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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 as

• 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.
  • tptacek 5y ago
    That 70 vs. 20 year argument assumes a bunch of facts not in evidence. In a star-search business, the outlier winners are a big part of what sets compensation levels for the authors that don't have runaway successes. It's possible, even likely, that cutting copyright terms back to an unprecedented 20 years --- that's shorter than the term we had in the 1700s --- would in fact drastically reduce the amount of work that gets produced, by making even the hits so unprofitable that nobody will invest in their authors. Meanwhile, if you rolled back the last two big extensions --- CTEA and the Berne-joining Copyright Act of '76 --- and brought us back to 1909, you'd still have 60 year terms. I'd flip the argument around and claim that no copyright opponent on HN would accept 60 years either. So what are we arguing about? Does term have anything real to do with this?
    • cortesoft 5y ago
      I probably should have left off mentioning any actual number of years, since my argument was not trying to argue for any specific length of time. The question I was answering is if we have copyright at all, why shouldn’t it be infinite in length? The answer is that the incentive copyright provides to creators has diminishing returns, and eventually provides no extra incentive… how long that period actually is is not obvious, but it is likely somewhere way before 95 years. And since society gets a benefit when works enter public domain, society has an incentive to try to set the length of time as short as possible while maintaining the incentive to create. I am not trying to argue for an exact length of time, just explaining why we don’t want it to be forever.
      • tptacek 5y ago
        I agree it shouldn't be forever. Maybe it should even be shorter. But I don't look at the market for original authorship of cultural works and think "wow, this a lucrative field to get into". Most authors are just barely getting by.
        • cortesoft 5y ago
          That is also part of what the article is pointing out… after a few years, only the wildly successful works are going to continue to have demand enough to make copyright matter… 99% of creators aren’t going to be affected at all by the length of copyright, so 99% of creators will not care either way.
• ipaddr 5y ago
  Frame it a different way. If you share with society should you be able to control other people's use of it? How does that benefit society? Remember the rules are enforced by society and need to serve society.
  • dahart 5y ago
    Copyright Law is the existing and established answer to that question that society has agreed upon. The article already explained how it benefits society: by protecting the people who create things of value for long enough that they can profit, in order to incentivize the creators to create. I don’t see how asking this sheds any light on the discussion, am I missing something or can you elaborate more?
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      We are discussing whether changing it makes sense. Society can agree to change the rules. Creators are not creating because copyright exists they are creating to make something. Copyright allows them to be the only person making money from their work. Why grant them that right when it doesn't exist in other industries. Come up with an amazing idea like selling bagged milk and everyone can copy you. Should we give them 95 years to be the only person who can sell a bag milk?
      • dahart 5y ago
        I’m not sure I understand what you mean; that right does exist in other industries in the form of patents and trademarks. You can register BaggedMilk(tm) and get protection. You can patent your bagged milk process or invention and get protection, if it’s a new idea. The terms aren’t the same as copyrights, but the protections and the reasons behind it are similar.
        • Dylan16807 5y ago
          Trademarks aren't similar at all. Fundamentally, you have to make it clear that you're a competing product and you can do whatever you want. Patents and copyright go hand-in-hand in protecting ideas. But patents last 20 years.
