6 ms·

I think copyright length is the biggest issue, I don't see why it has to be more than 2 or 3 years. Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expi

I think copyright length is the biggest issue, I don't see why it has to be more than 2 or 3 years. Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly.

tzs 15y ago
What would be the point of having copyright at all if the term was that short?
- mattmiller 15y ago
  If an indie artists created a song a studio could immediately remake the song and sell it before the artists had any distribution in place. 2 to 3 years should give the artists the opportunity to make some profit from his music.
  - yoklov 15y ago
    Hardly. If the length were 2-3 years then the studios could (and probably would) remake songs by indie artists which didn't become popular in the first 2-3 years. Copyright of 2-3 years is better than no copyright at all, but it's so short that it's basically useless.
    - randallsquared 15y ago
      Studios would spend their own money remaking songs that had failed to garner interest in the first place? Not only does that seem like a way to make a lot of flops, but if the original flopped for some reason that's correctable by someone else in order to make a hit, then isn't it a win for everyone for there to be a hit remake (the original writer/artist at least gets recognition that they would otherwise not have had)?
      - yoklov 15y ago
        I have more of a problem with the fact that it could happen. Besides, you really don't think there would be a market for taking less well known songs, rebranding them to make them palatable to the masses, and selling that? I can't imagine that if it were completely legal, they wouldn't try.
  - tzs 15y ago
    What about artists whose songs take more than 2 or 3 years to become popular? You don't think an artist should get anything if he writes a song that does so-so until it is featured a few years later in a hit movie and then the song becomes a hit? Or what about people who write books? Shouldn't they get money if their book is turned into a movie? With only 2 to 3 years of copyright, many books will go public domain long before a major movie can be put together.
  - Arelius 15y ago
    I think it deserves mention that without copyright, a studio doesn't even need to remake a song, they could rather simply and legally re-release the original, now public-domain song.
res0nat0r 15y ago
This is way too short. For example: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is currently #52 on Amazons top sellers list and has been in the top 100 for 1500 days now. I don't know what the best time for copyright protection is, but 2-3 years isn't it.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  The vast, vast, vast majority of published works are ephemera: news articles, magazine articles, technical publications, sports broadcasts, TV programs, etc. The economic lifetime of many of these is a few days or weeks. The original term of copyright was 14 years, with one extension. This has grown to the current ~105 years. Economic present-value analysis shows that the present value of an additional year of copyright past a couple of decades is virtually nil. As an incentive to create NEW works, global copyright extension makes zero sense. This argument hasn't been tested by SCOTUS, though Lawrence Lessig has stated that he might have done better in Eldred v. Ashcroft if he'd made that argument rather than claiming continued extensions violated the "for limited terms" Constitutional clause. 7HOHEP was published in 1989, giving it a 22 year life to date. Frankly, I don't think it's all that outstanding, but that's another story.
- mortil 15y ago
  While I agree that 2-3 years is probably too short time, your reasoning is wrong. The purpose of copyright should be to incentivise the creation of creative works, not to perpetually reward the owners of works with a sustained commercial value.
  - res0nat0r 15y ago
    This is a great argument, but a bit too idealistic in my opinion. If copyright kicks in a few years after I write my hit novel and then I see my revenue plummet to $0 even though I know tons of people are still willing to pay me for it, then I'd be less willing to write another book because of this. I'd be willing to bet that the next JK Rowlings of the world would fight tooth an nail to prevent any type of copyright change that doesn't at least extend until the authors death. Rowling and Stephen King aren't just in it for the money, but they do want to get paid.
yoklov 15y ago
While I agree that the length is a very important issue, 2-3 years is unreasonably short.
autarch 15y ago
Personally, I'd like see copyright entirely abolished. However, I think as a compromise something in the 2-5 year range could work. This is plenty of time to exploit the financial possibilities of the initial release of a creative work, and it still allows remixes and adaptions in a reasonable time frame.
- silentOpen 15y ago
  Attribution rights should last forever.
  - autarch 15y ago
    That seems fine to me. I'd like to see all content under a CC-BY-SA license. If that were the law, I'd be happy with it.
- zanny 15y ago
  There is already a specification between employees and private inventors, and I like how it favors the individual discovery. Even though that just leads businesses to say every discovery was by the owner. In a perfect world, copyright produced by big name corporations such as Microsoft would last 5 years or so, so that a product they make can mature, take market, they can make their profit, and then it goes public domain. They can still sell licenses for the automatic updates and such, and they don't need to make the source available - they just can't sue for duplication anymore. Likewise, I would like to see independent content creators given a means to extend copyrights on things they keep iterating upon. An example would be Penny Arcade - it started as a small venture and has since matured to a recognizable standard amongst game circles. However, Tycho and Gabe continue to make comics and have been doing so for ~15 years. I figure their early work should be public domain by this point (consider how few people read the entire archive of their comic that far back) but they should be able to file a renewal after 5 years to double a copyright to 10 if they are actively iterating on a copyrighted product or concept. I could settle for a blanket decade copyright