5 ms·

I've continually been stunned that there seems to be no political support for shortening and simplifying copyright terms and increasing the public domain for th

by Exmoor 6y ago

I've continually been stunned that there seems to be no political support for shortening and simplifying copyright terms and increasing the public domain for the good of all. Europe used to have what I'd consider a pretty common sense general term (at least for music) of 50 years after release. But even they abandoned that for reasons I can't understand. Everyone benefits from the public domain, so how can laws limiting it drastically be passed with little resistance?

triceratops 6y ago
This is a pretty common phenomenon with laws that benefit a powerful minority but are largely opaque or obscure to the public at large. The minority lobbies for ever-more favorable laws for themselves, but there's no countering force; or if it is, it's not as strong. See also agricultural subsidies or fossil fuel subsidies.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  If you have money, it is easier to lobby for something that will make you more money. If you have no money, it is more difficult to lobby to keep something free.
- sagarm 6y ago
  Ethanol mandates are an excellent example. Completely stupid policy -- better to literally just pay farmers to do nothing -- but still, it lives on, because Iowa is the first state in the primaries.
  - RockIslandLine 6y ago
    Iowa may be an example of how ethanol is done wrong in practice, but I'm not sure your theory is so sound. Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.
jumelles 6y ago
And the US is an outlier in that work produced by the federal government is in the public domain. Not the case in Commonwealth countries, for example.
- jhbadger 6y ago
  And this includes scientific papers published by US government scientists -- journals can't call copyright on those and so they are open access even if the journal isn't. Unfortunately this only works if all the authors are government. If it is a collaboration between government scientists and those in a university or company, this loophole doesn't hold.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  Poland has quite obvious law that government documents are not protected by copyright. Interestingly, in recent years it gets more and more broadly applied, for example to database listing schools and to aerial imagery taken on a government contracts. What is quite nice if you want to use them for example as a source for OpenStreetMap edits.
MichaelZuo 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
breck 6y ago
I've wondered this for nearly 20 years. I think it's for 3 reasons: 1) most people get their information from media sources that profit from copyrights. 2) academics profit from copyrights. Therefore little research is done to showing how copyrights and patents are bad for equality and the economy, and the work that is done receives little to no attention in the media (which doesn't want to go hunting for new business models to replace their current profits) 3) The industry has done a great job at marketing copyrights and patents as intellectual "property rights", even though it is in fact the exact opposite of property rights (property rights and copyrights/patents are logically incompatible). You have to hand it to them, dishonest but effective. How do you solve this? 1. You need to reach a large number of people via channels outside the copyright driven media (and we have that now—twitter!) 2. You need research and data that shows how bad these things are (and we have that now—the China miracle; the open source revolution; the research revolution powered by scihub; the horrific track record of patents in medicine) 3. You need to start effectively marketing to the people and change the perception of these laws. Someone on HN brought up the term "Imaginary Property" as an alternative to "Intellectual Property". I think it's catchy and will grow. My estimate is abolishing copyright and patents would be worth $100,000+'s for every person in America. I think it would be the single best thing we could do for our educational, healthcare, and media systems. I think the time has finally come when we can start spreading the word.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  Copyright within the EU got so bad that a lot of teachers are not allowed to make physical copies of a single page in the book they would use to give their students as homework. So, literally, the school must license the whole book for each potential copy they would make - a year in advance. And that is such a drain on finances for the education sector (which is so underfunded even without that new problem), it's absurd. We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways?
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    > We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways? For surplus value. It is the capitalist class that is dumbing down our children. I absolutely agree with your argument, but disagree that the working class have chosen to do this. It's the bourgeois class; what Professor Jakob Rigi calls: 'knowledge capitalists'. It is the capitalist system that is continuing to plunder the commons, and unfortunately capitalist enclosure is nothing new. Hopefully we can continue to organize to help make people aware of the contradictions of capitalism, in order to change our production system. "Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others` properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge [by the capitalists] is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting. By refusing to pay and using and distributing the product at will the “digital pirate” questions the moral validity of intellectual property. Although rebelious in terms of violating capitalist intellectal property, digital piracy does not touch the capitalist foundation of the production of knowledge. It merely remains a struggle in the realm of distribution. However, it is a very important form of struggle. It contributes to the formation of a new emerging politico-cultural subjectivity of the netizen. It might be true that most “digital pirates” copy items for personal use, however, the involvement of activists such as Swartz and recent coordinated protests against SOPA and ACTA are the signs and components of a global political resistance, in making, against rent-tribute extracting information capitalism." [1] [1] https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146 https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146
matthewbauer 6y ago
