18 ms·

All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

248 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago
99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.
- dr-detroit 5y ago
  "I am altering the deal, pray us megacorps don't alter it any further."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mattl 5y ago
  What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    One of the rights that copyright protects is the right to make derivative works--such as sequels and film adaptations. If you consider that someone like Terry Pratchett can productively write a literary universe for decades, it feels to me like the best answer is around 30-50 years.
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      Isn't that trademark? IOW, when Steamboat Willie's copyright expires, it doesn't give you the right to make a new Mickey Mouse film. Disney still has a trademark on Mickey.
      - jcranmer 5y ago
        No, trademark is entirely different IP. Copyright very explicitly protects the right to make derivative works. (See 17 USC §106 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106) for the full list of what copyright actually protects.)
        bryanlarsen 5y ago
        But if your copyright has expired, you can still prevent derivative works via trademark. Disney has trademarked Mickey Mouse.
  - Fordec 5y ago
    50%+1 of a standard living persons actionable career. Do assuming 18 to 70. That makes 52/2 = 26 and +1 = 27. For sake of even numbers, you can fight over 25 or 30. I don't mind either way, both are far better than the current status.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    Maybe 10 years. We are moving at breakneck speed in just about every corner, but copyright protections. A decade is forever in today's world.
    - sovnade 5y ago
      But there's plenty of things made 10 years ago that are still very relevant and still generating money for the creators. I think that's the concern.
      - mattl 5y ago
        Yeah. New Order are still making good money from Blue Monday from 1983, and clearly there’s a lot of interest in The Beatles still. Maybe a shorter period of time with an option to extend it like a snooze feature on an alarm clock.
        mnsc 5y ago
        But does having a work enter public domain automatically mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams via legitimate services like Spotify?
        mattl 5y ago
        That’s something that’s probably not been figured out yet. Probably won’t be figured out until popular stuff from the 50s and 60s starts hitting PD.
        criddell 5y ago
        Why would Spotify pay anybody for playing a public domain song?
        mnsc 5y ago
        Good point! :D
        5y ago
  - iamben 5y ago
    Honestly, I don't mind the idea that you the creator, personally, holds the copyright for life. If I write a song in my 20s that sets the world on fire and I can still live a good life at 80 off the back of it, great. The minute I sell that copyright to someone else (or it's inherited), a time limit begins to apply. Perhaps here you move into the '20 years' or something category.
    - toast0 5y ago
      For popular works, tracking the life of the creator is doable. For less popular works, figuring out who the creator is can be rather difficult. And then figuring out if they're alive isn't always easy either. The screen actors guild has somewhat of a highlander policy, but if I release something Copyright My Name, there's hundreds or thousands of people it could be, including a Pulitzer Prize winning author who will likely predecease me.
      - vineyardmike 5y ago
        Thats what registration is for. We know the "true" authors/owners of most patents, so why not copyrights.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Not OP, but I think it makes very little difference whatever number you pick between “none” and “forever”. Earlier this year a few authors whose work I enjoy tweeted furiously about this topic. Similar arguments may apply to audio and visual copyright. If, for example, copyright lasted 14 years, then The Atrocity Archives (Stross) would already be public domain, which reduces incentive to create more in the series (not sure why, I would have expected new novels have new copyright, but I trust an author to know what their own motivations are, and I refuse to second-guess). Now, these various authors on Twitter argued that being an author is poorly paid (it is), and that they would like to offer someone an inheritance comparable to a widow/er pension. I can sympathise with that. But, sales in most things decline over time. Sequels more, apparently (I wouldn’t know, one of the authors tweeted that). If income falls off exponentially with time, half the income for some specific work will be in the first x-months, 75% in 2x months, 99.9% in 10x months — I’m saying months rather than years because of how fast best-seller lists change, I don’t have real data. Conversely, the reason for such a decline is that almost all the people who care will have bought the work soon after it is published. Making copyright last 100(average of all x) fails to harm society by preventing the work from becoming public domain, but only by the same[2] as it fails to help creative people commercialise their creativity, and for exactly the same reason: almost nobody cares any more. This remains true even if the income curve isn’t exponential, as the benefit to society is simply not having to pay for it[3]. Certainly I’m not rushing out to download some copy of inter-war music, radio broadcasts of whatever category, or newspapers; and I don’t even know if that’s for lack of money because I don’t care. I suspect I’m not alone in not caring. Indeed, I only oppose zero/infinite duration because of the edge cases. The point of copyright is to give creators an incentive at all besides the default of creative people being patronised or commissioned. This is already a thing — furry art by commission; stories[0] and YouTubers supported on Patreon. As this is not the status quo, if we switched to “no copyright” I expect this will break stuff and bankrupt people who have come to rely on it (this also means I oppose sudden changes in general). If copyright was infinite, all works world eventually become lost in a legal quagmire of e.g. mergers and acquisitions where the actual owner ceases to be known. [0] https://www.patreon.com/HamboneHFY https://www.patreon.com/HamboneHFY [1] except where the income per unit is too small to process ($0.001 per person times US population is still a lot of money). [2] or losing track of who owns it, or [1]
  - ncallaway 5y ago
    The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.
    - loceng 5y ago
