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> “When Defendants exploit Plaintiffs’ sound recordings without authorization, neither Plaintiffs nor their artists see a dime. All of the artists are dead. >

> “When Defendants exploit Plaintiffs’ sound recordings without authorization, neither Plaintiffs nor their artists see a dime. All of the artists are dead. > Not only does this harm Plaintiffs and the artists or their heirs by depriving them of compensation, Hereditary wealth and continued rent-seeking is a very, very poor argument in favor of eternal copyright protection. > but it undermines the value of music,” the complaint adds. Music has inherent value and worth that can never be quantified or monetized. Honestly, screw the record labels. We can argue about the technicalities of copyright law until the cows come home, but this suit is morally disgusting to me.

echelon 3y ago
[flagged]
- isykt 3y ago
  Copyright should be life of the authors full stop. My dad dug ditches for half his life but I don’t get checks in the mail every time water flows through them.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Author’s life is too long. Surely, 20 years is far sufficient to incentivize creating media, although I would err on the side of 10 years. The copyright term is automatically too long if my anyone who would benefit from it entering the public domain is dead.
    - version_five 3y ago
      I think (but could be convinced otherwise) that the term is less important than the restrictions. More liberal definitions of fair use, for example, or clarity on when something is a copy or a derivative (like with people getting sued for vaguely similar songs) would be better. The work is always the authors, I'm less concerned about them retaining some kind of claim on it, especially if they're still actively using it, as long as there's sensible limitations on what rights they can block for others.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I think that makes the situation more complex than needs be by opening people up to more legal liability than necessary. As far as society is concerned, society’s resources (police, courts, etc) should only be given up to the point that the incentive to create works of art exists. At zero copyright length, we can say artists (and media creating/owning businesses) have less than a desirable amount of incentive to create (from society’s perspective). At 100 years, we can easily say there is too much incentive to seek rent and rest on one’s laurels. The most expensive works of art covered by copyright right now are big budget Hollywood movies and tv shows. If these businesses would continue to make them with a 20 year copyright term, then 20 years should be the max. And I might even say they would continue to make them with a 10 year term.
        account42 3y ago
        > At zero copyright length, we can say artists (and media creating/owning businesses) have less than a desirable amount of incentive to create (from society’s perspective). Can we? What is the amount of art that we want to be created? How much more art do we really need every year considering that old art can be infinitely reproduced in the digital age? Remember that the art output without copyright is well above zero since we had art before copyright.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      I would be satisfied with 20 years for commercial use of recordings, zero years – or simply no actual enforcement of copyright – for personal filesharing. Filesharers deeply passionate about music are likely to collect a larger library of recordings than they could ever afford to purchase, especially if they come from a relatively poor country. (No, streaming services like Spotify don’t do it. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not a FLAC securely preserved on my hard drive and backups, it doesn’t really exist.)
    - hakfoo 3y ago
      I think we need to completely revisit the ownership model here. Kill copyright entirely. (I would vote for anyone-- up to and including Mike Pence-- who made this a major plank of their campaign) We have at least one corner of the universe where we've defeated scarcity. We can't run out of music. Hell, we can't even run out of a specific recorded performance, if even the most trivial efforts of due-diligence backups are performed. We should be proud-- we're at least one step on the way towards Star Trek replicators and universal abundance. But the current system is so tied to the idea of "markets" and "ownership" that only really make sense for scarce physical goods, that we ended up having to force everyone, under threat of law, to treat a limitless resource that's part of our shared cultural experience, like a rare physical widget that must be owned, sliced up, and sold under restrictive covenant. We should be taking all the money going into the content business-- all the funds being spent on the production of movies, music, novels, art, potentially even software-- and use it to bankroll an enormous centralized endowment for the creative community. This immediately silences all "but how will artists eat?" strawmen. Even if you're not a live-show performer or merchandising expert, you get paid by the endowment on a predictable stipend basis, rather than having to hope you can effectively monetize a package of "rights" while dealing with an industry full of middlemen out to rip you off. This would ensure that many, many more artists can live their passion-- how many great but unknown bands could spend their lives touring, if we took the money that bankrolled Taylor Swift's tour and sliced it up into 50k-per-person-per-year grants? How many sculptors could we keep on the books for the price of one Anish Kapoor? It would also be interesting to compare efficiency of funds delivery-- replacing a bunch of for-profit publishers with a single cooperative or state-run entity probably results in more dollars actually reaching artists overall. It also avoids the perverse incentives on the other side-- if you make one world-breaking hit, you can't ride it forever. Just because you sung White Christmas once doesn't mean you get out of ever having to work again. If we eliminate the opportunity to slice and subdivide "rights" to a work, then there's no incentive to hold back maximum utilization of it. Imagine the improved utility of modern content services if they can get legal access to all the things-- Netflix and Hulu would have to compete on the best infrastructure, UI and tooling, rather than "only we have Futurama".
