5 ms·

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
        > I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that. I really like the model of every work automatically receiving protection. I think creations should automatically receive a relatively short-term automatic copy-right protection (say 14 years). After that, I think extensions should require manual renewals by the current rights holder (including contact information for the rights holder)
    - ncallaway 5y ago
      Yep, I really liked the copyright change to make copyright protection automatic, instead of requiring a filing. But it should require active regular renewal, to create the record of continued ownership. You should get a (reasonable) protected period of time automatically, to give you time to figure out which works are worth the effort to continue protecting. But it should require (minimal) active ongoing effort to maintain that protection. For me, this is especially relevant when it comes to abandoned digital content (like video games and other applications). It'll be *so* much harder to archive and preserve content that's 140 years old, than it will be content that's 14-28 years old.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  This is just extending the rent seeking. If the work is so valuable the owner can continue to extend their copyright, the public should receive that value after the 14 years (by which point, the owner has been made whole through collecting rents for those 14 years) versus the owner ratcheting up the cost to pay to maintain the copyright monopoly on the work in question.
  - ncallaway 5y ago
    Eh, if the price rises enough year over year, and you dump that funding into the National Institute for the Arts, or other programs to provide grants and funding to low-income artists, I could see it being a potentially useful tool to spread the wealth around from very commercially successful works. I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some positive outcomes from the approaches.
- SlimyHog 5y ago
  This would just mean that rich companies/people will get to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this whole situation where things don't enter the public domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.
  - jerf 5y ago
    On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n × number of works) every year. Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big company and you want to own your stuff forever. But behind the laws protecting those companies there's a ton of stuff that the owner doesn't care, nobody even knows who the owner is, etc. etc. (There's a lot of stuff that is de facto in the public domain because nobody owns it anymore in any practical sense, but there's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly steep fee for the benefit. Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything produced ever.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      This would definitely be better than the current system of basically forever minus one day, but still leaves the problem that a few giant corporations own giant chunks of our hearts, minds, and childhoods. The zeitgeist of our time should belong to us, at least after a decade or two.
_jal 5y ago
I can see scaling it by change in life expectancy, to keep the bargain roughly the same.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  Life expectancy of adults hasn’t changed much (ie your life expectancy when you’re in your 20s). The life expectancy number you’re most familiar with is largely driven by infancy because it’s the mean and high infant/child mortality skews that. We’re really good at saving the lives of children now but I don’t see why that matters for copyright. More hypothetically, let’s say human life spans got up to 500 years. Copyright is intended to promote the creation of art for the public good, not to fund the artist for their lifetime. If you created a popular piece of art of music in your 20s, why is it useful to society to help fund the next 480 years of life in any way?
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    This is mostly an urban legend. Yes, some amount of the increase in life expectancy is due to reduced infant mortality. But it’s nowhere near the bulk of it.
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      How are you defining urban legend? Here's from Wikipedia [1] > Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality > Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. > ... even in preindustrial times as is demonstrated by the Roman Life Expectancy table, which estimates life expectancy to be 25 years at birth, but 53 years upon reaching age 25 Here are actuarial tables for people in the US today [2]. The life expectancy if you reach 25 is.... 52 or 57 depending on if you're a man or woman. We're certainly better at reducing all cause mortality even in adults but it's not as stark of a difference as you might imagine, particularly its effect on the mean. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy [2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

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
      > I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that. I really like the model of every work automatically receiving protection. I think creations should automatically receive a relatively short-term automatic copy-right protection (say 14 years). After that, I think extensions should require manual renewals by the current rights holder (including contact information for the rights holder)
  - ncallaway 5y ago
    Yep, I really liked the copyright change to make copyright protection automatic, instead of requiring a filing. But it should require active regular renewal, to create the record of continued ownership. You should get a (reasonable) protected period of time automatically, to give you time to figure out which works are worth the effort to continue protecting. But it should require (minimal) active ongoing effort to maintain that protection. For me, this is especially relevant when it comes to abandoned digital content (like video games and other applications). It'll be *so* much harder to archive and preserve content that's 140 years old, than it will be content that's 14-28 years old.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
This is just extending the rent seeking. If the work is so valuable the owner can continue to extend their copyright, the public should receive that value after the 14 years (by which point, the owner has been made whole through collecting rents for those 14 years) versus the owner ratcheting up the cost to pay to maintain the copyright monopoly on the work in question.
- ncallaway 5y ago
  Eh, if the price rises enough year over year, and you dump that funding into the National Institute for the Arts, or other programs to provide grants and funding to low-income artists, I could see it being a potentially useful tool to spread the wealth around from very commercially successful works. I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some positive outcomes from the approaches.
SlimyHog 5y ago
This would just mean that rich companies/people will get to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this whole situation where things don't enter the public domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.
- jerf 5y ago
  On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n × number of works) every year. Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big company and you want to own your stuff forever. But behind the laws protecting those companies there's a ton of stuff that the owner doesn't care, nobody even knows who the owner is, etc. etc. (There's a lot of stuff that is de facto in the public domain because nobody owns it anymore in any practical sense, but there's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly steep fee for the benefit. Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything produced ever.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    This would definitely be better than the current system of basically forever minus one day, but still leaves the problem that a few giant corporations own giant chunks of our hearts, minds, and childhoods. The zeitgeist of our time should belong to us, at least after a decade or two.

_jal 5y ago

I can see scaling it by change in life expectancy, to keep the bargain roughly the same.

vlovich123 5y ago
Life expectancy of adults hasn’t changed much (ie your life expectancy when you’re in your 20s). The life expectancy number you’re most familiar with is largely driven by infancy because it’s the mean and high infant/child mortality skews that. We’re really good at saving the lives of children now but I don’t see why that matters for copyright. More hypothetically, let’s say human life spans got up to 500 years. Copyright is intended to promote the creation of art for the public good, not to fund the artist for their lifetime. If you created a popular piece of art of music in your 20s, why is it useful to society to help fund the next 480 years of life in any way?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  This is mostly an urban legend. Yes, some amount of the increase in life expectancy is due to reduced infant mortality. But it’s nowhere near the bulk of it.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    How are you defining urban legend? Here's from Wikipedia [1] > Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality > Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. > ... even in preindustrial times as is demonstrated by the Roman Life Expectancy table, which estimates life expectancy to be 25 years at birth, but 53 years upon reaching age 25 Here are actuarial tables for people in the US today [2]. The life expectancy if you reach 25 is.... 52 or 57 depending on if you're a man or woman. We're certainly better at reducing all cause mortality even in adults but it's not as stark of a difference as you might imagine, particularly its effect on the mean. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy [2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html