23 ms·

Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done

418 points by jseliger 5y ago

vixen99 5y ago
For those who, unaccountably, can't stand Winnie the Pooh, here is someone who will stand with you. https://bookmarks.reviews/in-which-winnie-the-pooh-makes-dorothy-parker-throw-up/ https://bookmarks.reviews/in-which-winnie-the-pooh-makes-dor...
- moate 5y ago
  Everyone has "that one thing" right? How many guys at parties have tried to seem interesting by telling everyone how overrated the Beatles are or how the MCU isn't really even movies when you think about it. goes back to humming "Little Black Rain Cloud" to himself
  - watwut 5y ago
    For whatever it is worth, Winnie the Pooh is far from most popular children's books. It was movies that got super popular and fun to watch. Book is one of those you buy, but rarely read cause neither you nor kid wants it that much.
- ghaff 5y ago
  When I saw your comment I was reminded of Dorothy Parker's quote. And indeed, what should I find in the link... (I did like Milne's books as a child though.) He did write some other things that were definitely not as child-oriented. I saw his play The Dover Road when I was in London a number of years back.
- easton 5y ago
  I never thought I’d find a Heffalump or Woozle on HN, but there you have it. Truly all walks of life come here.
password1 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder how many amazing movies, series and videogames we would have if everyone could use popular franchises for their creations (think MCU, Star Wars, LOTR, but also more niche franchises). Instead we only get the safe and family friendly cookie-cutter versions tuned for mass consumption. Big media corporations want to play it safe to ensure profitability, but other creators would be free to experiment in all other sort of narrative and stylistic directions.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  I think I'd prefer a world where there were fewer remakes and adaptations of existing franchises, and people focused on coming up with new things instead. I'm not suggesting that copyright should be extended for that purpose.
  - larsiusprime 5y ago
    Arguably the reasons there are more remakes and adaptations of existing franchises is specifically for value to accrue to those IP's, in a very siloed and narrow way with minimal cross-pollination across brand ownership lines.
  - password1 5y ago
    The problem with remakes and adaptations of existing franchises is that they all basically follow the same safe and tested structure. So they are boring and feel all the same because they basically are. I might argue that this phenomenon is too a byproduct of copyrights. In a world were everyone can create interesting things on any IP, there's no market for cookie-cutter adaptations. People watch cookie-cutter adaptations and remakes because it's the only way to experience the characters and worlds they like. If they had another option they probably just skip the reboot and go watch the new take from a different studio or director.
  - netcan 5y ago
    Both can coexist. Consider that Greek mythology or Irish fairy stories are basically different stories in the same "cinematic universe." But... that universe isn't a monopoly. Many authors contributed. Stories were tailored to different audiences. The cliche blockbuster remakes are corny because they are, but the concept of remakes, universes and sequels isn't bad.
cies 5y ago
> Copyrights should be shorter You're going up against a big lobby. To do that you first need a functioning democracy. In a place where "the people" rule, copyright'd be optimized to ensure a rich commons for everyone to enjoy. That was the original idea behind intellectual property law, e.g. copyright. Now it's big biz holding our culture for ransom.
- google234123 5y ago
  I don't think people care much about this issue and will focus more on issues that actually matter to them in a functioning democracy. E.g. taxes, health care, crime, education.
  - saxonww 5y ago
    The counter-argument to this is that in a functioning democracy, people would actually have the ability to think about things like copyright, vs. scrambling to get adequate healthcare or education, while knowing their tax money would do meaningful things about crime instead of whatever they're doing now.
    - moonchrome 5y ago
      Your point seem to be a rant about US social policies and is easily disproved by the fact that similar copyright terms existing in Europe where those things aren't the same.
      - nextstep 5y ago
        They exist in Europe because of a similar corrupting mechanism; just because the European system hasn't completely dismantled their social systems the way the US is close to doesn't mean that democracy isn't also being weakened by capitalism.
      - witrak 5y ago
        AFAIK the European model is not as similar as you seem to be convinced. And the origin of copyright was from the beginning related not to the well-being of authors but rather publishers.
wcerfgba 5y ago
Are there any campaigns or groups working on reducing the standard copyright term length? I believe this is a very worthwhile pursuit, but very complicated to undertake. The WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Berne Convention are international agreements, and individual countries also have their own laws. Thus I'm not even sure how one would go about starting to lobby for a reduced copyright term.
- phoe-krk 5y ago
  International Communia Association (https://www.communia-association.org/ https://www.communia-association.org/) is one group that I am aware of.
tehjoker 5y ago
Is there anyone who believes that copyright lengths have been decided by some kind of balanced process between equal parties that carefully looked at the economic interests and societal interests or is it just monopolists like Disney buying longer strangleholds on culture to make money? If you believe the latter, there's no point in writing about the balance of interests, you need to build counter power. We're just so far outside the regime of anything resembling reason. Talking about the balance of interests is only of use to try to decide if we should have copyrights at all in some theoretical alternate universe.
- VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
  Perhaps you underestimate the breadth of readership on HN.
  - amelius 5y ago
    If someone can give me a more reasonable copyright duration, I will change the law tomorrow!
    - labster 5y ago
      Twenty years from publication; the holder can pay the Library of Congress $2 to extend the copyright by one year. This fee doubles every year thereafter. So the 30th year only costs $1024, and the 40th year costs $1048576. If it remains profitable, you share the proceeds of rent-seeking with the public.
      - shagie 5y ago
        As copyrights are honored across multiple nations... this approach would encourage me to register my copyrights in say... Canada or England instead.
        labster 5y ago
        USA is the driving force behind all of these copyright treaties. Given Canada’s role in abandoning the copyright part of TPP… I suspect most regimes would change to ones where they pay less American companies and earn more taxes themselves.
shmerl 5y ago
Why isn't there a stronger push to scale the terms down? Those corrupt who profit from it for more than a century have nothing to do with the authors.
- rflrob 5y ago
  I believe that the issue is that the harms are broad but relatively small for each person, while the benefits are quite concentrated for those who do profit. Thus, there aren't going to be many people where loosening copyright terms is their primary factor in voting for a legislator or lobbying, while the large rights-holders will put considerable effort into maintaining or extending the status quo.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cogman10 5y ago
  Same reason tech patents last for 20 years and not 5. You've got big moneyed interests who benefit from long IP terms and small groups of people that might benefit from shorter IP periods. End result, no legislator will push for shorter terms, they just don't care about it. Disney can show how much money they'll lose if the mouse becomes public domain (and how much that'd hurt campaign contributions) while Mickey's auto repair shop will struggle to show similar losses if they can't put the mouse on their billboard.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  There's no group that sees a huge immediate profit from their reduction to finance a lobby, and the overall benefit to the average person is very opaque. How would you pitch a fifty year copyright to a random neighbor? "Tired of spending full price on Beatles albums? Wish you could hear more Elvis covers? Reduce copyright!"
