9 ms·
The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. To be fair to individual living authors
by photochemsyn 4y ago
The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. To be fair to individual living authors who hold their own copyrights, this would mean copyrights persisted 18 years past the author's death, or for 24 years after date of publication for for-hire contract jobs.
This is comparable to the lifetime of technical patents, and so would allow for a reasonable period to collect revenue from the work that can be used to finance new works and so on.
Otherwise, you just have consolidated interests squatting on material and collecting rents for no justifiable reason. It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain.
This kind of reasonable change to copyright law would go a long ways towards justifying legal crackdowns on piracy of more recent works, I think.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago> It's entirely ridiculous, for example, that a 1957 film like the Seventh Seal isn't yet in the public domain. That's way too generous. It's ridiculous that films made before 2010 aren't in the public domain. We're all going to be long dead before this stuff enters the public domain. Our culture should belong to us, not a bunch of corporations. If they want to keep making money, they should have to make new stuff instead of endless remakes of past successful IPs.
- Entinel 4y agoI disagree with your disagreement. 10 years is too short, 70 years is too long. There should definitely be a reduction but 10 years isn't it.
- dcow 4y agoHow about 14 years?
- matheusmoreira 4y agoEven 10 years is too generous. I'd rather make it 0 instead. I said 10 years because it's what would make copyright tolerable. The right thing as far as I'm concerned is abolishing it straight up. 10 years is a reasonable compromise. Remember, copyright exists at all because we allow it. The raw reality these monopolists face is that public domain is the default state of all information. We're all just pretending that we can't easily copy this stuff. The social contract was: we pretend we don't know how to copy their stuff, they get to make their money and then the works enter the public domain. They're clearly not keeping up their end of the social contract. Why should we? We should all just stop pretending we're dumb enough not to download their stuff at zero cost.
- onepointsixC 4y agoWould you be pleased if that applied to all of your work too? That immediately anyone can start taking your work and making money off of it? Copyright at least makes big players pay the original creators for the rights to the works. Netflix going ahead and making money off of subscribers while paying nothing to creators would be a significantly worse situation.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago> Would you be pleased if that applied to all of your work too? That immediately anyone can start taking your work and making money off of it? Sure. From now on I either release my software as AGPLv3 or I don't release it at all. Truth is even if someone violates my license I'm not gonna waste my limited time on this earth litigating against them in court over it. I have better things to do. Stallman would disagree but I think licenses like GPL shouldn't even exist at all: they all depend on copyright to enforce their terms and copyright shouldn't exist in the first place. It's fair as long as nobody is protected: billion dollar corporations can make money off my code but I can make money off of theirs too. Netflix code gets leaked? Oops, looks like it's our code now. Also, Netflix literally exists to solve the problems created by copyright itself. It's ironic how it was ultimately destroyed by copyright holders when they pulled their precious content and started their own shitty streaming services instead. Were it not for copyright, we'd all be using peer to peer technology invented decades ago to consume content much more efficiently. Everything humanity ever created would be available at our fingertips.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoI don't know about Stallman, but, as I interpret it, Bradley Kuhn agrees with you. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/mar/17/copyleft-ethical-source-putin-ukraine/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/mar/17/copyleft-ethical-...
- falcolas 4y ago> From now on I either release my software as AGPLv3 Why not just make it public domain? That's the default in a world without the right of ownership of code. > Oops, looks like it's our code now. How would you make money of it? It's not like you can sell it. > Were it not for copyright, we'd all be using peer to peer technology invented decades ago to consume content much more efficiently What content? How would it be paid for, since there's nothing that could be sold? Even hobby movies are done to make money.
- amelius 4y agoThe problem with copyright is that it was defined by politicians and lobbyists. Since this is about our culture, which concerns everyone, perhaps a national poll is in order where people can vote for a period between e.g. the two extremes 10 and 70 years.