      I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost, perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over it.
      - ncallaway 5y ago
        Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the rights holders are for a particular work. A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.
        natechols 5y ago
        This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.
        jedberg 5y ago
        I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that. That being said, what in reality would happen if you release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights holder.
        ncallaway 5y ago
  - danielrpa 5y ago
    25 years
  - keeglin 5y ago
    I was going to go with 10 years. I mean, nobody cared about Madonna's "Ray Of Light" beyond 1999. On the other hand, artists - like Dolly Parton - have made long careers out of songwriting that have carried them into their senior years, so it's a balance. Clearly 99 years is absurd. Maybe 20 years is the balance to strike. Dolly would still be doing just fine with that term.
    - siver_john 5y ago
      As the patron saint of my state, I'd also point out that she has used the money from her music to invest in other things. She is quite a shrewd business woman and I think even with 10 years she would have been fine. Though I think 20 years is reasonable enough.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    Life of the author+0 years. Most people expect to inherit money and property from their parents but not to be paid for work their parents did years ago. I don't see why children of authors should have different expectations.
    - C19is20 5y ago
      Is it the kids combining or the companies that bought the golden goose?
    - LanceH 5y ago
      Creates the odd incentive for people to die.
      - devcpp 5y ago
        And also to not die, since they earn money for their children. It's the reverse of the usual inheritance situation, where the state and the kids both want the person to die.
      - vineyardmike 5y ago
        Maybe timeleft = (AVG_LIFE_EXPECTANCY - currAge) or till death if currAge > avglife
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    IMHO you have to start with the justification. The previous justification was to incentivize creators by protecting their financial interests and the interests of their offspring. It’s very clear to see that those interests are no longer being met when you sell your blockbuster song to a record company for $500. IMHO make copyright non-transferable and make corporate copyright 14 years with an application to double. That way it works for the little guy without big guys abusing it (e.g. Disney).
  - DenisM 5y ago
    Copyright should be taxed every year based on the cumulative earnings for the first 10 years. This allows the rights holders to milk the bulk of the profit and yet quickly pass the orphaned works to the public domain - both benefitting the development of arts and sciences as stipulated by the US constitution. Heck, even taxing works for $1 a piece per year would free up a huge number of orphans.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so said works could participate in the market. But in the information age, where copying information is as close to free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense than it used to. That's without even considering that giant corporations have subverted this system and exploited many producers of works while profiting well past the deaths of the creators. It is my opinion that we need an alternative mechanism for funding the creation of information-works that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity.
    - splitstud 5y ago
      Then we would be well advised to listen to the creators of such work, who largely tend to describe the type of system you want to do away with.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        I don't think that follows. If we listen to car manufacturers we should replace our cars every year. Creators who make a lot of money with the current system are incentivized to perpetuate it, and some of those who don't make much imagine that they someday might.
    - pie_flavor 5y ago
      You have said it was originally to help out the market, and you have said copying information is now nearly free, but you forgot to say how or why the first part is incongruous with the second. Why does it make less sense than it used to? Which of our new capabilities could be leveraged by a new system?
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        You used to have to recoup the costs of publishing as well as fund the author. Binding books was and is not free, but copying bits effectively is.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  i think this is fair and we will likely see it extended further. the media works of today cost way more than they did before. some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the longevity of media has increased over time. we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even longer since the production value is so high i think we will see this in video games the most. they will continue to be revenue sources in digital formats and companies will be defensive over losing them
  - aqme28 5y ago
    Why is the cost of media a major factor on whether or not it is "fair"? Ostensibly, the point of these restrictions is to incentivize the people who make IP. But no one actually considers revenue 99 years into the future, so it doesn't work as an incentive.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Okay, but for all modern media at those price tags, the overwhelming majority of the revenue is seen within the first year, often within the first month or even first few days (consider pre-orders on video games— RDR2 reportedly made $725M in its first weekend). Why should this content be locked up for decades past the point where it has already made 90% of the money it's ever going to make? So the Disney company can have a century's worth of exclusive material ready to go when they launch D+, creating an absolutely impenetrable barrier to entry for an upstart?
  - criddell 5y ago
