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> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's view

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special exceptions to this law because they wanted larger profits. "We" didn't call the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 the "Mickey Mouse Act" for nothing. It's also no coincidence that Disney is now the largest media company in the world. Reducing copyright term extension has everything to do with restoring competition and creativity to our economy, and reversing corruption that borders on white collar crime. It has nothing to do with AI. Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly.

casey2 3y ago
Disney has a monopoly on media because they still have the copyright to their IP from the 20s? LOL! Companies that can leverage this new wave of AI will have, in reality, 1000x the advantage that you believe Disney has.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Yes. There's this little thing called brand value. Disney has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Forbes estimated it at being worth about $60 billion as I recall. That brand was built heavily over many decades on IP that dates back to the 1920s, such as the most recognizable Disney character, Mickey Mouse. They manipulated the law to enhance the value of that IP and thereby gained an edge over their competitors. That's a big part of why they now enjoy such a dominant position. None of this is especially controversial (you will get a very different spin from Disney of course). If you want to comment about how business works you should read history and learn how business works first. AI luminary that you are, if you choose to remain ignorant then I guess this whole cycle will happen again with AI.
- Spivak 3y ago
  The argument goes that copyright has allowed massive corporations to buy up and exert near total control over all of our shared stories. And when you own the cultural touchstones of whole generations that gives you power that no one else can ever wield. There is a massive amount of amazing stories based on ancient myths because it's one of the few large corpora that isn't copywritten. Once you see it in media you can't unsee it. The only space where that kind of creativity can thrive anymore is fan-fiction which lives in weird limbo where it's illegal but the copyright owners don't care. And when you want to bring any of it to the mainstream you have to hide it, all of Ali Hazelwoods books are reworked fanfics because she can't use the actual characters that inspired her -- her most famous book "The Love Hypothesis" is a Reylo fic. Go check out https://archiveofourown.org/media https://archiveofourown.org/media and see how many works are owned by a few large corporations.
ramblerman 3y ago
I'm not sure arguing for a company to rest on its laurels and keep feeding of an IP from 100 years ago is an argument for creativity and innovation.
- ejb999 3y ago
  but is it much different that descendants living off the interest and dividends of some large sum of money that their great-great grandparents accumulated a few hundred years ago? To me it is pretty much the same thing - not a fan of nepo-kids living off of trust funds they didn't earn - but if you are going to fix one problem, you should try to fix all of the almost identical ones at the same time and not get upset that disney is still making money off of something they created 100 years ago, and not be upset about kennedy's, rockefellers, and the like still living of the money their great-greats generated a hundred years ago.
  - readbeard 3y ago
    It would be similar if "intellectual property" was property in the same sense in which a table or a vast amount of money is property. However, it is not. Normal property ownership is something we use to manage scarcity that already exists—that there is only one of something, and we have to decide where it will go and who will be able to decide how it is used. Intellectual property, by contrast, creates artificial scarcity by means of a government-enforced monopoly (in the case of copyright, the monopoly is on the right to produce a copy of a work). It is unfortunate (and perhaps not accidental) that we settled on the term "intellectual property" as opposed to something more descriptive like "intellectual monopoly." "Intellectual property" encourages equivocating such monopolies with normal property, a mistake that tends to muddle debates on the subject.
soperj 3y ago
I think they nailed it with the original 1790 act. 14 years + 14 more is plenty.
- csallen 3y ago
  Same. The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The point of copyright should be to grant temporary monopolies to encourage creation, not to confer ownership. Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    but copyright is not for information or ideas, information and ideas cannot be copyrighted; it's for creative expression
    - renlo 3y ago
      and why should "creative expression" be owned?
      - Jarwain 3y ago
        It should be owned as long as people must rely on ownership to survive in our society.
samwillis 3y ago
My phrasing was absolutely not meant to be read as myself speaking for all, apologies, I certainly don't want to offend. It has felt on HN and elsewhere that the prevailing attitude to copyright has been these two, somewhat contradictory, things. That's what I was trying to highlight with my phrasing of "we", which was also not meant to include myself but be a nod to the way a vocal group try to steer and dominate the conversion. Both debates are important to have, I don't know the answers.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Thank you! I think the average HN'er is frankly pretty ignorant about how copyright law works, the history around it, and the arguments for and against various reforms. In fairness it's an esoteric topic and most software developers depend in some way on copyrighted work for their income so that's not a huge surprise I guess. But it probably explains the contradiction you observed! The #1 issue with copyright today in my opinion is that if we keep on extending it forever, it will forever entrench the wealth and power of a small number of companies that hold the largest portfolios of IP. I think this is also a huge issue for AI, maybe the biggest issue, because at the end of the day an AI is really just another copyrighted work. It is not the anthropomorphized thing that countless people are acting like it is, it's a work. Change copyright and you change the nature of future AI works.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    There is contradiction because, in fact, the HN audience is more than one person and those people have different and conflicting views.
- account42 3y ago
