5 ms·

Copyright law needs to change. Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and deri

Copyright law needs to change. Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it. Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later). Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really believes the work has yet to find its audience. The standard for abandoned works still protected under the existing system should default against the (potential) holder of the original copyright as long as a good-faith effort was made to reach them, and damages should amount to some sort of split of the profits.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?
- 0xfffafaCrash 4y ago
  I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist. That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies. No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves. Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation. Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Then how should any artists make any income at all from their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets. [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person who actually is in community regularly with working-class authors.] The world in which you speak of where art existed outside of notions of intellectual property meant only the wealthy and well-connected could be artists, whereas with copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster, specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author) was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only many years later was he able to regain rights to his work back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him- this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while he was being abused.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      We have the technology now to balance copyright - simply put - if an item is not available for a reasonable price, then the copyright expires or becomes "cannot be sold except by original author" or something. Needing to keep things like books that are currently in print protected shouldn't prevent people from obtaining works that have fallen out of print, apparently irrevocably. Print-on-demand and digital copies means that even a small author can keep their works available "for pay" easily now.
      - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm only concerned for living creators to retain rights to their work and be compensated for their creations while they are still actively using their work to give themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.
- gcanyon 4y ago
  Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall. That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself. Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars. At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else? So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly. As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work. Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long and how well royalty can still pay authors. Cassandra Khaw has repeatedly commented on how Hammers On Bone (published 2016) is still making them significant revenue. And this isn't at all covering the nuances of UK/US markets, where books can make it big in the UK and only years later publish in the US and vice versa (where I know for certain make significant income for authors)! I'm sure Susanna Clarke, who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is still immensely grateful for how well Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell continued to sell (and then she came out with another banger, Piranesi!). Victor LaVelle is still making money off The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) to the point of producing a re-release hardcover of the book due to popular demand! And I know Nnedi Okorafor is still earning excellent royalties from Who Fears Death (2011) even though her more profitable works (Binti, Akata series) are getting more attention nowadays. The argument that books primarily sell 95% of all they'll ever sell in the first 2-3 years is a total misunderstanding of the book market. It may look like that for current-events nonfiction or celebrity bibliographical works, but fiction markets don't work like that at all-- the backlist makes a huge chunk of the stable income of an author. This is true also for indie and self-pub markets (I can't name specific examples because I haven't done heavy research into this, but I know from panels and talks from other romance authors that self-publishing romance heavily relies on voracious readers who will buy your entire backlist.) But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies. Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains > There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well. > Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog. [1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/ https://craphound.com/pc/download/ [2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offering-a-good-product-at-a-fair-price-cory-doctorow-on-fair-trade-e-books-publishing-copyright-and-the-optimism-of-disaster/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offeri...
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and potentially profitable ones for himself.
    - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
      That is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the validity and duration of each of those rights.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Let them maintain copyright for longer, then, so long as they're willing to pay property taxes on it.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Frankly, I'm comfortable with the copyright holder being responsible to pay for the continued ownership of the copyright beyond its registration fees. It would allow them to determine whether or not a work is worth the continued investment to them, and presumably authors who are in a tight spot these days engage in mutual aid to assist each other. [#DisneyMustPay is a truly impressive mass cooperative event against an existential threat!] I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader cultural dissemination of their work.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    So what, like ten years free then ten year renewals each costing ten percent of total attributable revenue to date (probably with some minimum fee for extension)?
- legitimayzer 4y ago
  really good cultural artifacts are not created by people trying to make money. when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we get "masterpieces" like the rings of power.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Oh please, lots of great cultural creations had a profit motive. You think "Blade Runner" was made without any desire for profit? Or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or Peter Jackson's LotR movies? Those were enormously profitable. And Rings of Power was not that bad. It's not as great as the LotR movies, sure, but it's better than the Hobbit movies. (But not as good as some of the Hobbit fan edits.) And it's a LOT better than the new Netflix show "The Ark". What a turd, and a huge disappointment coming from some of the people behind Stargate.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      Minor correction: "The Ark" is a SyFy/Peacock show, not Netflix. My apologies to Netflix for naming them as having made what's probably the worst sci-fi show ever. Interestingly, I found the show that "The Ark" is loosely based on, a 70s show called "The Starlost". It's available on YouTube for free. Anyway, it was widely panned too, even named on someone's "worst sci-fi shows of all time" list. I've only seen one episode but it's already notably better than "The Ark" despite being 50 years old now (and not because "The Starlost" is great either).
anigbrowl 4y ago
Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations is ridiculous. There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital. In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.
- deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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graderjs 4y ago
Another approach that may be less at risk of the vicissitudes of legal trajectory on the copyright issue is a mass-scale decentralized archive: in other words, a democratization of archiving. One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea). A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others. I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving. ^0: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile ^1: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox ^2: https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much later after the first book... does this mean George R R Martin should be paid 0 while HBO makes a killing on the first few seasons? How would any artist retire ever if they cannot make money off their existing body of work?