if it included patents. Everything copyrighted expires after 10 years without exception under any circumstance and after expiration duplication and reproduction is no longer restricted to the copyright holder. Reproducing content and material becomes the responsibility of the one seeking it or someone else providing it, such as when the patents on some car engine expire after a decade of being on the roads, you can reverse engineer that engine without fear of patent infringement but you still need to take the steps to actually rebuild the thing. That last point is important to understand. Just because something goes public domain doesn't mean that the original manufacturer (example, the car engine) can't continue to sell that engine. They can sell it for whatever they want. Having patents expire just means their competitors can copy design decisions in that engine after 10 years to improve their own engines and sell them competitively. Same thing with media. Piracy only exists because the cost of reproduction is near 0 for almost any digital data. But people would still pay for features - Steam games could sell for a dollar or two to have cloud saved games, screenshots, built in recording features, etc. And then when the steam platform passes into public domain, that doesn't mean Valve can't sell games with it - it just means people can alter or reverse engineer the software if they have it and if they want to and sell it however they want. But Valve would still have all the servers, and would be selling the usage of them - and they don't just become public goods. They are always private property.
kemayo 15y ago
The original 14 years with an optional extension sounds quite reasonable, honestly.
nextparadigms 15y ago
2-3 years is probably too short. Somewhere around 10 years seems more reasonable. The same should be true for patents, although the biggest problem with patents is not the length of the patent, but what is considered a valid patent by the Patent Office in the first place, when most of them get invalidated in Court when tested.
- randomdata 15y ago
  I've read it takes 13 years to take a new agricultural threshing design from concept to production. If the patent expired after 10 years, there would be no ability to recoup those massive R&D expenses. For other patents, 10 years is practically an eternity. It seems the problem is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution to intellectual property rights, despite our best efforts to try and fine one.
  - loceng 15y ago
    Perhaps then only R&D would be put into things that would truly benefit all of society. The amount of thought and discussion that would go into each decision would be unprecedented. It could be controlled to allow competition of sorts, though less resources would be wasted by there being many times more duplication than necessary.
  - unthreshed 15y ago
    Sweeping some problems under the rug, this seems like an incentive to only patent something when you're ready for production... Sounds like a win for anyone who wants to use a new threshing design.
icebraining 15y ago
As a compromise, the infinite copyright with a required payment to maintain it of $2ⁿ⁻¹ with n being the number of years since the creation of the work seems reasonable to me. People would hold copyright as long as it made financial sense, and orphaned works would rapidly drop to Public Domain.
- ars 15y ago
  It would be too hard to define what a "work" is. If I publish a collection of short stories does each story need a payment? Or just the book as a whole? What about a collection of blog posts?
masklinn 15y ago
2-3 years is too short if you're part of the 90% whose project is the "long tail", it only provides for big, heavily front-loaded blockbusters. But the current limits are indeed completely out of whack. > Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly. It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  >It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art. I highly doubt there is any significant number of independent artists who depend on copyright for their income. Most will have already realized that it's better to seek new ways to make ends meet. The argument is bullshit. It wouldn't be any different than now. Probably better, because people would stop relying on an entirely broken system of controlling the uncontrollable (the sharing of information). Oh, and copyright was never meant for the "small, starving artist". It was made by distributors for distributors. That's historical fact, and hasn't changed in the ~450 years this nonsensical system has prevailed.
unthreshed 15y ago
It might be fruitful to decompose individual copyrights and lengths. Consider a CC BY-NC-ND license that decays in stages to CC BY after X years...
hopefulhacker 15y ago
Same policy for software right? Or in HN fashion engineers are protected and other creatives are left out in the libertarian cold? I think going back to 14 years and one renewal is more than fair. It's far longer than all but the most popular works are profitable for but gives the creator a generation of control over it. No one can feel cheated. In the old days, most people didn't even renew after the first term expired. You wouldn't have seen Star Wars enter the public domain after 14 years but most of the movies in MST3K, books about certain time periods written at the moment, software that won't sell another copy would all be there.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  Simple, everything would become SaaS and while it would not technically be copyright; all the code would be holed up in a maximum security datacentre somewhere.
quandrum 15y ago
I would like to see a copyright that expired quickly, but had unlimited renewals for ever increasing fees. This would allow the top % of copyright works that remain profitable to be held by their creators, while the vast majority of work would quickly pass into the public domain. Plus, the larger fees on ridiculously long copyrights (Mickey Mouse) would help pay for the officials who oversee the whole thing.
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  An exponential function which suppresses early costs would be ideal. Something that approaches billions / year some time around year 40, for example. I'm not sure whether it's the right approach for patents -- pharmaceutical companies for example would just keep cranking up the prices until they reached the maximum economic return.