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        Music and other media are not fungible. I think this is a worm in the apple that dooms many market based arguments. However your idea of a creative endowment is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
  - version_five 3y ago
    Some VC will come up with a "drainage as a service" or "uber for drainage" model that lets them extract more value from ditches.
    - TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
      I know this is meant as a joke, but any sufficiently advanced drainage system already includes contracts and provisions for cleaning and maintenance. Drainage at-scale is actually a very challenging engineering problem. @PracticalEngineeringChannel on YouTube has plenty of videos on engineering drainage systems.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Were the pipes that were installed leased to the city? An artist could choose to release a song as public domain after being paid to make it and people would use it without paying them.
  - Wistar 3y ago
    Although, that’d be cool.
  - beej71 3y ago
    I think the publish date plus 20 years not to exceed the life of the author is plenty.
    - adventured 3y ago
      There are some significant edge cases that can plainly make that unfair. Let's say Kurt Cobain dies at 27 (or even younger) without an heir other than a very young daughter. ~95% of his earning capacity might be in the next 15 years, rather than the prior 5 years. The daughter might be cast into relying on charity while everybody else gets to freely commercially exploit his music after his death. ('the US social safety net needs reformed'; pre-empting those responses, because one is extraordinarily difficult to reform, the other isn't nearly so; that'd just be an excuse to hide behind) Ritchie Valens comes from a poor family, creates a gigantic hit, dies at 17. His family deserves nothing specifically, while everybody else gets to freely commercially exploit his young talent forever. A life of the author clause is inherently cruel. 20 years fixed, approaches that in a far more reasonable and fair manner. Families / heirs matter too. They often suffer, or otherwise carry a share of weight for the artist, so the artist can create, tour, publish, publicize, etc. Pretending otherwise is pure fantasy, it's life in an idealized vacuum.
      - beej71 3y ago
        I agree that's a potential loss with a 20 year or life term, but I still argue this is a net gain for the world. Edit: I might be flexible on the life part. But not the 20.
      - account42 3y ago
        Personally I would not involve the authors life at all in the term (then again I think the ideal term length is zero) but I also don't see an artist kids not being able to profit from their dead parents works anymore unfair than a cobblers kids not being able to profit from their parents works after death. Life isn't fair. If someone needs welfare than I am in support of making sure it is available - but please let's not use it as an excuse for unrelated laws.
    - blackoil 3y ago
  - comprev 3y ago
    That’s because the contract he signed with his employers did not include an agreement where he continued to get paid for when water flowed through the ditches. Some artists will have a contract for a lump sum, others will have agreements for every time their record is played.
    - isykt 3y ago
      The contracts of adhesion that perpetuate society disproportionately valuing one form of labor over another do not validate the exploitation of one group of laborer over another.
      - adventured 3y ago
        Not all labor is created equal, nor should it be. It's not equal, it can never be equal. And there's nothing that can ever be done to change that, no matter how hard a state might try to force 'equal' distribution of unearned money. Society should value one form of labor different from another, it's good that it always has and always will. I've worked with plenty of very lazy bums that intentionally, knowingly do 1/3 of their job while other people have to work far harder because of them (or the business would fail and everybody loses). People like that are free riders, society should not be kind to them when they're repeatedly fired from jobs. All labor isn't equal, quite obviously, and treating it as though it is, is unfair to the vast majority.