0xfffafaCrash 4y ago
I’d argue that copyright and intellectual property more broadly shouldn’t exist. That wouldn’t lead to the end of culture but a cultural explosion as people became able to remix and propagate ideas more freely without the fear of punishment for violating artificial state-enforced monopolies. No one is obligated to create a work and no one is obligated to share their created works with others. There’s no inherent right to anything once you put an idea out there and the legal constructs are just novel artificial ways to keep the have-nots from competing with the haves. Culture existed well before notions of intellectual property and if anything today we have far better means of both producing works ourselves and collectively funding works that might not exist without compensation. Rewarding the top 0.0001% of lucky creators with huge compensation isn’t worth the broad societal damage that is done by preventing people from sharing or making use of ideas.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Then how should any artists make any income at all from their work? I'm not talking about 0.0001% lucky creators with huge compensation. I mean the 70 year old with cancer who cannot write anymore. I mean the 35 year old disabled artist who cannot work a "normal" salaried job. I mean the artist from an underdeveloped country who became popular and now the "wealthy" countries want to translate and publish their work in their relatively wealthy markets. [These are all real cases I'm familiar with, as a person who actually is in community regularly with working-class authors.] The world in which you speak of where art existed outside of notions of intellectual property meant only the wealthy and well-connected could be artists, whereas with copyright a cancer-fighting, aging, midlist author can still demand royalty payments if Disney bought his books and are still selling them for profit (Alan Dean Foster, specifically). Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn author) was put through elder abuse and lived in poverty, and only many years later was he able to regain rights to his work back as well as force recompense for harm committed to him- this wouldn't work if the rights to his work expired while he was being abused.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    We have the technology now to balance copyright - simply put - if an item is not available for a reasonable price, then the copyright expires or becomes "cannot be sold except by original author" or something. Needing to keep things like books that are currently in print protected shouldn't prevent people from obtaining works that have fallen out of print, apparently irrevocably. Print-on-demand and digital copies means that even a small author can keep their works available "for pay" easily now.
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      I'm completely comfortable with a "if no one's making it available reasonably, it should be made so" policy. I'm only concerned for living creators to retain rights to their work and be compensated for their creations while they are still actively using their work to give themselves a living, so I would be fine with ensuring work isn't irrevocably lost due to lack of copies.
gcanyon 4y ago
Fair arguments, thanks for the thoughts. I think all of it needs to be taken in the context that "helping" creators is a secondary goal in service to the prime goal of maximizing creative output overall. That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself. Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars. At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else? So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly. As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I'm not asking whether or not George R.R. Martin would or wouldn't be fine: I'm asking whether or not it's reasonable for HBO to make a killing off his work without him being paid at all as an example of how it doesn't seem reasonable on its face that smaller authors should just get shafted if someone makes a huge profit off their work. Since we want to talk about mid-tier authors, I think you'd be surprised how long and how well royalty can still pay authors. Cassandra Khaw has repeatedly commented on how Hammers On Bone (published 2016) is still making them significant revenue. And this isn't at all covering the nuances of UK/US markets, where books can make it big in the UK and only years later publish in the US and vice versa (where I know for certain make significant income for authors)! I'm sure Susanna Clarke, who has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is still immensely grateful for how well Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell continued to sell (and then she came out with another banger, Piranesi!). Victor LaVelle is still making money off The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) to the point of producing a re-release hardcover of the book due to popular demand! And I know Nnedi Okorafor is still earning excellent royalties from Who Fears Death (2011) even though her more profitable works (Binti, Akata series) are getting more attention nowadays. The argument that books primarily sell 95% of all they'll ever sell in the first 2-3 years is a total misunderstanding of the book market. It may look like that for current-events nonfiction or celebrity bibliographical works, but fiction markets don't work like that at all-- the backlist makes a huge chunk of the stable income of an author. This is true also for indie and self-pub markets (I can't name specific examples because I haven't done heavy research into this, but I know from panels and talks from other romance authors that self-publishing romance heavily relies on voracious readers who will buy your entire backlist.) But should any of those authors become sick, disabled, or otherwise no longer able to produce, should they end up never making another cent of any of their works? How would they support themselves 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies. Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains > There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well. > Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog. [1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/ https://craphound.com/pc/download/ [2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offering-a-good-product-at-a-fair-price-cory-doctorow-on-fair-trade-e-books-publishing-copyright-and-the-optimism-of-disaster/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offeri...
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Cory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and potentially profitable ones for himself.
  - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
    That is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the validity and duration of each of those rights.
int_19h 4y ago
Let them maintain copyright for longer, then, so long as they're willing to pay property taxes on it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Frankly, I'm comfortable with the copyright holder being responsible to pay for the continued ownership of the copyright beyond its registration fees. It would allow them to determine whether or not a work is worth the continued investment to them, and presumably authors who are in a tight spot these days engage in mutual aid to assist each other. [#DisneyMustPay is a truly impressive mass cooperative event against an existential threat!] I'm merely against the notion that we should do away with the few ways a working-class artist can earn a living and continue making more work with their labor. I'd even be happy to do away with copyright if all creators had a guarantee of income/recompense proportional to the broader cultural dissemination of their work.
- thfuran 4y ago
  So what, like ten years free then ten year renewals each costing ten percent of total attributable revenue to date (probably with some minimum fee for extension)?
legitimayzer 4y ago
really good cultural artifacts are not created by people trying to make money. when cultural creations are prompted by a profit motive, we get "masterpieces" like the rings of power.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Oh please, lots of great cultural creations had a profit motive. You think "Blade Runner" was made without any desire for profit? Or "2001: A Space Odyssey"? Or Peter Jackson's LotR movies? Those were enormously profitable. And Rings of Power was not that bad. It's not as great as the LotR movies, sure, but it's better than the Hobbit movies. (But not as good as some of the Hobbit fan edits.) And it's a LOT better than the new Netflix show "The Ark". What a turd, and a huge disappointment coming from some of the people behind Stargate.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Minor correction: "The Ark" is a SyFy/Peacock show, not Netflix. My apologies to Netflix for naming them as having made what's probably the worst sci-fi show ever. Interestingly, I found the show that "The Ark" is loosely based on, a 70s show called "The Starlost". It's available on YouTube for free. Anyway, it was widely panned too, even named on someone's "worst sci-fi shows of all time" list. I've only seen one episode but it's already notably better than "The Ark" despite being 50 years old now (and not because "The Starlost" is great either).

