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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

by 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.
  - criddell 5y ago
    > That’s a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. I based my statement on https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/copyright-basics/purpose-of-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... > 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 I don't think we disagree really. I said the goal was to maximize overall benefit to society and I think you did too. Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied.
    - dahart 5y ago
      > Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied. I disagree. Plenty of people already know 10 years is too short, and it doesn’t take a study to show it. Lots of businesses take longer than that to get established, even the very fastest-moving fastest-distributing businesses like software startups.
      - criddell 5y ago
        It might be bad for you if code you wrote ten years ago is no longer protected by copyright, but what about society in general? Maybe five new start ups can take that old software and build something better than you were able to. Would that disincentivize creators? Maybe. Would the copyright expiration make a thousand flowers bloom? That's what would need to be studied. What the net benefit or harm is, isn't obvious.
        dahart 5y ago
        True, this is a valid point. I’m under the impression that it has been studied, though I don’t have a source off the top of my head. It’s definitely been debated vigorously and often. Anyway, keep in mind that this net benefit needs to incentivize people to get over the static friction of starting in the first place. We don’t want to make a point of handing content and ideas over to incremental producers because that will disincentivize people from trying in the first place. Also important is that part of the net benefit to society is a trickle-down argument that we need to reward the authors first in order for society to reap the net benefit. The point is not to encourage business at the fastest possible speed be letting people borrow the ideas and inventions and content of others, the point is to protect the people who do the actual original work for a reasonable period of time, and to allow for the fact that they might be less good at business than someone who’s only reselling content. Might be worth stating that study the economics of social net benefits is incredibly difficult, and can take a very, very long time, longer than you and I have left. The environment is a great example of how we’ve made disastrous business choices that were rationalized by “social benefit”, but turned out to be wrong.
skywal_l 5y ago
It took 7 months for the Sonny Bono Act (of Sonny and Cher and at the time congressman) to extends the copyright from 50 to 70 years. I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last "infrastructure" law (remember 2017's infrastructure week?). By the way, that law was sponsored by Mary Bono, Sonny Bono's widow (Sonny Bono died during that year) and also congresswoman. All this is a neat little circle of people voting laws for their own benefits. This has nothing to do with artists or small businesses. I think it is fair to say that once the original author of the work is dead, the copyright should go with it. And if a corporation buy the copyright, then they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today.
- dahart 5y ago
  > they they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today. It’s neither fair nor accurate to point at the speed distribution as an indicator of the speed of building a viable business. It’s a fact that it’s common for a business to need a decade to build it’s business pipeline before the business is viable and fully supporting its employees. Don’t forget this system needs to support small businesses and not just megacorps. From the perspective of law, and of copyright specifically, it’s also a mistake to assume that all business can move at the pace of electronically distributed software. Physical hardware goods frequently take more than a year to design, manufacture, and stock prior to distribution. Today we can add in an extra year of COVID related delays for the ordering and distributing pipeline … how many things are on insane back order delay as we speak? Copyright needs to be long enough that things like today’s situation don’t prevent a business from even starting to recoup, right? > I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last “infrastructure law” The point I was making is that law moves slower than tech. You would agree that infrastructure funding happens on a glacial pace compared to what’s hot on GitHub or what new ideas are being incorporated into neural network training, right? It’s fine to think of a few years being “fast”, but that’s a subjective opinion that isn’t relative to something specific. I was trying to make a comparison between law and the things presumably parent was calling “breakneck speed”, which is clearly referring to things that move faster than law. I also mentioned “existing” laws for a specific reason - new laws can and sometimes do come up quickly. But laws we need to know in order to comply with need to be mostly stable. And by and large, most of our law doesn’t change every year, we have small nips and tucks mostly in places that don’t affect the majority of the population.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup? How many startups today make their money by sharing actual source code and not cloud services? Unless its AGPL then you need not know the source for most services anyways.