It sounds like a bad deal for Europe if for instance Taylor Swift’s works get life + 70 years but Ed Sheeran’s works get 50 years. Nationalism is the main reason current copyright laws are seen as reasonable - no country wants to give their citizens a worse deal than another country. I’m afraid shortening copyright lengths would have to be done by international agreement.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  That's an individualist and not a society perspective. I think 70 year lock up is a worse deal than 50 for the citizenry in general. So you can flip that. Maybe the artist wants to go to a place with a reduced length of time because it gives them a richer catalog from which to make derivative works (like practically every Disney movie ever made). The often-used "incentivize innovation" argument can be flipped as well. The luxurious length of time may make our most creative people lazy and thus disincentivizes innovation in the same way that giving a worker, say, 10 million dollars will make them no longer show up for work.
- antientropic 6y ago
  A 50 year copyright term would also apply to foreign works, so Taylor Swift would be out of copyright in the EU after 50 years. However, under the rule of the shorter term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term), the US would be allowed to reduce Ed Sheeran's copyright to 50 years.
chrismcb 6y ago
Money. Not many people are going to lobby for something to be free. And you have companies like Disney claiming they can create jobs, so it is good for the people.
jl6 6y ago
I think the public at large cares little for “ancient” works from 1925, because that was such a different age. There is a great cultural disconnect. We typically don’t feel those works were ours in the first place. So we don’t see a great benefit in suddenly having free access to them. This will change. I believe our current cultural continuity reaches all the way back to the end of the Second World War, and that this continuity is a stretching window not a sliding window. When works from 1945+ start to enter the public domain I think the public at large will recognize these as part of their own cultural continuity and start to appreciate the value of the public domain.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  I think it's a sliding window rather than a stretching window. They're the tunes that grandma remembers listening to in her childhood. In 30 years, grandma will be dead, and the cultural heritage will be the tunes mom remembers listening to in her childhood.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  I highly doubt it will change. One of the main arguments for the Sony Bono Act of 1998 was: [1] > The term extension was supported for two key reasons. First, "copyright industries give us [(the United States)] one of our most significant trade surpluses." Second, the recently enacted legislation in the European Union had extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions. Howard Coble also stated that it was good for consumers since "When works are protected by copyright, they attract investors who can exploit the work for profit." > The term extension portion was supported by Songwriters Guild of America, National Academy of Songwriters, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, National Music Publishers Association, the Information Technology Association of America and others. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act The E.U. extension pertained to recordings of performances and was meant to harmonize with the copyright terms of authors for whom a copyright term of 70 years already applied. Moreover, copyright protection in the E.U. doesn't take the "date of publication" as starting point, but the year of death of the author. It means that in the E.U., to this day, works - works of art, music, photographs, posters, postcards,... - made in the 19th century can still be protected if the author passed after 1950. It also means that clearing copyright in the E.U. is a huge obstacle for archives and libraries when when it comes to opening up their collections. The main incentives for copyright protection are economic and geostrategic. Paradoxically, in a global, digitized world, copyright protections have gained even more strategic value in trade agreements.
shmerl 6y ago
Corruption. Those who profit on it have too much control over legislature. They extended copyright to insane lengths and they'll fight toot and nail against reducing it.
13415 6y ago
At least they should stop copyright once the authors dies. I understand that the creator deserves fair compensation, but why would relatives or companies who bought the copyright make a living from some dead person's work? To me it makes no sense, people should be paid for their own work based on their own merits. But even during lifetime 20 or 30 years would be more reasonable. As much as I sympathize with people who make substantial money off a Christmas song they wrote 40 years ago, the idea of lifelong support already seems a bit exaggerated.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  If memory serves me, and it’s late so I don’t want to go research right now, original copyright in the US was 20 years + 20 more if the author was still alive. You want works to outlast a person in the pathological (edge) case, which the old law supported because, if you’re an author and you release your most recent work a year before you die, you want the spouse you leave behind to profit despite your absence. Imagine being a sick old man that wants to write one last book and some carnivorous movie company refuses to pay you for the movie rights because you’re about to die anyway. That’s not really protecting the author as copyright is intended.
app4soft 6y ago
> I've continually been stunned that there seems to be no political support for shortening and simplifying copyright terms and increasing the public domain for the good of all. While this issue persists mostly for old copyrighted staff, a lot of newly created Public Domain works could be grabbed from OpenClipArt.org, OpenGameArt.org and similar sites.
varispeed 6y ago
> But even they abandoned that for reasons I can't understand. The answer is if you cannot understand why something like this happened, then most likely it means money changed hands. There is a strong lobby that is milking the copyright situation and what it is to them to pay some underpaid career politicians to ensure the status quo or even squeeze it a bit more?
jokethrowaway 6y ago
A centralised government means it's easy for rich companies to pay-to-win. I think we shouldn't have copyright enshrined in law and just use 2 parties contract to prevent copies (eg. I purchased/accessed this from you, I promise I won't copy or you can sue me in a private court). Sure, it's not the same level of protection but copyright is proportionally useful to how useful / how much money you can make. By doing this, you're giving freedom to experiment to everyone, remove legal friction in society and successful products (which are more likely to attract clones and piracy) will have a bit less revenue. Not a bad deal in my book.
rapjr9 6y ago
A part of the explanation might be that some copyrighted materials are considered part of a countries culture, and they don't want their culture to become diluted by the material becoming public domain. In other words, it's an attempt to keep cultures from merging or dissipating. You can argue about whether that's a good or a bad idea.