  Trying to find consistency in the prevalent (or more commonly predominantly expressed) attitudes and opinions of groups is a common fallacy. You can have a group with a large number of members holding opinion A and nother large number of members holding opionion ¬A without any member being in both groups. Of course in reallity things are usually more complex and wer are talking about two different opinions A and B that aren't even inherently incompatibly but just some motivations for A would lead to ¬B and vice versa. But un this particular case I think the flaw is in your assumption that the majority wants stricter copyright law for AI rather than wants the same copyright law that humans are beholden to to also apply to AI, wether that law is the current may-as-well-be-perpetual-monopoly or 0 copyright or anything in between.
lancesells 3y ago
> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, etc. and there's nothing out there that stops them. I've got no love for giant corporations but I see it a lot less about copyright than massive corporation gobbling up more corporations. There's no shortage of creativity out there if you look for it.
- ramses0 3y ago
  I was "doing the analysis" w/ Toy Story not long ago. They basically invented Woody/Buzz out of whole cloth, "guilty of being an incredibly lovable toy by association" (with other incredibly lovable toys). As I'm watching Toy Story with my kid, and seeing classic toys (eg: Mousetrap in the background), all the "friends" are legit copyright classics from other companies, but Buzz and Woody are "Disney/Pixar Exclusives" and nobody else can include them. A clever mechanism that seems to have paid off over two modern generations to guarantee they can "craft" a new copyrighted character at any moment (Buzz 2.0, Space Cowboy 9000, whatever...).
  - dcow 3y ago
    Wow I never noticed this. Thanks for sharing!
- butterfi 3y ago
  "No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." L. Lessig
  - kemotep 3y ago
    I’m no fan of the life of the author plus 70 years copyright regime we have today but the Brothers Grimm died roughly 70 years before Disney started making cartoons. So that is still something possible to do in roughly 20 years.
ihateyouall123 3y ago
[flagged]
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Why does Disney have an "ill-gotten" monopoly? The people who worked for the company created something. Why shouldn't they get to control how it's used. Do you feel like you should have control over what you create? Why not others?
- sowbug 3y ago
  Circular reasoning. If you assume your ideas are your own, and nobody else can benefit from them without your permission, then the point of your rhetorical questions follows. The reality is that IP laws are a grafting of property-like attributes onto something that absolutely isn't property. Do I feel I should have control over what I create? I make hammers for a living. I sell them for $10. I don't expect any control over what people do with "my" hammers once I sell them. I don't even expect to stop my neighbor from buying one, teaching herself to build hammers, and then manufacturing and selling identical ones for $9. Do you? (To anticipate the rest of this tired conversation, the temporary monopoly tradeoff ("securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries") is facially reasonable. But it's important to recognize that the "shouldn't" and "feel" in your questions are based on a very recent recharacterization of these temporary monopolies as "intellectual property," which is probably the most financially successful propaganda term ever devised. Start with "temporary monopoly" instead, and then the better rhetorical question for you to be asking is "when should Disney's temporary monopoly end?")
- Taywee 3y ago
  The people who worked for the company created something. The people who work for the company collect rent on things they didn't make.
dclowd9901 3y ago
> Reducing copyright term extension has everything to do with restoring competition and creativity to our economy Can you explain your line of thinking here? How does the ability to use another company’s intellectual property restore creativity? It just seems like a path to allow bootlegging.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Glad you asked! So copyright is a limited, temporary monopoly on a work. You create a work, the law grants you the exclusive rights to that work, for a time. Because of this monopoly the vast majority of the benefit from that work accrues to you, including financially. (All pretty fair in my opinion, you did the work, you deserve the reward!) If let's say Star Wars falls out of copyright tomorrow, economically that has two effects. One, Disney loses a ton of future revenue. Two, countless Disney other people create derivatives of Star Wars, and they make money from those. Competition is increased. So the expiration of a copyright results in a sharing of the wealth. The wealth generating potential along with the creative potential is passed along to all members of society. Our culture becomes richer and deeper. A great example of this is all the works that build on the mythos created by HP Lovecraft, one of the last great ones created before Congress started indefinitely extending copyright. Lovecraft wrote great literature and some of the authors that built on his world are fantastic as well, I'm sure they've come up with countless ideas he never considered. But as long as Congress keeps on extending copyright, nothing we create today will ever become like that. There is of course an important question about what is fair and how long a copyright should last. Most people these days agree that it should last for at least the author's lifetime, maybe long enough to benefit their kids and grandkids as well. But the status quo is basically permanent copyright which prevents substantial creative and economic benefits to society.
  - mathquestion 3y ago
    > If let's say Star Wars falls out of copyright tomorrow, economically that has two effects. One, Disney loses a ton of future revenue. Two, countless Disney other people create derivatives of Star Wars, and they make money from those. Competition is increased. Three, the derivatives are made and Disney starts marketing "Disney's Star Wars" which continue to be the high-demand (and high-value) versions. The situation is unchanged. For example, you can currently buy The Little Mermaid in non-Disney form[1], but Disney's version is what most people want. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=little+mermaid+Hans+Christian+Andersen https://www.amazon.com/s?k=little+mermaid+Hans+Christian+And...
pachico 3y ago
Unrelated but "offensive" is not necessarily bad. We should accept that people can get offended by anything and, because of this, just demote the concept.
majormajor 3y ago
> This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. The "we" that has been calling for shorter terms is no more a gross generalization than the "we" that is calling for more protection against AI use of stuff. The world outside of HN-and-similar has been much less anti-copyright than the world in here. More "neutral" seems to be dominant - we're not extending it anymore; we're not shrinking it either. And currently generally more panicked about AI taking away their jobs and rendering their skills and creativity useless. The original post was a very fair summary of how there are now two ground-level movements competing that there weren't two years ago.
SergeAx 3y ago
But in more general view Disney being an international media giant is good for US, isn't it?