• danShumway 5y ago
  > Let me ask it another way: assuming that we have a copyright system, why should my copyrights ever expire? Because copyright exists for a reason, not by nature. Assume we have a copyright system, sure. We've got one. The thing is that people made that system. Why did they do it? What was the reasoning for making that system, and is the current system still functioning the way we wanted it to function when we created it? We can't completely ignore the reason why copyright exists, because copyright isn't real. Copyright isn't a right, there's no natural moral reason to for it to exist, it's not a property right and there's no coherent framing of copyright as a property right that makes sense when examined with the same rigor that we use to examine other property rights. Copying an idea doesn't deprive anyone else of anything other than a monopoly over other people's behaviors, which is not something that we usually care about when talking about natural rights. We don't claim that inventing a better mousetrap is violence because it puts the old mousetrap makers out of business, so there's no good way to phrase "a monopoly over profits" as a natural right that people are morally entitled to. And the more we go down that road (independent invention, the fact that copyright can't exist without a public domain because very little of what we create is original, etc, etc...) -- we just keep finding problems and situations where copyright doesn't make sense as a moral right. But there's an even bigger problem: it's not just that copyright isn't a moral right, copyright is also a restriction on the rights of culture itself. One of the most human things in the world that you'll find in every culture is that human beings share things with each other: ideas, stories, thoughts, and emotions. Copyright restricts people's freedom to share ideas, to fix their problems, and to exercise their own autonomy. It also intrudes into the free market, allowing emerging monopolies over content, and allows content to be weaponized to manipulate other parts of the market. It also restricts the collective autonomy of a culture to define itself and and to define its own cultural language. However, despite all of these problems copyright is also a very convenient way to make sure artists get paid for the things they make. This is why humans invented it. So the question becomes: given that copyright is a pragmatic restriction of both individual and cultural rights, are we going just far enough to make sure that artists get paid and that they're incentivized to make new art, or are we going farther than that and restricting people unnecessarily? ---- > 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.) To be clear, I am not in the first camp. I would say that no one has a moral claim over an idea, you can not logically own a thought or a story, and I don't think that is a way of looking at the world that stands up to scrutiny. I would not say copyright is just the way that society protects your idea, I would say that an idea is literally "no-one's property", the latter part of your sentence is correct. I'll kind of issue the same challenge back to you in the opposite direction: I have heard moral arguments for copyright based on ideals of fairness or out of people deserving compensation when they help society. Some of those make sense, that's stuff we care about. However, I have never heard an internally consistent explanation of how someone can inherently own an idea that stands up to scrutiny in the real world; IP as a natural property right doesn't make sense either from a Libertarian/Anarchist perspective or from a Collectivist/Communist perspective, it's kind of amazing how many different worldviews it clashes with. There's a huge amount of work that has been put into the phrasing of copyright and IP as "property" and "right", the names aren't accidental. But it's just pure propaganda, it's phrased that way so it sounds better to you. Copyright is a purely pragmatic invention designed to encourage production and to compensate artists. It has the same moral weight as any other administrative law we've invented: that is to say important and beneficial and worth having around, but only important in so-far as it accomplishes its original goal. Past that point, IP is an abridgement of actual natural rights to things like free speech, cultural exchange, and even (when we get the DMCA involved) actual property rights to tamper with and inspect products that people actually own. There are decent arguments for multiple different copyright policies in multiple directions. But most of the decent arguments are based around pragmatism and policy (whether or not copyright is actually accomplishing its goals in its current form); they're rarely based around some kind of mythological right people should have to control everyone else's ability to imitate them or share information freely.
• chrismcb 5y ago
  Here is the USA copyright was designed "for a limited time" that is why your copyright should expire. The question becomes "what is a limited time?" My belief is that the artists lifetime is too long, and the artist it isn't really limited. I also dont believe you want copyrights to end with the artists death. So pick a limited time, good for everyone. I say 25 years.
  • dahart 5y ago
    > copyright was designed “for a limited time” that is why your copyright should expire. That’s just circular, not a reason. The explanation & philosophy behind limited terms isn’t justified with “because it was designed with limited terms”. The rationale was stated in the article, and is written into copyright law. I don’t have any beef with your opinion, but so far it’s only an opinion and not backed up by clear reasoning or evidence. 25 years is shorter than copyright has ever been in the US, even in 1790, more than 200 years ago. If you believe creator lifetime is too long, part of the question is whether you would really stick to that if you were making money from your own work. Imagine, if you will, that you write software for your employer. Your software is currently protected by copyrights. But if that software copyright protection expires in 25 years, then any software you write can be legally taken by a brand new startup that doesn’t write code, it only sells code other people wrote, even using other people’s marketing material, including videos and imagery your company built. They offer your product for cheaper than your employer can, because their operating expenses are one hundredth of yours. Can your product & employer survive this, will your job last? If your job were actually on the line and might disappear suddenly anytime the company you work for has their work expire, do you still stick to your opinion that 25 years is enough?
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      Ironically, we have excellent examples of your ideas in practice. Video games from 1995 are lost to time because they cannot be legally duplicated and delivered and even if they were the os to run them is under copyright and no longer sold. Meanwhile, the source code to all MSFT oses before XP leaked and it hasn't hurt them at all. Might it hurt them a bit if DosBOX used that leaked code to make a better emulator? I don't see how, they're already no longer selling that code.