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Sure! That's what "good copyright" is for. But at some point Pooh/Mickey/etc become part of the public domain. That currently takes longer that I think is neces

by cies 5y ago

Sure! That's what "good copyright" is for. But at some point Pooh/Mickey/etc become part of the public domain. That currently takes longer that I think is necessary to pay the artists, and largely in place to pay shareholder dividends of the big corps owing the intellectual property (IP). It in then my artistic freedom to equate IP with culture and consider the really long expiry times "holding ransom".

dahart 5y ago
I think copyrights are too long. But, devil’s advocate, I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive. Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it? (Not saying I advocate this; I don’t. I’m just asking for a more clear argument as to why the public should be able to co-opt some IP and call it “culture” just because it got popular and/or profitable.)
- cies 5y ago
  > Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it? You have! Then just don't publish/share/release it. Take it physically to your grave. Once you publish it, I also have the "natural ability" to record it. Copyright limits my ability to record/reuse what I technically can by what is allowed. Copyright, and other IP rights have been sold as to give the original creators some head start which would make investing in such works more easy, in the end leading to a more rich commons for everyone.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Your argument across multiple comments doesn't cohere. You mention "good copyright" upthread, but here have somehow derived an innate right to record and reproduce anything you technically can, which is an argument that relitigates the entire premise of copyright, which is to artificially restrict that innate right in order to incentivize people to author new works.
    - cies 5y ago
      > You mention "good copyright" That means short copyright, just enough to increase innovation. > but here have somehow derived an innate right to record and reproduce anything you technically can No, that's not a right, that just a technical ability. Copyright outlaw that ability. > to artificially restrict that innate right in order to incentivize people to author new works. Exactly that is what all IP law does imho.
- ykevinator2 5y ago
  Because it's taxpayer funded enforcement. The walmart employee funds the guards around George Lucas and kim kardashian's castles.
  - dahart 5y ago
    The police are taxpayer funded enforcement of the things in your house and in your bank. Should personal property and wealth savings also revert to the public because of this? It would be a stronger argument if the creation of the work was taxpayer funded, then that would be a decent reason to have the protections lapse eventually.
    - labawi 5y ago
      IP is not property. If you put your chair on display, then yes, people should¹ have a right to make a similar chair and copy and share ad infinitum, but taking the original chair itself would be a no-no. It's not a good comparison. To take thing further, there are various takes on personal property, with broad acceptance that yes, personal property should (gradually) revert to the public (taxes), otherwise very bad things happen (see inequality). Some societies do not have personal property beyond some personal items. Property/ownership has vast negative consequences (exacerbating greed, poverty, starvation, mass suffering; many wars are fought for property), though I'd agree it is in many ways better than alternatives, especially if the state and taxation dulls some of the sharp edges. ¹ By default. We may argue to what extent some restrictions may be reasonable as an imperfect way to achieve a certain goal.
      - dahart 5y ago
        I didn’t argue that IP was property. I responded to the suggestion that the reason to have a limited copyright term is because enforcement is taxpayer funded. I’m pointing out that this reasoning is inconsistent and has no strong basis.
        labawi 5y ago
        I'm pointing out your reasoning is unfounded non sequitur. Physical property does indeed revert to public domain, hence it does not make sense to add requisites for release of intellectual restrictions. Requiring public funding for only-temporarily-private IP would make things more inconsistent.
- fistfucker3000 5y ago
  Because even if your name is on it, the idea that “you” made it is not really true. Someone made materials for you, somebody taught you the skills needed to make the thing. There was a whole functioning society that allowed the work to be made in the first place. The society was also the thing that enforced the property rights for some arbitrary length of time. At some point, the society that helped create the work should share in the spoils.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Fine, so tax it. This doesn’t amount to a pro-argument that someone else should be able to divert my income stream and my creative work for their own private gain.
    - kapuasuite 5y ago
      There’s no counter-argument to make beyond my self-interest in consuming creative works at very low cost and with very few limitations outweighing your self-interest in profiting from your works.
