30 ms·

Our current copyright is far far too long. 20 years would be far more reasonable. We can talk about side issues all we want, but at the end of the day, copyrigh

Our current copyright is far far too long. 20 years would be far more reasonable. We can talk about side issues all we want, but at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit. 20 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit.

andirk 4y ago
Seeing as the USA's ultra affluent crust is grossly crowded with generational wealth, I don't think they'd like the idea of removing any of their profits, however long ago and however void of any of their own toil, regardless of the overall good it would do.
- robocat 4y ago
  > is grossly crowded with generational wealth The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth - and power law distribution of wealth really matters. That said, I agree there is a problem with intergenerational wealth, although possibly more through family political power and influence than their raw financial power.
  - wraptile 4y ago
    > The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth Not sure what you mean by that. Just going through the wikipedia articles they certainly seem to have inherited some part of their fortune. Using money to make more money isn't particularly complicated. You also inherit the social standing which makes successful investments much easier.
    - robocat 4y ago
      The money they “inherited” is a tiny percentage of the money they made. The other things they inherited matter: education, political and financial connections, and if they hit $0 they usually have backup options. What I am trying to say is that the money is almost irrelevant. If money were the only relevant issue, then the top ten would have all come from “ultra affluent” families and the top ten should all have recognisably older wealth surnames, like Windsor, Rockefeller, Washington. Inter-generational wealth matters, but where does Ford come into the Forbes list? Certainly the poor are less likely to move up (who on the Forbes list had parents from 1950s China?) Most importantly, the majority of arguments about the wealthy fail the smell test, as soon as you see the billions of people in the world who desire to be as well off as a poor person in the US. Don’t just look at those that are far wealthier than you, look at the number that are far poorer, and the arguments they would make about how you inherited your wealth.
autoexec 4y ago
> at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about. Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators. 20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me. If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.
- zqfuz 4y ago
  "making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit" sounds like "protection of profit" to me.
  - qu4z-2 4y ago
    Right, but it's the means not the end.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    That was a means to an end, not the end itself. That's the point. The goal of copyright has always been very clear. It was for encouraging the creation of new works.
    - godelski 4y ago
      Done through the means of ensuring that the original artist may profit off of their own hard work and no one else can steal the hard work and profit off it. The abuse you're talking about is the extension of the same mechanism that allows rights owners to profit for much longer periods of time, which actually discourages the creation of new works. This can all be true because there aren't binary solutions and things need nuance.
ep103 4y ago
Its the Mickey Mouse problem. Disney doesn't want Mickey or related works to enter public domain, because it would be a huge knock to their current empire. Still, this seems rather easily solvable to naïve little old me. 20 year copyright by default, with a 20 year review cycle process an individual/company can apply to to ask for extension, on the condition that they can prove harm to newly generated IP, if the copyright is not-renewed. Still using Mickey Mouse to generate new works of non-derivative IP, and copyright of Mickey Mouse isn't causing damage to any other competing agencies (the way holding IP to a new drug or invention would)? Fine, renew granted.
- clcaev 4y ago
  Or, beyond 28 years, if the work is not released to the public domain, have an annual copyright tax based upon a "fair market" assessment of the property. To keep assessment real, perhaps let there be an auction starting at 2x the taxed value.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing? Right now, especially without registration required anymore, there is no burden to owning copyrights "passively". If they had to enumerate and price them, that alone may make it worth shedding some of them.
    - gwd 4y ago
      > Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing? I've come to the conclusion that this sort of property tax (on everything, including land, equipment, trademarks, and copyrighted material) is the only kind of tax that actually makes sense economically. Fundamentally, "property" is one person or entity taking something from society as a whole (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence); "taxation" is its natural inverse: society as a whole taking something back from a person or individual (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence). There's a pleasant symmetry that the people who have benefit the most from the setup of society should be the ones who fund it; and that in a sense, ownership must be continually "justified".
that_guy_iain 4y ago
Imagine creating something in your 20s and you stop earning off it in your 40s. I think it should be until the death of the creator.
- silisili 4y ago
  As was posited in another comment, if we're encouraging innovation here, that would help the point. Encourage creators to have to create again. As an aside - I'd imagine for most works, the vast majority of earnings would come from the first 20 years. I mean, people aren't flocking to the theatre to see Titanic anymore, yeah? I'm sure there's some streaming deals and licenses to show and whatnot, but nothing like theatre earnings.
  - class4behavior 4y ago
    Copyright is not the same as patents nor is innovation the only or necessarily the most relevant concern. Authors have rights, especially artists are often not immediately discovered, and a lot of large businesses would be able to suppress new works for 20 years.
  - aczerepinski 4y ago
    I very much agree with your general point but still feel 20 is too short. / Somewhere in the 30-50 range.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    This shows ignorance on how creators make money. Creators don't make money purely through producing new works, per se. They create money with a robust set of works whose long tail collectively forms enough money for them to live off of. This relies on the notion that the intellectual property of the creator is theirs for a significantly long time. This is because the money made upfront is unpredictable [a novel's upfront payment is often just a few thousand dollars, but takes over a year to write, edit, and produce...]
    - zozbot234 4y ago
zozbot234 4y ago
OTOH, there's a huge amount of content out there that's formally and legally in the public domain already but not really findable/discoverable via detailed cataloging, or easily usable (and reusable) by 21st-c. standards. Zillions of random page scans up on Google Books, Hathitrust and the Internet Archive. If what you genuinely care about is expanding access to the legacy of our intellectual history, the low-hanging fruit really is very low. Beyond clear cases like ensuring preservation of materials that are obviously at risk, it's kinda hard to argue and lobby for a shorter copyright term when we're collectively ignoring what's long been available for the taking.