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Because lawyers and publicists cost $$$ and the payoff is indirect and broadly dispersed across population and time, rather than arriving in the form of a check. It would require at the least 10s of millions in lobbying expenses, and raising that amount of money in the name of an abstraction is likely a non-starter. You could run a piracy website that only offered works more than X years old, where X is some popular proposal for a reasonable term, and then fight a test case. To my mind the best legal argument against the current regime is that the Constitution's specification of 'limited time' copyright has been extended to be longer than the median human lifetime, thus making it effectively perpetual for most humans in the US; this also hinders the formation of a constituency for shorter periods because fewer and fewer people have had the experience of seeing a work they admired at the time of publication subsequently enter the public domain. But realistically, any test case is likely to fail because higher courts would probably just say 'the term might be effectively infinite for people but it's short in the lifetime of a nation and corporations are arguably immortal so no media giveaway for you peons.'
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
I don't see that much a problem with it. 95 years or death + 70 years gives the creator and their children the benefit of their copyrights. How long do people think it should be?
- loeg 5y ago
  One thousand years. This gives the creator, their children, and their descendants the benefit of their copyrights for a millennium.
  - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
    1,000 years is too long IMO.
    - loeg 5y ago
      Why 200 years, but not 1000?
      - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        Who said 200 years?
        _dain_ 5y ago
        Disney, circa 2070.
        VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        Is that real or did you just make that up
        _dain_ 5y ago
        I saw it in a dream, so yes it's real.
    - 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
The longest I can theoretically think is justified is the death of the author. The idea to keep works out of the public domain so that heirs or estates or businesses can live off economic rents is pretty bizarre to me, seems straight up feudal.
- cogman10 5y ago
  If someone writes a best seller and kicks the bucket, it'd sort of suck that someone like Disney could swoop in and make a bunch of movies without paying a dime of royalties to the author's family. Or that a bunch of publishers can have a field day republishing the best seller diluting all the work of the original publisher. But on the flip side, 90+ years is really WAY too long. Cut it to 20 years. Long enough to capture the initial buzz, but not so long that we end up with shit staying under the mouse's thumb forever.
  - dlp211 5y ago
    This is exactly what Disney did do though; Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio; to become a massive corp. And now that they are a massive Corp that just can buy the rights to any copyrighted material locking out competitors. Imagine if others had the chance to compete.
    - troupe 5y ago
      Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story. Carlo Collodi was dead by 1890 so Disney definitely didn't "swoop in" and benefit at his or his descendent's expense. I believe the other stories you mention are even older.
      - superluserdo 5y ago
        >Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story. This is very much an "in principle" thing. In practice, many of these traditional stories have (sadly) become synonymous with the Disney version, so Disney's work is basically the canonical version. This gives Disney a very good sword of Damocles to hang over the heads of anyone else trying to adapt these folk stories: to my understanding if you include a single copyrightable adaptation or embellishment of the original that was written by Disney without "prior art", you're liable to be steamrollered by the lawyer army and be ruined.
cassac 5y ago
I’m fine with copyrights being longer as long as company’s have to actually pay for it. Something like 3% gross revenue. We could minimize shell companies by limiting infringement fines to be based on the copyright payment. So if Disney hides Mickey Mouse behind a 30 cent company then violations are only worth 30 cents.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I don't think it has to be profit based. Just have an ever increasing flat rate. Free 20 years but every year after becomes increasingly expensive. Then Disney can protect their stuff for ages while putting a lot of money back in to the government, while the vast majority of content becomes free at 20 years because it has no commercial value.
dahart 5y ago
It’s great that the article starts with what’s right about copyrights. I also agree that copyrights last too long at the moment, they could be shortened a bit. > But this system has its limitations. I’ll highlight three that are particularly important: Intellectual property rights can result in fewer people enjoying the product than would be efficient. They can be expensive to determine and enforce. And they can ultimately create a kind of drag on the whole economy if too many of the economy’s rewards are for work that was done in the distant past. I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. This is already happening in some ways online, sites like YouTube allow crowd-source reporting of breaches, for better or worse. Yes, it’s being abused and there are problems, but it is in fact cheaper than going to court. > The first-order consequences of online piracy are that you are better off, and nobody is worse off. Copyright law is specifically founded on the principle that this is not true, and it is why being sued for copyright breach explicitly does not depend on the creator making money on the thing being copied. (It helps if there’s clear financial damage, but is by no means necessary.) Coming from a site on economics, this assertion seems particularly troubling. Taking something of value without paying for it is still stealing, there is economic harm, and it’s irrelevant whether the creator is deprived of something tangible. Even the author acknowledges that if there were no copyrights, it would be economically damaging, and the entire reason why is because there is harm done when pirating, and we’re trying to balance that harm with the good. > We can ultimately reject an online piracy model, at least for some works, because we worry about the second-order incentive effects of creators not getting paid. But then we miss out on the good first-order consequences of distributing the work to anyone who wants it. Interesting framing that reverses first-order and second-order effect, again problematic from an economics perspective. Paying buyers of copies are the first-order primary economy for copies. What economic “first-order” good does distributing free copies to anyone who wants it do? I’m in favor of being able to incorporate and remix works after some time, but unlimited free copies immediately after creation would be first-order bad.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. I think you're misunderstanding TFA there. The main thing they're talking about there is not the cost of enforcement (point 2), but the cost to society in terms of lost / unrealised economic surplus (point 1). Look at the first graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus : the blue line, producers' price as a function of unit cost, should in economic theory equal their marginal cost. The shape it has in this graph is typical for manufactured physical goods; it slopes upwards to the right. For "intellectual property", like books or films, it will be much closer to a horizontal line (once you've written the book / produced the movie, you can sell additional units at almost no additional cost; all additional revenue is almost purely profit). Sure, the blue area (producer surplus) may be smaller with a horizontal supply price line, but the point is that the total economic surplus (blue plus red area) would be much larger with a lower horizontal supply price line than with a higher one. The author's argument is that the monopoly granted by too-strict copyright terms allow suppliers to keep the price higher than would otherwise be the case, making the size of the whole surplus -- blue plus (admittedly, mostly) red areas -- smaller than it could (should) be. That is the true economic cost of too-strict copyright terms. At least that's how I understood their argument.
goto11 5y ago
> For example, imagine if you didn’t have to pay full price for works, but instead, just for the cost of printing or downloading. You’d get to enjoy more of them than you would otherwise. I doubt that. The limiting factor for my reading is not money, it is time and other stuff I like to do. I suspect it is like that for most people. Reading is very cheap compared to other forms of entertainment.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It's very different when you want to quickly reference a dozen books in any given field, as opposed to just "reading" any one of them cover to cover. That's where copyright restrictions start to become very painful. Yes, libraries exist to make this kind of scholarship easier but not without restrictions of their own.
