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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

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?"
  - dahart 5y ago
    > I think this misses the point that parent is making I don’t, it’s important to clearly differentiate between patents and copyrights, and parent’s example was discussing patents and not copyrights in the context of a discussion purely about copyrights. The reason patent terms are shorter is because patent inventions are considered more important to release into society in a timely manner than works of art. It makes plenty of sense that the business case for music and books and other individual personal or creative works might often take much longer than for, say, industrial corporations. There are hardly any solo inventors actively getting patents compared to the vast number of people creating music and art. > Shouldn’t the system of intellectual property be the thing that needs to justify itself It already is justified, and the article re-iterated those justifications while arguing clumsily (IMO) for shorter terms. I’m not debating whether we should have copyrights. I’m just exploring and curious about how to justify any given balance point, and how to reason more clearly about terms. It’s not that easy, and can’t be as quickly stated as many many people seem to assume. People are just throwing around numbers that “feel” good to them, not because they’re aware of the history of media and IP and the many varied problems and experiences people have had.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      >> I think this misses the point that parent is making > I don’t, it’s important to clearly differentiate between patents and copyrights Why? The distinction seems quite artificial to me -- "intellectual property" is "intellectual property", isn't it? -- so IMO its proponents own the burden of justifying it.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Let’s not pretend that Star Wars is as important as the Polio vaccine Then surely the protection for silly Western-in-space films should be shorter than that for important medical breakthroughs, not considerably longer as it is now?
- Dylan16807 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. Those exceptions only cover a small fraction of the important social uses you get from public domain works.

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?"
- dahart 5y ago
  > I think this misses the point that parent is making I don’t, it’s important to clearly differentiate between patents and copyrights, and parent’s example was discussing patents and not copyrights in the context of a discussion purely about copyrights. The reason patent terms are shorter is because patent inventions are considered more important to release into society in a timely manner than works of art. It makes plenty of sense that the business case for music and books and other individual personal or creative works might often take much longer than for, say, industrial corporations. There are hardly any solo inventors actively getting patents compared to the vast number of people creating music and art. > Shouldn’t the system of intellectual property be the thing that needs to justify itself It already is justified, and the article re-iterated those justifications while arguing clumsily (IMO) for shorter terms. I’m not debating whether we should have copyrights. I’m just exploring and curious about how to justify any given balance point, and how to reason more clearly about terms. It’s not that easy, and can’t be as quickly stated as many many people seem to assume. People are just throwing around numbers that “feel” good to them, not because they’re aware of the history of media and IP and the many varied problems and experiences people have had.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    >> I think this misses the point that parent is making > I don’t, it’s important to clearly differentiate between patents and copyrights Why? The distinction seems quite artificial to me -- "intellectual property" is "intellectual property", isn't it? -- so IMO its proponents own the burden of justifying it.
CRConrad 5y ago
> Let’s not pretend that Star Wars is as important as the Polio vaccine Then surely the protection for silly Western-in-space films should be shorter than that for important medical breakthroughs, not considerably longer as it is now?
Dylan16807 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. Those exceptions only cover a small fraction of the important social uses you get from public domain works.