- bentley 4y ago
  I really don’t understand your justification here. A consequence of Sturgeon† is that most public domain material was unpopular in its day, and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022. Why does that imply copyright terms shouldn’t be shortened? If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today. † Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022 How could you tell, when most of it hasn't even been seriously looked at by anyone? Good cataloging is key to making existing material more relevant to more people.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
vhiremath4 4y ago
All of this IP law was written well before the large-scale adoption of the internet which has greatly accelerated the proliferation of ideas and and largely commoditized ingenuity. It's insane we haven't lowered the current timeline. Some commenters are mentioning the current folks in power who stand to lose a lot pushing back on change. That's probably the most plausible reason I can think of but curious of any others.
ww520 4y ago
Yes. The copyright duration needs to be shorten. To grandfather in the existing copyrights, any new ones will have one year shortened every year until the 20 year mark reached. Then all copyright work have 20 years. That's it.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Interesting effect of this is that it would release a truly massive amount of previously copyrighted work in a short timespan. Assuming this takes effect next year, some time in 2073, all copyrighted material created between this year and 2053 will be in the public domain.
jjcm 4y ago
I'm not fully convinced 20 years is the right answer. Things made 20 years ago are still often in pop-culture (The Matrix Trilogy, the first 7 seasons of South Park, the first 5 Harry Potter books), and these entering the public domain would create significant pressure to avoid the names of these series becoming legally generic. Managing the rights of these also feels like it would create significant stress on platforms trying to stem off piracy - is that 5 min clip from the Simpsons from seasons 1-15 (legal), or 15-34 (illegal)? Somewhere between the two feels more significant. Few series will run that long, and anything that does enter the public domain will be unambiguous due to its look, feel, and sound. Something like the original Star Wars (45 years old) is clearly older and is distinct from modern media in its look and feel. Something like The Lord of the Rings on the otherhand is hard to differentiate.
- krapp 4y ago
  You're only looking at the commercial value of copyright - making sure an IP stays as profitable as possible for as long as possible. But cultural value is just as, if not more, important, as is the premise (lost in modern society) that culture should be driven by people rather than manufactured by corporations. Copyright should end soon enough for public adoption of a work to still be culturally significant, even if that interferes with its market viability.
  - jjcm 4y ago
    What I'm looking at is the clarity value of copyright - do I know what things are and aren't copyrighted? I'm working on a social media startup right now, and managing copyright is tricky as it is. My concern here is that if copyright were only 20 years, removing copyrighted content would become even harder, making it even more difficult to compete with Meta / Google / etc.
    - krapp 4y ago
      I can't imagine finding out if something is older than 20 years would be prohibitively expensive - especially when those other platforms would have to do the same thing were copyright limits to change, meaning infrastructure would probably rapidly be developed to enable it. Most platforms don't even care, and Google just lets anyone claim anything and leaves it to the claimants to sort out.
Animats 4y ago
It was 28 years, with paid extensions, until the Copyright Term Extension Act. We need a lobby pushing to cut it back to 50, which is the international standard.
- aczerepinski 4y ago
  50 sounds very reasonable. Not only is it plenty long to monetize a work but it may also incentivize aging legends to have a second golden age of creativity at the end of their career. One of my favorite all time musicians is still touring (and sounding great!) but his entire set list is music he wrote in the 60s and 70s. I suspect he still has it in him to write amazing new music.
- gfaster 4y ago
  The international standard is actually life + 50 years, but US and EU along with South Korea, Japan, and many others are at life + 70. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
snarf21 4y ago
I get the sentiment but writing the Great American Novel is no easy proposition. Everyone who is saying 20 years are plenty should first make sure their wealth doesn't come from a salary. Creators are taking the risk so deserve the reward. I'm fine with ending with the creators death. This does push the creator to keep creating to maximize earnings for their estate prior to death. Creation is hard and it shouldn't be like art where paintings are only valuable posthumously.
- avereveard 4y ago
  the problem is that very rarely creators own the copyright, most of the time it's transferred to corporations. in principle I agree with you, but corporations should have restrictive limits (i.e. 20 years after first copyright transfer from a natural person) - and just to be sure, make it so that royalty contracts are null and void if they cover a duration longer than 5 years, so that corporation cannot workaround the issue buying new property for pennies using forever exlusive royalties and preventing renegotiation once the property becomes famous (i.e. avoid the current musicians/labels contracts where unknowns get scouted early and chained forever)
  - snarf21 4y ago
    It seems like that could be solved by making them non-transferable. They can only be licensed by a corporation.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  Art sale is used to launder money. The artists involved are irrelevant. Pablo Escobar wasn’t an art buff.
alvah 4y ago
Blame the cartoon mouse, it ruins everything it touches.
purple_ferret 4y ago
> 0 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit. How is it any more absurd than a trademark? Why should someone be able to write and sell a book about Harry Potter but not sell their own Iphone?
- geysersam 4y ago
  The purposes of those concepts are totally different. The purpose of trademarks is customer safety. If it wasn't illegal to infringe trademarks, it would be much easier to distribute fake products, and companies would have less incentive to build their brand on quality. The motivation for copyright is similar in that it exists to incentivize beneficial behavior (creating valuable works). But it's different because it also limits the distribution of the works. If this "cost" is too high, there is no economical sense in having so long copyright. Trademarks are not intrinsically valuable (to society). Limiting their use has no cost.
rgmerk 4y ago
I agree, but authors will scream blue murder and claim that you're depriving of their chances of any kind of security in retirement if you do so. Do they have a point? There are undoubtedly some creators making money from their old works, but I'd bet the vast majority of creators who do make a living from their work at some point (a small fraction of those who write or compose) make the vast majority of the royalties from their work in the first 20 years of its existence. Even more so when you apply appropriate present values to future royalties. But when I looked for actual evidence to support or refute this point the quality of evidence in the public domain is extremely weak - either anecdata from prominent authors, or very poor-quality aggregate data from economists supporting liberalizing copyright. If I didn't need to earn a living would be fun and useful to do a PhD examining this question properly.