    > some songs cost millions to produce Nobody is investing millions in a song that they think could take 95 years to earn enough to justify the investment. Copyright is there to incentivize creating new works. If the copyright was shortened to max(life of the artist, 50 years), how many artists do you think would stop creating? Frankly, there's an argument to be made that shortening the length of copyright to 25 years would encourage more new works simply because you can rest an your laurels.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I think if we're going to time limit ownership rights to intellectual property we should time limit ownership rights to everything - including land, buildings, shares and stocks, bonds, art collections, all of it. Except maybe trivial items like home furnishings and portable tools. I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing between these asset classes. If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is all property. If it isn't, it isn't. Any argument you can make about the benefits of putting intellectual work in the public domain, you can also make - more convincingly - about land and any other productive resource.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Personal ownership is already limited by the owner’s lifetime and automatically transfers when they die. Copyrights, on the other hand, outlive the creator.
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      Generational wealth is a significant problem as winner take all dynamics tend to concentrate wealth within families until they get so powerful that they form aristocracies. The US is new enough that it’s aristocracy is just getting started. Several European countries lack them because war or revolution hit the reset button, but if you look at a country like the UK, you will see it alive and well.
      - User23 5y ago
        Plenty of UK nobility has no substantial assets to speak of other than a house that’s ten times bigger than they need and a constant money pit. The traditional way out is to marry a rich commoner who wants their children to be titled.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        On the other hand, generational wealth below obscene amounts is a vital stabilizing force in a society. A middle to upper middle class family passing on a boost to each subsequent generation is a good thing. Grandparents help pay for their grandkids' schooling, kids have some sense of stability and a safety net, etc. We need many layers of safety nets and stabilizing forces, because every layer is prone to different types of failure. There is a natural and desirable support structure of individial -> family -> community -> state -> humanity that allows society and individuals to survive and thrive through changing circumstances. Too much reliance on any one layer, especially the state, is a recipe for fragility or tyranny. When every individual has an emergency fund, every family has a nest egg, every community pulls together in time of need, and every state provides a safety net of last resort, we can weather any storm.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  It gets more odd for the next few years. See 'Sound Recordings Published' sections https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
  - Amorymeltzer 5y ago
    This is a fabulous resource! I especially like that, unlike most guides, it also lists the dates going forward. Great way to show just how complex the system we've cobbled together is.
- grishka 5y ago
  In an ideal world, copyright should last for maybe two or three years. It would still mostly fulfill its purpose to allow the creator to earn money, but would severely curtail the abuse potential. In an even more ideal world, copyright shouldn't be transferable.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    It is complicated. For very popular artists yes, their music is commercially short-lived and most of the returns will come in the first six months. But for the more obscure composers and performers the reality is completely different.
    - t-writescode 5y ago
      It wouldn't. If a music studio needs to wait 4 years to not have to pay any royalties at all, then the song would be recorded (copyright created) and the music groups would just wait 4 years and then start playing it on radio stations. It needs to be something like 12 + 12 or 20 + 20, or even 20 + infinitely continuable for a gradually increasing cost. It still has the potential issue of waiting out that 24 to 40 years; but companies are less likely to do that, when a few years is basically nothing. It's been 2 years since covid started, for example.
      - grishka 5y ago
        Companies will go bankrupt. Their business models will break down. Yes. That's intended. There's no need for these middlemen in the age of the internet.
        rhines 5y ago
        IMO if you want to end the commercialization of content, targeting copyright is not the most effective route. Big players will still be able to use their power to ensure that they have control over distribution, and will continue to profit off of content. Small players, such as the people coming up with new content, will find it harder and harder to make any money, to the benefit of the big players who no longer need to share profits with them. The more effective approach would be to simply remove the economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no one's able to profit off it in the first place and spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer penalized.
- kragen 5y ago
  We should eliminate copyright. Zero years. Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records. It became fairly dubious in the age of photocopiers and tape recorders, but fortunately was little enforced, except in the USSR. A photocopier was useless without typeset or handwritten text to copy, and a tape recorder was no substitute for a recording studio, and the copies degraded every generation, so publishing houses were still needed. Now every computer is a book-copying and music-copying machine more powerful than the entire publishing industry a few decades ago: it can transmit a gigabit per second, and for a one-megabyte book, that's 125 copies a second, 10 million copies a day, 3 billion copies a year, so copyright is a constant danger to everyone. Fanfic sites are full of people sharing stories they wrote with no expectation of making money. Soundcloud is full of indie band recordings edited in Audacity. The age of the rich celebrity authors like Isaac Asimov or Ernest Hemingway ended decades ago, not due to xeroxes but due to TV. (We still have celebrity musicians, but it's not clear that helping the Rolling Stones buy cocaine is an important public policy objective.) The best software is free software, as copyright makes proprietary software untrustworthy, creating incentives to stuff it with malware. And, even if Elsevier were paying researchers instead of vice versa, the idea that copyright on research papers could fund research is as ludicrous as the idea that people would stop singing songs and telling stories without monopoly profits. Apps, videos, and websites constantly disappear due to (often groundless) accusations of copyright violations. Police evade accountability by playing copyrighted music, rendering any recordings of their abuses copyright violations. A friend of mine committed suicide after being prosecuted for copyright violations that might have been fair use; we'll never know. So, I would set the copyright term at zero years. Legal monopolies on preserving and sharing knowledge are not only useless in today's world, they are harmful, a monstrous menace to the integrity of the historical record and to private communication.