- clnq 4y agoWhy is 10 years too short and what should the period be?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoIt's sort of humorous that "rule against perpetuities" is a fundamental legal concept [1] [2] but copyright just sidesteps that and allows for locking up culture for almost two centuries. [1] https://youtu.be/j1jkilao3MQ?t=903 https://youtu.be/j1jkilao3MQ?t=903 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThat's interesting. Have there been attempts to litigate copyrights based on that precedent?
- kmeisthax 4y agoI don't think so. Copyright already has an equivalent rule in the constitution, and that applies to the whole term, not just to transfers of copyright in a will. That being said, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the subsequent SCOTUS case Eldred v. Ashcroft[0] showed that this rule is very flimsy. The biggest protection against copyright perpetuities is that Congress currently shows no appetite for a further extension. The life+70 extension we got last time happened in a time when copyright was an uncontroversial and boring matter. This stopped being the case just a few years after the CTEA, when the masses realized that this fancy new digital realm called the Internet was functionally owned by whoever owned the copyrights on the data running through it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft
- mminer237 4y agoWell, that's not that different. That's 21 years after the life of some person in being. If you want it to last a long time, you say youngest living descendant of someone well-known, like the King of England, as then you presumably get the full ~90 years of some baby plus 21 years. Corporate copyrights last a flat 95 years from publication. Also, half of the US states have effectively done away the rule against perpetuities and statutorily allow perpetual trusts now: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Sitkoff_790.pdf#page=15 http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/S...
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoFrankly, I can't understand such movies aren't monetized more. I can imagine there' some money to be made from ads, especially from movies most people will never watch anyway. My teenage daughter will most likely never watch The Seventh Seal. Unless she stumbled upon it on Youtube or something.
- j5155 4y agoI completely agree with you, but I think the issue with something like this is the sheer volume of lobbying power that companies like Nintendo and Disney have to stop it.
- AlecSchueler 4y agoWhat can be done about that?
- majormajor 4y agoMake more individuals care, outside of just people on HN and such.
- kevviiinn 4y agoBan lobbying and think tanks
- thfuran 4y agoSo it shouldn't be legal to write your Congressional rep and tell them you want them to do X?
- kevviiinn 4y agoIt shouldn't be legal to hire groups of professionals to do that, it also shouldn't be legal to send your representatives gifts, take them on vacations, or out to dinner Writing them a letter is fine
- AlecSchueler 4y agoHow you can police certain people not being allowed to dine with others?
- thfuran 4y agoSo a group like EFF shouldn't be able to petition Congress?
- OscarCunningham 4y agoThe other 'best way' to reduce piracy would be to sell all electronic works through the same online interface without the need for any other apps or DRM. Otherwise, the pirated product is actually better than the paid one.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoHaving a single online interface means that people will fight to control it (and it's not partition tolerant). Better to go content-addressed and let people move bits around in whatever way suits their use case. Then, separately from delivery, have player plugins which compare hashes of the content to an online database to decide who ought to get paid for the bits I've consumed. It's the player, after all, which knows how my attention was allocated, not the downloader.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoI’m not sure one single interface is the solution, but making a product that people actually want to buy is. At the moment you can subscribe to half a dozen different streaming services, only to end up with some of the content you want to watch. Spotify basically solved music pirating. Today it doesn’t really matter if you subscribe to Spotify, or Apple Music, or Tidal, or YouTube Music… most people can get most of the music they want to listen to from one of them, and the experience is good enough that pirating music would just be needlessly tedious (for most consumers).
- nathias 4y agowhy would you want to reduce piracy?
- ketzu 4y ago> The best way to reduce piracy of copyrighted works is to cut the copyright period by 75% relative to current standards. Personally, I believe this would have a negligible effect on piracy or even online arguments around copyright. I believe that, because I think the most piracy concerns recent works, e.g., computer games and movies of the last few years.
- Aerbil313 4y agoAbolish copyright. It’ll be like open-source software. The works created will be less in quality and quantity, but they’ll be works of passion, and I can watch everything. Worth the tradeoff. Of course this comment is nothing other than an internet rant because humans has no control over humanity’s large scale activities. They’re almost deterministically emergent.