epigramx 4y ago
1927 is 95 years.
sfifs 4y ago
Life expectancy is 2.5X what it was when these laws were first conceived and the majority of creative people have a relatively short peak creative period where most of their valuable output comes - eg. Typical recording artists last no more than 10 years & to be able to achieve their peak, they have to often give up on things that promise stable careers for people (advanced college degrees, internships and starter roles in the 20s) not in the creative industry. So why not let them enjoy the benefits of their creativity through royalty in their old age if someone streams their song decades later? There are a lot of senior artists who would be facing very significant hardship if not for their royalties. You can see this much more often in athletes who don't have a royalty stream.
- p1necone 4y ago
  What about a compromise where the original works (and republishing verbatim) are protected for the life of the creator, but derivative works (e.g. writing a new novel with the same characters/setting) are only prevented from being created for 10-20 years?
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Life expectancy was mostly shorter due to infant mortality. The average person who made it to 5 years old didn’t have an expectation to die at 35 at all.
p1necone 4y ago
I want to see what would happen if we abolished all IP law except for trademarks. No patents, no copyrights. I personally doubt it would actually discourage anyone from producing art or innovating in science/technology, but it might have other unexpected negative effects.
- radiKal07 4y ago
  Bad idea. The small guy with a genius innovation will get eaten by the big corporation with 100x more resources.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    Seems like for profit private corporations are the problem. Not the idea.
- spigottoday 4y ago
  One negative effect might be that you don't get to hear the music, read the book or view the art because you are not the wealthy patron or one of their friends. That's the way it used to work.
clarkmoody 4y ago
As it stands, all the myths of our culture are only allowed to be told by giant media conglomerates. Nobody but the House of Mouse, for instance, can tell the stories of Darth, Luke, Han, and Yoda.
beezle 4y ago
If I write a best seller at age 25, I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45. I'd also argue that heirs should also have some period of exclusivity as well. Using the best seller at age 25 example, were I to die an untimely death at age 32 I would again hope that my very young daughter would still be able to receive benefit from my creative works. So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me. In the case of a non-human copyright holder, 50 years seems reasonable can broadly comparable to that of the life of a human creator.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45 Write more best sellers then. > So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me. Yeah, of course a life+20 year monopoly on bits is great. For you. Instead of sitting down and working on more books so humanity can benefit, you get to sit down and collect rent from your past successes until you die. And then your children get to collect that rent for 20 years. You only need to strike gold once to be set for life and provide for children too. Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? It shouldn't. The social contract was "we'll pretend we can't easily copy this stuff so you can make money for a few years before it enters the public domain". This life time monopoly bullshit is a clear violation of this contract. A society whose public domain rights were robbed has zero incentive not to use libgen for everything.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Not everyone can consistently write books that get popular. Most authors only have a single book or series get popular and the rest of their books do not sell anywhere near as well.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      That doesn't justify giving them lifetime government enforced monopolies. If they want to keep getting paid, they should have to keep creating new works. Anything else is rent seeking. Having to give them monopolies at all is bad enough but the current state of copyright is completely unacceptable. Also, their children are owed exactly nothing by society. At most they should be able to inherit still valid copyrights with no change to their durations. Heirs getting a completely new two decade monopoly just so they could "benefit" is absurd and intolerable.
pwython 4y ago
As an artist by trade, you're damn right I want my kids & grandkids to profit from my IP (though I'm no Walt Disney), whether 20 or 100 years later. Art is different my friend. I'm not piecing together code from StackOverflow. Why should my heirlooms be sold to the highest bidder outside of my family due to copyright legal loopholes?
- slyall 4y ago
  Well I assume you are happy with a portion of you and your work's income for the next 100 years going to your teachers ( art and other subjects ) without who you could not have created the work. Also any medical people who treated you or your parents. Teaching and Medicine are skilled jobs that took years to learn. It is hardly fair that you and your heirs get to profit from some teacher's or Doctor's work without them getting a share.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Family heirlooms? Your art is not a heirloom. It's just information, transferred from your mind into your medium of preference. Information is just bits, nothing but a unique number whose discovery you feel entitled to. You think yourself superior to people who "piece together code from StackOverflow"? You're not. They will prove it to you with machine learning AI.
  - pwython 4y ago
    > "Your art is not a heirloom.... you're not entitled to..." What? An heirloom by definition is something passed down in a family for generations. If I created Mickey Mouse for example, why does my future offspring have to give away its rights, perhaps to someone that may use the character in nefarious ways for profit? I fail to see the logic of having a free-for-all on an artist's work just because they're potentially deceased and therefore let someone else receive profits instead of the original creator's family?
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      The family can produce their own works if they want control.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Copyright shouldn't last even one decade. Most of the profits of games and movies are made in the first few weeks. Give them like five years of protection in order to be exceptionally generous and allow for exactly 0 extensions. That's it. That's how copyright should work in order to be tolerable. Anything else is pure rent seeking.
- nearbuy 4y ago
  A lot of great indie games wouldn't even have been finished when their copyright expired if it lasted only 5 years (Factorio, Minecraft, Terraria). And Cave Story wouldn't have made any money. It was released for free in 2004 but few people knew about it at the time. It wasn't until 2010/2011 when it released on Nintendo and Steam (paid version) that it took off.
  - elsjaako 4y ago