nerdjon 5y ago
While I do agree that 95 years is fairly long, as a consumer I am a little more conflicted. I like the idea that any IP created in my lifetime can stay in control by some entity from a consumer standpoint. Take something like Star Wars, once that enters general domain than there is the possibility of "Star Wars" being taken in a ton of different directions and makes it harder for a fan to follow since they will effectively be competing with eachother as the true "Star Wars". Personally I don't exactly know what a good timeline is, but I don't fully understand what exactly the harm is of some entity being able to keep control of something for a certain period of time. Or am I missing something here?
- danbolt 5y ago
  When I imagine your scenario, I like the idea of accepting that there’s no true “Star Wars” and having a bunch of different variations on it that we can enjoy/discuss. For example, Disney had a bunch of anime studios produce different non-cannon Star Wars shorts. I loved the variety, and I loved seeing everyone talk about which ones were their favourites. I think a stronger public domain would really help with this.
- hyperhopper 5y ago
  People already do things like that. Are you confused what the true Sonic games are, vs fan spinoffs and fanfic? I think it's easy to know which company makes the franchise that you are a fan of.
  - nerdjon 5y ago
    Of course they do, But I would assume that once some of these mega franchises hit the public domain, we could see Sony (just a random non disney example) make a big budget Star Wars movie and try to create their own Star Wars universe that is separate. This may or may not actually be a thing since by the time Star Wars hits public domain it may be irreverent. But if we had a shorter period, I would assume that could happen?
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
einpoklum 5y ago
Copyright length should be 0. Owners should not be able to use the state to prevent people making copies of text. These restrictions were scandalous when British parliament legislated them in the "Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" - to favor the printers' guild (1662); and it is scandalous today. Check out the page for this book on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/winniethepooh01miln https://archive.org/details/winniethepooh01miln --- The article says: > Reasoning out whether it should exist based on philosophical first principles is largely a dead end. it is a dead end in the sense that one would not be able to convince a person who does not assume the legitimacy of copy restrictions would not be convinced.
- falcolas 5y ago
  In the US alone, there are ~40,000 full time authors, who are creating a minimum of a $2.4 billion in retail and commercial business transactions every year (based on the $60k median income for authors). Those authors provide the raw material that supports dozens of supporting businesses - publishers, printers, editors, book stores, libraries, critics, and so forth. This is something that, without copyright, wouldn't exist. Even should patrons step up and provide that $2.4 billion every year for authors (very unlikely, in my opinion), the support industries would disappear.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > This is something that, without copyright, wouldn't exist. That's a baseless, and false, claim. You're repeating the kind of arguments RIAA was making against music file sharing.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Without copyright, the value of a book's contents is $0, because the mean cost† for (re)producing it is $0. If a product has no value, you can not create a market for that product. Relatively basic economics. The ability to create value around a product that has no value of its own requires quite a bit of additional effort. Authors can't hold concerts, after all. The RIAA's argument in the Napster days is definitely similar, but they were arguing from the point of their production costs not being $0, and copyright is in place, making copying legitimately illegal. † The cost for the first copy is $30,000 (given a Brandon Sanderson pace), and every subsequent copy costs $0 (give or take a few tiny fractions of a penny).
short12 5y ago
It should be 20 years, the descendents can get the profits made during that time or they can get a job
morpheuskafka 5y ago
One thing I haven't seen used much is a license that effectively voluntarily shortens a copyright term. There's a lot of people here who might want to license something either commercially or as Creative Commons, rather than dedicating it to the public domain immediately. But why not add text to the license that dedicates it at a future date, corresponding to however long you feel the copyright should last (say, 30 years)?
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Creative Commons explored this: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright
pmarreck 5y ago
95 years is FOUR generations. That's absolutely ridiculous.
elbasti 5y ago
I used to be very gung-ho about short copyright periods but my thinking has gotten a bit confused for two reasons: 1. I think there's virtue in limiting the modification --as opposed to the reproduction-- of works for some time after the death of the author. There's something distasteful about thinking of (to the use OP's example) Winnie the Pooh merchandise at Target, or The Winnie Pooh Movie having nothing to do with the "real" Winnie The Pooh. There is some value to the "sanctity" of a work IMHO, for some time. In other words, avoiding the "dracula-ization" or "frankenstein-ization" (read: "gross commercialization") of works for some time. That being said, it makes sense for the original, unmodified work, to enter the public domain. I think this is a distinction worth exploring. 2. More controversially, there are some works where there's a credible argument that the author is a "corporation." An example here is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each movie has the imprimatur of the director, but in the aggregate they feel very much "MCU" in style. If anything, the authors seem to be Kevin Feige, Louis D'esposito, and Victoria Alonso. The characters were originally created by Stan Lee et al, but if Marvel Studios were to create a new character (and make that character a flagship one, etc) that character would genuinely be a corporate creation. Would love a discussion on these topics.
- behringer 5y ago
  The first problem to solve would be the abolition of the corporation.
- password1 5y ago
  I don't agree with 2. If you look at any great work of art in movies or videogames it's easy to pin-point to one or just a few people that heavily influenced specific creative aspects of the final product. For a character to be memorable enough that a corporation decides to invest to make it a flagship one, you can rest assured there will be some great mind behind it that influenced it heavily to make it stand out in the crowd. If you were to take an committee of execs/businesspeople and make them create the "perfect MCU character" it would be either a copycat of something existing, or something so bland and safe that fans would forget in one second. That's why they still hire screenwriters and directors. I would also argue that tasking a team of creatives of coming up with a brand new superhero that: 1) fits the "MCU style" 2) it's safe and family friendly 3) is original enough to stand out 4) is likable 5) fits the current zeitgeist without feeling like a PR stunt. - would be an extremely daunting task for even the most experienced creative team. They might manage to do it and create a new flagship character for the MCU owned entirely by Disney, but it wouldn't be a "corporate character" and the real authors' influences and creativity would be extremely apparent in the character.
anamax 5y ago
I can live with semi-infinite copyright terms for non-encrypted IP IFF the copyright owner is required to periodically re-register the copyrighted items with the copyright office or lose the copyright. Why registration? Because if the copyright owner gets to rely on the legal system to protect its rights, the rest of us should be able to find out what rights are being protected. Why exclude encrypted IP? Because IP owners should get only one bite at the apple. Alternatively, the registration should have the plain text, to be made public when/if the registrant decides that registration is no longer worth the trouble.
combatentropy 5y ago