by Exmoor 6y ago

triceratops 6y ago

This is a pretty common phenomenon with laws that benefit a powerful minority but are largely opaque or obscure to the public at large. The minority lobbies for ever-more favorable laws for themselves, but there's no countering force; or if it is, it's not as strong. See also agricultural subsidies or fossil fuel subsidies.

chrismcb 6y ago
If you have money, it is easier to lobby for something that will make you more money. If you have no money, it is more difficult to lobby to keep something free.
sagarm 6y ago
Ethanol mandates are an excellent example. Completely stupid policy -- better to literally just pay farmers to do nothing -- but still, it lives on, because Iowa is the first state in the primaries.
- RockIslandLine 6y ago
  Iowa may be an example of how ethanol is done wrong in practice, but I'm not sure your theory is so sound. Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.

jumelles 6y ago

And the US is an outlier in that work produced by the federal government is in the public domain. Not the case in Commonwealth countries, for example.

jhbadger 6y ago
And this includes scientific papers published by US government scientists -- journals can't call copyright on those and so they are open access even if the journal isn't. Unfortunately this only works if all the authors are government. If it is a collaboration between government scientists and those in a university or company, this loophole doesn't hold.
matkoniecz 6y ago
Poland has quite obvious law that government documents are not protected by copyright. Interestingly, in recent years it gets more and more broadly applied, for example to database listing schools and to aerial imagery taken on a government contracts. What is quite nice if you want to use them for example as a source for OpenStreetMap edits.