    Minecraft kept being updated during early development, so unless you wanted to play a five year old version it would still have been under copyright. I agree it probably wouldn't have sold for a billion dollars, but they were making a lot of money before the sale. Cave Story I'm less familiar with, but again the Nintento and Steam versions would probably be different and have new copyright. But I think you're saying the game sold well despite a free version being available. Isn't this an example that you don't need any copyright to make money off a game?
    - nearbuy 4y ago
      Yeah, the first 3 games were (and still are) being updated. Still seems problematic to lose your original copyright before your even finished making your game. People looking to make a quick buck could put old copies of your game on Steam, same name and everything. The Cave Story Steam version had some minor graphics changes but no major differences. Mainly, a lot of people hadn't heard of it before then, and people weren't necessarily aware there was a free version. Copyright was important here; without it, someone else would have put it on Steam years earlier.
- 4y ago
briga 4y ago
A lot of famous writers today lived in poverty and obscurity and sold very few books until their old age. Seems like it would be unfair for them to not profit from their life’s work just because it’s more than 20 years old.
- hnfong 4y ago
  Yet copyright persists a constant number of years after the author's death. Is there anyone seriously arguing that a person should profit from their life's work even after they're dead?
Schroedingersat 4y ago
I like the idea of an extension with a hefty tax. After an initial period of ~10 years, you have to declare the value of the IP each year and pay 10% of that p.a. Anyone willing to provide your declared value to the public coffers can then have it placed in the public domain.
ozim 4y ago
I have a slightly different take. Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works. Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way. Without it big publishing companies would just publish stuff without paying royalties, because they could can just do that. With 75 years it will be also some inheritance for authors children - should we also let publishing companies just take that? There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
- bmitc 4y ago
  As much as I dislike big corporations abusing the system, like Disney, that’s a good point. In particular for novelists and artists, it can take decades for discovery and subsequent appreciation of their work.
- another-dave 4y ago
  Could always leave the timescales as-is, but have a break clause — if your work generates more than $xM in sales it's now out of copyright. Would protect the non-Star Wars/Harry Potters, but also let us recognise that SW/HP/LotR _have_ become part of our shared culture and it does wider society little benefit to give one company a monopoly on them
- myrmidon 4y ago
  > Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works. I would argue the opposite: that for non-bestsellers, income after 20 years is completely negligible. NO one is buying 2nd rate fiction 20 years after it was first published, only bestsellers will still sell a significant fraction after that long. I also don't see how potential income 20 years later could ever effectively motivate or enable a person...
- ohbtvz 4y ago
  > Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way. Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?
zcombynator 4y ago
think about Mickey Mouse. It's STILL in active use by Disney. I feel like it SHOULD still be protected, even though its' been 75 years. What about the Coca Cola Brand and Logo? It's also more than 100 years old. Can I start a 1:1 copycat, including logo and name? It should probably be related to ACTIVE USAGE, not first mention.
- samarthr1 4y ago
  Coca Cola's brand and logo are trademarks, not copyrights btw.
Worldblender 4y ago
I agree about how excessively long the current copyright laws can be, but there's a few things I wonder about that has to be done before that can realistically happen, along with several other related questions I got. Regardless of what happens in the end, any amount of copyright term reduction, even if that's only like 10 or 20 years, is better than nothing. * How will the Berne Convention from the early 1900s be dealt with? Since multiple countries signed onto that, how can that be overridden or be repelled so that at least some countries can start to reduce copyright terms? I know there's a few countries that didn't sign onto this convention, but they don't enough power to cause major reforms to occur. * I wish I could do it all myself, but I don't have enough money to convince most politicians to support such reforms. There's got to be some way I can easily gather like people who support such reforms. It's even harder if this has to happen outside of the United States for any meaningful reform to start. Where could I possibly get started on gathering like people for this purpose? * I know about fanworks (such as fanart, fanfiction, and fangames) and the like, but unfortunately, such things aren't tolerated when they're mixed with open-source software or anything with similar licensing. How come many of those can stay up while being legally dubious (by way of using characters and/or settings from pre-existing mass media without explicit permission from the original rightsholder(s)), but open-source software doesn't get that same pass, even if only for non-commercial purposes? Even if many rightsholders would ignore such things for not being worth their time to take down, it still doesn't feel totally right if the law was strictly followed. * If a (non-open source like) work gets delisted or removed from online stores or websites to the point where it can't be legally obtained anywhere (and hence can only be acquired via piracy), would that count as a publisher or author saying that they effectively revoked rights to such a work? Then if that work cannot be legally obtained anymore, would that also mean that that work can never enter the public domain unless it becomes available again in the future? I ask these questions in order to reduce the likelihood that I end up with a DMCA notice sent against any of my fanworks, that could potentially hurt my chances for getting future jobs. Then that could have a domino effect of making my life very hard if this gets bad enough because of not being able to find a source of income because people got scared of me infringing their copyrights. I may be exaggerating these worries, but that's what could happen if I strictly followed the law.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
Another point is software has a short shelf life. 10 years, maybe. What's the point of 75 year copyright protection for software? Books - the sales fall off a cliff after a year.
grishka 4y ago
3-5 years AT MOST. 20 years is an eternity in today's world. Most of the revenue a creative work generates comes in the first few months after its release anyway. For movies, the revenue from outside of cinema screenings is not even considered for statistical purposes. It would also make some sense to make copyright non-transferable.
zokier 4y ago
Artistic control is major aspect of copyright; as an artist you might not want to allow Disney to make hack adaptation of your story, or someone use your song in an ad, or gazillion other things. Of course such protection can be made into separate law, but I think just slashing copyright would be problematic.
radiKal07 4y ago
What if I write a book when I'm 20 and is a huge flop but it gets massive success 30 years later when I'm 50?
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
[dead]