      - dahart 5y ago
        There is a counter argument to make, and that’s not it. If getting free stuff were the primary argument in favor of shorter copyright, our court system would have extended copyrights forever already.
        kapuasuite 5y ago
        Congress is the one that’s dramatically extended copyright length, not the courts.
        dahart 5y ago
        Sure, fine. I stand corrected and remain unsatisfied by still not hearing any clear or compelling reasons to shorten copyrights. Congress isn’t extending copyrights on their own, their doing it because they’ve been asked to by businesses like Disney. The length hasn’t been extended “dramatically”, any time recently. No more dramatically than in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Duration_of_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  >But, devil’s advocate, I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive. Because you've got it backwards, you have no inherent right to any intellectual property you create, it's a legal fiction. Before copyright was a thing, freely copying and remixing the ideas and stories of others was the default. Once an idea is out there, you have no moral right to tell others they cannot share it. Copyright is an attempt to give an incentive to people to come up with more good ideas and stories and music, but the default is that they belong to everyone.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Outside of your innate right to split someone's skull open with the nearest tree branch and take the freshly killed squirrel out of their dead hands, pretty much all rights are legal fictions. You have to do better in your argument than to point out that the balancing acts we do in our laws are artificial. What we're discussing here is a right that's been baked into American law since its creation; it's not a random idea Sonny Bono had in 1997.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      It was originally 14 years, renewable for an additional 14 year term if the author was alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...
      - tptacek 5y ago
        It was almost 60 years as of 1909, 14 years before Disney existed. But if you believe the right itself is a fiction, I'm not sure what the term has to do with anything.
        pseudalopex 5y ago
        How is 1909 relevant to the origin of copyright? The article explained how limited copyright is a useful incentive apart from any moral view. And it explained how the term affects the costs.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  You can do that. Just keep it to yourself!
- jevoten 5y ago
  Ok, lets pretend IP never reverts to the public domain. Before you write the first word, pay a license to the heir of whoever invented written language. And spoken, for that matter. And invented paper, and the pen. Then to the heirs of all the folk tales and myths you'll inevitably be borrowing from, consciously or not, starting with the epic of Gilgamesh.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    But that's not how copyright works, you don't need to pay anything to the original author if you're merely borrowing their ideas even if the original work is not in the public domain. You're free to make a movie 'inspired' by Star Wars as long as you don't actually copy anything directly, use any character names etc.
    - jevoten 5y ago
      You're making a legal argument, about how things are, not how they should be. If we're talking about "how copyright works", 100 years ago it worked very differently from today.
- jychang 5y ago
  I mean, you can apply that logic to other IPs like vaccines as well. Imagine if the polio vaccine was never public domain until 95 years after everyone involved in inventing it died. I don't see why being the first to come up with something means it has to be yours infinitely. Most research can be duplicated. 10, 20, 30 or more years of exclusivity, sure, I see the logic in that. But if you truly invented something novel and can't monetize it within a few decades, you're doing something wrong. I also think about the electronic music scene and how it freely remixes older songs from the 1970s etc. Imagine if that never existed.
  - dahart 5y ago
    This comment is confusing patents with copyrights. But allow me to take it at face value anyway. Let’s not pretend that Star Wars is as important as the Polio vaccine, or that we aren’t able to differentiate between artworks and medical technology. We can and do already have exceptions to the copyright law that allow for important social uses, so I don’t buy this argument. > I don’t see why being the first to come up with something means it has to be your infinitely. This doesn’t answer the question of why someone else should be able to take what I created for their own personal gain. A lot of song remixing falls under Fair Use Copyright Law. Some of it doesn’t, and even if we like it, maybe shouldn’t be allowed. The question at hand is at what time can I just copy your entire album verbatim and sell it for my own profit, unmodified. That’s what copyright expiring enables.
    - tdeck 5y ago
      > We can and do already have exceptions to the copyright law that allow for important social uses, so I don’t buy this argument. I think this misses the point that parent is making. The ordinary protection period of a patent is just a couple of decades (not only for specific exceptions), and that seems to be sufficient. The goal of each system is to encourage creative qodk. We still get plenty of inventions. So why should the ordinary term of copyright monopoly be so much longer than the term of patent monopoly? > This doesn’t answer the question of why someone else should be able to take what I created for their own personal gain. This feels like a shifting of the burden. Shouldn't the system of intellectual property be the thing that needs to justify itself, rather than the other way around? Copyright isn't a natural state, it involves paying the courts and police for enforcement, giving them additional powers, criminalizing additional activities, etc... People can go to prison for violating the set of rules copyright sets up. Every such system needs to have good reasons for it's existence that outweigh the problems caused by the system, so the conversation should be more nuanced than "why should you get to copy X without paying for it?"
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Because it allows others to build on it without limit.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it? Because Mickey mouse is just a mouse and Frankenstein is "the modern Prometheus" and Star Wars is a western movie where "Lucas has said that the plot and characters in the 1958 Japanese film The Hidden Fortress, directed by Akira Kurosawa, was a major inspiration" (Star Wars came out only 19 years later, in 1977) nothing we create is "ours" let alone forever... There's an argument on incentives, if copyright ends after say 20 years, media companies could simply wait 20 years to use the content for free, it's possible, but I don't think it's probable. I imagine a system where if the publisher makes a lot more money (with a lot to be defined) than the original author made before the creation went public domain, then they could be forced to compensate the original author.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    What if you write a book which only becomes popular 20 years after you first publish it. In that case the publisher(s) would make a lot of money and the author would get nothing (of course with ebooks nobody would likely make any money..) how would that be fair?