  - andymockli 5y ago
    To add to your point, the futility of copyright enforcement in the digital age created a new industry in the form of DRM and YouTube auto-takedown algorithms.
danielrpa 5y ago
75-80 years late, so wonderful
- Hokusai 5y ago
  So, anyone that had a personal attachment to that music is dead. The current goal of copyright is to let companies own the culture you grew with. All the movies, music, books and games that defined who you are will not enter the public domain until you are dead or very old. Companies like Disney were founded on well known stories. They will not allow anybody else too accomplish the same.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    Disney was founded on Mickey Mouse. Yes, they made major motion pictures out of old myths and legends, like Cinderella and Robin Hood, but those stories have always been public domain and you can write a book or movie about them with no problem.
    - cool_dude85 5y ago
      Not sure about their finances back then, but I have to guess that their feature films were the money makers and the shorts less so. And I think the grandparent's point is that Mickey Mouse today is in some sense analogous to your Cinderellas and Robin Hoods in the 30s... only you can't make your own movie about him.
      - Someone 5y ago
        Back then, their feature films weren’t money makers, as they didn’t make them. Their first feature film was very profitable, but it was from about 15 years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarfs_(1937_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarf...). However, their next two movies (Pinocchio, Fantasia) cost them money because they were released during World War Two, when they couldn’t show them in large parts of the world. They needed Dumbo to make up for that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbo#Box_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbo#Box_office), then Bambi wasn’t a huge success, either (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi#Box_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi#Box_office) So, I guess it wasn’t till after World War Two that their feature films became profitable. They survived, so chances are the shorts brought in money.
phkahler 5y ago
Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?
- aardvark179 5y ago
  A simple copy of remaster won’t cut it in the US, but if you did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those. There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and rights payments.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
    As far as I know, restoration is insufficient to claim a derivative copyright in a public domain work because it lacks sufficient originality. To the extent you do a good job, your additions to the underlying public domain work are not your creative authorship. They are a restoration of the original author's authorship. I believe that is why Peter Kuran (Trinity and Beyond) patented a photochemical restoration process for revitalizing the color in films. Because his other restoration work is not protectable.
- sovnade 5y ago
  Doesn't it have to be changed in some way? Changing the storage format doesn't change the actual work. I assume you're talking about the Fair Use clause where something has to be different enough from the original to be re-claimed as new?
- dahart 5y ago
  No, because the original is still in the public domain. Copyright law is pretty good about defining “derivative works”, and someone’s remaster is not going to hold up as a copyrightable contribution.
  - kragen 5y ago
macksd 5y ago
does the Charleston
hippie_queen 5y ago
Can't wait to finally sample Thomas Edison on the phonograph for my Soundcloud tracks, and not having to worry about the police knocking at my door!
- kristopolous 5y ago
  Hey be careful what you wish for! Check out "I am the Edison phonograph" from 1906 https://youtu.be/EQC9CjFezrQ https://youtu.be/EQC9CjFezrQ I'd use that, totally would.
  - btilly 5y ago
    Sadly, that's still under copyright. The problem was that various music copyrights were being dated from the 1970s for historical reasons despite the music itself being much older. Congress passed a law fixing a whole lot of that in one lump. Which is why music from the 1920s becomes public domain at the same time as movies from the early 1930s.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      I guess it's Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton then. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zCrtErmipXE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zCrtErmipXE Alright, that's fine for now. The distance between this and modern pop music is actually razor thin. Update the instrumentation with synthesizers, give it percussions and you'd be done. Interesting, the covers are further away from modern pop than this is
- Clubber 5y ago
  Or getting sued for twice your current net worth.
- odiroot 5y ago
  Knowing Edison, he can get up from the grave any day, to sue you into bankruptcy.
  - 5y ago
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Steamboat Willie was in 1928 though, I wonder if anyone is sitting around thinking aw, when that comes out my evil plan can finally be put into motion.
clavicat 5y ago
This deluge of jungle music will turn your daughters into flappers and Gibson girls before you can say 23 skidoo.
- werds 5y ago
  this could turn hare krishna into a bad boy
paulpauper 5y ago
does this mean Beatles music will eventually be public domain
- ryankrage77 5y ago
  Not in your lifetime.
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: What will enter the public domain in 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420667 - Dec 2021 (229 comments)
6510 5y ago
Non of fiction is important enough to have laws about.
twirlock 5y ago
One hundred years. Yeah, our establishment is so committed to all the kumbaya shit it spouts when limiting individual expression.
silexia 5y ago
Copyright should expire 20 years after the work is created. Shorter and the author will not be able to monetize, longer and society is held hostage by rent seekers. Patents should just be abolished altogether. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.