andirk 4y ago

Seeing as the USA's ultra affluent crust is grossly crowded with generational wealth, I don't think they'd like the idea of removing any of their profits, however long ago and however void of any of their own toil, regardless of the overall good it would do.

robocat 4y ago
> is grossly crowded with generational wealth The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth - and power law distribution of wealth really matters. That said, I agree there is a problem with intergenerational wealth, although possibly more through family political power and influence than their raw financial power.
- wraptile 4y ago
  > The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth Not sure what you mean by that. Just going through the wikipedia articles they certainly seem to have inherited some part of their fortune. Using money to make more money isn't particularly complicated. You also inherit the social standing which makes successful investments much easier.
  - robocat 4y ago
    The money they “inherited” is a tiny percentage of the money they made. The other things they inherited matter: education, political and financial connections, and if they hit $0 they usually have backup options. What I am trying to say is that the money is almost irrelevant. If money were the only relevant issue, then the top ten would have all come from “ultra affluent” families and the top ten should all have recognisably older wealth surnames, like Windsor, Rockefeller, Washington. Inter-generational wealth matters, but where does Ford come into the Forbes list? Certainly the poor are less likely to move up (who on the Forbes list had parents from 1950s China?) Most importantly, the majority of arguments about the wealthy fail the smell test, as soon as you see the billions of people in the world who desire to be as well off as a poor person in the US. Don’t just look at those that are far wealthier than you, look at the number that are far poorer, and the arguments they would make about how you inherited your wealth.

autoexec 4y ago

> at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about. Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators. 20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me. If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.

zqfuz 4y ago
"making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit" sounds like "protection of profit" to me.
- qu4z-2 4y ago
  Right, but it's the means not the end.
- autoexec 4y ago
  That was a means to an end, not the end itself. That's the point. The goal of copyright has always been very clear. It was for encouraging the creation of new works.
  - godelski 4y ago
    Done through the means of ensuring that the original artist may profit off of their own hard work and no one else can steal the hard work and profit off it. The abuse you're talking about is the extension of the same mechanism that allows rights owners to profit for much longer periods of time, which actually discourages the creation of new works. This can all be true because there aren't binary solutions and things need nuance.

ep103 4y ago

Its the Mickey Mouse problem. Disney doesn't want Mickey or related works to enter public domain, because it would be a huge knock to their current empire. Still, this seems rather easily solvable to naïve little old me. 20 year copyright by default, with a 20 year review cycle process an individual/company can apply to to ask for extension, on the condition that they can prove harm to newly generated IP, if the copyright is not-renewed. Still using Mickey Mouse to generate new works of non-derivative IP, and copyright of Mickey Mouse isn't causing damage to any other competing agencies (the way holding IP to a new drug or invention would)? Fine, renew granted.

clcaev 4y ago
Or, beyond 28 years, if the work is not released to the public domain, have an annual copyright tax based upon a "fair market" assessment of the property. To keep assessment real, perhaps let there be an auction starting at 2x the taxed value.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing? Right now, especially without registration required anymore, there is no burden to owning copyrights "passively". If they had to enumerate and price them, that alone may make it worth shedding some of them.
  - gwd 4y ago
    > Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing? I've come to the conclusion that this sort of property tax (on everything, including land, equipment, trademarks, and copyrighted material) is the only kind of tax that actually makes sense economically. Fundamentally, "property" is one person or entity taking something from society as a whole (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence); "taxation" is its natural inverse: society as a whole taking something back from a person or individual (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence). There's a pleasant symmetry that the people who have benefit the most from the setup of society should be the ones who fund it; and that in a sense, ownership must be continually "justified".

that_guy_iain 4y ago

Imagine creating something in your 20s and you stop earning off it in your 40s. I think it should be until the death of the creator.

silisili 4y ago
As was posited in another comment, if we're encouraging innovation here, that would help the point. Encourage creators to have to create again. As an aside - I'd imagine for most works, the vast majority of earnings would come from the first 20 years. I mean, people aren't flocking to the theatre to see Titanic anymore, yeah? I'm sure there's some streaming deals and licenses to show and whatnot, but nothing like theatre earnings.
- class4behavior 4y ago
  Copyright is not the same as patents nor is innovation the only or necessarily the most relevant concern. Authors have rights, especially artists are often not immediately discovered, and a lot of large businesses would be able to suppress new works for 20 years.
- aczerepinski 4y ago
  I very much agree with your general point but still feel 20 is too short. / Somewhere in the 30-50 range.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  This shows ignorance on how creators make money. Creators don't make money purely through producing new works, per se. They create money with a robust set of works whose long tail collectively forms enough money for them to live off of. This relies on the notion that the intellectual property of the creator is theirs for a significantly long time. This is because the money made upfront is unpredictable [a novel's upfront payment is often just a few thousand dollars, but takes over a year to write, edit, and produce...]
  - zozbot234 4y ago

zozbot234 4y ago

OTOH, there's a huge amount of content out there that's formally and legally in the public domain already but not really findable/discoverable via detailed cataloging, or easily usable (and reusable) by 21st-c. standards. Zillions of random page scans up on Google Books, Hathitrust and the Internet Archive. If what you genuinely care about is expanding access to the legacy of our intellectual history, the low-hanging fruit really is very low. Beyond clear cases like ensuring preservation of materials that are obviously at risk, it's kinda hard to argue and lobby for a shorter copyright term when we're collectively ignoring what's long been available for the taking.