anigbrowl 4y ago

Currently the copyright term in the US is life-of-author plus 70 (edit: corrected from 90) years. Life of author has some reasonable basis. Past death it's understandable that descendants would want the estate to be worth something, if an author was unable to capitalize upon their work in their lifetime, but supporting an author's family for 3 generations is ridiculous. There isn't a political solution to this. Because the US has a territorial electoral system, no politician is ever going to be representing a constituency who will care about the diminution of copyright terms as their primary issue, and building a legislative coalition to advance a nebulous public interest is hard, massively more so when countered by politicians who are bankrolled by large concentrations of capital. In this country, any attempt to advance the current and future public interest over private gain is loudly denounced as tyranny by people who are awash in wealth and power. Those who try to undermine the foundations of capital from below are denounced as thieves and terrorists. That's why you get an endless ratchet effect.

deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago

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graderjs 4y ago

Another approach that may be less at risk of the vicissitudes of legal trajectory on the copyright issue is a mass-scale decentralized archive: in other words, a democratization of archiving. One "organized" way to do it would be to have "Internet Archive" run a SETI-at-home type of daemon on your computer to use a bit of idle time and disk to store blocks (obviously there's a rich literature of decentralized file sharing which I'm not apprentice to and so please be suspicious of my suggestions as the "best" method~~but you get the idea). A "disorganized" way could be to have a "federation" of personal archives, comprised by tools like SingleFile^0, ArchiveBox^1, and my own DiskerNet^2 -- which all in various ways make it possible for you to save web content to your own device, and. It can be then shared with others. I think in general, aside from any legal perturbations, one should not as a general rule rely on such a single point of failure for something (to some at least) so critical. Probably humanity (or at least netizenry) needs to embrace some form (or mish-mash of various forms) of truly dcentralized archiving. ^0: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile ^1: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox ^2: https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet