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>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.

>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.
- Retric 5y ago
  No, people can actually protect themselves from theft by securing their property. You however can’t protect a book after selling it to someone else, that’s the legal fiction. Also, IP law is relatively recent in American law which originates from England and France. Originally copyright only protected works from authors inside the country was only extended to foreign works in 1891 making it roughly half the age of the US.
  - kcb 5y ago
    If you copy my book I'm going to break your kneecaps. How is that any different from securing your property presumably through violence?
    - Retric 5y ago
      For one how can you detect it? You just sold me the book, what are you keeping goons in the house of everyone that bought a copy?
  - tptacek 5y ago
    IPR is literally in the main text of the US Constitution.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Which dates back to 11 years after the founding of the US, but hundreds of years after the settlement of the the US. And as I just said it only recognized works created in the US and therefore didn’t represent any recognition of copyright as some universal fact. It was a relatively ad hock compromise extending some at the time recent developments in English law.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      A lot of things are the main text of the US Constitution that are not inherent individual rights: the entire text about how representatives are allotted between States for example. To say that in the natural world people don't always have their rights guaranteed does not mean that Senator age requirements are in the same category of Right as a Right to a fair trial. One of those is a moral right and one of them is an administrative policy. The age of copyright in the relation to the US is kind of weird debate to have, because in general we would want to look considerably earlier than the formation of the US to talk about moral rights, or at least we would want to look at arguments outside of the Constitution to try and figure out whether Copyright is a moral right or a pragmatic policy. ---- All we really get from the Constitution is: > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; Which just leads to more endless debate over what "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" actually means, and whether a government right to regulate something is the same as an individual right/entitlement to a specific regulatory outcome (usually we don't treat those two things as the same). And we can go down that rabbit hole of what the founders intended, but in some ways that debate almost doesn't even matter when we get into what people are morally entitled to, because if the argument is that copyright is a natural property right that people are morally entitled to, that argument shouldn't boil down to "Jefferson thought so." Looking at what the founders intended really only matters if copyright isn't a moral right, it matters if it's a policy designed to produce an outcome because then we can look at intent and see if the policy is producing the desired outcome. If people want to argue that they're morally entitled to a monopoly on pieces of culture, then they need a much stronger argument for that position.
dahart 5y ago
I feel like this is arguing word semantics without attempting to answer the question. I was talking about within a society that already has copyright. Let me ask it another way: assuming that we have a copyright system, why should my copyrights ever expire? Why should our system not protect my ability to make money on my work, and allow me to choose who inherits the income stream and becomes the future owner of the work? Money and property can be inherited and doesn’t revert to public ownership, why should IP? (Again, note I’m asking for discussion’s sake and for clarity, not suggesting my personal beliefs or advocating a specific policy.) I feel like “default is that they belong to everyone” is a framing that doesn’t quite make sense, it’s mis-using the word “belong”. The less loaded way to phrase what you’re saying is that without copyright, there’s nothing preventing someone from copying my work, not that it’s somehow inherently everyone’s property (which is literally to say that it’s no-one’s property.)
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I am not sure why the copyright system existing already or not changes the argument. However, to answer your question, the reason is right in the linked article… the first order benefit of allowing everyone to copy everything freely makes the world a better place… if everyone can download and read a great book for free, everyone gets a free book and no extra resources are used… that is a lot of utility created. Of course, the worry is the that the second order effect will be fewer people create works because they can’t support themselves if everyone can just copy their work. So we create copyright to mitigate that second order effect, but we still want to maximize the first order benefit of as many people getting access as possible… so the best way to do that is to set the copyright term as short as possible so that people are incentivized to create as much work as possible, but still get the benefit of free copying as soon as we can. As the author points out, no one is going to decide not to create a work just because they know they won’t be able to profit from it in 70 years… if people are still going to want it in 70 years, that means it will be very popular and certainly financially still worth creating even if you can only profit for say, 20 years. So the tl;dr… we want copyrights to expire because we aren’t incentivizing more creation by having copyrights not expire. Basically, the ideal would be to tune the length to keep being shorter until we see a drop off in output of creative works.
qwytw 5y ago
> Before copyright was a thing, freely copying and remixing the ideas and stories of others was the default You describe this as something positive without considering that it was basically impossible to survive as an author (or any other creative professional) before copyright existed unless you had a rich patron sponsoring you (who obviously had his own agenda) or were independently wealthy. It wasn't really feasible to make a living by selling your work to actual consumers. I mean just look at Cervantes one of the most popular writers in Europe at the time who died in relative poverty and obscurity and who was basically only able to write and publish what he did because he found a rich nobleman willing to finance him.