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > What if you write a book which only becomes popular 20 years after you first publish it I would thank the Gods because they gave me a second chance when nobody, including me, expected it and probably other books of mine would be rediscovered as well and I would be contacted to write something new. The point is that after 20 years of producing zero income, anyone would lose interest and if it gets a sudden popularity it's probably someone else's merit. But we are talking about extremely rare conditions. What if you buy a house and sell it the day before its price skyrocket? What if you buy stocks and the day after you sell them they go up 10x? You the author have moral rights over the creation, you'll always be the author, but your rights to an economic compensation over something you created should be limited in time. Especially because most of the time economic rights are sold to entities that only care about profiting from the IPs and nothing else. Publishing a book it's much like publishing an opensource projects, once it's out, it's out, it's no longer yours. A friend of mine is a popular comic book writer in my country, he has been publishing comics for over 20 years, growing his audience over a long span of time. When he suddenly had a spike in popularity, the first thing he did was to publish a collection of all his past works, sell it and make a profit (the comics are all still free on the web for those who wonna read them without paying) He is the author and controls the source material, he owns all the originals he owns (and wrote) all the scripts, they have great value even if the copyright was hypothetically expired. But let's look at it from another angle: what if an unknown book becomes popular 25 years after the author wrote it, because someone saw a great potential in it, a potential that 25 years before wasn't even there and adapted it to make it resonate with the present? Think about disaster stories about climate change or a pandemic, they are much more popular now than 25 years ago. Isn't it the person who did the research and found the book in the first place the real protagonist of this story? Should the author be compensated because there was an outbreak? On the other hand, if you want to adapt a story, wouldn't you contact the original author first? Publishing something that becomes a hit it's always worth it, even if your economic rights on it have expired.
- tioaoa101 5y ago
  I see the tension around copyright as an instance of the tension between our personal independence and our social interdependence. Your special effort or unique inspiration may indeed produce something valuable - and it is just that you, the individual, be rewarded for that value. But it is also just to recognize that your ability to produce anything useful is built on the efforts and insights of countless others, most whom you have long forgotten or are long dead. The vast majority will receive no recompense for their part in your success, particularly (in my experience) the most deserving. So it seems to me that to demand a reward at the moment of inspiration may be fitting, but the longer a society enforces an exclusive reward for ideas inevitably built on the back of the entire community, the more likely that enforcement has made the transition from something just to something unjust. Pontificating aside, the current system makes me sad.
- Olreich 5y ago
  Fundamentally, copyright is the government promising to beat up anyone that copies a protected work. Now, we don't live in a complete dystopia, so it's not literal beatings. It's legal protection and the beating up is the infringer of the copyright having to pay a bunch of money to the copyright holder. That means that the government is spending resources in order to maintain that copyright. Government is funded by "the people", and so "the people" are paying to beat up anyone who sells a Mickey Mouse doll. In actuality, the reason it doesn't work like you'd expect is because "the people" are separate from "the government", and it doesn't actually cost much to maintain copyright. But there are a bunch of interested parties in getting to keep monopolies on copying for long periods of time. But yeah, the reason they shouldn't last forever is because they are relatively expensive to maintain, and some great works can come from public domain stories (case in point, the lovable Mouse who used Grimm's fairy tales as the basis for all of it's most profitable works). Life of author? Definitely. But if the author assigns rights to a corporation? Probably shouldn't allow it to extend 200 years or whatever Disney is up to. Disney won't die, so there is no natural end to the monopoly, and Disney has also proven that they aren't interested in branching out to new stories (perhaps because us humans like the old ones so much). A reasonable copyright in a digital age is probably something like life of the author, or 25 years after transfer to a corporation. This still effectively provides 75+ years of protection for most works, but then the author gets more say (because transfer of ownership can't happen without giving up monopoly rights sooner), and things like film and games and such aren't locked up for hundreds of years, as it would be surprising to have them owned by a human.
- musicale 5y ago
  >I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive Overlong copyright terms lead to what we have now, where digital libraries either ignore copyright law (libgen, scihub), or have the best features of ebooks (easy copying and transmission, access from all regions of the world, unlimited simultaneous readers, etc.) crippled by DRM, or have limited collections of works by living authors, or are locked behind paywalls (Elsevier.) Copyright law could provide a time-limited monopoly on copying that is a reasonable balance of public benefit with incentives for authors to create additional works, but currently it does not and harms both purposes. I expect many authors are less concerned with verbatim copies of their works being distributed than for derivative works or adaptations being distributed. Perhaps copyright should be split a bit more finely.