MichaelZuo 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

breck 6y ago

I've wondered this for nearly 20 years. I think it's for 3 reasons: 1) most people get their information from media sources that profit from copyrights. 2) academics profit from copyrights. Therefore little research is done to showing how copyrights and patents are bad for equality and the economy, and the work that is done receives little to no attention in the media (which doesn't want to go hunting for new business models to replace their current profits) 3) The industry has done a great job at marketing copyrights and patents as intellectual "property rights", even though it is in fact the exact opposite of property rights (property rights and copyrights/patents are logically incompatible). You have to hand it to them, dishonest but effective. How do you solve this? 1. You need to reach a large number of people via channels outside the copyright driven media (and we have that now—twitter!) 2. You need research and data that shows how bad these things are (and we have that now—the China miracle; the open source revolution; the research revolution powered by scihub; the horrific track record of patents in medicine) 3. You need to start effectively marketing to the people and change the perception of these laws. Someone on HN brought up the term "Imaginary Property" as an alternative to "Intellectual Property". I think it's catchy and will grow. My estimate is abolishing copyright and patents would be worth $100,000+'s for every person in America. I think it would be the single best thing we could do for our educational, healthcare, and media systems. I think the time has finally come when we can start spreading the word.

cookiengineer 6y ago
Copyright within the EU got so bad that a lot of teachers are not allowed to make physical copies of a single page in the book they would use to give their students as homework. So, literally, the school must license the whole book for each potential copy they would make - a year in advance. And that is such a drain on finances for the education sector (which is so underfunded even without that new problem), it's absurd. We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways?
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways? For surplus value. It is the capitalist class that is dumbing down our children. I absolutely agree with your argument, but disagree that the working class have chosen to do this. It's the bourgeois class; what Professor Jakob Rigi calls: 'knowledge capitalists'. It is the capitalist system that is continuing to plunder the commons, and unfortunately capitalist enclosure is nothing new. Hopefully we can continue to organize to help make people aware of the contradictions of capitalism, in order to change our production system. "Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others` properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge [by the capitalists] is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting. By refusing to pay and using and distributing the product at will the “digital pirate” questions the moral validity of intellectual property. Although rebelious in terms of violating capitalist intellectal property, digital piracy does not touch the capitalist foundation of the production of knowledge. It merely remains a struggle in the realm of distribution. However, it is a very important form of struggle. It contributes to the formation of a new emerging politico-cultural subjectivity of the netizen. It might be true that most “digital pirates” copy items for personal use, however, the involvement of activists such as Swartz and recent coordinated protests against SOPA and ACTA are the signs and components of a global political resistance, in making, against rent-tribute extracting information capitalism." [1] [1] https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146 https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146

matthewbauer 6y ago

It sounds like a bad deal for Europe if for instance Taylor Swift’s works get life + 70 years but Ed Sheeran’s works get 50 years. Nationalism is the main reason current copyright laws are seen as reasonable - no country wants to give their citizens a worse deal than another country. I’m afraid shortening copyright lengths would have to be done by international agreement.

kristopolous 6y ago
That's an individualist and not a society perspective. I think 70 year lock up is a worse deal than 50 for the citizenry in general. So you can flip that. Maybe the artist wants to go to a place with a reduced length of time because it gives them a richer catalog from which to make derivative works (like practically every Disney movie ever made). The often-used "incentivize innovation" argument can be flipped as well. The luxurious length of time may make our most creative people lazy and thus disincentivizes innovation in the same way that giving a worker, say, 10 million dollars will make them no longer show up for work.
antientropic 6y ago
A 50 year copyright term would also apply to foreign works, so Taylor Swift would be out of copyright in the EU after 50 years. However, under the rule of the shorter term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term), the US would be allowed to reduce Ed Sheeran's copyright to 50 years.

chrismcb 6y ago

Money. Not many people are going to lobby for something to be free. And you have companies like Disney claiming they can create jobs, so it is good for the people.

jl6 6y ago

I think the public at large cares little for “ancient” works from 1925, because that was such a different age. There is a great cultural disconnect. We typically don’t feel those works were ours in the first place. So we don’t see a great benefit in suddenly having free access to them. This will change. I believe our current cultural continuity reaches all the way back to the end of the Second World War, and that this continuity is a stretching window not a sliding window. When works from 1945+ start to enter the public domain I think the public at large will recognize these as part of their own cultural continuity and start to appreciate the value of the public domain.

