8 ms·
'Music is as good as gold or oil': A man spending billions on old hits
- Swenrekcah 6y agoThis is why copyright should only last for 20 years or so. Possibly extendable one time and one time only. As an absolute maximum.
- javert 6y agoLonger copyright times would incentivize more investment in artists. For example, you would see "YC for budding young novelists" if copyright were more long-term and secure. You can pay the living expenses of a whole lot of would-be-starving-artists-but-actually-baristas, for an enormous number of years, if you can collect investment revenue from the one who turned out to be Stephen King. This idea is an extension of what copyright is for, which it to allow creators to make money, thus incentivizing them. I support unlimited-duration copyright.
- danbmil99 6y agoI don't think the financial challenge of being a writer these days is correlated to copyright laws being too weak.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lokl 6y agoSome literary agencies operate like this. They make most of their revenue from a small number of authors. In some ways, literary agencies already are "YC for budding young novelists."
- javert 6y agoI appreciate your pointing this out. My proposal would undoubtedly allow literary agencies to take more chances, funding more new authors for longer periods of time.
- rectang 6y ago> I support unlimited-duration copyright. Wow. That's an unpopular position around here! Even among those of us who support copyright and cringe at the advocacy for piracy you often see in these threads, I think there is a lot more support for shortening copyright duration. Zero copyright facilitates exploitation by certain corporations (telecoms, media giants), while unlimited copyright facilitates exploitation by a different set of corporations (IP-hoarding publishers). Limited duration copyright is the best option.
- javert 6y agoBut there is a counterpoint to that. More copyright helps creators and incentivizes creation. > unlimited copyright facilitates exploitation by a different set of corporations "Exploitation" is a loaded word. Nobody is going to pay $500 to read Harry Potter. What you would see with unlimited copyright is what you already see: there is a reasonable maximum that can be charged for (say) books in a given market. In other markets (e.g. 3rd world), prices are lower. Scientific publishing is an entirely different issue, BTW. Science journal publishers rape universities and the general public. That is not really because of copyright. It's a different system of abuse that I don't want to raise here.
- jbay808 6y agoOf the creators you know, how many of them would rank the limited duration of copyright terms among their chief worries that lead them to re-think a career as a creator?
- metalliqaz 6y ago> More copyright helps creators and incentivizes creation. This is false. It helps corporations and hardly anyone else. There was incentive to create music and other works before copyright and there would still be without it.
- javert 6y agoThis side-steps the idea presented in my original comment (4th parent of this comment).
- metalliqaz 6y agoReally drank Disney's cool-aid, huh?
- dang 6y agoPlease don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- leetcrew 6y ago> You can pay the living expenses of a whole lot of would-be-starving-artists-but-actually-baristas, for an enormous number of years, if you can collect investment revenue from the one who turned out to be Stephen King. even with unlimited-length copyright, who would do that? if I'm the investor, I would just find a bunch of aspiring artists and offer to pay their living expenses for a year in exchange for ownership of the copyright. I'd ditch the ones that didn't make money and offer better terms to the successful ones for their next work. with unlimited-length copyright, I might be willing to give more people a one-year shot, but the end result would still be that most of them go back to their barista job.
- mr_toad 6y agoThis is pretty much how the music industry operates already.
- PhantomGremlin 6y agoif copyright were more long-term I really don't get this. Other people have already replied to you but not specifically on "long-term" vs your later "unlimited-duration" stand. The USA adopted the Berne Convention in 1989. It stipulates that the duration of the term for copyright protection is the life of the author plus at least 50 years after their death. For some categories of works, the minimum duration is shorter. For example, the minimum term for applied art is 25 years. Movies have a minimum term of 50 years. Countries may choose a longer term of protection, and most countries have done so. If you're a potential "budding young novelist", will you eschew that career because life + 50 years isn't unlimited and isn't long enough for you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths#Berne_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
- LukeShu 6y agoHonestly, I'd be happy with a short term and unlimited renewals; you just have to renew it. Shortish base-term of 10 years or so that works as currently, but after that you need to renew every 10 years. Let the special interests that currently lobby to extend copyright just spend that money renewing; don't hold everyone else's stuff hostage from the public domain too. And by forcing them to actually file renewals, the forgotten works in buyouts will slip through to the PD; there will be no questions of "who actually owns these rights" for old works, just check who renewed it.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoAlso make it public record on the internet. Current copyright owners must renew with proof for anything over 10 years old. Boom.