- librexpr 5y ago
  The ability to preserve, study, and build on works is very important to me. Some of my favorite fiction is fanfiction, there are many ROM hacks and mods that improve games I've played, etc. Shorter copyright would enable these things by making them legally possible sooner. I think there would be more high-quality media and software if copyright was shorter, in the 20 to 50 years range. I'm also not hurting anyone by making copies of things, the only negative side-effect is that the creator might make less money. On the other hand, the fact that it's illegal to make modified versions of copyrighted works, or to send them to my friends, has been a significant inconvenience in my life and to my creativity. Money for the author is important, and we make concessions for that by having copyright, but in the absence of anything else the default ought to be freedom, not copyright. I'd go for 20 years of copyright by default, with the option of renewing up to 50 years, which ought to be long enough for the creator to make their money. As an aside, I don't care if others sell copies of my work, that's why I prefer to release it under open-source licenses or into the public domain directly.
  - dahart 5y ago
    > I'm also not hurting anyone by making copies of things, the only negative side-effect is that the creator might make less money. This is not true, and this is codified into copyright law already. A discussion of copyright cannot continue past this point until it’s understood and agreed that using others’ work without permission comes with multiple kinds of social harm. People can be and have been sued for breach of copyright without either making a financial gain nor taking away from the creator’s financial gain. It’s fundamentally damaging because it’s not yours to copy and distribute, and there are reasons beyond money why, including a variety of ways it can affect your reputation. The law has only been getting more clear on this point that nobody should have to justify why they wish to reserve all rights and not allow others to take their work, which is why copyrights became default-on for everything created, and no longer requires registration. > I don’t care if others sell copies of my work This is great! This must mean that your income doesn’t depend on your creative work, right? It’s important to fully understand that many people do care, not only if others resell their works, but they care deeply if others even redistribute their work. 20 + 50 seems like it could be reasonable-ish to me but how do you arrive at that “ought to be long enough to make their money”? How long does it take, on average, for creators including all the non-Disney entities? Given that this has to work well on balance for everyone. Why should it even matter how long it takes for a creator to “make their money”?
Retric 5y ago
The issue is companies are going to keep reusing stale properties for decades. That’s the issue, creating new works is what keeps things vibrant not rehashing what was popular 40+ years ago. StarWars is 45 years old, Star Trek is 56 years old, and Iron Man is 59 freaking years old at this point. We don’t need to rehash stale stories, but nobody is going to innovate when a ready cash cow is there for the milking.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > We don’t need to rehash stale stories, but nobody is going to innovate when a ready cash cow is there for the milking. If the original Iron Man was in the public domain, would they stop making new Marvel movies? Why, because the movies are currently driving demand for issues of Tales of Suspense #39 or Iron Man #1, and wouldn't be worth it without that? Many of the classic Disney movies are based on stories that were in the public domain at the time of their original publication. They keep rehashing old stories because they're lazy or are marketing to fans of the franchise, not because the original is or isn't in the public domain.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Would they stop making new Marvel movies? Largely yes as presumably someone would have already made todays Marvel movies 30 years ago. They tried rehashing the Spider Man origin story several times and people got bored because they had already seen it. I am not saying nobody would do movie adoptions, just that they would be made closer to the original content. Consider every Shakespeare movie is in the public domain and sure every few years someone remakes Hamlet, but it isn’t a new major movie every year like clockwork. And nobody would be trying to stretch the Hobbit across three Movies to maximize profit.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      Licensing isn't the thing that prevents big budget productions from happening. If they wanted to make a bunch of big budget Marvel movies in 1992, nothing was stopping them. They'd have just paid for the rights back then, the same as they do now. What copyright expiration would get you that you don't have now is tons and tons and tons of fan fiction and small budget productions. A few of which would have been good and most of which would have been both terrible and ignored. Like every school play being Shakespeare, but now it's Spider Man. And heretical crossovers. Deadpool vs. the Joker and things like that. But Tangled, Frozen, Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, all the Peter Pan movies, they're based on public domain stories and they're still making major films out of them on a regular basis. The Snow Queen is one public domain fairy tale, Frozen is three movies.
zhoujianfu 5y ago
It seems like what makes sense is protection for trademarks/brands/characters should be infinite, because it’s clear that there’s harm in just letting anybody make their own “Nike” shoes or make a really crappy movie starring “Mickey Mouse”. But, you could still put actual works in the public domain after ~20 years. I think there’s a difference between being able to freely copy and use a video of “Steamboat Willie” and having full use to put Mickey on any shabby product anyone in the world wants to.