248 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago

99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.

dr-detroit 5y ago
"I am altering the deal, pray us megacorps don't alter it any further."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mattl 5y ago
What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?
- jcranmer 5y ago
  One of the rights that copyright protects is the right to make derivative works--such as sequels and film adaptations. If you consider that someone like Terry Pratchett can productively write a literary universe for decades, it feels to me like the best answer is around 30-50 years.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Isn't that trademark? IOW, when Steamboat Willie's copyright expires, it doesn't give you the right to make a new Mickey Mouse film. Disney still has a trademark on Mickey.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      No, trademark is entirely different IP. Copyright very explicitly protects the right to make derivative works. (See 17 USC §106 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106) for the full list of what copyright actually protects.)
      - bryanlarsen 5y ago
        But if your copyright has expired, you can still prevent derivative works via trademark. Disney has trademarked Mickey Mouse.
- Fordec 5y ago
  50%+1 of a standard living persons actionable career. Do assuming 18 to 70. That makes 52/2 = 26 and +1 = 27. For sake of even numbers, you can fight over 25 or 30. I don't mind either way, both are far better than the current status.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  Maybe 10 years. We are moving at breakneck speed in just about every corner, but copyright protections. A decade is forever in today's world.
  - sovnade 5y ago
    But there's plenty of things made 10 years ago that are still very relevant and still generating money for the creators. I think that's the concern.
    - mattl 5y ago
      Yeah. New Order are still making good money from Blue Monday from 1983, and clearly there’s a lot of interest in The Beatles still. Maybe a shorter period of time with an option to extend it like a snooze feature on an alarm clock.
      - mnsc 5y ago
        But does having a work enter public domain automatically mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams via legitimate services like Spotify?
        mattl 5y ago
        That’s something that’s probably not been figured out yet. Probably won’t be figured out until popular stuff from the 50s and 60s starts hitting PD.
        criddell 5y ago
        Why would Spotify pay anybody for playing a public domain song?
        mnsc 5y ago
        Good point! :D
        5y ago
- iamben 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't mind the idea that you the creator, personally, holds the copyright for life. If I write a song in my 20s that sets the world on fire and I can still live a good life at 80 off the back of it, great. The minute I sell that copyright to someone else (or it's inherited), a time limit begins to apply. Perhaps here you move into the '20 years' or something category.
  - toast0 5y ago
    For popular works, tracking the life of the creator is doable. For less popular works, figuring out who the creator is can be rather difficult. And then figuring out if they're alive isn't always easy either. The screen actors guild has somewhat of a highlander policy, but if I release something Copyright My Name, there's hundreds or thousands of people it could be, including a Pulitzer Prize winning author who will likely predecease me.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Thats what registration is for. We know the "true" authors/owners of most patents, so why not copyrights.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Not OP, but I think it makes very little difference whatever number you pick between “none” and “forever”. Earlier this year a few authors whose work I enjoy tweeted furiously about this topic. Similar arguments may apply to audio and visual copyright. If, for example, copyright lasted 14 years, then The Atrocity Archives (Stross) would already be public domain, which reduces incentive to create more in the series (not sure why, I would have expected new novels have new copyright, but I trust an author to know what their own motivations are, and I refuse to second-guess). Now, these various authors on Twitter argued that being an author is poorly paid (it is), and that they would like to offer someone an inheritance comparable to a widow/er pension. I can sympathise with that. But, sales in most things decline over time. Sequels more, apparently (I wouldn’t know, one of the authors tweeted that). If income falls off exponentially with time, half the income for some specific work will be in the first x-months, 75% in 2x months, 99.9% in 10x months — I’m saying months rather than years because of how fast best-seller lists change, I don’t have real data. Conversely, the reason for such a decline is that almost all the people who care will have bought the work soon after it is published. Making copyright last 100(average of all x) fails to harm society by preventing the work from becoming public domain, but only by the same[2] as it fails to help creative people commercialise their creativity, and for exactly the same reason: almost nobody cares any more. This remains true even if the income curve isn’t exponential, as the benefit to society is simply not having to pay for it[3]. Certainly I’m not rushing out to download some copy of inter-war music, radio broadcasts of whatever category, or newspapers; and I don’t even know if that’s for lack of money because I don’t care. I suspect I’m not alone in not caring. Indeed, I only oppose zero/infinite duration because of the edge cases. The point of copyright is to give creators an incentive at all besides the default of creative people being patronised or commissioned. This is already a thing — furry art by commission; stories[0] and YouTubers supported on Patreon. As this is not the status quo, if we switched to “no copyright” I expect this will break stuff and bankrupt people who have come to rely on it (this also means I oppose sudden changes in general). If copyright was infinite, all works world eventually become lost in a legal quagmire of e.g. mergers and acquisitions where the actual owner ceases to be known. [0] https://www.patreon.com/HamboneHFY https://www.patreon.com/HamboneHFY [1] except where the income per unit is too small to process ($0.001 per person times US population is still a lot of money). [2] or losing track of who owns it, or [1]
- ncallaway 5y ago
  The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.
  - loceng 5y ago
    I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost, perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over it.
    - ncallaway 5y ago
      Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the rights holders are for a particular work. A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.
      - natechols 5y ago
        This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.
        jedberg 5y ago
        I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that. That being said, what in reality would happen if you release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights holder.
        ncallaway 5y ago
- danielrpa 5y ago
  25 years
- keeglin 5y ago
  I was going to go with 10 years. I mean, nobody cared about Madonna's "Ray Of Light" beyond 1999. On the other hand, artists - like Dolly Parton - have made long careers out of songwriting that have carried them into their senior years, so it's a balance. Clearly 99 years is absurd. Maybe 20 years is the balance to strike. Dolly would still be doing just fine with that term.
  - siver_john 5y ago
    As the patron saint of my state, I'd also point out that she has used the money from her music to invest in other things. She is quite a shrewd business woman and I think even with 10 years she would have been fine. Though I think 20 years is reasonable enough.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  Life of the author+0 years. Most people expect to inherit money and property from their parents but not to be paid for work their parents did years ago. I don't see why children of authors should have different expectations.
  - C19is20 5y ago
    Is it the kids combining or the companies that bought the golden goose?
  - LanceH 5y ago
    Creates the odd incentive for people to die.
    - devcpp 5y ago
      And also to not die, since they earn money for their children. It's the reverse of the usual inheritance situation, where the state and the kids both want the person to die.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Maybe timeleft = (AVG_LIFE_EXPECTANCY - currAge) or till death if currAge > avglife
- jimbob45 5y ago
  IMHO you have to start with the justification. The previous justification was to incentivize creators by protecting their financial interests and the interests of their offspring. It’s very clear to see that those interests are no longer being met when you sell your blockbuster song to a record company for $500. IMHO make copyright non-transferable and make corporate copyright 14 years with an application to double. That way it works for the little guy without big guys abusing it (e.g. Disney).
- DenisM 5y ago
  Copyright should be taxed every year based on the cumulative earnings for the first 10 years. This allows the rights holders to milk the bulk of the profit and yet quickly pass the orphaned works to the public domain - both benefitting the development of arts and sciences as stipulated by the US constitution. Heck, even taxing works for $1 a piece per year would free up a huge number of orphans.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so said works could participate in the market. But in the information age, where copying information is as close to free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense than it used to. That's without even considering that giant corporations have subverted this system and exploited many producers of works while profiting well past the deaths of the creators. It is my opinion that we need an alternative mechanism for funding the creation of information-works that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity.
  - splitstud 5y ago
    Then we would be well advised to listen to the creators of such work, who largely tend to describe the type of system you want to do away with.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I don't think that follows. If we listen to car manufacturers we should replace our cars every year. Creators who make a lot of money with the current system are incentivized to perpetuate it, and some of those who don't make much imagine that they someday might.
  - pie_flavor 5y ago
    You have said it was originally to help out the market, and you have said copying information is now nearly free, but you forgot to say how or why the first part is incongruous with the second. Why does it make less sense than it used to? Which of our new capabilities could be leveraged by a new system?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      You used to have to recoup the costs of publishing as well as fund the author. Binding books was and is not free, but copying bits effectively is.
foolfoolz 5y ago
i think this is fair and we will likely see it extended further. the media works of today cost way more than they did before. some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the longevity of media has increased over time. we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even longer since the production value is so high i think we will see this in video games the most. they will continue to be revenue sources in digital formats and companies will be defensive over losing them
- aqme28 5y ago
  Why is the cost of media a major factor on whether or not it is "fair"? Ostensibly, the point of these restrictions is to incentivize the people who make IP. But no one actually considers revenue 99 years into the future, so it doesn't work as an incentive.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Okay, but for all modern media at those price tags, the overwhelming majority of the revenue is seen within the first year, often within the first month or even first few days (consider pre-orders on video games— RDR2 reportedly made $725M in its first weekend). Why should this content be locked up for decades past the point where it has already made 90% of the money it's ever going to make? So the Disney company can have a century's worth of exclusive material ready to go when they launch D+, creating an absolutely impenetrable barrier to entry for an upstart?
- criddell 5y ago
  > some songs cost millions to produce Nobody is investing millions in a song that they think could take 95 years to earn enough to justify the investment. Copyright is there to incentivize creating new works. If the copyright was shortened to max(life of the artist, 50 years), how many artists do you think would stop creating? Frankly, there's an argument to be made that shortening the length of copyright to 25 years would encourage more new works simply because you can rest an your laurels.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I think if we're going to time limit ownership rights to intellectual property we should time limit ownership rights to everything - including land, buildings, shares and stocks, bonds, art collections, all of it. Except maybe trivial items like home furnishings and portable tools. I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing between these asset classes. If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is all property. If it isn't, it isn't. Any argument you can make about the benefits of putting intellectual work in the public domain, you can also make - more convincingly - about land and any other productive resource.