        isykt 3y ago
        If there are people working 3x as hard, why aren’t they negotiating for 3x the pay? It would create an incentive for the business to fire the people only doing 1/3 the work, or else cut their pay by 2/3rds in accordance with the value of the labor. This does not happen because the workers involved don’t have that kind of power. The power imbalance between the two parties is so vast that the laborers have no choice but to accept unfair terms.
        comprev 3y ago
  - knorker 3y ago
    Well, should be capped by life of the author.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Copyright should be an annual fee that increases by year. Year zero through five: free Year six: $500 Year seven: $1000 Year eight: $2500 Year nine: $5000 Year ten: $10,000 Year eleven: $25,000 Year twelve: $50,000 Year thirteen: $100,000 Year fourteen: $250,000 Year fifteen: $500,000 Year sixteen: $1,000,000 Year seventeen: $2,500,000 Year eighteen: $5,000,000 Year nineteen: $10,000,000 Year twenty: $25,000,000 ...
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Big publishers would love that sort of scheme. It puts copyright out of reach of basically everyone else.
      - echelon 3y ago
        Maybe my scale is wrong, maybe it's not. In the above case, big media couldn't afford to drag everything along forever. If every music track over 20 years old cost $25M per year to renew, they'd let tons of it expire into the public domain. This kind of increasing scale renewal fee forces them to make more impactful works that are worth paying for. If they're truly valued by society, they'll pay the tax to keep them for longer. It forces everyone to keep creating, which is good for employment and the economy. You shouldn't stop your output. There's probably some optimal scale that incentivizes everyone to make more, and more of the content to be excellent.
    - remram 3y ago
      Some things make more money than others. A uniform pricing means that Disney can afford to keep their work protected for decades while my non-monetized short stories/illustrations/blog posts will be protected for a year. How do you even price that per item? Do I pay once for the blog? Once per post?
  - codazoda 3y ago
    What about software? I was thinking about this last night. Should I use a license agreement that gives my proprietary software to the public domain when I die? What about my open source software that I can no longer maintain? In my case, the software is probably not popular enough to continue without me. Should it keep a GPL license or be converted to MIT or to public domain? What if I do have a hit someday and it provides income to me? My family might rely on that income, at least for a time, if I die early. I’d love to give a business to my kids and them to their kids. Anyway, just rambling. I agree that copyright is probably too long.
    - hakfoo 3y ago
      I was always sort of surprised nobody invented a clear declaration for that sort of thing-- a pre-packaged, battle-tested paragraph you could put in your will that says "On my death, all my copyrights immediately revert to the public domain." Market it in a cute way, like "content donor" analogous to the "organ donor" tickoff on the driver's license form.
    - beej71 3y ago
      I have an unwritten dying wish to grant all my writing to the public domain when I pass away, but still need to figure out where to cram that in the will and need to set it up with someone to update the licenses and copyright notices for me.
- api 3y ago
  If AI destroys anyone it would be the artists, since labels with distribution networks could use it to create content without ever needing to pay anyone. The Internet should have taught us that if there is a portal the owner of that portal and the network effect around it has all the power. Look at Twitter. Half its users hate its new management and spend much of their time there complaining about it, but they are still using it. Why? Because people are still using it.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Copyright is no threat to artists as artists create for their own drive. Copyright will kill millionaire artists. Currently the system has poor artists and millionaire artists. The millionaire artists will be hosed. The poor artists are already poor so not much changes for them. Most music is produced by people at home and with friends chilling. Look at guitar center and all those stores. Lots of instruments sold. Same for art supplies. There are only a few thousand wealthy artists.
- Asooka 3y ago
  Yes it should. Property is property. It is insane that some property somehow becomes unownable after an arbitrary length of time. If I own land, that land will go to my heirs or, if none exist, on auction. Then someone else will own it. It won't become permanently public and non-property. Intellectual property ought to work the same way. The great part is that we can create an infinite amount of intellectual property, so everybody has an equal opportunity to own as much as their fingers can write. Land is finite, art is infinite. If there were a lot of art available entirely for free, people would never pay for any new art and we will stagnate. I guess patents could be forcibly taken by the government and licenses minted for free, if the current holder is determined to be maliciously setting the price for licensing too high and holding back science.