by cies 5y ago

dahart 5y ago

I think copyrights are too long. But, devil’s advocate, I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive. Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it? (Not saying I advocate this; I don’t. I’m just asking for a more clear argument as to why the public should be able to co-opt some IP and call it “culture” just because it got popular and/or profitable.)

cies 5y ago
> Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it? You have! Then just don't publish/share/release it. Take it physically to your grave. Once you publish it, I also have the "natural ability" to record it. Copyright limits my ability to record/reuse what I technically can by what is allowed. Copyright, and other IP rights have been sold as to give the original creators some head start which would make investing in such works more easy, in the end leading to a more rich commons for everyone.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Your argument across multiple comments doesn't cohere. You mention "good copyright" upthread, but here have somehow derived an innate right to record and reproduce anything you technically can, which is an argument that relitigates the entire premise of copyright, which is to artificially restrict that innate right in order to incentivize people to author new works.
  - cies 5y ago
    > You mention "good copyright" That means short copyright, just enough to increase innovation. > but here have somehow derived an innate right to record and reproduce anything you technically can No, that's not a right, that just a technical ability. Copyright outlaw that ability. > to artificially restrict that innate right in order to incentivize people to author new works. Exactly that is what all IP law does imho.
ykevinator2 5y ago
Because it's taxpayer funded enforcement. The walmart employee funds the guards around George Lucas and kim kardashian's castles.
- dahart 5y ago
  The police are taxpayer funded enforcement of the things in your house and in your bank. Should personal property and wealth savings also revert to the public because of this? It would be a stronger argument if the creation of the work was taxpayer funded, then that would be a decent reason to have the protections lapse eventually.
  - labawi 5y ago
    IP is not property. If you put your chair on display, then yes, people should¹ have a right to make a similar chair and copy and share ad infinitum, but taking the original chair itself would be a no-no. It's not a good comparison. To take thing further, there are various takes on personal property, with broad acceptance that yes, personal property should (gradually) revert to the public (taxes), otherwise very bad things happen (see inequality). Some societies do not have personal property beyond some personal items. Property/ownership has vast negative consequences (exacerbating greed, poverty, starvation, mass suffering; many wars are fought for property), though I'd agree it is in many ways better than alternatives, especially if the state and taxation dulls some of the sharp edges. ¹ By default. We may argue to what extent some restrictions may be reasonable as an imperfect way to achieve a certain goal.
    - dahart 5y ago
      I didn’t argue that IP was property. I responded to the suggestion that the reason to have a limited copyright term is because enforcement is taxpayer funded. I’m pointing out that this reasoning is inconsistent and has no strong basis.
      - labawi 5y ago
        I'm pointing out your reasoning is unfounded non sequitur. Physical property does indeed revert to public domain, hence it does not make sense to add requisites for release of intellectual restrictions. Requiring public funding for only-temporarily-private IP would make things more inconsistent.
fistfucker3000 5y ago
Because even if your name is on it, the idea that “you” made it is not really true. Someone made materials for you, somebody taught you the skills needed to make the thing. There was a whole functioning society that allowed the work to be made in the first place. The society was also the thing that enforced the property rights for some arbitrary length of time. At some point, the society that helped create the work should share in the spoils.
- dahart 5y ago
  Fine, so tax it. This doesn’t amount to a pro-argument that someone else should be able to divert my income stream and my creative work for their own private gain.
  - kapuasuite 5y ago
    There’s no counter-argument to make beyond my self-interest in consuming creative works at very low cost and with very few limitations outweighing your self-interest in profiting from your works.
    - dahart 5y ago
      There is a counter argument to make, and that’s not it. If getting free stuff were the primary argument in favor of shorter copyright, our court system would have extended copyrights forever already.
      - kapuasuite 5y ago
        Congress is the one that’s dramatically extended copyright length, not the courts.
        dahart 5y ago
        Sure, fine. I stand corrected and remain unsatisfied by still not hearing any clear or compelling reasons to shorten copyrights. Congress isn’t extending copyrights on their own, their doing it because they’ve been asked to by businesses like Disney. The length hasn’t been extended “dramatically”, any time recently. No more dramatically than in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Duration_of_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
HideousKojima 5y ago
>But, devil’s advocate, I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive. Because you've got it backwards, you have no inherent right to any intellectual property you create, it's a legal fiction. Before copyright was a thing, freely copying and remixing the ideas and stories of others was the default. Once an idea is out there, you have no moral right to tell others they cannot share it. Copyright is an attempt to give an incentive to people to come up with more good ideas and stories and music, but the default is that they belong to everyone.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Outside of your innate right to split someone's skull open with the nearest tree branch and take the freshly killed squirrel out of their dead hands, pretty much all rights are legal fictions. You have to do better in your argument than to point out that the balancing acts we do in our laws are artificial. What we're discussing here is a right that's been baked into American law since its creation; it's not a random idea Sonny Bono had in 1997.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    It was originally 14 years, renewable for an additional 14 year term if the author was alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...
