6 ms·
It's a bit amusing that copyright law supporters always go to the 'think of the authors who need to get paid' when at present, copyright extends to 70 years AFT
by photochemsyn 4y ago
It's a bit amusing that copyright law supporters always go to the 'think of the authors who need to get paid' when at present, copyright extends to 70 years AFTER the author's death IIRC, or 95 years after date of publication if it was a contract job.
In contrast, patents are only valid for 20 years after patent publication, for good reasons (a limited period encourages technological development and prevents patent squatting).
Right now, we have large corporate publishers squatting on copyright to prevent dissemination of works that should really have been in the public domain decades ago. Cutting copyright periods in half (at least) makes a lot of sense.
- ghaff 4y agoBooks can be "discovered" quite a bit later in a way that patents generally are not. That said, cutting copyright length significantly makes sense to me whatever the details.
- hotstickyballs 4y agoIf the motivation of copyright is to make it worthwhile to write then being discovered later isn’t really a factor
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mdp2021 4y ago> should really have been in the public domain decades ago A good occasion to note the parallel context of books not being reprinted. Last time I wanted to buy copies of works of a prominent author to gift them around, and was told "Impossible - out of print": weeks ago. Texts which are not protected by "pre-emptive" availability (esp. electronic) somehow disappear - Michael S. Hart (Project Gutenberg) was right.
- retrac 4y agoI recently wanted to look something up related to Mesopotamia. Well into the weeds of scholarship. The only transcription of the text I wanted as far as I could determine was in a book written in the 1930s of which there are only a handful of copies. A local university library had it thankfully. The author died half a century ago. While it would technically be legal here for a library to copy one of their copies for archival purposes should it finally disintegrate, the knowledge is on the precipice of being lost. There's absolutely no justification whatsoever for that book still being under copyright. I doubt harms like that were even considered at all by my own government here in Canada when the copyright term was recently extended 20 years. For some reason when people think copyright they think pulp trash of the last few years. Maybe copyright should only be a few years then?
- DennisP 4y agoRecently I found that John C. Wright's fantastic Golden Age trilogy has gone out of print, and the Kindle version is no longer available either. I know it used to be available because I have the sample; I went to purchase the full copy on kindle and that's no longer possible. Why publishers would do this is beyond my understanding.
- beej71 4y agoI think at some point it's simply cheaper for them to let the book vaporize.
- mdp2021 4y agoWhich counts as destruction of global wealth - and in the age of reproducibility -, on the ground of "rights" (making works private and not accessible) and "potential eventual exploitation of rights".
- DennisP 4y agoMy brother and I wrote a silly little book and put it on Kindle. It sells very few copies but costs us nothing at all, in either money or time.
- bazoom42 4y agoApply the same logic to any kind of asset. Why should real estate, ownership of land, or any other material posession be inherited through generations? Why not let it revert to the public domain upon the death of the owner?
- truckerbill 4y agoThis actually would solve a lot of problems also. Rent-seeking isn't very productive compared to what removing it enables.
- citizenkeen 4y agoIP exists to encourage the creation of ideas that are easy to copy. Land is neither created nor easy to copy.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoBecause land is actually real, physical, naturally finite. It's actual property in the simplest most intuitive sense. Intellectual property is just the whole world pretending it can't produce an unbounded number of copies at negligible costs. If we had planetary scale Star Trek replicators there'd be no need to have physical property either.
- katbyte 4y agoland is also usually taxed. Squatting on it, at least the most desired/valuable kind, has a cost.
- Ekaros 4y agoAnd the whole after death is really weird one to me. That really doesn't work with anything else we do. I would be ready to accept something clear and simple. 50 years from publication. Should cover most of the revenue and also reasonably cover the off-spring in unfortunate cases. For digital media like games maybe 25-30 years would feel better for me, but I'm somewhat ready to trade it bit up.