- dahart 5y ago
  Personal ownership is already limited by the owner’s lifetime and automatically transfers when they die. Copyrights, on the other hand, outlive the creator.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    Generational wealth is a significant problem as winner take all dynamics tend to concentrate wealth within families until they get so powerful that they form aristocracies. The US is new enough that it’s aristocracy is just getting started. Several European countries lack them because war or revolution hit the reset button, but if you look at a country like the UK, you will see it alive and well.
    - User23 5y ago
      Plenty of UK nobility has no substantial assets to speak of other than a house that’s ten times bigger than they need and a constant money pit. The traditional way out is to marry a rich commoner who wants their children to be titled.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      On the other hand, generational wealth below obscene amounts is a vital stabilizing force in a society. A middle to upper middle class family passing on a boost to each subsequent generation is a good thing. Grandparents help pay for their grandkids' schooling, kids have some sense of stability and a safety net, etc. We need many layers of safety nets and stabilizing forces, because every layer is prone to different types of failure. There is a natural and desirable support structure of individial -> family -> community -> state -> humanity that allows society and individuals to survive and thrive through changing circumstances. Too much reliance on any one layer, especially the state, is a recipe for fragility or tyranny. When every individual has an emergency fund, every family has a nest egg, every community pulls together in time of need, and every state provides a safety net of last resort, we can weather any storm.
sumtechguy 5y ago
It gets more odd for the next few years. See 'Sound Recordings Published' sections https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
- Amorymeltzer 5y ago
  This is a fabulous resource! I especially like that, unlike most guides, it also lists the dates going forward. Great way to show just how complex the system we've cobbled together is.
grishka 5y ago
In an ideal world, copyright should last for maybe two or three years. It would still mostly fulfill its purpose to allow the creator to earn money, but would severely curtail the abuse potential. In an even more ideal world, copyright shouldn't be transferable.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  It is complicated. For very popular artists yes, their music is commercially short-lived and most of the returns will come in the first six months. But for the more obscure composers and performers the reality is completely different.
  - t-writescode 5y ago
    It wouldn't. If a music studio needs to wait 4 years to not have to pay any royalties at all, then the song would be recorded (copyright created) and the music groups would just wait 4 years and then start playing it on radio stations. It needs to be something like 12 + 12 or 20 + 20, or even 20 + infinitely continuable for a gradually increasing cost. It still has the potential issue of waiting out that 24 to 40 years; but companies are less likely to do that, when a few years is basically nothing. It's been 2 years since covid started, for example.
    - grishka 5y ago
      Companies will go bankrupt. Their business models will break down. Yes. That's intended. There's no need for these middlemen in the age of the internet.
      - rhines 5y ago
        IMO if you want to end the commercialization of content, targeting copyright is not the most effective route. Big players will still be able to use their power to ensure that they have control over distribution, and will continue to profit off of content. Small players, such as the people coming up with new content, will find it harder and harder to make any money, to the benefit of the big players who no longer need to share profits with them. The more effective approach would be to simply remove the economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no one's able to profit off it in the first place and spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer penalized.
kragen 5y ago
We should eliminate copyright. Zero years. Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records. It became fairly dubious in the age of photocopiers and tape recorders, but fortunately was little enforced, except in the USSR. A photocopier was useless without typeset or handwritten text to copy, and a tape recorder was no substitute for a recording studio, and the copies degraded every generation, so publishing houses were still needed. Now every computer is a book-copying and music-copying machine more powerful than the entire publishing industry a few decades ago: it can transmit a gigabit per second, and for a one-megabyte book, that's 125 copies a second, 10 million copies a day, 3 billion copies a year, so copyright is a constant danger to everyone. Fanfic sites are full of people sharing stories they wrote with no expectation of making money. Soundcloud is full of indie band recordings edited in Audacity. The age of the rich celebrity authors like Isaac Asimov or Ernest Hemingway ended decades ago, not due to xeroxes but due to TV. (We still have celebrity musicians, but it's not clear that helping the Rolling Stones buy cocaine is an important public policy objective.) The best software is free software, as copyright makes proprietary software untrustworthy, creating incentives to stuff it with malware. And, even if Elsevier were paying researchers instead of vice versa, the idea that copyright on research papers could fund research is as ludicrous as the idea that people would stop singing songs and telling stories without monopoly profits. Apps, videos, and websites constantly disappear due to (often groundless) accusations of copyright violations. Police evade accountability by playing copyrighted music, rendering any recordings of their abuses copyright violations. A friend of mine committed suicide after being prosecuted for copyright violations that might have been fair use; we'll never know. So, I would set the copyright term at zero years. Legal monopolies on preserving and sharing knowledge are not only useless in today's world, they are harmful, a monstrous menace to the integrity of the historical record and to private communication.
- andymockli 5y ago
  To add to your point, the futility of copyright enforcement in the digital age created a new industry in the form of DRM and YouTube auto-takedown algorithms.