    - tptacek 5y ago
      It was almost 60 years as of 1909, 14 years before Disney existed. But if you believe the right itself is a fiction, I'm not sure what the term has to do with anything.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        How is 1909 relevant to the origin of copyright? The article explained how limited copyright is a useful incentive apart from any moral view. And it explained how the term affects the costs.
tshaddox 5y ago
You can do that. Just keep it to yourself!
jevoten 5y ago
Ok, lets pretend IP never reverts to the public domain. Before you write the first word, pay a license to the heir of whoever invented written language. And spoken, for that matter. And invented paper, and the pen. Then to the heirs of all the folk tales and myths you'll inevitably be borrowing from, consciously or not, starting with the epic of Gilgamesh.
- qwytw 5y ago
  But that's not how copyright works, you don't need to pay anything to the original author if you're merely borrowing their ideas even if the original work is not in the public domain. You're free to make a movie 'inspired' by Star Wars as long as you don't actually copy anything directly, use any character names etc.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    You're making a legal argument, about how things are, not how they should be. If we're talking about "how copyright works", 100 years ago it worked very differently from today.
jychang 5y ago
I mean, you can apply that logic to other IPs like vaccines as well. Imagine if the polio vaccine was never public domain until 95 years after everyone involved in inventing it died. I don't see why being the first to come up with something means it has to be yours infinitely. Most research can be duplicated. 10, 20, 30 or more years of exclusivity, sure, I see the logic in that. But if you truly invented something novel and can't monetize it within a few decades, you're doing something wrong. I also think about the electronic music scene and how it freely remixes older songs from the 1970s etc. Imagine if that never existed.
- dahart 5y ago
  This comment is confusing patents with copyrights. But allow me to take it at face value anyway. Let’s not pretend that Star Wars is as important as the Polio vaccine, or that we aren’t able to differentiate between artworks and medical technology. We can and do already have exceptions to the copyright law that allow for important social uses, so I don’t buy this argument. > I don’t see why being the first to come up with something means it has to be your infinitely. This doesn’t answer the question of why someone else should be able to take what I created for their own personal gain. A lot of song remixing falls under Fair Use Copyright Law. Some of it doesn’t, and even if we like it, maybe shouldn’t be allowed. The question at hand is at what time can I just copy your entire album verbatim and sell it for my own profit, unmodified. That’s what copyright expiring enables.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    > We can and do already have exceptions to the copyright law that allow for important social uses, so I don’t buy this argument. I think this misses the point that parent is making. The ordinary protection period of a patent is just a couple of decades (not only for specific exceptions), and that seems to be sufficient. The goal of each system is to encourage creative qodk. We still get plenty of inventions. So why should the ordinary term of copyright monopoly be so much longer than the term of patent monopoly? > This doesn’t answer the question of why someone else should be able to take what I created for their own personal gain. This feels like a shifting of the burden. Shouldn't the system of intellectual property be the thing that needs to justify itself, rather than the other way around? Copyright isn't a natural state, it involves paying the courts and police for enforcement, giving them additional powers, criminalizing additional activities, etc... People can go to prison for violating the set of rules copyright sets up. Every such system needs to have good reasons for it's existence that outweigh the problems caused by the system, so the conversation should be more nuanced than "why should you get to copy X without paying for it?"
WalterBright 5y ago
Because it allows others to build on it without limit.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it? Because Mickey mouse is just a mouse and Frankenstein is "the modern Prometheus" and Star Wars is a western movie where "Lucas has said that the plot and characters in the 1958 Japanese film The Hidden Fortress, directed by Akira Kurosawa, was a major inspiration" (Star Wars came out only 19 years later, in 1977) nothing we create is "ours" let alone forever... There's an argument on incentives, if copyright ends after say 20 years, media companies could simply wait 20 years to use the content for free, it's possible, but I don't think it's probable. I imagine a system where if the publisher makes a lot more money (with a lot to be defined) than the original author made before the creation went public domain, then they could be forced to compensate the original author.