bentley 4y ago
I really don’t understand your justification here. A consequence of Sturgeon† is that most public domain material was unpopular in its day, and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022. Why does that imply copyright terms shouldn’t be shortened? If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today. † Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022 How could you tell, when most of it hasn't even been seriously looked at by anyone? Good cataloging is key to making existing material more relevant to more people.
  - dmitriid 4y ago

vhiremath4 4y ago

All of this IP law was written well before the large-scale adoption of the internet which has greatly accelerated the proliferation of ideas and and largely commoditized ingenuity. It's insane we haven't lowered the current timeline. Some commenters are mentioning the current folks in power who stand to lose a lot pushing back on change. That's probably the most plausible reason I can think of but curious of any others.

ww520 4y ago

Yes. The copyright duration needs to be shorten. To grandfather in the existing copyrights, any new ones will have one year shortened every year until the 20 year mark reached. Then all copyright work have 20 years. That's it.

alwayslikethis 4y ago
Interesting effect of this is that it would release a truly massive amount of previously copyrighted work in a short timespan. Assuming this takes effect next year, some time in 2073, all copyrighted material created between this year and 2053 will be in the public domain.

jjcm 4y ago

I'm not fully convinced 20 years is the right answer. Things made 20 years ago are still often in pop-culture (The Matrix Trilogy, the first 7 seasons of South Park, the first 5 Harry Potter books), and these entering the public domain would create significant pressure to avoid the names of these series becoming legally generic. Managing the rights of these also feels like it would create significant stress on platforms trying to stem off piracy - is that 5 min clip from the Simpsons from seasons 1-15 (legal), or 15-34 (illegal)? Somewhere between the two feels more significant. Few series will run that long, and anything that does enter the public domain will be unambiguous due to its look, feel, and sound. Something like the original Star Wars (45 years old) is clearly older and is distinct from modern media in its look and feel. Something like The Lord of the Rings on the otherhand is hard to differentiate.

krapp 4y ago
You're only looking at the commercial value of copyright - making sure an IP stays as profitable as possible for as long as possible. But cultural value is just as, if not more, important, as is the premise (lost in modern society) that culture should be driven by people rather than manufactured by corporations. Copyright should end soon enough for public adoption of a work to still be culturally significant, even if that interferes with its market viability.
- jjcm 4y ago
  What I'm looking at is the clarity value of copyright - do I know what things are and aren't copyrighted? I'm working on a social media startup right now, and managing copyright is tricky as it is. My concern here is that if copyright were only 20 years, removing copyrighted content would become even harder, making it even more difficult to compete with Meta / Google / etc.
  - krapp 4y ago
    I can't imagine finding out if something is older than 20 years would be prohibitively expensive - especially when those other platforms would have to do the same thing were copyright limits to change, meaning infrastructure would probably rapidly be developed to enable it. Most platforms don't even care, and Google just lets anyone claim anything and leaves it to the claimants to sort out.

Animats 4y ago

It was 28 years, with paid extensions, until the Copyright Term Extension Act. We need a lobby pushing to cut it back to 50, which is the international standard.

aczerepinski 4y ago
50 sounds very reasonable. Not only is it plenty long to monetize a work but it may also incentivize aging legends to have a second golden age of creativity at the end of their career. One of my favorite all time musicians is still touring (and sounding great!) but his entire set list is music he wrote in the 60s and 70s. I suspect he still has it in him to write amazing new music.
gfaster 4y ago
The international standard is actually life + 50 years, but US and EU along with South Korea, Japan, and many others are at life + 70. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...

snarf21 4y ago

I get the sentiment but writing the Great American Novel is no easy proposition. Everyone who is saying 20 years are plenty should first make sure their wealth doesn't come from a salary. Creators are taking the risk so deserve the reward. I'm fine with ending with the creators death. This does push the creator to keep creating to maximize earnings for their estate prior to death. Creation is hard and it shouldn't be like art where paintings are only valuable posthumously.

avereveard 4y ago
the problem is that very rarely creators own the copyright, most of the time it's transferred to corporations. in principle I agree with you, but corporations should have restrictive limits (i.e. 20 years after first copyright transfer from a natural person) - and just to be sure, make it so that royalty contracts are null and void if they cover a duration longer than 5 years, so that corporation cannot workaround the issue buying new property for pennies using forever exlusive royalties and preventing renegotiation once the property becomes famous (i.e. avoid the current musicians/labels contracts where unknowns get scouted early and chained forever)
- snarf21 4y ago
  It seems like that could be solved by making them non-transferable. They can only be licensed by a corporation.
geraldwhen 4y ago
Art sale is used to launder money. The artists involved are irrelevant. Pablo Escobar wasn’t an art buff.

alvah 4y ago

Blame the cartoon mouse, it ruins everything it touches.

purple_ferret 4y ago

> 0 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit. How is it any more absurd than a trademark? Why should someone be able to write and sell a book about Harry Potter but not sell their own Iphone?

geysersam 4y ago
The purposes of those concepts are totally different. The purpose of trademarks is customer safety. If it wasn't illegal to infringe trademarks, it would be much easier to distribute fake products, and companies would have less incentive to build their brand on quality. The motivation for copyright is similar in that it exists to incentivize beneficial behavior (creating valuable works). But it's different because it also limits the distribution of the works. If this "cost" is too high, there is no economical sense in having so long copyright. Trademarks are not intrinsically valuable (to society). Limiting their use has no cost.

rgmerk 4y ago

I agree, but authors will scream blue murder and claim that you're depriving of their chances of any kind of security in retirement if you do so. Do they have a point? There are undoubtedly some creators making money from their old works, but I'd bet the vast majority of creators who do make a living from their work at some point (a small fraction of those who write or compose) make the vast majority of the royalties from their work in the first 20 years of its existence. Even more so when you apply appropriate present values to future royalties. But when I looked for actual evidence to support or refute this point the quality of evidence in the public domain is extremely weak - either anecdata from prominent authors, or very poor-quality aggregate data from economists supporting liberalizing copyright. If I didn't need to earn a living would be fun and useful to do a PhD examining this question properly.