I think copyright length is the biggest issue, I don't see why it has to be more than 2 or 3 years. Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly.

tzs 15y ago

What would be the point of having copyright at all if the term was that short?

mattmiller 15y ago
If an indie artists created a song a studio could immediately remake the song and sell it before the artists had any distribution in place. 2 to 3 years should give the artists the opportunity to make some profit from his music.
- yoklov 15y ago
  Hardly. If the length were 2-3 years then the studios could (and probably would) remake songs by indie artists which didn't become popular in the first 2-3 years. Copyright of 2-3 years is better than no copyright at all, but it's so short that it's basically useless.
  - randallsquared 15y ago
    Studios would spend their own money remaking songs that had failed to garner interest in the first place? Not only does that seem like a way to make a lot of flops, but if the original flopped for some reason that's correctable by someone else in order to make a hit, then isn't it a win for everyone for there to be a hit remake (the original writer/artist at least gets recognition that they would otherwise not have had)?
    - yoklov 15y ago
      I have more of a problem with the fact that it could happen. Besides, you really don't think there would be a market for taking less well known songs, rebranding them to make them palatable to the masses, and selling that? I can't imagine that if it were completely legal, they wouldn't try.
- tzs 15y ago
  What about artists whose songs take more than 2 or 3 years to become popular? You don't think an artist should get anything if he writes a song that does so-so until it is featured a few years later in a hit movie and then the song becomes a hit? Or what about people who write books? Shouldn't they get money if their book is turned into a movie? With only 2 to 3 years of copyright, many books will go public domain long before a major movie can be put together.
- Arelius 15y ago
  I think it deserves mention that without copyright, a studio doesn't even need to remake a song, they could rather simply and legally re-release the original, now public-domain song.

res0nat0r 15y ago

This is way too short. For example: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is currently #52 on Amazons top sellers list and has been in the top 100 for 1500 days now. I don't know what the best time for copyright protection is, but 2-3 years isn't it.