- qwytw 5y ago
  What if you write a book which only becomes popular 20 years after you first publish it. In that case the publisher(s) would make a lot of money and the author would get nothing (of course with ebooks nobody would likely make any money..) how would that be fair?
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > What if you write a book which only becomes popular 20 years after you first publish it I would thank the Gods because they gave me a second chance when nobody, including me, expected it and probably other books of mine would be rediscovered as well and I would be contacted to write something new. The point is that after 20 years of producing zero income, anyone would lose interest and if it gets a sudden popularity it's probably someone else's merit. But we are talking about extremely rare conditions. What if you buy a house and sell it the day before its price skyrocket? What if you buy stocks and the day after you sell them they go up 10x? You the author have moral rights over the creation, you'll always be the author, but your rights to an economic compensation over something you created should be limited in time. Especially because most of the time economic rights are sold to entities that only care about profiting from the IPs and nothing else. Publishing a book it's much like publishing an opensource projects, once it's out, it's out, it's no longer yours. A friend of mine is a popular comic book writer in my country, he has been publishing comics for over 20 years, growing his audience over a long span of time. When he suddenly had a spike in popularity, the first thing he did was to publish a collection of all his past works, sell it and make a profit (the comics are all still free on the web for those who wonna read them without paying) He is the author and controls the source material, he owns all the originals he owns (and wrote) all the scripts, they have great value even if the copyright was hypothetically expired. But let's look at it from another angle: what if an unknown book becomes popular 25 years after the author wrote it, because someone saw a great potential in it, a potential that 25 years before wasn't even there and adapted it to make it resonate with the present? Think about disaster stories about climate change or a pandemic, they are much more popular now than 25 years ago. Isn't it the person who did the research and found the book in the first place the real protagonist of this story? Should the author be compensated because there was an outbreak? On the other hand, if you want to adapt a story, wouldn't you contact the original author first? Publishing something that becomes a hit it's always worth it, even if your economic rights on it have expired.
tioaoa101 5y ago
I see the tension around copyright as an instance of the tension between our personal independence and our social interdependence. Your special effort or unique inspiration may indeed produce something valuable - and it is just that you, the individual, be rewarded for that value. But it is also just to recognize that your ability to produce anything useful is built on the efforts and insights of countless others, most whom you have long forgotten or are long dead. The vast majority will receive no recompense for their part in your success, particularly (in my experience) the most deserving. So it seems to me that to demand a reward at the moment of inspiration may be fitting, but the longer a society enforces an exclusive reward for ideas inevitably built on the back of the entire community, the more likely that enforcement has made the transition from something just to something unjust. Pontificating aside, the current system makes me sad.
Olreich 5y ago
Fundamentally, copyright is the government promising to beat up anyone that copies a protected work. Now, we don't live in a complete dystopia, so it's not literal beatings. It's legal protection and the beating up is the infringer of the copyright having to pay a bunch of money to the copyright holder. That means that the government is spending resources in order to maintain that copyright. Government is funded by "the people", and so "the people" are paying to beat up anyone who sells a Mickey Mouse doll. In actuality, the reason it doesn't work like you'd expect is because "the people" are separate from "the government", and it doesn't actually cost much to maintain copyright. But there are a bunch of interested parties in getting to keep monopolies on copying for long periods of time. But yeah, the reason they shouldn't last forever is because they are relatively expensive to maintain, and some great works can come from public domain stories (case in point, the lovable Mouse who used Grimm's fairy tales as the basis for all of it's most profitable works). Life of author? Definitely. But if the author assigns rights to a corporation? Probably shouldn't allow it to extend 200 years or whatever Disney is up to. Disney won't die, so there is no natural end to the monopoly, and Disney has also proven that they aren't interested in branching out to new stories (perhaps because us humans like the old ones so much). A reasonable copyright in a digital age is probably something like life of the author, or 25 years after transfer to a corporation. This still effectively provides 75+ years of protection for most works, but then the author gets more say (because transfer of ownership can't happen without giving up monopoly rights sooner), and things like film and games and such aren't locked up for hundreds of years, as it would be surprising to have them owned by a human.
musicale 5y ago
>I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive Overlong copyright terms lead to what we have now, where digital libraries either ignore copyright law (libgen, scihub), or have the best features of ebooks (easy copying and transmission, access from all regions of the world, unlimited simultaneous readers, etc.) crippled by DRM, or have limited collections of works by living authors, or are locked behind paywalls (Elsevier.) Copyright law could provide a time-limited monopoly on copying that is a reasonable balance of public benefit with incentives for authors to create additional works, but currently it does not and harms both purposes. I expect many authors are less concerned with verbatim copies of their works being distributed than for derivative works or adaptations being distributed. Perhaps copyright should be split a bit more finely.