I find that most people don't understand creativity. If you believe an artist or inventor is some mystic sage who creates works ex nihilo, then you misunderstand creativity and attribute to it far too much. And therefore you might grant an artist a period of copyright that is longer than is really deserved or needed. Through much of my life, I have been accused of being "creative". In elementary school my class recognized me as the best at drawing. In fifth grade I wrote a book that was checked out so many times from the school library that it filled up the check-out card front and back. In high school, I made dozens of little movies with my friends. After college I was a graphic designer, and both of my employers expressed awe at my work. The best explanation of creativity that I have found is a video series by Kirby Ferguson called Everything Is a Remix, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc It shows what I always knew in the back of my head: that nothing I ever made was from staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was just me ripping off all my favorite things I had seen before. Everyone tries their hand at art, and often it obviously is a copy. My secret was that I would take a little of this, a little of that, copy 5 different things and mix them all together, rather than making a straight copy of just one thing. I wasn't trying to hide anything, it was just how my mind naturally worked. I thought one thing from one movie was cool, so I took part of that. I thought something else from a drawing was cool, so I took some of that. Then I merged it all together, naturally, without really thinking about what I was doing, just trying to make something cool. Then I saw that video and realized that is what pretty much everyone had been doing, no matter how famous. A great artist is not someone who creates stuff out of nothing. More like someone who comes up with a new recipe based on five previous recipes. I'm sure they deserve something, just not everything, foreverz!
- nhooyr 5y ago
  What was the book about?
- arcastroe 5y ago
  This makes it sound almost as if ideas themselves were "alive", in the sense that they reproduce and undergo natural selection, with the best ideas being "remixed" into new idea babies
theK 5y ago
How about just permitting copyright on real people as a non transactable property? From my understanding, the grief with IP law comes from corporate activity. So if only people can own copyright and the only thing they can do with it is license it for creative purposes everything should clear up right? EDIT: s/transitive/transactable/
vannevar 5y ago
Copyright hasn't been extended because anyone thought it was in the public interest; it's been extended because monied corporate interests paid to have it extended, and there just isn't much political will in the people at large to oppose it because they have no clear conception of what they are losing. The vast majority of them are never going to create derivative works, and as long as the content is relatively cheap to consume, they aren't going to complain if copyright extends to infinity.
phkahler 5y ago
If copyright is to incentivise creators, maybe it should not be transferable?
1ncorrect 5y ago
Copyright and patents need competing mechanisms which derive and attribute the value of an idea based on their use, as opposed to their availability. Their current incantations incentivise conjuring artificial scarcity in order to fit the incumbent sociopathic and monotheistic economic religion of our time. I see no reason alternative systems shouldn’t be invoked which incentivise realising the communal value from how far and often an idea is used. They could exist along side what currently exists, with competitive and cooperative relational dependencies established as needs arise.
steve_g 5y ago
This was the argument made by Larry Lessig in Eldred vs Ashcroft - the extreme length of the US copyright term is well beyond what's necessary "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." 95 years is by no means a "limited time." He lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft
krupan 5y ago
The whole idea of still getting paid for work you did 20, 30, 90! years ago blows my mind. How does anyone think that's reasonable? Can you imagine if plumbers ("you're still using that drain I installed, pay up!"), firefighters ("still using that house I saved, pay up!"), doctors ("that surgery I did in 2003? Still bringing in royalties! Let's buy another boat!"), etc. got paid that way!?
neilwilson 5y ago
Copyright doesn't need 2 years to get the job done. Nobody simply selling their labour in the market gets to live off what they did yesterday, never mind two years ago. It's a monopoly and in any sensible system would be subject to anti-trust and market competition action like any other monopoly. And in any sensible system there would also be a way for creative people to earn a living wage.
inglor_cz 5y ago
So I am an author who made significant money on his copyrighted works, and I think that copyright terms should be reformed (and mostly shortened) too. My main beef with the long term copyright system is that it does precisely the opposite what it is supposed to do: it suppresses creativity by making it legally risky to derive works even from abandonware. Everyone discusses Cinderella, but IMHO the worst problem with long copyright is the huge, huge pile of semi-orphaned or utterly orphaned works that no one is legally allowed to touch, even though they do not make any money for their creators and heirs. This is a pure dead weight loss. IDK how big this pile of untouchable works is, but I would guess that over 99 per cent of copyrighted works do not make even a dollar a year after some 20-30 years since their publication. So my reform, that would actually consider the interests of both small creators and big corporations, would be return to the double-tiered system: - every work would be in automatic, free copyright for 20 years, - after that, the owner of the copyright would have to register the work in a publicly accesible catalog for a very mild fee (something like 3 dollars yearly). That fee would prevent spamming of the database by frivolous requests, but would winnow out works that are no longer, or never have been, commercially interesting for their creators. It would also make easier lives of other people who would be interested in licensing said work, because they would know whom to contact. This second phase could be much longer, perhaps for 80 years. I would be happy, as an author, to subject my own works to similar rules (actually I release my texts much sooner.) And this scheme would solve the abandonware problem, returning civilization to its original way of building art - which is derivation from the earlier works.
- IanCal 5y ago
  I've wondered about a system where after a short initial period you pay a fee based on a value you assign to the copyright. The twist being that this value is then used for the sale of the copyright. Disney say that Mickey mouse is worth $1M to pay lower fees? OK but anyone is able to buy the copyright for that amount. By keeping something in copyright you're stopping everyone else from using it as they want, and asking the government to enforce this for you. In return, you should pay for that privilege. Having one system/cost for both my small run book and the basis for multi-billion dollar companies feels odd though. You could have the fee scale based on age, or not. Curious to hear where this poorly spec'd system would fail, so am putting it on HN to be dismantled :)
mbar84 5y ago
https://questioncopyright.org/ https://questioncopyright.org/ http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
Ekaros 5y ago
I'm up for relatively long copyright periods like 50 years for literary and graphical works. Maybe music and movies too. Gives plenty of time to sell it during life time and authors should be productive as well. Their kids only deserve money they saved. Now with software and computer games, I would be up for something sorter like 25 years from release of the version. Still gives period to sell it, but also takes in account how things are different. And I'm not wholly against trademark protections either. Not the whole name, but let's say versions of logo and such. Yes you can use name and content, but you can't sell it with branding or logo that has established use.
gcanyon 5y ago
The copyright term was 28 years, with an option to renew for another 28 years, at a time when distributing your work worldwide, or even nationwide — to derive its full value — could take years, or even longer to promote and gain awareness. Now distribution and promotion are very much faster. It can takes weeks, or even days, for a work to gain popularity. The term should be updated to reflect that reality: it should be something like 3-5 years, with the possibility to extend if necessary. In all cases a copyright should be treated like trademark: use it or lose it. And if an author isn’t responsive to requests, there should be some relatively simple way to force expiration of the copyright and use the work.
thefringthing 5y ago
95 years is not even the longest copyright period in the United States: some sound recordings will not enter the public domain until 110 years after their first publication.