danielrpa 5y ago

75-80 years late, so wonderful

Hokusai 5y ago
So, anyone that had a personal attachment to that music is dead. The current goal of copyright is to let companies own the culture you grew with. All the movies, music, books and games that defined who you are will not enter the public domain until you are dead or very old. Companies like Disney were founded on well known stories. They will not allow anybody else too accomplish the same.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Disney was founded on Mickey Mouse. Yes, they made major motion pictures out of old myths and legends, like Cinderella and Robin Hood, but those stories have always been public domain and you can write a book or movie about them with no problem.
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    Not sure about their finances back then, but I have to guess that their feature films were the money makers and the shorts less so. And I think the grandparent's point is that Mickey Mouse today is in some sense analogous to your Cinderellas and Robin Hoods in the 30s... only you can't make your own movie about him.
    - Someone 5y ago
      Back then, their feature films weren’t money makers, as they didn’t make them. Their first feature film was very profitable, but it was from about 15 years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarfs_(1937_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarf...). However, their next two movies (Pinocchio, Fantasia) cost them money because they were released during World War Two, when they couldn’t show them in large parts of the world. They needed Dumbo to make up for that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbo#Box_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbo#Box_office), then Bambi wasn’t a huge success, either (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi#Box_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi#Box_office) So, I guess it wasn’t till after World War Two that their feature films became profitable. They survived, so chances are the shorts brought in money.

phkahler 5y ago

Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?

aardvark179 5y ago
A simple copy of remaster won’t cut it in the US, but if you did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those. There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and rights payments.
- SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
  As far as I know, restoration is insufficient to claim a derivative copyright in a public domain work because it lacks sufficient originality. To the extent you do a good job, your additions to the underlying public domain work are not your creative authorship. They are a restoration of the original author's authorship. I believe that is why Peter Kuran (Trinity and Beyond) patented a photochemical restoration process for revitalizing the color in films. Because his other restoration work is not protectable.
sovnade 5y ago
Doesn't it have to be changed in some way? Changing the storage format doesn't change the actual work. I assume you're talking about the Fair Use clause where something has to be different enough from the original to be re-claimed as new?
dahart 5y ago
No, because the original is still in the public domain. Copyright law is pretty good about defining “derivative works”, and someone’s remaster is not going to hold up as a copyrightable contribution.
- kragen 5y ago

macksd 5y ago

does the Charleston

hippie_queen 5y ago

Can't wait to finally sample Thomas Edison on the phonograph for my Soundcloud tracks, and not having to worry about the police knocking at my door!

kristopolous 5y ago
Hey be careful what you wish for! Check out "I am the Edison phonograph" from 1906 https://youtu.be/EQC9CjFezrQ https://youtu.be/EQC9CjFezrQ I'd use that, totally would.
- btilly 5y ago
  Sadly, that's still under copyright. The problem was that various music copyrights were being dated from the 1970s for historical reasons despite the music itself being much older. Congress passed a law fixing a whole lot of that in one lump. Which is why music from the 1920s becomes public domain at the same time as movies from the early 1930s.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    I guess it's Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton then. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zCrtErmipXE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zCrtErmipXE Alright, that's fine for now. The distance between this and modern pop music is actually razor thin. Update the instrumentation with synthesizers, give it percussions and you'd be done. Interesting, the covers are further away from modern pop than this is
Clubber 5y ago
Or getting sued for twice your current net worth.
odiroot 5y ago
Knowing Edison, he can get up from the grave any day, to sue you into bankruptcy.
- 5y ago

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

Steamboat Willie was in 1928 though, I wonder if anyone is sitting around thinking aw, when that comes out my evil plan can finally be put into motion.

clavicat 5y ago

This deluge of jungle music will turn your daughters into flappers and Gibson girls before you can say 23 skidoo.

werds 5y ago
this could turn hare krishna into a bad boy

paulpauper 5y ago

does this mean Beatles music will eventually be public domain

ryankrage77 5y ago
Not in your lifetime.

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: What will enter the public domain in 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420667 - Dec 2021 (229 comments)

6510 5y ago

Non of fiction is important enough to have laws about.

twirlock 5y ago

One hundred years. Yeah, our establishment is so committed to all the kumbaya shit it spouts when limiting individual expression.

silexia 5y ago

Copyright should expire 20 years after the work is created. Shorter and the author will not be able to monetize, longer and society is held hostage by rent seekers. Patents should just be abolished altogether. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.