casey2 3y ago

Disney has a monopoly on media because they still have the copyright to their IP from the 20s? LOL! Companies that can leverage this new wave of AI will have, in reality, 1000x the advantage that you believe Disney has.

safety1st 3y ago
Yes. There's this little thing called brand value. Disney has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Forbes estimated it at being worth about $60 billion as I recall. That brand was built heavily over many decades on IP that dates back to the 1920s, such as the most recognizable Disney character, Mickey Mouse. They manipulated the law to enhance the value of that IP and thereby gained an edge over their competitors. That's a big part of why they now enjoy such a dominant position. None of this is especially controversial (you will get a very different spin from Disney of course). If you want to comment about how business works you should read history and learn how business works first. AI luminary that you are, if you choose to remain ignorant then I guess this whole cycle will happen again with AI.
Spivak 3y ago
The argument goes that copyright has allowed massive corporations to buy up and exert near total control over all of our shared stories. And when you own the cultural touchstones of whole generations that gives you power that no one else can ever wield. There is a massive amount of amazing stories based on ancient myths because it's one of the few large corpora that isn't copywritten. Once you see it in media you can't unsee it. The only space where that kind of creativity can thrive anymore is fan-fiction which lives in weird limbo where it's illegal but the copyright owners don't care. And when you want to bring any of it to the mainstream you have to hide it, all of Ali Hazelwoods books are reworked fanfics because she can't use the actual characters that inspired her -- her most famous book "The Love Hypothesis" is a Reylo fic. Go check out https://archiveofourown.org/media https://archiveofourown.org/media and see how many works are owned by a few large corporations.

ramblerman 3y ago

I'm not sure arguing for a company to rest on its laurels and keep feeding of an IP from 100 years ago is an argument for creativity and innovation.

ejb999 3y ago
but is it much different that descendants living off the interest and dividends of some large sum of money that their great-great grandparents accumulated a few hundred years ago? To me it is pretty much the same thing - not a fan of nepo-kids living off of trust funds they didn't earn - but if you are going to fix one problem, you should try to fix all of the almost identical ones at the same time and not get upset that disney is still making money off of something they created 100 years ago, and not be upset about kennedy's, rockefellers, and the like still living of the money their great-greats generated a hundred years ago.
- readbeard 3y ago
  It would be similar if "intellectual property" was property in the same sense in which a table or a vast amount of money is property. However, it is not. Normal property ownership is something we use to manage scarcity that already exists—that there is only one of something, and we have to decide where it will go and who will be able to decide how it is used. Intellectual property, by contrast, creates artificial scarcity by means of a government-enforced monopoly (in the case of copyright, the monopoly is on the right to produce a copy of a work). It is unfortunate (and perhaps not accidental) that we settled on the term "intellectual property" as opposed to something more descriptive like "intellectual monopoly." "Intellectual property" encourages equivocating such monopolies with normal property, a mistake that tends to muddle debates on the subject.

soperj 3y ago

I think they nailed it with the original 1790 act. 14 years + 14 more is plenty.

csallen 3y ago
Same. The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The point of copyright should be to grant temporary monopolies to encourage creation, not to confer ownership. Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  but copyright is not for information or ideas, information and ideas cannot be copyrighted; it's for creative expression
  - renlo 3y ago
    and why should "creative expression" be owned?
    - Jarwain 3y ago
      It should be owned as long as people must rely on ownership to survive in our society.

samwillis 3y ago

My phrasing was absolutely not meant to be read as myself speaking for all, apologies, I certainly don't want to offend. It has felt on HN and elsewhere that the prevailing attitude to copyright has been these two, somewhat contradictory, things. That's what I was trying to highlight with my phrasing of "we", which was also not meant to include myself but be a nod to the way a vocal group try to steer and dominate the conversion. Both debates are important to have, I don't know the answers.

safety1st 3y ago
Thank you! I think the average HN'er is frankly pretty ignorant about how copyright law works, the history around it, and the arguments for and against various reforms. In fairness it's an esoteric topic and most software developers depend in some way on copyrighted work for their income so that's not a huge surprise I guess. But it probably explains the contradiction you observed! The #1 issue with copyright today in my opinion is that if we keep on extending it forever, it will forever entrench the wealth and power of a small number of companies that hold the largest portfolios of IP. I think this is also a huge issue for AI, maybe the biggest issue, because at the end of the day an AI is really just another copyrighted work. It is not the anthropomorphized thing that countless people are acting like it is, it's a work. Change copyright and you change the nature of future AI works.
- pixl97 3y ago
  There is contradiction because, in fact, the HN audience is more than one person and those people have different and conflicting views.
account42 3y ago
Trying to find consistency in the prevalent (or more commonly predominantly expressed) attitudes and opinions of groups is a common fallacy. You can have a group with a large number of members holding opinion A and nother large number of members holding opionion ¬A without any member being in both groups. Of course in reallity things are usually more complex and wer are talking about two different opinions A and B that aren't even inherently incompatibly but just some motivations for A would lead to ¬B and vice versa. But un this particular case I think the flaw is in your assumption that the majority wants stricter copyright law for AI rather than wants the same copyright law that humans are beholden to to also apply to AI, wether that law is the current may-as-well-be-perpetual-monopoly or 0 copyright or anything in between.

lancesells 3y ago

> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, etc. and there's nothing out there that stops them. I've got no love for giant corporations but I see it a lot less about copyright than massive corporation gobbling up more corporations. There's no shortage of creativity out there if you look for it.

ramses0 3y ago
I was "doing the analysis" w/ Toy Story not long ago. They basically invented Woody/Buzz out of whole cloth, "guilty of being an incredibly lovable toy by association" (with other incredibly lovable toys). As I'm watching Toy Story with my kid, and seeing classic toys (eg: Mousetrap in the background), all the "friends" are legit copyright classics from other companies, but Buzz and Woody are "Disney/Pixar Exclusives" and nobody else can include them. A clever mechanism that seems to have paid off over two modern generations to guarantee they can "craft" a new copyrighted character at any moment (Buzz 2.0, Space Cowboy 9000, whatever...).
- dcow 3y ago
  Wow I never noticed this. Thanks for sharing!
butterfi 3y ago
"No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." L. Lessig
- kemotep 3y ago
  I’m no fan of the life of the author plus 70 years copyright regime we have today but the Brothers Grimm died roughly 70 years before Disney started making cartoons. So that is still something possible to do in roughly 20 years.