418 points by jseliger 5y ago

For those who, unaccountably, can't stand Winnie the Pooh, here is someone who will stand with you. https://bookmarks.reviews/in-which-winnie-the-pooh-makes-dorothy-parker-throw-up/ https://bookmarks.reviews/in-which-winnie-the-pooh-makes-dor...

moate 5y ago
Everyone has "that one thing" right? How many guys at parties have tried to seem interesting by telling everyone how overrated the Beatles are or how the MCU isn't really even movies when you think about it. goes back to humming "Little Black Rain Cloud" to himself
- watwut 5y ago
  For whatever it is worth, Winnie the Pooh is far from most popular children's books. It was movies that got super popular and fun to watch. Book is one of those you buy, but rarely read cause neither you nor kid wants it that much.
ghaff 5y ago
When I saw your comment I was reminded of Dorothy Parker's quote. And indeed, what should I find in the link... (I did like Milne's books as a child though.) He did write some other things that were definitely not as child-oriented. I saw his play The Dover Road when I was in London a number of years back.
easton 5y ago
I never thought I’d find a Heffalump or Woozle on HN, but there you have it. Truly all walks of life come here.

password1 5y ago

Sometimes I wonder how many amazing movies, series and videogames we would have if everyone could use popular franchises for their creations (think MCU, Star Wars, LOTR, but also more niche franchises). Instead we only get the safe and family friendly cookie-cutter versions tuned for mass consumption. Big media corporations want to play it safe to ensure profitability, but other creators would be free to experiment in all other sort of narrative and stylistic directions.

karaterobot 5y ago
I think I'd prefer a world where there were fewer remakes and adaptations of existing franchises, and people focused on coming up with new things instead. I'm not suggesting that copyright should be extended for that purpose.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  Arguably the reasons there are more remakes and adaptations of existing franchises is specifically for value to accrue to those IP's, in a very siloed and narrow way with minimal cross-pollination across brand ownership lines.
- password1 5y ago
  The problem with remakes and adaptations of existing franchises is that they all basically follow the same safe and tested structure. So they are boring and feel all the same because they basically are. I might argue that this phenomenon is too a byproduct of copyrights. In a world were everyone can create interesting things on any IP, there's no market for cookie-cutter adaptations. People watch cookie-cutter adaptations and remakes because it's the only way to experience the characters and worlds they like. If they had another option they probably just skip the reboot and go watch the new take from a different studio or director.
- netcan 5y ago
  Both can coexist. Consider that Greek mythology or Irish fairy stories are basically different stories in the same "cinematic universe." But... that universe isn't a monopoly. Many authors contributed. Stories were tailored to different audiences. The cliche blockbuster remakes are corny because they are, but the concept of remakes, universes and sequels isn't bad.

cies 5y ago

> Copyrights should be shorter You're going up against a big lobby. To do that you first need a functioning democracy. In a place where "the people" rule, copyright'd be optimized to ensure a rich commons for everyone to enjoy. That was the original idea behind intellectual property law, e.g. copyright. Now it's big biz holding our culture for ransom.

google234123 5y ago
I don't think people care much about this issue and will focus more on issues that actually matter to them in a functioning democracy. E.g. taxes, health care, crime, education.
- saxonww 5y ago
  The counter-argument to this is that in a functioning democracy, people would actually have the ability to think about things like copyright, vs. scrambling to get adequate healthcare or education, while knowing their tax money would do meaningful things about crime instead of whatever they're doing now.
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    Your point seem to be a rant about US social policies and is easily disproved by the fact that similar copyright terms existing in Europe where those things aren't the same.
    - nextstep 5y ago
      They exist in Europe because of a similar corrupting mechanism; just because the European system hasn't completely dismantled their social systems the way the US is close to doesn't mean that democracy isn't also being weakened by capitalism.
    - witrak 5y ago
      AFAIK the European model is not as similar as you seem to be convinced. And the origin of copyright was from the beginning related not to the well-being of authors but rather publishers.

wcerfgba 5y ago

Are there any campaigns or groups working on reducing the standard copyright term length? I believe this is a very worthwhile pursuit, but very complicated to undertake. The WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Berne Convention are international agreements, and individual countries also have their own laws. Thus I'm not even sure how one would go about starting to lobby for a reduced copyright term.

phoe-krk 5y ago
International Communia Association (https://www.communia-association.org/ https://www.communia-association.org/) is one group that I am aware of.

tehjoker 5y ago

Is there anyone who believes that copyright lengths have been decided by some kind of balanced process between equal parties that carefully looked at the economic interests and societal interests or is it just monopolists like Disney buying longer strangleholds on culture to make money? If you believe the latter, there's no point in writing about the balance of interests, you need to build counter power. We're just so far outside the regime of anything resembling reason. Talking about the balance of interests is only of use to try to decide if we should have copyrights at all in some theoretical alternate universe.

VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
Perhaps you underestimate the breadth of readership on HN.
- amelius 5y ago
  If someone can give me a more reasonable copyright duration, I will change the law tomorrow!
  - labster 5y ago
    Twenty years from publication; the holder can pay the Library of Congress $2 to extend the copyright by one year. This fee doubles every year thereafter. So the 30th year only costs $1024, and the 40th year costs $1048576. If it remains profitable, you share the proceeds of rent-seeking with the public.
    - shagie 5y ago
      As copyrights are honored across multiple nations... this approach would encourage me to register my copyrights in say... Canada or England instead.
      - labster 5y ago
        USA is the driving force behind all of these copyright treaties. Given Canada’s role in abandoning the copyright part of TPP… I suspect most regimes would change to ones where they pay less American companies and earn more taxes themselves.

shmerl 5y ago

Why isn't there a stronger push to scale the terms down? Those corrupt who profit from it for more than a century have nothing to do with the authors.

rflrob 5y ago
I believe that the issue is that the harms are broad but relatively small for each person, while the benefits are quite concentrated for those who do profit. Thus, there aren't going to be many people where loosening copyright terms is their primary factor in voting for a legislator or lobbying, while the large rights-holders will put considerable effort into maintaining or extending the status quo.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cogman10 5y ago
Same reason tech patents last for 20 years and not 5. You've got big moneyed interests who benefit from long IP terms and small groups of people that might benefit from shorter IP periods. End result, no legislator will push for shorter terms, they just don't care about it. Disney can show how much money they'll lose if the mouse becomes public domain (and how much that'd hurt campaign contributions) while Mickey's auto repair shop will struggle to show similar losses if they can't put the mouse on their billboard.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
There's no group that sees a huge immediate profit from their reduction to finance a lobby, and the overall benefit to the average person is very opaque. How would you pitch a fifty year copyright to a random neighbor? "Tired of spending full price on Beatles albums? Wish you could hear more Elvis covers? Reduce copyright!"
anigbrowl 5y ago
Because lawyers and publicists cost $$$ and the payoff is indirect and broadly dispersed across population and time, rather than arriving in the form of a check. It would require at the least 10s of millions in lobbying expenses, and raising that amount of money in the name of an abstraction is likely a non-starter. You could run a piracy website that only offered works more than X years old, where X is some popular proposal for a reasonable term, and then fight a test case. To my mind the best legal argument against the current regime is that the Constitution's specification of 'limited time' copyright has been extended to be longer than the median human lifetime, thus making it effectively perpetual for most humans in the US; this also hinders the formation of a constituency for shorter periods because fewer and fewer people have had the experience of seeing a work they admired at the time of publication subsequently enter the public domain. But realistically, any test case is likely to fail because higher courts would probably just say 'the term might be effectively infinite for people but it's short in the lifetime of a nation and corporations are arguably immortal so no media giveaway for you peons.'