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.
Retric 5y ago
No, people can actually protect themselves from theft by securing their property. You however can’t protect a book after selling it to someone else, that’s the legal fiction. Also, IP law is relatively recent in American law which originates from England and France. Originally copyright only protected works from authors inside the country was only extended to foreign works in 1891 making it roughly half the age of the US.
- kcb 5y ago
  If you copy my book I'm going to break your kneecaps. How is that any different from securing your property presumably through violence?
  - Retric 5y ago
    For one how can you detect it? You just sold me the book, what are you keeping goons in the house of everyone that bought a copy?
- tptacek 5y ago
  IPR is literally in the main text of the US Constitution.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Which dates back to 11 years after the founding of the US, but hundreds of years after the settlement of the the US. And as I just said it only recognized works created in the US and therefore didn’t represent any recognition of copyright as some universal fact. It was a relatively ad hock compromise extending some at the time recent developments in English law.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    A lot of things are the main text of the US Constitution that are not inherent individual rights: the entire text about how representatives are allotted between States for example. To say that in the natural world people don't always have their rights guaranteed does not mean that Senator age requirements are in the same category of Right as a Right to a fair trial. One of those is a moral right and one of them is an administrative policy. The age of copyright in the relation to the US is kind of weird debate to have, because in general we would want to look considerably earlier than the formation of the US to talk about moral rights, or at least we would want to look at arguments outside of the Constitution to try and figure out whether Copyright is a moral right or a pragmatic policy. ---- All we really get from the Constitution is: > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; Which just leads to more endless debate over what "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" actually means, and whether a government right to regulate something is the same as an individual right/entitlement to a specific regulatory outcome (usually we don't treat those two things as the same). And we can go down that rabbit hole of what the founders intended, but in some ways that debate almost doesn't even matter when we get into what people are morally entitled to, because if the argument is that copyright is a natural property right that people are morally entitled to, that argument shouldn't boil down to "Jefferson thought so." Looking at what the founders intended really only matters if copyright isn't a moral right, it matters if it's a policy designed to produce an outcome because then we can look at intent and see if the policy is producing the desired outcome. If people want to argue that they're morally entitled to a monopoly on pieces of culture, then they need a much stronger argument for that position.

dahart 5y ago

I feel like this is arguing word semantics without attempting to answer the question. I was talking about within a society that already has copyright. Let me ask it another way: assuming that we have a copyright system, why should my copyrights ever expire? Why should our system not protect my ability to make money on my work, and allow me to choose who inherits the income stream and becomes the future owner of the work? Money and property can be inherited and doesn’t revert to public ownership, why should IP? (Again, note I’m asking for discussion’s sake and for clarity, not suggesting my personal beliefs or advocating a specific policy.) I feel like “default is that they belong to everyone” is a framing that doesn’t quite make sense, it’s mis-using the word “belong”. The less loaded way to phrase what you’re saying is that without copyright, there’s nothing preventing someone from copying my work, not that it’s somehow inherently everyone’s property (which is literally to say that it’s no-one’s property.)

cortesoft 5y ago
I am not sure why the copyright system existing already or not changes the argument. However, to answer your question, the reason is right in the linked article… the first order benefit of allowing everyone to copy everything freely makes the world a better place… if everyone can download and read a great book for free, everyone gets a free book and no extra resources are used… that is a lot of utility created. Of course, the worry is the that the second order effect will be fewer people create works because they can’t support themselves if everyone can just copy their work. So we create copyright to mitigate that second order effect, but we still want to maximize the first order benefit of as many people getting access as possible… so the best way to do that is to set the copyright term as short as possible so that people are incentivized to create as much work as possible, but still get the benefit of free copying as soon as we can. As the author points out, no one is going to decide not to create a work just because they know they won’t be able to profit from it in 70 years… if people are still going to want it in 70 years, that means it will be very popular and certainly financially still worth creating even if you can only profit for say, 20 years. So the tl;dr… we want copyrights to expire because we aren’t incentivizing more creation by having copyrights not expire. Basically, the ideal would be to tune the length to keep being shorter until we see a drop off in output of creative works.

qwytw 5y ago

> Before copyright was a thing, freely copying and remixing the ideas and stories of others was the default You describe this as something positive without considering that it was basically impossible to survive as an author (or any other creative professional) before copyright existed unless you had a rich patron sponsoring you (who obviously had his own agenda) or were independently wealthy. It wasn't really feasible to make a living by selling your work to actual consumers. I mean just look at Cervantes one of the most popular writers in Europe at the time who died in relative poverty and obscurity and who was basically only able to write and publish what he did because he found a rich nobleman willing to finance him.