- LukeShu 6y agoMaybe not on the Internet, but go back to old Library of Congress rules. You used to need to file a copy with the Library of Congress to obtain copyright. Then they'd start filing it, but immediately taking it out on loan, and lose it. Then they'd "file" it and take it out on loan before ever giving it over; the copy for the library never existed. Then they decided to just give up on the farce, and not make you file. To renew a work, you should have to actually file a (non-DRM) copy with the Library of Congress, and not take it out on loan. If it's important enough to renew, it's important enough for the Library to demand an actual copy. Now, I don't support having to file with the Library of Congress for the initial copyright, that'd disproportionately hurt independent people who publish on the Internet.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoI mean I'm not opposed to this, but if you're claiming something is your copyright, there should be online carbon copies of it so anybody can confirm and verify.
- rectang 6y agoI agree that the uncertainty over whether works are actually copyrighted is a major concern, and one that I wish we could fix independent of the issue of copyright duration. However, concentration of valuable IP in the hands of the few is also a problem. Limited duration copyright provides the greatest benefit to individual authors (by maximizing their bargaining power while limiting the bargaining power of IP-hoarders through erosion) and the public domain.
- rtx 6y agoDo you also hold the same views for brand names?
- dllthomas 6y agoWell, for my part, I do think that we should be able to copy and share brand names without permission from their originator after 20 years. On the flip side, I also think that we shouldn't be able to use creative works to pass ourselves off as someone we're not, at any point after the creation. "IP" is an odd collection collection of things that actually work pretty different from each other. Patent limits the use of some kinds information; copyright limits the copying of other kinds of information. Both of these are naturally "non-rivalrous" - I can watch a movie or build an engine at the same time that you watch that same movie or build that same (kind of) engine and we don't interfere with each other. We artificially treat them as if they were rivalrous - where "there are only so many to go around" - so that the market will better reward their production. Letting them eventually fall into the public domain, however, ameliorates the dead weight loss we're causing by artificially driving up the price. Trademark is a bit different. Someone choosing to do business with me, because they have had good experiences doing so in the past or heard about me from a friend, is a limited resource in a way information alone is not. Letting others confuse that by providing their own goods and services under my mark doesn't increase the total value available. So your question isn't really a natural one. These things work differently and it makes sense that we treat them differently. Having said that, your question does make me think about an issue I've seen crop up occasionally, where a long-standing brand known for high quality will self destruct by cutting the quality without cutting prices. If the reduction in quality allows for sufficient cutting of expenses, and the reduction in quality is not sufficiently, immediately obvious, this can radically increase margins without significantly decreasing volume and make people a lot of short term profit until the suckers buying the product figure it out. On the one hand, simply capping the length would presumably make this worse, not better. On the other hand, making them contingent on something beyond a certain point might be an interesting space to look for a solution.
- iso1210 6y agoCopyright and patents protect the producer Trademarks protect the consumer
- metalliqaz 6y agoThis is not what copyright is for.
- WJW 6y agoThe internet was "for" military communications and academic research sharing, not cat videos or ecommerce. A great many things are used for things other than what they were intended for.
- metalliqaz 6y agoA meaningless argument. The Internet is for communication, which is still its primary purpose.
- coldtea 6y agoIt wasn't for communication in general though, it was for millitary communications - a specific thing. And even if the argument if flawed, the concept underlying it is solid: what something was "originally meant for" is not the same as what something was actually usef for, or found eventually useful for....
- uryga 6y agoim a bit surprised by this thread tbh! the original comment's pragmatics (in the linguistic sense) are pretty clearly "i believe this is an abuse of the copyright mechanism". discussing the system's original purpose or whatever seems besides the point...
- coldtea 6y agoBut it's only an abuse of the copyright mechanism based on the "original purpose" (to promote art etc). It's not an abuse based on its actual, de facto, purpose: to sustain profitable back catalogue sales and aid the entertainment industry. So whether the "original purpose" is important is the whole point in determining abuse or not...