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

I don't see that much a problem with it. 95 years or death + 70 years gives the creator and their children the benefit of their copyrights. How long do people think it should be?

loeg 5y ago
One thousand years. This gives the creator, their children, and their descendants the benefit of their copyrights for a millennium.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  1,000 years is too long IMO.
  - loeg 5y ago
    Why 200 years, but not 1000?
    - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
      Who said 200 years?
      - _dain_ 5y ago
        Disney, circa 2070.
        VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        Is that real or did you just make that up
        _dain_ 5y ago
        I saw it in a dream, so yes it's real.
  - 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

The longest I can theoretically think is justified is the death of the author. The idea to keep works out of the public domain so that heirs or estates or businesses can live off economic rents is pretty bizarre to me, seems straight up feudal.

cogman10 5y ago
If someone writes a best seller and kicks the bucket, it'd sort of suck that someone like Disney could swoop in and make a bunch of movies without paying a dime of royalties to the author's family. Or that a bunch of publishers can have a field day republishing the best seller diluting all the work of the original publisher. But on the flip side, 90+ years is really WAY too long. Cut it to 20 years. Long enough to capture the initial buzz, but not so long that we end up with shit staying under the mouse's thumb forever.
- dlp211 5y ago
  This is exactly what Disney did do though; Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio; to become a massive corp. And now that they are a massive Corp that just can buy the rights to any copyrighted material locking out competitors. Imagine if others had the chance to compete.
  - troupe 5y ago
    Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story. Carlo Collodi was dead by 1890 so Disney definitely didn't "swoop in" and benefit at his or his descendent's expense. I believe the other stories you mention are even older.
    - superluserdo 5y ago
      >Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story. This is very much an "in principle" thing. In practice, many of these traditional stories have (sadly) become synonymous with the Disney version, so Disney's work is basically the canonical version. This gives Disney a very good sword of Damocles to hang over the heads of anyone else trying to adapt these folk stories: to my understanding if you include a single copyrightable adaptation or embellishment of the original that was written by Disney without "prior art", you're liable to be steamrollered by the lawyer army and be ruined.

cassac 5y ago

I’m fine with copyrights being longer as long as company’s have to actually pay for it. Something like 3% gross revenue. We could minimize shell companies by limiting infringement fines to be based on the copyright payment. So if Disney hides Mickey Mouse behind a 30 cent company then violations are only worth 30 cents.

Gigachad 5y ago
I don't think it has to be profit based. Just have an ever increasing flat rate. Free 20 years but every year after becomes increasingly expensive. Then Disney can protect their stuff for ages while putting a lot of money back in to the government, while the vast majority of content becomes free at 20 years because it has no commercial value.

dahart 5y ago

It’s great that the article starts with what’s right about copyrights. I also agree that copyrights last too long at the moment, they could be shortened a bit. > But this system has its limitations. I’ll highlight three that are particularly important: Intellectual property rights can result in fewer people enjoying the product than would be efficient. They can be expensive to determine and enforce. And they can ultimately create a kind of drag on the whole economy if too many of the economy’s rewards are for work that was done in the distant past. I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. This is already happening in some ways online, sites like YouTube allow crowd-source reporting of breaches, for better or worse. Yes, it’s being abused and there are problems, but it is in fact cheaper than going to court. > The first-order consequences of online piracy are that you are better off, and nobody is worse off. Copyright law is specifically founded on the principle that this is not true, and it is why being sued for copyright breach explicitly does not depend on the creator making money on the thing being copied. (It helps if there’s clear financial damage, but is by no means necessary.) Coming from a site on economics, this assertion seems particularly troubling. Taking something of value without paying for it is still stealing, there is economic harm, and it’s irrelevant whether the creator is deprived of something tangible. Even the author acknowledges that if there were no copyrights, it would be economically damaging, and the entire reason why is because there is harm done when pirating, and we’re trying to balance that harm with the good. > We can ultimately reject an online piracy model, at least for some works, because we worry about the second-order incentive effects of creators not getting paid. But then we miss out on the good first-order consequences of distributing the work to anyone who wants it. Interesting framing that reverses first-order and second-order effect, again problematic from an economics perspective. Paying buyers of copies are the first-order primary economy for copies. What economic “first-order” good does distributing free copies to anyone who wants it do? I’m in favor of being able to incorporate and remix works after some time, but unlimited free copies immediately after creation would be first-order bad.

CRConrad 5y ago
> I like the 3rd reason, but don’t find the first two very compelling. We can make enforcement less expensive, having it be costly is a reason to make copyrights stronger, not a great reason to ditch the system. I think you're misunderstanding TFA there. The main thing they're talking about there is not the cost of enforcement (point 2), but the cost to society in terms of lost / unrealised economic surplus (point 1). Look at the first graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus : the blue line, producers' price as a function of unit cost, should in economic theory equal their marginal cost. The shape it has in this graph is typical for manufactured physical goods; it slopes upwards to the right. For "intellectual property", like books or films, it will be much closer to a horizontal line (once you've written the book / produced the movie, you can sell additional units at almost no additional cost; all additional revenue is almost purely profit). Sure, the blue area (producer surplus) may be smaller with a horizontal supply price line, but the point is that the total economic surplus (blue plus red area) would be much larger with a lower horizontal supply price line than with a higher one. The author's argument is that the monopoly granted by too-strict copyright terms allow suppliers to keep the price higher than would otherwise be the case, making the size of the whole surplus -- blue plus (admittedly, mostly) red areas -- smaller than it could (should) be. That is the true economic cost of too-strict copyright terms. At least that's how I understood their argument.

goto11 5y ago

> For example, imagine if you didn’t have to pay full price for works, but instead, just for the cost of printing or downloading. You’d get to enjoy more of them than you would otherwise. I doubt that. The limiting factor for my reading is not money, it is time and other stuff I like to do. I suspect it is like that for most people. Reading is very cheap compared to other forms of entertainment.