londons_explore 6y ago
I think it's a sliding window rather than a stretching window. They're the tunes that grandma remembers listening to in her childhood. In 30 years, grandma will be dead, and the cultural heritage will be the tunes mom remembers listening to in her childhood.
CaptArmchair 6y ago
I highly doubt it will change. One of the main arguments for the Sony Bono Act of 1998 was: [1] > The term extension was supported for two key reasons. First, "copyright industries give us [(the United States)] one of our most significant trade surpluses." Second, the recently enacted legislation in the European Union had extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions. Howard Coble also stated that it was good for consumers since "When works are protected by copyright, they attract investors who can exploit the work for profit." > The term extension portion was supported by Songwriters Guild of America, National Academy of Songwriters, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, National Music Publishers Association, the Information Technology Association of America and others. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act The E.U. extension pertained to recordings of performances and was meant to harmonize with the copyright terms of authors for whom a copyright term of 70 years already applied. Moreover, copyright protection in the E.U. doesn't take the "date of publication" as starting point, but the year of death of the author. It means that in the E.U., to this day, works - works of art, music, photographs, posters, postcards,... - made in the 19th century can still be protected if the author passed after 1950. It also means that clearing copyright in the E.U. is a huge obstacle for archives and libraries when when it comes to opening up their collections. The main incentives for copyright protection are economic and geostrategic. Paradoxically, in a global, digitized world, copyright protections have gained even more strategic value in trade agreements.

shmerl 6y ago

Corruption. Those who profit on it have too much control over legislature. They extended copyright to insane lengths and they'll fight toot and nail against reducing it.

13415 6y ago

At least they should stop copyright once the authors dies. I understand that the creator deserves fair compensation, but why would relatives or companies who bought the copyright make a living from some dead person's work? To me it makes no sense, people should be paid for their own work based on their own merits. But even during lifetime 20 or 30 years would be more reasonable. As much as I sympathize with people who make substantial money off a Christmas song they wrote 40 years ago, the idea of lifelong support already seems a bit exaggerated.

t-writescode 6y ago
If memory serves me, and it’s late so I don’t want to go research right now, original copyright in the US was 20 years + 20 more if the author was still alive. You want works to outlast a person in the pathological (edge) case, which the old law supported because, if you’re an author and you release your most recent work a year before you die, you want the spouse you leave behind to profit despite your absence. Imagine being a sick old man that wants to write one last book and some carnivorous movie company refuses to pay you for the movie rights because you’re about to die anyway. That’s not really protecting the author as copyright is intended.

app4soft 6y ago

> I've continually been stunned that there seems to be no political support for shortening and simplifying copyright terms and increasing the public domain for the good of all. While this issue persists mostly for old copyrighted staff, a lot of newly created Public Domain works could be grabbed from OpenClipArt.org, OpenGameArt.org and similar sites.

varispeed 6y ago

> But even they abandoned that for reasons I can't understand. The answer is if you cannot understand why something like this happened, then most likely it means money changed hands. There is a strong lobby that is milking the copyright situation and what it is to them to pay some underpaid career politicians to ensure the status quo or even squeeze it a bit more?

jokethrowaway 6y ago

A centralised government means it's easy for rich companies to pay-to-win. I think we shouldn't have copyright enshrined in law and just use 2 parties contract to prevent copies (eg. I purchased/accessed this from you, I promise I won't copy or you can sue me in a private court). Sure, it's not the same level of protection but copyright is proportionally useful to how useful / how much money you can make. By doing this, you're giving freedom to experiment to everyone, remove legal friction in society and successful products (which are more likely to attract clones and piracy) will have a bit less revenue. Not a bad deal in my book.

rapjr9 6y ago

A part of the explanation might be that some copyrighted materials are considered part of a countries culture, and they don't want their culture to become diluted by the material becoming public domain. In other words, it's an attempt to keep cultures from merging or dissipating. You can argue about whether that's a good or a bad idea.