dredmorbius 15y ago
The vast, vast, vast majority of published works are ephemera: news articles, magazine articles, technical publications, sports broadcasts, TV programs, etc. The economic lifetime of many of these is a few days or weeks. The original term of copyright was 14 years, with one extension. This has grown to the current ~105 years. Economic present-value analysis shows that the present value of an additional year of copyright past a couple of decades is virtually nil. As an incentive to create NEW works, global copyright extension makes zero sense. This argument hasn't been tested by SCOTUS, though Lawrence Lessig has stated that he might have done better in Eldred v. Ashcroft if he'd made that argument rather than claiming continued extensions violated the "for limited terms" Constitutional clause. 7HOHEP was published in 1989, giving it a 22 year life to date. Frankly, I don't think it's all that outstanding, but that's another story.
mortil 15y ago
While I agree that 2-3 years is probably too short time, your reasoning is wrong. The purpose of copyright should be to incentivise the creation of creative works, not to perpetually reward the owners of works with a sustained commercial value.
- res0nat0r 15y ago
  This is a great argument, but a bit too idealistic in my opinion. If copyright kicks in a few years after I write my hit novel and then I see my revenue plummet to $0 even though I know tons of people are still willing to pay me for it, then I'd be less willing to write another book because of this. I'd be willing to bet that the next JK Rowlings of the world would fight tooth an nail to prevent any type of copyright change that doesn't at least extend until the authors death. Rowling and Stephen King aren't just in it for the money, but they do want to get paid.

yoklov 15y ago

While I agree that the length is a very important issue, 2-3 years is unreasonably short.

autarch 15y ago

Personally, I'd like see copyright entirely abolished. However, I think as a compromise something in the 2-5 year range could work. This is plenty of time to exploit the financial possibilities of the initial release of a creative work, and it still allows remixes and adaptions in a reasonable time frame.

silentOpen 15y ago
Attribution rights should last forever.
- autarch 15y ago
  That seems fine to me. I'd like to see all content under a CC-BY-SA license. If that were the law, I'd be happy with it.
zanny 15y ago
There is already a specification between employees and private inventors, and I like how it favors the individual discovery. Even though that just leads businesses to say every discovery was by the owner. In a perfect world, copyright produced by big name corporations such as Microsoft would last 5 years or so, so that a product they make can mature, take market, they can make their profit, and then it goes public domain. They can still sell licenses for the automatic updates and such, and they don't need to make the source available - they just can't sue for duplication anymore. Likewise, I would like to see independent content creators given a means to extend copyrights on things they keep iterating upon. An example would be Penny Arcade - it started as a small venture and has since matured to a recognizable standard amongst game circles. However, Tycho and Gabe continue to make comics and have been doing so for ~15 years. I figure their early work should be public domain by this point (consider how few people read the entire archive of their comic that far back) but they should be able to file a renewal after 5 years to double a copyright to 10 if they are actively iterating on a copyrighted product or concept. I could settle for a blanket decade copyright if it included patents. Everything copyrighted expires after 10 years without exception under any circumstance and after expiration duplication and reproduction is no longer restricted to the copyright holder. Reproducing content and material becomes the responsibility of the one seeking it or someone else providing it, such as when the patents on some car engine expire after a decade of being on the roads, you can reverse engineer that engine without fear of patent infringement but you still need to take the steps to actually rebuild the thing. That last point is important to understand. Just because something goes public domain doesn't mean that the original manufacturer (example, the car engine) can't continue to sell that engine. They can sell it for whatever they want. Having patents expire just means their competitors can copy design decisions in that engine after 10 years to improve their own engines and sell them competitively. Same thing with media. Piracy only exists because the cost of reproduction is near 0 for almost any digital data. But people would still pay for features - Steam games could sell for a dollar or two to have cloud saved games, screenshots, built in recording features, etc. And then when the steam platform passes into public domain, that doesn't mean Valve can't sell games with it - it just means people can alter or reverse engineer the software if they have it and if they want to and sell it however they want. But Valve would still have all the servers, and would be selling the usage of them - and they don't just become public goods. They are always private property.