zozbot234 5y ago
It's very different when you want to quickly reference a dozen books in any given field, as opposed to just "reading" any one of them cover to cover. That's where copyright restrictions start to become very painful. Yes, libraries exist to make this kind of scholarship easier but not without restrictions of their own.

nerdjon 5y ago

While I do agree that 95 years is fairly long, as a consumer I am a little more conflicted. I like the idea that any IP created in my lifetime can stay in control by some entity from a consumer standpoint. Take something like Star Wars, once that enters general domain than there is the possibility of "Star Wars" being taken in a ton of different directions and makes it harder for a fan to follow since they will effectively be competing with eachother as the true "Star Wars". Personally I don't exactly know what a good timeline is, but I don't fully understand what exactly the harm is of some entity being able to keep control of something for a certain period of time. Or am I missing something here?

danbolt 5y ago
When I imagine your scenario, I like the idea of accepting that there’s no true “Star Wars” and having a bunch of different variations on it that we can enjoy/discuss. For example, Disney had a bunch of anime studios produce different non-cannon Star Wars shorts. I loved the variety, and I loved seeing everyone talk about which ones were their favourites. I think a stronger public domain would really help with this.
hyperhopper 5y ago
People already do things like that. Are you confused what the true Sonic games are, vs fan spinoffs and fanfic? I think it's easy to know which company makes the franchise that you are a fan of.
- nerdjon 5y ago
  Of course they do, But I would assume that once some of these mega franchises hit the public domain, we could see Sony (just a random non disney example) make a big budget Star Wars movie and try to create their own Star Wars universe that is separate. This may or may not actually be a thing since by the time Star Wars hits public domain it may be irreverent. But if we had a shorter period, I would assume that could happen?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago

einpoklum 5y ago

Copyright length should be 0. Owners should not be able to use the state to prevent people making copies of text. These restrictions were scandalous when British parliament legislated them in the "Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" - to favor the printers' guild (1662); and it is scandalous today. Check out the page for this book on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/winniethepooh01miln https://archive.org/details/winniethepooh01miln --- The article says: > Reasoning out whether it should exist based on philosophical first principles is largely a dead end. it is a dead end in the sense that one would not be able to convince a person who does not assume the legitimacy of copy restrictions would not be convinced.

falcolas 5y ago
In the US alone, there are ~40,000 full time authors, who are creating a minimum of a $2.4 billion in retail and commercial business transactions every year (based on the $60k median income for authors). Those authors provide the raw material that supports dozens of supporting businesses - publishers, printers, editors, book stores, libraries, critics, and so forth. This is something that, without copyright, wouldn't exist. Even should patrons step up and provide that $2.4 billion every year for authors (very unlikely, in my opinion), the support industries would disappear.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > This is something that, without copyright, wouldn't exist. That's a baseless, and false, claim. You're repeating the kind of arguments RIAA was making against music file sharing.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Without copyright, the value of a book's contents is $0, because the mean cost† for (re)producing it is $0. If a product has no value, you can not create a market for that product. Relatively basic economics. The ability to create value around a product that has no value of its own requires quite a bit of additional effort. Authors can't hold concerts, after all. The RIAA's argument in the Napster days is definitely similar, but they were arguing from the point of their production costs not being $0, and copyright is in place, making copying legitimately illegal. † The cost for the first copy is $30,000 (given a Brandon Sanderson pace), and every subsequent copy costs $0 (give or take a few tiny fractions of a penny).

short12 5y ago

It should be 20 years, the descendents can get the profits made during that time or they can get a job

morpheuskafka 5y ago

One thing I haven't seen used much is a license that effectively voluntarily shortens a copyright term. There's a lot of people here who might want to license something either commercially or as Creative Commons, rather than dedicating it to the public domain immediately. But why not add text to the license that dedicates it at a future date, corresponding to however long you feel the copyright should last (say, 30 years)?

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Creative Commons explored this: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright

pmarreck 5y ago

95 years is FOUR generations. That's absolutely ridiculous.

elbasti 5y ago

I used to be very gung-ho about short copyright periods but my thinking has gotten a bit confused for two reasons: 1. I think there's virtue in limiting the modification --as opposed to the reproduction-- of works for some time after the death of the author. There's something distasteful about thinking of (to the use OP's example) Winnie the Pooh merchandise at Target, or The Winnie Pooh Movie having nothing to do with the "real" Winnie The Pooh. There is some value to the "sanctity" of a work IMHO, for some time. In other words, avoiding the "dracula-ization" or "frankenstein-ization" (read: "gross commercialization") of works for some time. That being said, it makes sense for the original, unmodified work, to enter the public domain. I think this is a distinction worth exploring. 2. More controversially, there are some works where there's a credible argument that the author is a "corporation." An example here is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each movie has the imprimatur of the director, but in the aggregate they feel very much "MCU" in style. If anything, the authors seem to be Kevin Feige, Louis D'esposito, and Victoria Alonso. The characters were originally created by Stan Lee et al, but if Marvel Studios were to create a new character (and make that character a flagship one, etc) that character would genuinely be a corporate creation. Would love a discussion on these topics.

behringer 5y ago
The first problem to solve would be the abolition of the corporation.
password1 5y ago
I don't agree with 2. If you look at any great work of art in movies or videogames it's easy to pin-point to one or just a few people that heavily influenced specific creative aspects of the final product. For a character to be memorable enough that a corporation decides to invest to make it a flagship one, you can rest assured there will be some great mind behind it that influenced it heavily to make it stand out in the crowd. If you were to take an committee of execs/businesspeople and make them create the "perfect MCU character" it would be either a copycat of something existing, or something so bland and safe that fans would forget in one second. That's why they still hire screenwriters and directors. I would also argue that tasking a team of creatives of coming up with a brand new superhero that: 1) fits the "MCU style" 2) it's safe and family friendly 3) is original enough to stand out 4) is likable 5) fits the current zeitgeist without feeling like a PR stunt. - would be an extremely daunting task for even the most experienced creative team. They might manage to do it and create a new flagship character for the MCU owned entirely by Disney, but it wouldn't be a "corporate character" and the real authors' influences and creativity would be extremely apparent in the character.

anamax 5y ago

I can live with semi-infinite copyright terms for non-encrypted IP IFF the copyright owner is required to periodically re-register the copyrighted items with the copyright office or lose the copyright. Why registration? Because if the copyright owner gets to rely on the legal system to protect its rights, the rest of us should be able to find out what rights are being protected. Why exclude encrypted IP? Because IP owners should get only one bite at the apple. Alternatively, the registration should have the plain text, to be made public when/if the registrant decides that registration is no longer worth the trouble.