epigramx 4y ago

1927 is 95 years.

sfifs 4y ago

Life expectancy is 2.5X what it was when these laws were first conceived and the majority of creative people have a relatively short peak creative period where most of their valuable output comes - eg. Typical recording artists last no more than 10 years & to be able to achieve their peak, they have to often give up on things that promise stable careers for people (advanced college degrees, internships and starter roles in the 20s) not in the creative industry. So why not let them enjoy the benefits of their creativity through royalty in their old age if someone streams their song decades later? There are a lot of senior artists who would be facing very significant hardship if not for their royalties. You can see this much more often in athletes who don't have a royalty stream.

p1necone 4y ago
What about a compromise where the original works (and republishing verbatim) are protected for the life of the creator, but derivative works (e.g. writing a new novel with the same characters/setting) are only prevented from being created for 10-20 years?
thehappypm 4y ago
Life expectancy was mostly shorter due to infant mortality. The average person who made it to 5 years old didn’t have an expectation to die at 35 at all.

p1necone 4y ago

I want to see what would happen if we abolished all IP law except for trademarks. No patents, no copyrights. I personally doubt it would actually discourage anyone from producing art or innovating in science/technology, but it might have other unexpected negative effects.

radiKal07 4y ago
Bad idea. The small guy with a genius innovation will get eaten by the big corporation with 100x more resources.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Seems like for profit private corporations are the problem. Not the idea.
spigottoday 4y ago
One negative effect might be that you don't get to hear the music, read the book or view the art because you are not the wealthy patron or one of their friends. That's the way it used to work.

clarkmoody 4y ago

As it stands, all the myths of our culture are only allowed to be told by giant media conglomerates. Nobody but the House of Mouse, for instance, can tell the stories of Darth, Luke, Han, and Yoda.

beezle 4y ago

If I write a best seller at age 25, I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45. I'd also argue that heirs should also have some period of exclusivity as well. Using the best seller at age 25 example, were I to die an untimely death at age 32 I would again hope that my very young daughter would still be able to receive benefit from my creative works. So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me. In the case of a non-human copyright holder, 50 years seems reasonable can broadly comparable to that of the life of a human creator.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45 Write more best sellers then. > So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me. Yeah, of course a life+20 year monopoly on bits is great. For you. Instead of sitting down and working on more books so humanity can benefit, you get to sit down and collect rent from your past successes until you die. And then your children get to collect that rent for 20 years. You only need to strike gold once to be set for life and provide for children too. Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? It shouldn't. The social contract was "we'll pretend we can't easily copy this stuff so you can make money for a few years before it enters the public domain". This life time monopoly bullshit is a clear violation of this contract. A society whose public domain rights were robbed has zero incentive not to use libgen for everything.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Not everyone can consistently write books that get popular. Most authors only have a single book or series get popular and the rest of their books do not sell anywhere near as well.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    That doesn't justify giving them lifetime government enforced monopolies. If they want to keep getting paid, they should have to keep creating new works. Anything else is rent seeking. Having to give them monopolies at all is bad enough but the current state of copyright is completely unacceptable. Also, their children are owed exactly nothing by society. At most they should be able to inherit still valid copyrights with no change to their durations. Heirs getting a completely new two decade monopoly just so they could "benefit" is absurd and intolerable.

pwython 4y ago

As an artist by trade, you're damn right I want my kids & grandkids to profit from my IP (though I'm no Walt Disney), whether 20 or 100 years later. Art is different my friend. I'm not piecing together code from StackOverflow. Why should my heirlooms be sold to the highest bidder outside of my family due to copyright legal loopholes?

slyall 4y ago
Well I assume you are happy with a portion of you and your work's income for the next 100 years going to your teachers ( art and other subjects ) without who you could not have created the work. Also any medical people who treated you or your parents. Teaching and Medicine are skilled jobs that took years to learn. It is hardly fair that you and your heirs get to profit from some teacher's or Doctor's work without them getting a share.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Family heirlooms? Your art is not a heirloom. It's just information, transferred from your mind into your medium of preference. Information is just bits, nothing but a unique number whose discovery you feel entitled to. You think yourself superior to people who "piece together code from StackOverflow"? You're not. They will prove it to you with machine learning AI.
- pwython 4y ago
  > "Your art is not a heirloom.... you're not entitled to..." What? An heirloom by definition is something passed down in a family for generations. If I created Mickey Mouse for example, why does my future offspring have to give away its rights, perhaps to someone that may use the character in nefarious ways for profit? I fail to see the logic of having a free-for-all on an artist's work just because they're potentially deceased and therefore let someone else receive profits instead of the original creator's family?
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    The family can produce their own works if they want control.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

Copyright shouldn't last even one decade. Most of the profits of games and movies are made in the first few weeks. Give them like five years of protection in order to be exceptionally generous and allow for exactly 0 extensions. That's it. That's how copyright should work in order to be tolerable. Anything else is pure rent seeking.