- echelon 6y agoWith AI-generated vocals and music, I think we're about to see an explosion in works created. I don't know that it's wise to invest in copyright catalogues right now. We're going to be able to create nearly unlimited music with famous vocalists (and entirely generated ones!) Check out the Tupac Shakur voice on https://vo.codes https://vo.codes It's kind of broken, but it took zero effort. And that's the direction we're headed. r9y9 on Github has amazing results synthesizing lyrics. Better than vocaloid at this point. Look what people are making: https://www.reddit.com/r/VocalSynthesis/comments/i3egph/even_stronger/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VocalSynthesis/comments/i3egph/even... https://youtu.be/3qR8I5zlMHs https://youtu.be/3qR8I5zlMHs https://youtu.be/2X3Rqo6JVmg https://youtu.be/2X3Rqo6JVmg https://youtu.be/noJHHN39ZCw https://youtu.be/noJHHN39ZCw https://m.soundcloud.com/r9y9/sets/dnn-based-singing-voice https://m.soundcloud.com/r9y9/sets/dnn-based-singing-voice My prediction is that in ten years, music copyright is going to be very different than it is today. We'll still have live artists putting on performances, but we'll also have entirely virtual artists like Gorillaz (with neural-backed lyrics) and recreations of Tupac, MJ, Elvis, and so on.
- jhardy54 6y ago> It's kind of broken, but it took zero effort. What does "zero effort" mean? I'd be surprised if you told me that Tupac's voice was recreated without using any copyrighted material.
- echelon 6y ago> I'd be surprised if you told me that Tupac's voice was recreated without using any copyrighted material. This fascinates me and opens up a wholly new can of worms. Technically, it's mostly Linda Johnson's speech data, which is in the public domain. Most voice models incorporate this as the base for learning how to transform phoneme to spectrogram, spectrogram to waveform. They'll then transfer learn on top of this. Could you tell the difference between Tupac and an impersonator? What about 10% Tupac, 90% impersonator? What if it's really 1% Tupac, 9% impersonator, 90% Linda Johnson? Or no Tupac at all? Can anyone tell the difference? Where did the copyrighted data go? Is there any left?
- bgrainger 6y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22019925
- zozbot234 6y agoI do wonder why this guy thinks that the rights to a successful song are an "uncorrelated" asset. Wouldn't strong economic growth mean that people are far more likely to spend money on these things? Especially for 'sync' rights which mostly come up for things like ads, or derivative mass-marketed media (e.g. successful song X ends up in the soundtrack of movie Y)? Just seemed like a weird claim to me.
- davidivadavid 6y agoNot a professional finance person, but I think that in that context it's important to look at "uncorrelated from what". When building a basket of uncorrelated assets, you look at pairwise correlations, not just aggregates.
- paulpauper 6y agoBecause even in recessions, studios and ad agencies still shell out big bucks for songs, even if the stock market is down a lot. The royalty rates for Beatles songs did not fall in 2000-2003 despite the S&P 500 falling 50%. There is very low correlation with other asset classes.
- paulpauper 6y agoThis only works well if if people still care about the artists and culture long after the hits are released. Catalogs from the 50s, 60s, and 70s were dirt cheap in the 80s and early 90s because few anticipated the huge nostalgic demand by boomers to relive their youth in the 2000s and later. Will today's consumers of pop music feel the same nostalgic attachment as boomers to today? hard to know. But I think not, due to fragmentation. A top-selling Arina Grande song will probably be all but forgotten in 50 years.
- puranjay 6y agoPeople will always listen to the music of their youth. The 90s pop hits are still popular among my 30+ year old friends because that was the music they grew up listening to
- coldtea 6y ago>A top-selling Arina Grande song will probably be all but forgotten in 50 years. The people listening to it now will listen to it in 30 and 50 years. And, judging by social media comments, teenagers in that era will also appreciate it. There used to be this notion that only "great" music survives (probably judging from classical music or the history of literature), and "transient" pop hits don't, but we've seen every one-hit-wonder and tons of pop hits from the 70s and 80s survice just fine, and even get new listeners. It's basically a kitch pop hit, but it's not just people listening to Toto's Africa in the 1980s that appreciate it now. Or stuff in Madonna's 80s catalogue, etc.
- martindbp 6y agoAn interesting thought experiment: what if shares in songs could be traded on a public exchange? Which would be in the S&P 500?