kemayo 15y ago

The original 14 years with an optional extension sounds quite reasonable, honestly.

nextparadigms 15y ago

2-3 years is probably too short. Somewhere around 10 years seems more reasonable. The same should be true for patents, although the biggest problem with patents is not the length of the patent, but what is considered a valid patent by the Patent Office in the first place, when most of them get invalidated in Court when tested.

randomdata 15y ago
I've read it takes 13 years to take a new agricultural threshing design from concept to production. If the patent expired after 10 years, there would be no ability to recoup those massive R&D expenses. For other patents, 10 years is practically an eternity. It seems the problem is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution to intellectual property rights, despite our best efforts to try and fine one.
- loceng 15y ago
  Perhaps then only R&D would be put into things that would truly benefit all of society. The amount of thought and discussion that would go into each decision would be unprecedented. It could be controlled to allow competition of sorts, though less resources would be wasted by there being many times more duplication than necessary.
- unthreshed 15y ago
  Sweeping some problems under the rug, this seems like an incentive to only patent something when you're ready for production... Sounds like a win for anyone who wants to use a new threshing design.

icebraining 15y ago

As a compromise, the infinite copyright with a required payment to maintain it of $2ⁿ⁻¹ with n being the number of years since the creation of the work seems reasonable to me. People would hold copyright as long as it made financial sense, and orphaned works would rapidly drop to Public Domain.

ars 15y ago
It would be too hard to define what a "work" is. If I publish a collection of short stories does each story need a payment? Or just the book as a whole? What about a collection of blog posts?

masklinn 15y ago

2-3 years is too short if you're part of the 90% whose project is the "long tail", it only provides for big, heavily front-loaded blockbusters. But the current limits are indeed completely out of whack. > Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly. It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art.

slowpoke 15y ago
>It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art. I highly doubt there is any significant number of independent artists who depend on copyright for their income. Most will have already realized that it's better to seek new ways to make ends meet. The argument is bullshit. It wouldn't be any different than now. Probably better, because people would stop relying on an entirely broken system of controlling the uncontrollable (the sharing of information). Oh, and copyright was never meant for the "small, starving artist". It was made by distributors for distributors. That's historical fact, and hasn't changed in the ~450 years this nonsensical system has prevailed.

unthreshed 15y ago

It might be fruitful to decompose individual copyrights and lengths. Consider a CC BY-NC-ND license that decays in stages to CC BY after X years...

hopefulhacker 15y ago

Same policy for software right? Or in HN fashion engineers are protected and other creatives are left out in the libertarian cold? I think going back to 14 years and one renewal is more than fair. It's far longer than all but the most popular works are profitable for but gives the creator a generation of control over it. No one can feel cheated. In the old days, most people didn't even renew after the first term expired. You wouldn't have seen Star Wars enter the public domain after 14 years but most of the movies in MST3K, books about certain time periods written at the moment, software that won't sell another copy would all be there.

jiggy2011 15y ago
Simple, everything would become SaaS and while it would not technically be copyright; all the code would be holed up in a maximum security datacentre somewhere.

quandrum 15y ago

I would like to see a copyright that expired quickly, but had unlimited renewals for ever increasing fees. This would allow the top % of copyright works that remain profitable to be held by their creators, while the vast majority of work would quickly pass into the public domain. Plus, the larger fees on ridiculously long copyrights (Mickey Mouse) would help pay for the officials who oversee the whole thing.

jacques_chester 15y ago
An exponential function which suppresses early costs would be ideal. Something that approaches billions / year some time around year 40, for example. I'm not sure whether it's the right approach for patents -- pharmaceutical companies for example would just keep cranking up the prices until they reached the maximum economic return.