nearbuy 4y ago
A lot of great indie games wouldn't even have been finished when their copyright expired if it lasted only 5 years (Factorio, Minecraft, Terraria). And Cave Story wouldn't have made any money. It was released for free in 2004 but few people knew about it at the time. It wasn't until 2010/2011 when it released on Nintendo and Steam (paid version) that it took off.
- elsjaako 4y ago
  Minecraft kept being updated during early development, so unless you wanted to play a five year old version it would still have been under copyright. I agree it probably wouldn't have sold for a billion dollars, but they were making a lot of money before the sale. Cave Story I'm less familiar with, but again the Nintento and Steam versions would probably be different and have new copyright. But I think you're saying the game sold well despite a free version being available. Isn't this an example that you don't need any copyright to make money off a game?
  - nearbuy 4y ago
    Yeah, the first 3 games were (and still are) being updated. Still seems problematic to lose your original copyright before your even finished making your game. People looking to make a quick buck could put old copies of your game on Steam, same name and everything. The Cave Story Steam version had some minor graphics changes but no major differences. Mainly, a lot of people hadn't heard of it before then, and people weren't necessarily aware there was a free version. Copyright was important here; without it, someone else would have put it on Steam years earlier.
4y ago

briga 4y ago

A lot of famous writers today lived in poverty and obscurity and sold very few books until their old age. Seems like it would be unfair for them to not profit from their life’s work just because it’s more than 20 years old.

hnfong 4y ago
Yet copyright persists a constant number of years after the author's death. Is there anyone seriously arguing that a person should profit from their life's work even after they're dead?

Schroedingersat 4y ago

I like the idea of an extension with a hefty tax. After an initial period of ~10 years, you have to declare the value of the IP each year and pay 10% of that p.a. Anyone willing to provide your declared value to the public coffers can then have it placed in the public domain.

ozim 4y ago

I have a slightly different take. Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works. Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way. Without it big publishing companies would just publish stuff without paying royalties, because they could can just do that. With 75 years it will be also some inheritance for authors children - should we also let publishing companies just take that? There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".

bmitc 4y ago
As much as I dislike big corporations abusing the system, like Disney, that’s a good point. In particular for novelists and artists, it can take decades for discovery and subsequent appreciation of their work.
another-dave 4y ago
Could always leave the timescales as-is, but have a break clause — if your work generates more than $xM in sales it's now out of copyright. Would protect the non-Star Wars/Harry Potters, but also let us recognise that SW/HP/LotR _have_ become part of our shared culture and it does wider society little benefit to give one company a monopoly on them
myrmidon 4y ago
> Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works. I would argue the opposite: that for non-bestsellers, income after 20 years is completely negligible. NO one is buying 2nd rate fiction 20 years after it was first published, only bestsellers will still sell a significant fraction after that long. I also don't see how potential income 20 years later could ever effectively motivate or enable a person...
ohbtvz 4y ago
> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way. Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?

zcombynator 4y ago

think about Mickey Mouse. It's STILL in active use by Disney. I feel like it SHOULD still be protected, even though its' been 75 years. What about the Coca Cola Brand and Logo? It's also more than 100 years old. Can I start a 1:1 copycat, including logo and name? It should probably be related to ACTIVE USAGE, not first mention.

samarthr1 4y ago
Coca Cola's brand and logo are trademarks, not copyrights btw.

Worldblender 4y ago

I agree about how excessively long the current copyright laws can be, but there's a few things I wonder about that has to be done before that can realistically happen, along with several other related questions I got. Regardless of what happens in the end, any amount of copyright term reduction, even if that's only like 10 or 20 years, is better than nothing. * How will the Berne Convention from the early 1900s be dealt with? Since multiple countries signed onto that, how can that be overridden or be repelled so that at least some countries can start to reduce copyright terms? I know there's a few countries that didn't sign onto this convention, but they don't enough power to cause major reforms to occur. * I wish I could do it all myself, but I don't have enough money to convince most politicians to support such reforms. There's got to be some way I can easily gather like people who support such reforms. It's even harder if this has to happen outside of the United States for any meaningful reform to start. Where could I possibly get started on gathering like people for this purpose? * I know about fanworks (such as fanart, fanfiction, and fangames) and the like, but unfortunately, such things aren't tolerated when they're mixed with open-source software or anything with similar licensing. How come many of those can stay up while being legally dubious (by way of using characters and/or settings from pre-existing mass media without explicit permission from the original rightsholder(s)), but open-source software doesn't get that same pass, even if only for non-commercial purposes? Even if many rightsholders would ignore such things for not being worth their time to take down, it still doesn't feel totally right if the law was strictly followed. * If a (non-open source like) work gets delisted or removed from online stores or websites to the point where it can't be legally obtained anywhere (and hence can only be acquired via piracy), would that count as a publisher or author saying that they effectively revoked rights to such a work? Then if that work cannot be legally obtained anymore, would that also mean that that work can never enter the public domain unless it becomes available again in the future? I ask these questions in order to reduce the likelihood that I end up with a DMCA notice sent against any of my fanworks, that could potentially hurt my chances for getting future jobs. Then that could have a domino effect of making my life very hard if this gets bad enough because of not being able to find a source of income because people got scared of me infringing their copyrights. I may be exaggerating these worries, but that's what could happen if I strictly followed the law.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

Another point is software has a short shelf life. 10 years, maybe. What's the point of 75 year copyright protection for software? Books - the sales fall off a cliff after a year.

grishka 4y ago

3-5 years AT MOST. 20 years is an eternity in today's world. Most of the revenue a creative work generates comes in the first few months after its release anyway. For movies, the revenue from outside of cinema screenings is not even considered for statistical purposes. It would also make some sense to make copyright non-transferable.

zokier 4y ago

Artistic control is major aspect of copyright; as an artist you might not want to allow Disney to make hack adaptation of your story, or someone use your song in an ad, or gazillion other things. Of course such protection can be made into separate law, but I think just slashing copyright would be problematic.

radiKal07 4y ago

What if I write a book when I'm 20 and is a huge flop but it gets massive success 30 years later when I'm 50?

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

[dead]