5 ms·

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
      - mattl 5y ago
        Presumably if they want to have access to the non-PD stuff they’d have to figure out something.
  - vmception 5y ago
    The option to extend it being priced by the royalties collected and requiring substantial accounting of such. Patents, for example, have maintenance fees that are quite high. So even that 20 year length is not really automatic and guaranteed, while already seen as problematically long to many.
dahart 5y ago
Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup? Sometimes it takes longer than that to break even… All law moves slowly. The law is supposed to move slowly, that’s (mostly) a feature, not a bug. You don’t want the existing laws to change every year, driving would be more of a nightmare than it already is. Copyright was originally about protecting a creator’s ability to make some money from their works. Despite the fact it was extended in part to help Disney make money forever, we should still have some protection for artists and small businesses, right? We don’t want to shorten the copyright term just because NPM has a lot of churn, do we? That doesn’t seem like a good reason.
- criddell 5y ago
  But think of all the businesses that might be built on the work of the original business that never took off. What we are trying to maximize is overall benefit to society, so we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work. Ten years may or may not be too short. How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?
  - dahart 5y ago
    > we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work That’s a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. Copyright is intended to protect individual works of authorship, and allow the author to leverage their work, even when they only produce a single work. > How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year? It happens all the time in software companies! The early software foundation of a company is often integral to where it is when it starts making money. It’s common for the core ideas and algorithms to sit around for many years while the company is building marketing and payment and integrations and customer support and waiting for business to catch on. Sometimes companies wait on their patents to be granted before even starting to try to monetize some software, and it can take a couple of years just to get the patent. From a copyright perspective, it’s important to understand and recognize that business, like law, often moves very slowly. While I’m firmly in agreement that 99 years is too long, I also think 10 years is too short. And to reiterate: the term length shouldn’t be set because tech moves fast, it should be set by considering what’s long enough to recoup an investment and when it’s fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it for their own financial gains.

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
    - mattl 5y ago
      Presumably if they want to have access to the non-PD stuff they’d have to figure out something.
- vmception 5y ago
  The option to extend it being priced by the royalties collected and requiring substantial accounting of such. Patents, for example, have maintenance fees that are quite high. So even that 20 year length is not really automatic and guaranteed, while already seen as problematically long to many.

dahart 5y ago

Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup? Sometimes it takes longer than that to break even… All law moves slowly. The law is supposed to move slowly, that’s (mostly) a feature, not a bug. You don’t want the existing laws to change every year, driving would be more of a nightmare than it already is. Copyright was originally about protecting a creator’s ability to make some money from their works. Despite the fact it was extended in part to help Disney make money forever, we should still have some protection for artists and small businesses, right? We don’t want to shorten the copyright term just because NPM has a lot of churn, do we? That doesn’t seem like a good reason.

criddell 5y ago
But think of all the businesses that might be built on the work of the original business that never took off. What we are trying to maximize is overall benefit to society, so we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work. Ten years may or may not be too short. How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?
- dahart 5y ago
  > we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work That’s a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. Copyright is intended to protect individual works of authorship, and allow the author to leverage their work, even when they only produce a single work. > How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year? It happens all the time in software companies! The early software foundation of a company is often integral to where it is when it starts making money. It’s common for the core ideas and algorithms to sit around for many years while the company is building marketing and payment and integrations and customer support and waiting for business to catch on. Sometimes companies wait on their patents to be granted before even starting to try to monetize some software, and it can take a couple of years just to get the patent. From a copyright perspective, it’s important to understand and recognize that business, like law, often moves very slowly. While I’m firmly in agreement that 99 years is too long, I also think 10 years is too short. And to reiterate: the term length shouldn’t be set because tech moves fast, it should be set by considering what’s long enough to recoup an investment and when it’s fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it for their own financial gains.