3 ms·

> 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 encoura

by 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?
- dahart 4y ago
  > Keep working if you want to keep making money. FWIW, this is literally what copyright law is saying. Instead of copying someone else, seeking rent for something you didn’t invest in, taking away from someone else’s investment, go make your own stuff to copy & distribute & sell.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Sure, as long as the copyright term is valid. After that, the works are in the public domain where there are no restrictions to what we can do with our shared culture. Why do you conveniently forget that the law also talks about public domain? The same public domain that contained works that artists like Walt Disney drew from in order to strike it rich, only to subsequently lobby the government to rob us of the same rights he enjoyed time and time again? These functionally infinite copyright terms rob us of our rights and turns copyright infringement into civil disobedience.
    - dahart 4y ago
      > as long as the copyright term is valid. No, the whole idea behind copyrights of any term length is to provide and incentive for people to make something new instead of copy someone else’s work. The retort you used, “Keep working if you want to keep making money” applies to people who seek to copy or remix work as much as it applies to people who seek to protect their work from copies or remixes. I really would love to hear a compelling argument that convinces me, I want a stronger argument for a reduction in term length (and I do think it should be shortened), but this hyperbole isn’t doing it. You’re complaining about rent-seeking, but failing to understand that this isn’t an argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not. This is an argument about who gets to seek rent, the person who did the creative work, or someone else who ‘borrowed’ the work without adding value. Personally, I’d certainly rather default to giving creators money over copiers, wouldn’t you? Copyright was established to avoid the second kind of rent-seeking, which has historically been a real economic drain.
      - 4y ago

by dahart 4y ago

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?

dahart 4y ago
> Keep working if you want to keep making money. FWIW, this is literally what copyright law is saying. Instead of copying someone else, seeking rent for something you didn’t invest in, taking away from someone else’s investment, go make your own stuff to copy & distribute & sell.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Sure, as long as the copyright term is valid. After that, the works are in the public domain where there are no restrictions to what we can do with our shared culture. Why do you conveniently forget that the law also talks about public domain? The same public domain that contained works that artists like Walt Disney drew from in order to strike it rich, only to subsequently lobby the government to rob us of the same rights he enjoyed time and time again? These functionally infinite copyright terms rob us of our rights and turns copyright infringement into civil disobedience.
  - dahart 4y ago
    > as long as the copyright term is valid. No, the whole idea behind copyrights of any term length is to provide and incentive for people to make something new instead of copy someone else’s work. The retort you used, “Keep working if you want to keep making money” applies to people who seek to copy or remix work as much as it applies to people who seek to protect their work from copies or remixes. I really would love to hear a compelling argument that convinces me, I want a stronger argument for a reduction in term length (and I do think it should be shortened), but this hyperbole isn’t doing it. You’re complaining about rent-seeking, but failing to understand that this isn’t an argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not. This is an argument about who gets to seek rent, the person who did the creative work, or someone else who ‘borrowed’ the work without adding value. Personally, I’d certainly rather default to giving creators money over copiers, wouldn’t you? Copyright was established to avoid the second kind of rent-seeking, which has historically been a real economic drain.
    - 4y ago