4 ms·

If there is no copyright holder anymore, then who will sue you if you just start selling the thing?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
10000truths 5y ago
Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.
- autoexec 5y ago
  Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own. In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity. It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part. If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?
stormbrew 5y ago
It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium. Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it. This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. that's why we should have kept copyright limited to human creators and not allowed them to be bought up by effectively immortal corporations who can pass, sell, or auction off those rights to other corporations. Just one more way the public is being robbed from art and creative works that should be freely and easily available to them to enjoy and build off of.
  - vshade 5y ago
    I think it's a bit hard for things like games or even movies to be owned by a person given how many people have to work on those. Having a shorter time limit from publication would be easier and better for the public.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      I agree 100% about the shorter time limit being preferable but only as long as that limit is significantly shorter than the life of the copyright holder and can't be extended. With things as they are today, the real benefit of denying corporations the ability to own copyrights would be in that humans actually die. I don't see much of an issue with multiple individuals having equal share of a copyright though. We already pretty much have that now as it is. For a single recording of a song you're already dealing with a large number of rights that may not all be owned by the same people covering things like the composition, the performance/recording, synchronization, and distribution which could itself include separate licenses for different mediums (radio, physical media, streaming) or markets (domestic vs international), but somehow we manage to work it all out most of the time. The important thing is that the problem of perpetual copyright goes away and people can start accessing and building on their own culture without fear of being sued for massive damages.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    If copyright was limited to human creators, then you'd have to track down and get a license from every single person who touched the pixels and code in the game rather than from the one corporate entity. That would be thousands of people in a modern game using a mature game engine.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Then whoever can make a non-frivolous claim to the copyright will crawl out of the woodwork to sue you for damages because they suddenly have a financial incentive to do so.

autoexec 5y ago
Honestly even the largest companies don't seem to care too much about suing people for copyrights they don't actually own. In the cox cable lawsuit, with billions in damages at stake, the major record labels under the RIAA had a ton of infringement claims thrown out on appeal because they didn't actually have the rights or hadn't registered them at the time of the alleged activity. It shaved a fair amount of cash off the damages cox was on the hook for, but it must have taken them an immense amount of time and effort to check the rights on all those works to find them and as far as I can tell, the labels who falsely claimed to the courts that they had the rights didn't see any consequences for their part. If there's no accountability for failing to keep their own records in order even in such a massive high profile copyright lawsuit why would they ever bother?

stormbrew 5y ago

It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. If they're individual works, ownership follows the estate wherever it goes for decades. If it's a corporate work/work for hire, the assets were probably bought by someone in a firesale, and then they might have gone out of business and all their assets were bought too and so on ad nausium. Proving that no one owns the copyright to the satisfaction of any company or person who's even a little risk averse then becomes essentially an archeological or genealogical task that's rarely worth it. This is why we get an endless stream of movies and books built on ideas from before 1920 and everything made since then that isn't a blockbuster of some sort languishes into obscurity. Eternal copyright is where ideas go to die.

autoexec 5y ago
> It's genuinely very difficult to have things completely lose any kind of copyright ownership is the thing. that's why we should have kept copyright limited to human creators and not allowed them to be bought up by effectively immortal corporations who can pass, sell, or auction off those rights to other corporations. Just one more way the public is being robbed from art and creative works that should be freely and easily available to them to enjoy and build off of.
- vshade 5y ago
  I think it's a bit hard for things like games or even movies to be owned by a person given how many people have to work on those. Having a shorter time limit from publication would be easier and better for the public.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    I agree 100% about the shorter time limit being preferable but only as long as that limit is significantly shorter than the life of the copyright holder and can't be extended. With things as they are today, the real benefit of denying corporations the ability to own copyrights would be in that humans actually die. I don't see much of an issue with multiple individuals having equal share of a copyright though. We already pretty much have that now as it is. For a single recording of a song you're already dealing with a large number of rights that may not all be owned by the same people covering things like the composition, the performance/recording, synchronization, and distribution which could itself include separate licenses for different mediums (radio, physical media, streaming) or markets (domestic vs international), but somehow we manage to work it all out most of the time. The important thing is that the problem of perpetual copyright goes away and people can start accessing and building on their own culture without fear of being sued for massive damages.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  If copyright was limited to human creators, then you'd have to track down and get a license from every single person who touched the pixels and code in the game rather than from the one corporate entity. That would be thousands of people in a modern game using a mature game engine.