librexpr 5y ago
The ability to preserve, study, and build on works is very important to me. Some of my favorite fiction is fanfiction, there are many ROM hacks and mods that improve games I've played, etc. Shorter copyright would enable these things by making them legally possible sooner. I think there would be more high-quality media and software if copyright was shorter, in the 20 to 50 years range. I'm also not hurting anyone by making copies of things, the only negative side-effect is that the creator might make less money. On the other hand, the fact that it's illegal to make modified versions of copyrighted works, or to send them to my friends, has been a significant inconvenience in my life and to my creativity. Money for the author is important, and we make concessions for that by having copyright, but in the absence of anything else the default ought to be freedom, not copyright. I'd go for 20 years of copyright by default, with the option of renewing up to 50 years, which ought to be long enough for the creator to make their money. As an aside, I don't care if others sell copies of my work, that's why I prefer to release it under open-source licenses or into the public domain directly.
- dahart 5y ago
  > I'm also not hurting anyone by making copies of things, the only negative side-effect is that the creator might make less money. This is not true, and this is codified into copyright law already. A discussion of copyright cannot continue past this point until it’s understood and agreed that using others’ work without permission comes with multiple kinds of social harm. People can be and have been sued for breach of copyright without either making a financial gain nor taking away from the creator’s financial gain. It’s fundamentally damaging because it’s not yours to copy and distribute, and there are reasons beyond money why, including a variety of ways it can affect your reputation. The law has only been getting more clear on this point that nobody should have to justify why they wish to reserve all rights and not allow others to take their work, which is why copyrights became default-on for everything created, and no longer requires registration. > I don’t care if others sell copies of my work This is great! This must mean that your income doesn’t depend on your creative work, right? It’s important to fully understand that many people do care, not only if others resell their works, but they care deeply if others even redistribute their work. 20 + 50 seems like it could be reasonable-ish to me but how do you arrive at that “ought to be long enough to make their money”? How long does it take, on average, for creators including all the non-Disney entities? Given that this has to work well on balance for everyone. Why should it even matter how long it takes for a creator to “make their money”?

Retric 5y ago

The issue is companies are going to keep reusing stale properties for decades. That’s the issue, creating new works is what keeps things vibrant not rehashing what was popular 40+ years ago. StarWars is 45 years old, Star Trek is 56 years old, and Iron Man is 59 freaking years old at this point. We don’t need to rehash stale stories, but nobody is going to innovate when a ready cash cow is there for the milking.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> We don’t need to rehash stale stories, but nobody is going to innovate when a ready cash cow is there for the milking. If the original Iron Man was in the public domain, would they stop making new Marvel movies? Why, because the movies are currently driving demand for issues of Tales of Suspense #39 or Iron Man #1, and wouldn't be worth it without that? Many of the classic Disney movies are based on stories that were in the public domain at the time of their original publication. They keep rehashing old stories because they're lazy or are marketing to fans of the franchise, not because the original is or isn't in the public domain.
- Retric 5y ago
  Would they stop making new Marvel movies? Largely yes as presumably someone would have already made todays Marvel movies 30 years ago. They tried rehashing the Spider Man origin story several times and people got bored because they had already seen it. I am not saying nobody would do movie adoptions, just that they would be made closer to the original content. Consider every Shakespeare movie is in the public domain and sure every few years someone remakes Hamlet, but it isn’t a new major movie every year like clockwork. And nobody would be trying to stretch the Hobbit across three Movies to maximize profit.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    Licensing isn't the thing that prevents big budget productions from happening. If they wanted to make a bunch of big budget Marvel movies in 1992, nothing was stopping them. They'd have just paid for the rights back then, the same as they do now. What copyright expiration would get you that you don't have now is tons and tons and tons of fan fiction and small budget productions. A few of which would have been good and most of which would have been both terrible and ignored. Like every school play being Shakespeare, but now it's Spider Man. And heretical crossovers. Deadpool vs. the Joker and things like that. But Tangled, Frozen, Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, all the Peter Pan movies, they're based on public domain stories and they're still making major films out of them on a regular basis. The Snow Queen is one public domain fairy tale, Frozen is three movies.

zhoujianfu 5y ago

It seems like what makes sense is protection for trademarks/brands/characters should be infinite, because it’s clear that there’s harm in just letting anybody make their own “Nike” shoes or make a really crappy movie starring “Mickey Mouse”. But, you could still put actual works in the public domain after ~20 years. I think there’s a difference between being able to freely copy and use a video of “Steamboat Willie” and having full use to put Mickey on any shabby product anyone in the world wants to.