ihateyouall123 3y ago

[flagged]

xhkkffbf 3y ago

Why does Disney have an "ill-gotten" monopoly? The people who worked for the company created something. Why shouldn't they get to control how it's used. Do you feel like you should have control over what you create? Why not others?

sowbug 3y ago
Circular reasoning. If you assume your ideas are your own, and nobody else can benefit from them without your permission, then the point of your rhetorical questions follows. The reality is that IP laws are a grafting of property-like attributes onto something that absolutely isn't property. Do I feel I should have control over what I create? I make hammers for a living. I sell them for $10. I don't expect any control over what people do with "my" hammers once I sell them. I don't even expect to stop my neighbor from buying one, teaching herself to build hammers, and then manufacturing and selling identical ones for $9. Do you? (To anticipate the rest of this tired conversation, the temporary monopoly tradeoff ("securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries") is facially reasonable. But it's important to recognize that the "shouldn't" and "feel" in your questions are based on a very recent recharacterization of these temporary monopolies as "intellectual property," which is probably the most financially successful propaganda term ever devised. Start with "temporary monopoly" instead, and then the better rhetorical question for you to be asking is "when should Disney's temporary monopoly end?")
Taywee 3y ago
The people who worked for the company created something. The people who work for the company collect rent on things they didn't make.

dclowd9901 3y ago

> Reducing copyright term extension has everything to do with restoring competition and creativity to our economy Can you explain your line of thinking here? How does the ability to use another company’s intellectual property restore creativity? It just seems like a path to allow bootlegging.

safety1st 3y ago
Glad you asked! So copyright is a limited, temporary monopoly on a work. You create a work, the law grants you the exclusive rights to that work, for a time. Because of this monopoly the vast majority of the benefit from that work accrues to you, including financially. (All pretty fair in my opinion, you did the work, you deserve the reward!) If let's say Star Wars falls out of copyright tomorrow, economically that has two effects. One, Disney loses a ton of future revenue. Two, countless Disney other people create derivatives of Star Wars, and they make money from those. Competition is increased. So the expiration of a copyright results in a sharing of the wealth. The wealth generating potential along with the creative potential is passed along to all members of society. Our culture becomes richer and deeper. A great example of this is all the works that build on the mythos created by HP Lovecraft, one of the last great ones created before Congress started indefinitely extending copyright. Lovecraft wrote great literature and some of the authors that built on his world are fantastic as well, I'm sure they've come up with countless ideas he never considered. But as long as Congress keeps on extending copyright, nothing we create today will ever become like that. There is of course an important question about what is fair and how long a copyright should last. Most people these days agree that it should last for at least the author's lifetime, maybe long enough to benefit their kids and grandkids as well. But the status quo is basically permanent copyright which prevents substantial creative and economic benefits to society.
- mathquestion 3y ago
  > If let's say Star Wars falls out of copyright tomorrow, economically that has two effects. One, Disney loses a ton of future revenue. Two, countless Disney other people create derivatives of Star Wars, and they make money from those. Competition is increased. Three, the derivatives are made and Disney starts marketing "Disney's Star Wars" which continue to be the high-demand (and high-value) versions. The situation is unchanged. For example, you can currently buy The Little Mermaid in non-Disney form[1], but Disney's version is what most people want. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=little+mermaid+Hans+Christian+Andersen https://www.amazon.com/s?k=little+mermaid+Hans+Christian+And...

pachico 3y ago

Unrelated but "offensive" is not necessarily bad. We should accept that people can get offended by anything and, because of this, just demote the concept.

majormajor 3y ago

> This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. The "we" that has been calling for shorter terms is no more a gross generalization than the "we" that is calling for more protection against AI use of stuff. The world outside of HN-and-similar has been much less anti-copyright than the world in here. More "neutral" seems to be dominant - we're not extending it anymore; we're not shrinking it either. And currently generally more panicked about AI taking away their jobs and rendering their skills and creativity useless. The original post was a very fair summary of how there are now two ground-level movements competing that there weren't two years ago.

SergeAx 3y ago

But in more general view Disney being an international media giant is good for US, isn't it?