by dahart 5y ago

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.
- criddell 5y ago
  > That’s a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. I based my statement on https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/copyright-basics/purpose-of-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... > 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 I don't think we disagree really. I said the goal was to maximize overall benefit to society and I think you did too. Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied.
  - dahart 5y ago
    > Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied. I disagree. Plenty of people already know 10 years is too short, and it doesn’t take a study to show it. Lots of businesses take longer than that to get established, even the very fastest-moving fastest-distributing businesses like software startups.
    - criddell 5y ago
      It might be bad for you if code you wrote ten years ago is no longer protected by copyright, but what about society in general? Maybe five new start ups can take that old software and build something better than you were able to. Would that disincentivize creators? Maybe. Would the copyright expiration make a thousand flowers bloom? That's what would need to be studied. What the net benefit or harm is, isn't obvious.
      - dahart 5y ago
        True, this is a valid point. I’m under the impression that it has been studied, though I don’t have a source off the top of my head. It’s definitely been debated vigorously and often. Anyway, keep in mind that this net benefit needs to incentivize people to get over the static friction of starting in the first place. We don’t want to make a point of handing content and ideas over to incremental producers because that will disincentivize people from trying in the first place. Also important is that part of the net benefit to society is a trickle-down argument that we need to reward the authors first in order for society to reap the net benefit. The point is not to encourage business at the fastest possible speed be letting people borrow the ideas and inventions and content of others, the point is to protect the people who do the actual original work for a reasonable period of time, and to allow for the fact that they might be less good at business than someone who’s only reselling content. Might be worth stating that study the economics of social net benefits is incredibly difficult, and can take a very, very long time, longer than you and I have left. The environment is a great example of how we’ve made disastrous business choices that were rationalized by “social benefit”, but turned out to be wrong.

skywal_l 5y ago

It took 7 months for the Sonny Bono Act (of Sonny and Cher and at the time congressman) to extends the copyright from 50 to 70 years. I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last "infrastructure" law (remember 2017's infrastructure week?). By the way, that law was sponsored by Mary Bono, Sonny Bono's widow (Sonny Bono died during that year) and also congresswoman. All this is a neat little circle of people voting laws for their own benefits. This has nothing to do with artists or small businesses. I think it is fair to say that once the original author of the work is dead, the copyright should go with it. And if a corporation buy the copyright, then they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today.

dahart 5y ago
> they they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today. It’s neither fair nor accurate to point at the speed distribution as an indicator of the speed of building a viable business. It’s a fact that it’s common for a business to need a decade to build it’s business pipeline before the business is viable and fully supporting its employees. Don’t forget this system needs to support small businesses and not just megacorps. From the perspective of law, and of copyright specifically, it’s also a mistake to assume that all business can move at the pace of electronically distributed software. Physical hardware goods frequently take more than a year to design, manufacture, and stock prior to distribution. Today we can add in an extra year of COVID related delays for the ordering and distributing pipeline … how many things are on insane back order delay as we speak? Copyright needs to be long enough that things like today’s situation don’t prevent a business from even starting to recoup, right? > I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last “infrastructure law” The point I was making is that law moves slower than tech. You would agree that infrastructure funding happens on a glacial pace compared to what’s hot on GitHub or what new ideas are being incorporated into neural network training, right? It’s fine to think of a few years being “fast”, but that’s a subjective opinion that isn’t relative to something specific. I was trying to make a comparison between law and the things presumably parent was calling “breakneck speed”, which is clearly referring to things that move faster than law. I also mentioned “existing” laws for a specific reason - new laws can and sometimes do come up quickly. But laws we need to know in order to comply with need to be mostly stable. And by and large, most of our law doesn’t change every year, we have small nips and tucks mostly in places that don’t affect the majority of the population.

vineyardmike 5y ago

> Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup? How many startups today make their money by sharing actual source code and not cloud services? Unless its AGPL then you need not know the source for most services anyways.