combatentropy 5y ago

I find that most people don't understand creativity. If you believe an artist or inventor is some mystic sage who creates works ex nihilo, then you misunderstand creativity and attribute to it far too much. And therefore you might grant an artist a period of copyright that is longer than is really deserved or needed. Through much of my life, I have been accused of being "creative". In elementary school my class recognized me as the best at drawing. In fifth grade I wrote a book that was checked out so many times from the school library that it filled up the check-out card front and back. In high school, I made dozens of little movies with my friends. After college I was a graphic designer, and both of my employers expressed awe at my work. The best explanation of creativity that I have found is a video series by Kirby Ferguson called Everything Is a Remix, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc It shows what I always knew in the back of my head: that nothing I ever made was from staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was just me ripping off all my favorite things I had seen before. Everyone tries their hand at art, and often it obviously is a copy. My secret was that I would take a little of this, a little of that, copy 5 different things and mix them all together, rather than making a straight copy of just one thing. I wasn't trying to hide anything, it was just how my mind naturally worked. I thought one thing from one movie was cool, so I took part of that. I thought something else from a drawing was cool, so I took some of that. Then I merged it all together, naturally, without really thinking about what I was doing, just trying to make something cool. Then I saw that video and realized that is what pretty much everyone had been doing, no matter how famous. A great artist is not someone who creates stuff out of nothing. More like someone who comes up with a new recipe based on five previous recipes. I'm sure they deserve something, just not everything, foreverz!

nhooyr 5y ago
What was the book about?
arcastroe 5y ago
This makes it sound almost as if ideas themselves were "alive", in the sense that they reproduce and undergo natural selection, with the best ideas being "remixed" into new idea babies

theK 5y ago

How about just permitting copyright on real people as a non transactable property? From my understanding, the grief with IP law comes from corporate activity. So if only people can own copyright and the only thing they can do with it is license it for creative purposes everything should clear up right? EDIT: s/transitive/transactable/

vannevar 5y ago

Copyright hasn't been extended because anyone thought it was in the public interest; it's been extended because monied corporate interests paid to have it extended, and there just isn't much political will in the people at large to oppose it because they have no clear conception of what they are losing. The vast majority of them are never going to create derivative works, and as long as the content is relatively cheap to consume, they aren't going to complain if copyright extends to infinity.

phkahler 5y ago

If copyright is to incentivise creators, maybe it should not be transferable?

1ncorrect 5y ago

Copyright and patents need competing mechanisms which derive and attribute the value of an idea based on their use, as opposed to their availability. Their current incantations incentivise conjuring artificial scarcity in order to fit the incumbent sociopathic and monotheistic economic religion of our time. I see no reason alternative systems shouldn’t be invoked which incentivise realising the communal value from how far and often an idea is used. They could exist along side what currently exists, with competitive and cooperative relational dependencies established as needs arise.

steve_g 5y ago

This was the argument made by Larry Lessig in Eldred vs Ashcroft - the extreme length of the US copyright term is well beyond what's necessary "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." 95 years is by no means a "limited time." He lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

krupan 5y ago

The whole idea of still getting paid for work you did 20, 30, 90! years ago blows my mind. How does anyone think that's reasonable? Can you imagine if plumbers ("you're still using that drain I installed, pay up!"), firefighters ("still using that house I saved, pay up!"), doctors ("that surgery I did in 2003? Still bringing in royalties! Let's buy another boat!"), etc. got paid that way!?

neilwilson 5y ago

Copyright doesn't need 2 years to get the job done. Nobody simply selling their labour in the market gets to live off what they did yesterday, never mind two years ago. It's a monopoly and in any sensible system would be subject to anti-trust and market competition action like any other monopoly. And in any sensible system there would also be a way for creative people to earn a living wage.

inglor_cz 5y ago

So I am an author who made significant money on his copyrighted works, and I think that copyright terms should be reformed (and mostly shortened) too. My main beef with the long term copyright system is that it does precisely the opposite what it is supposed to do: it suppresses creativity by making it legally risky to derive works even from abandonware. Everyone discusses Cinderella, but IMHO the worst problem with long copyright is the huge, huge pile of semi-orphaned or utterly orphaned works that no one is legally allowed to touch, even though they do not make any money for their creators and heirs. This is a pure dead weight loss. IDK how big this pile of untouchable works is, but I would guess that over 99 per cent of copyrighted works do not make even a dollar a year after some 20-30 years since their publication. So my reform, that would actually consider the interests of both small creators and big corporations, would be return to the double-tiered system: - every work would be in automatic, free copyright for 20 years, - after that, the owner of the copyright would have to register the work in a publicly accesible catalog for a very mild fee (something like 3 dollars yearly). That fee would prevent spamming of the database by frivolous requests, but would winnow out works that are no longer, or never have been, commercially interesting for their creators. It would also make easier lives of other people who would be interested in licensing said work, because they would know whom to contact. This second phase could be much longer, perhaps for 80 years. I would be happy, as an author, to subject my own works to similar rules (actually I release my texts much sooner.) And this scheme would solve the abandonware problem, returning civilization to its original way of building art - which is derivation from the earlier works.

IanCal 5y ago
I've wondered about a system where after a short initial period you pay a fee based on a value you assign to the copyright. The twist being that this value is then used for the sale of the copyright. Disney say that Mickey mouse is worth $1M to pay lower fees? OK but anyone is able to buy the copyright for that amount. By keeping something in copyright you're stopping everyone else from using it as they want, and asking the government to enforce this for you. In return, you should pay for that privilege. Having one system/cost for both my small run book and the basis for multi-billion dollar companies feels odd though. You could have the fee scale based on age, or not. Curious to hear where this poorly spec'd system would fail, so am putting it on HN to be dismantled :)

mbar84 5y ago

https://questioncopyright.org/ https://questioncopyright.org/ http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

Ekaros 5y ago

I'm up for relatively long copyright periods like 50 years for literary and graphical works. Maybe music and movies too. Gives plenty of time to sell it during life time and authors should be productive as well. Their kids only deserve money they saved. Now with software and computer games, I would be up for something sorter like 25 years from release of the version. Still gives period to sell it, but also takes in account how things are different. And I'm not wholly against trademark protections either. Not the whole name, but let's say versions of logo and such. Yes you can use name and content, but you can't sell it with branding or logo that has established use.

gcanyon 5y ago

The copyright term was 28 years, with an option to renew for another 28 years, at a time when distributing your work worldwide, or even nationwide — to derive its full value — could take years, or even longer to promote and gain awareness. Now distribution and promotion are very much faster. It can takes weeks, or even days, for a work to gain popularity. The term should be updated to reflect that reality: it should be something like 3-5 years, with the possibility to extend if necessary. In all cases a copyright should be treated like trademark: use it or lose it. And if an author isn’t responsive to requests, there should be some relatively simple way to force expiration of the copyright and use the work.

thefringthing 5y ago

95 years is not even the longest copyright period in the United States: some sound recordings will not enter the public domain until 110 years after their first publication.