  - raincole 3y ago
    > Property is property. It is insane that some property somehow becomes unownable after an arbitrary length of time. If I own land, that land will go to my heirs or, if none exist, on auction. Then someone else will own it. Yes and in almost every country properties like land are taxed by their values. If copyright lasts forever, it should be taxed by its value too (not by income!).
  - beej71 3y ago
    I see no reason why the laws around IP need to be the same as the laws for real estate.
  - account42 3y ago
    So-called "intellectual property" is no property at all but a government-protected monopoly on distribution. You do not "own" copyright. This monopoly isn't free for society - both the enforcement and the loss due to restrictions on other peoples basic rights (namely, freedom of speech).
- spamizbad 3y ago
  Oh labels love AI: they can train their catalogs and produce “new” works from dead artists. Contracts already have AI clauses which, if an artist isn’t careful, gives the label rights to use their works to have AI produce new content under their name.
dumpsterlid 3y ago
[dead]
tptacek 3y ago
I'm sure that whatever the labels are doing here is odious, and that there's no validity to the suit, but "all the artists are dead" isn't a valid argument. Artists receive, during their lifetimes, funds valued based on the duration of the label's rights to their work. Copyrights that terminated with the life of the author would drastically reduce the compensation authors got in their own lifetimes.

echelon 3y ago

[flagged]

isykt 3y ago
Copyright should be life of the authors full stop. My dad dug ditches for half his life but I don’t get checks in the mail every time water flows through them.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Author’s life is too long. Surely, 20 years is far sufficient to incentivize creating media, although I would err on the side of 10 years. The copyright term is automatically too long if my anyone who would benefit from it entering the public domain is dead.
  - version_five 3y ago
    I think (but could be convinced otherwise) that the term is less important than the restrictions. More liberal definitions of fair use, for example, or clarity on when something is a copy or a derivative (like with people getting sued for vaguely similar songs) would be better. The work is always the authors, I'm less concerned about them retaining some kind of claim on it, especially if they're still actively using it, as long as there's sensible limitations on what rights they can block for others.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I think that makes the situation more complex than needs be by opening people up to more legal liability than necessary. As far as society is concerned, society’s resources (police, courts, etc) should only be given up to the point that the incentive to create works of art exists. At zero copyright length, we can say artists (and media creating/owning businesses) have less than a desirable amount of incentive to create (from society’s perspective). At 100 years, we can easily say there is too much incentive to seek rent and rest on one’s laurels. The most expensive works of art covered by copyright right now are big budget Hollywood movies and tv shows. If these businesses would continue to make them with a 20 year copyright term, then 20 years should be the max. And I might even say they would continue to make them with a 10 year term.
      - account42 3y ago
        > At zero copyright length, we can say artists (and media creating/owning businesses) have less than a desirable amount of incentive to create (from society’s perspective). Can we? What is the amount of art that we want to be created? How much more art do we really need every year considering that old art can be infinitely reproduced in the digital age? Remember that the art output without copyright is well above zero since we had art before copyright.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I would be satisfied with 20 years for commercial use of recordings, zero years – or simply no actual enforcement of copyright – for personal filesharing. Filesharers deeply passionate about music are likely to collect a larger library of recordings than they could ever afford to purchase, especially if they come from a relatively poor country. (No, streaming services like Spotify don’t do it. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not a FLAC securely preserved on my hard drive and backups, it doesn’t really exist.)
