4 ms·

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 exclusivi

• 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.
      • wutwutwutwut 4y ago
        How long have you lived in your house? Can I have it now?
        • matheusmoreira 4y ago
          Really? You're gonna compare artificially scarce imaginary property with real property on the real world like land and physical possessions?
          • wutwutwutwut 4y ago
            > real property on the real world like land and physical possessions That's "real" only because the government enforces it. My point was that the comment I replied to was ridiculous.
            • matheusmoreira 4y ago
              It's "real" because it exists in the real world. It's naturally scarce as a result since two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. There's only so much land available. It's a completely different matter compared to imaginary artificially scarce cultural property which boils down to ownership of unique numbers. That's what's ridiculous.
        • jennnyy 4y ago
          You're free to make an exact copy of it whenever you like :)
          • wutwutwutwut 4y ago
            At least where I live, copying a house would not be allowed since the specification falls under copyright. So no?
        • oblio 4y ago
          Nope, but you can download it.
    • nearbuy 4y ago
      Most authors have zero big hits. But authors that get one hit are more likely to get future hits. Most people have to work until retirement age. If you happen to get a big hit that earns you enough money to retire at age 28, then congratulations, you're one of the lucky few. But society doesn't owe you the right to make a lifetime worth of money off of a single book. You can work until retirement age like everyone else. Also, long copyright terms only affects retirement age for a very small percentage of authors. Most authors aren't well known, have no big hits, and each of their books gets most of its sales in its first few years. These authors have to work their whole life regardless. Authors with a really big hit, like J.K. Rowling, have enough money to retire after that one book, regardless of whether copyright is only 20 years or longer. It only makes the difference for those authors who have a small hit that won't quite earn enough to retire in 20 years, but will earn enough over 40-60 years. That's rare. Books usually earn the vast majority of their profits in those first 20 years.
  • dahart 4y ago
    > Write more best sellers then. Come on, that’s flippant response to a valid point. Best-sellers are a function of luck. Copyright laws are intended to encourage more creative output by offering original work some protection. Suggesting that individual authors should have less protection and pump out more work and just get lucky isn’t realistic. > Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? Calling it absurd and being outraged and incredulous weakens your argument here, when this has been established over centuries (millennia arguably) by many many smart people. The rent-seeking, as you call it, provides two functions: 1) to allow time for authors to collect returns on their creativity and time investment, and 2) to act as a force to encourage more creative output from society. The limited time monopoly that authors enjoy is the reason that it becomes an incentive to create new work. It should be attractive to author new things and unattractive to steal and publish others’ work. If you make the protection period too short, it won’t work, it won’t be an incentive, it will become a disincentive and we’ll get both artists going broke and less creative work and more stealing. (There are countries in the world today with weaker copyright laws than the US that already exhibit high rates of IP theft and low rates of original creative output.) I don’t know what social contract you’re referring to, but since copyright is the law, it is the de facto contract today.
    • matheusmoreira 4y ago
      > Come on, that’s flippant response to a valid point. It's the best I can do when faced with people who feel entitled to lifetime and posthumous rent for doing a bit of intelectual work. I mean, there's an artist in the comments lower on this page who wants up to lifetime+100 years of rent seeking for him, his children and his grand children to enjoy. Keep working if you want to keep making money. That's literally the most polite way I can put it. > when this has been established over centuries (millennia arguably) by many many smart people Well, those smart people didn't exactly count on computers existing. It was easy to enforce copyright when you needed to be a major industry player owning expensive printing presses to infringe copyright at any appreciable scale. Now copyright infringement is trivial, people do it without even realizing it simply because they can. People infringe copyright every single time they download a random picture off of some photographer's website or something. The world will never be like it was before and it's time to accept that. Copyright is a thing of the past. To put that genie back in the bottle, you'll need tyranny the likes of which really ought to offend every single user posting here on Hacker News. It's simply not possible without destroying everything hackers stand for, the computing freedom we cherish. And of course it's exactly what the copyright industry is lobbying for. > The limited time monopoly that authors enjoy is the reason that it becomes an incentive to create new work. I have no idea why you think a lifetime+posthumous monopoly can be considered "limited time" in any way. You'll be long dead by the time it expires. It is functionally infinite. Limited time is 5 years, 10 at most. Then the cultural works I grew up with would be public property by the time I'm an adult. That's limited time. You can observe its duration being limited. That's tolerable. > If you make the protection period too short, it won’t work, it won’t be an incentive And making it too long creates rent seeking and robs us of our public domain rights. > There are countries in the world today with weaker copyright laws than the US that already exhibit high rates of IP theft and low rates of original creative output. Oh please. The countries you speak of? Many of them don't even have universal basic sanitation. They have better things to do than police the imaginary property of americans. The US Trade Office being a mouthpiece of US "stakeholders" is straight up offensive. US corporations using the might of the US government to sanction sovereign countries. The only possible reason not to be outraged is you're profiting off of this. > I don’t know what social contract you’re referring to The one that expects us to believe we can't just go to libgen literally right now and download a copy of your book for free. Always extending copyright durations until it's functionally infinite. You're not keeping up your end of the public domain bargain. Why should we keep ours?
• wraptile 4y ago
  Honestly, everyone should be able to sustain themselves 20 years later if they can write a best seller once. If you can't well then you are either extremely unlucky, have health issues or are just plain lazy - we shouldn't base this particular law on this.
• hnfong 4y ago
  Copyright for X years since first publish makes sense. Lifetime copyright makes sense too. But "Lifetime + X years" just rewards those for whatever reason has a longer life. There's no reason a work should be protected for a longer time because the author lived longer.
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    I don’t understand what “lifetime” means. What if multiple people publish it? How does this affect open source software? A lot of software uses restrictive licenses such as AGPL. There could be many people that own the copyright or an organization. The intent of AGPL software is that it isn’t used without giving back to the community.
• onion2k 4y ago
  Things entering the public domain should be considered in the context of lowering the cost of access more than the work being the basis of new dirivative works. It's far more important that millions of people can read or watch something without having to pay a fee to the publisher than it is for someone to use the work as source material for a new work. Copyright should be much shorter so that everyone can access culturally relevant art and books even if they have very little money. Right now the only option for many is piracy because the works their peers are seeing work enter the public domain until decades after they die.
  • Jochim 4y ago
    I disagree. Reusing, reimagining, and retelling are fundamental concepts and key to human development. Copyright is almost unjustifiable as a concept in from that perspective. Copyright sets an arbitrary limit on what is considered "original". The vagueness of that limit is then used to crush and suppress related ideas, with no care as to whether they were discovered entirely independently. The goal of ensuring that people are recognised and rewarded for their work is noble. Copyright is just an awful way of doing so. It runs contrary to how our brains work and enforcing it is in the same ballpark as thought policing.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Who not a guaranteed minimum of 25 years after publication (for posthumous works and authors who kick the bucket shortly after publication) with the expectation of lifetime of the author should they live more than 25 years after publication? The heirs of the long-lived authors will have to take the personal responsibility to have their own creative ideas instead of trading on their father's legacy.