional creative class then you must implement a system that allows them to benefit from the works they produce. To rely on people producing things producing things without economic incentive is essentially the argument for anarchosocialism. It might work to some small degree for passion projects, but what the overall volume of creative production would collapse as creatives would have to find other ways to support themselves.

ineedasername 7y ago
> producing things without economic incentive is essentially the argument for anarchosocialism. Which could work if we were to implement something like universal basic income, or progress to an agalmic economic society. I'm not optimistic on either of those.
WalterBright 7y ago
As usual, we can look at history for answers. In the 19th century in Germany, Germany had no copyright or patent laws. There was an explosion of creativity and technological progress, and Germany became the European leader economically and technologically.
- azernik 7y ago
  The lack of patent laws was very clearly a positive for Germany; the argument for those is IMO much weaker than for copyright. Especially for developing, backward economies (early-19th-century US, late-19th-century Germany, and contemporary China), ignoring foreign patents is very useful for speeding up technology transfer from more advanced economies; within 19th-century US there's some limited evidence for patents being useful as a way of paying local, small producers to publish their innovations widely, but the domestic Chinese quasi-open-source "shanzhai" electronic ecosystem produces quite a lot of its own innovation while completely disregarding patent rules. But the evidence for lack of copyright being useful in that period is very weak: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/copyright-germany-britain/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/copyright-germany-britain/ Most of the great German authors of the period had to hold other jobs to support themselves, which made completing works slow and halting. Goethe supported himself as a courtier/bureaucrat/officer of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar until his mid-40s, Hegel was a teacher and academic administrator, Kleist barely made a living off of of publishing a magazine and stints in Prussian government service, etc.

henryfjordan 7y ago

IP laws are anti-competitive and rent-seeking, that's exactly the point. I agree that the amount of time copyrights are good for is ridiculous, but I still think it's better than not having them. Imagine if J.K.Rowling wrote the first 3 Harry Potter books but didn't see a dime because the second they got popular everyone with a printing press started selling them royalty-free. Would she have finished the series? I got to read all 7 books because J.K.Rowling was incentivized to write them by her copyright.

gdhbcc 7y ago
You're assuming that copyright is the only way to make money out of writing, which is simply untrue.
- SeanLuke 7y ago
  Okay. So using the J.K. Rowling example: provide a plausible way that she could make money off of her writing, and particularly her first risky book, in the absence of copyright.
  - FlyMoreRockets 7y ago
    There are a number of cases where creators of popular works have been granted substantial sums to create subsequent works through crowdsourcing. Edit for examples. Cyan, creator of Myst and Riven, had two very successful Kickstarter to fund new works. First, they raised $1,321,306 to make Obduction, then $1,433,161 for Firmament. Elite: Dangerous raised £1,578,316 for a modern remake. Yes, it works for books, too: https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=18&sort=most_funded&seed=2646719&page=1 https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=18...
    - SeanLuke 7y ago
      Cyan had already made Myst and Riven. This is close to the opposite of what I was asking for. So once again: you seriously think that J.K. Rowling, a completely unknown author with a manuscript repeatedly rejected by publishing houses, is going to be able to raise sufficient funding on Kickstarter for her first work?

javajosh 7y ago

You make two arguments here, one about degree and the other about kind. As for kind, as others have pointed out, the intent of IP law is to create artificial scarcity. The marginal cost of information is 0, so you have to put turnstiles somewhere. Society has kind of blundered and stumbled into the mishmash of enforcement measures we have today, but the intent is to reward content creators. If you accept this is a good thing, then the degree problem becomes one of proportionality. I agree that life + 70 years is exorbitant, but that particular formula is relatively easy to change legally. Practically, you have to fight powerful interests (Disney) to change it, but it can (and IMHO should) be done. One interesting notion is to fully privatize the problem of artificial scarcity. This might look something like leasing a Disney device (for example) to watch Disney content. This seems like something of a nightmare, until you realize that you don't really need to watch movies.

dredmorbius 7y ago
The problems with the DRM route are ... well known. See the EFF (https://www.eff.org/issues/drm https://www.eff.org/issues/drm) and FSF (https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/drm.html https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/drm.html) especially. Among other matters: - Your devices are no longer fully under your control, and don't answer to you. - Even where DRM isn't itself directly. malware (Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...), it inevitably creates backdoors for APTs. - The legal proscriptions on analysing and assessing ADRM mechanisms create both minefields for researchers and multiply the existing security threat risk. But most critically, and pretty much fully torpedoing your voluntarism argument, device vendors may be contractually or legally prohibited from producing non-DRM-afflicted devices in their own relationships with DRM gatekeepers, meaning that there are no (or very crippled or expensive) DRM-free alternatives. Witness ongoing efforts to plug the "anologue hole" (https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole) in various devices and software. FWIW, my complete crap Chrome browser on my complete crap Samsung Android device refuses to allow me to screenshot this HN thread claiming it is a "DRM protected page". I'd love to replace the device with something vaguely comparable. Between licensing restrictions, monopoly coercion, and market dynamics, there is literally nothing available. Or more briefly: Your assertion is absolutely unsupported by empirical experience.

vmception 7y ago

Maybe Congress should delegate the time of IP rights to the agencies, and then we can just worry about regulatory capture, but not the insurmountable nature of getting Congress to listen to the people instead of Corporate IP aggregators

2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago

An author's children shouldn't get jack unless the author saved royalties for them.

airstrike 7y ago
> An author's children shouldn't get jack unless the author saved royalties for them. This is such an obvious notion and it's not discussed nearly as often as it should. It's not like my employer will be sending my last paycheck to my children 70 years after my death...
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  On the other hand, your employer does not have the opportunity to accumulate your work without paying you while you are alive, then apply that accumulated work for fun and profit after your death. The "life plus X" is a Chesterton's Fence - it was originally there for a reason. The length of X has since grown to be ridiculous, yes, but posthumous publishing of works for which the creator received nothing was a thing.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Copyright in unpublished works is an entirely different matter than in published ones. Unpublished works get much stronger protection, that can extend for as long as 120 years from creation in the U.S. So I don't think your scenario is very relevant.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Copyright is abused, yes. People want to write anyway, yes. But you need time and resources and space to write, review, edit. Some novelists spent years collecting rejection slips (e.g. Stephen King; Larry Niven did it full time with a trust fund), which is probably irrational. But with no pot of gold at the end, only the properly delusional or wealthy could justify that investment. OTOH copyright enforcement isn't that effective, so publishers meaninglessly vary textbook editions yearly, with expiring access to essential online content.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> I feel that the whole subject of copyright is generally anti-competitive and rent-seeking Property rights in general are anti-competitive and support rent-seeking. That's actually very much the point of them; to insulate a particular interest from those who would compete with the person to whom the right is granted and enable the grantee to reliably extract value from the subject of the right, including by monopoly rents.

Taniwha 7y ago

Originally copyright was a bargain between the creator and the government (originally the Crown, but now the people) - essentially it's "we give you a fixed term monopoly, and in return you turn your creation over into the public domain afterwards". Two things have messed with that deal - corporations are now treated as people, who live forever, and copyright extension allows corporations to extend copyright past the lifespan of the public they've made that bargain with. I'd argue that a bargain that you can never collect on is not a valid bargain - the whole basis of copyright has been undermined - now it's just a monopoly.

kd5bjo 7y ago
For patents, part of the deal was also that the inventor should clearly describe how the invention works. Modern patents, however, are drafted to be so obtuse that they’re basically impossible to learn from.