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    I think we need to completely revisit the ownership model here. Kill copyright entirely. (I would vote for anyone-- up to and including Mike Pence-- who made this a major plank of their campaign) We have at least one corner of the universe where we've defeated scarcity. We can't run out of music. Hell, we can't even run out of a specific recorded performance, if even the most trivial efforts of due-diligence backups are performed. We should be proud-- we're at least one step on the way towards Star Trek replicators and universal abundance. But the current system is so tied to the idea of "markets" and "ownership" that only really make sense for scarce physical goods, that we ended up having to force everyone, under threat of law, to treat a limitless resource that's part of our shared cultural experience, like a rare physical widget that must be owned, sliced up, and sold under restrictive covenant. We should be taking all the money going into the content business-- all the funds being spent on the production of movies, music, novels, art, potentially even software-- and use it to bankroll an enormous centralized endowment for the creative community. This immediately silences all "but how will artists eat?" strawmen. Even if you're not a live-show performer or merchandising expert, you get paid by the endowment on a predictable stipend basis, rather than having to hope you can effectively monetize a package of "rights" while dealing with an industry full of middlemen out to rip you off. This would ensure that many, many more artists can live their passion-- how many great but unknown bands could spend their lives touring, if we took the money that bankrolled Taylor Swift's tour and sliced it up into 50k-per-person-per-year grants? How many sculptors could we keep on the books for the price of one Anish Kapoor? It would also be interesting to compare efficiency of funds delivery-- replacing a bunch of for-profit publishers with a single cooperative or state-run entity probably results in more dollars actually reaching artists overall. It also avoids the perverse incentives on the other side-- if you make one world-breaking hit, you can't ride it forever. Just because you sung White Christmas once doesn't mean you get out of ever having to work again. If we eliminate the opportunity to slice and subdivide "rights" to a work, then there's no incentive to hold back maximum utilization of it. Imagine the improved utility of modern content services if they can get legal access to all the things-- Netflix and Hulu would have to compete on the best infrastructure, UI and tooling, rather than "only we have Futurama".
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Music and other media are not fungible. I think this is a worm in the apple that dooms many market based arguments. However your idea of a creative endowment is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
- version_five 3y ago
  Some VC will come up with a "drainage as a service" or "uber for drainage" model that lets them extract more value from ditches.
  - TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
    I know this is meant as a joke, but any sufficiently advanced drainage system already includes contracts and provisions for cleaning and maintenance. Drainage at-scale is actually a very challenging engineering problem. @PracticalEngineeringChannel on YouTube has plenty of videos on engineering drainage systems.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Were the pipes that were installed leased to the city? An artist could choose to release a song as public domain after being paid to make it and people would use it without paying them.
- Wistar 3y ago
  Although, that’d be cool.
- beej71 3y ago
  I think the publish date plus 20 years not to exceed the life of the author is plenty.
  - adventured 3y ago
    There are some significant edge cases that can plainly make that unfair. Let's say Kurt Cobain dies at 27 (or even younger) without an heir other than a very young daughter. ~95% of his earning capacity might be in the next 15 years, rather than the prior 5 years. The daughter might be cast into relying on charity while everybody else gets to freely commercially exploit his music after his death. ('the US social safety net needs reformed'; pre-empting those responses, because one is extraordinarily difficult to reform, the other isn't nearly so; that'd just be an excuse to hide behind) Ritchie Valens comes from a poor family, creates a gigantic hit, dies at 17. His family deserves nothing specifically, while everybody else gets to freely commercially exploit his young talent forever. A life of the author clause is inherently cruel. 20 years fixed, approaches that in a far more reasonable and fair manner. Families / heirs matter too. They often suffer, or otherwise carry a share of weight for the artist, so the artist can create, tour, publish, publicize, etc. Pretending otherwise is pure fantasy, it's life in an idealized vacuum.
    - beej71 3y ago
      I agree that's a potential loss with a 20 year or life term, but I still argue this is a net gain for the world. Edit: I might be flexible on the life part. But not the 20.
    - account42 3y ago
      Personally I would not involve the authors life at all in the term (then again I think the ideal term length is zero) but I also don't see an artist kids not being able to profit from their dead parents works anymore unfair than a cobblers kids not being able to profit from their parents works after death. Life isn't fair. If someone needs welfare than I am in support of making sure it is available - but please let's not use it as an excuse for unrelated laws.
  - blackoil 3y ago
- comprev 3y ago
  That’s because the contract he signed with his employers did not include an agreement where he continued to get paid for when water flowed through the ditches. Some artists will have a contract for a lump sum, others will have agreements for every time their record is played.
  - isykt 3y ago
    The contracts of adhesion that perpetuate society disproportionately valuing one form of labor over another do not validate the exploitation of one group of laborer over another.
    - adventured 3y ago
      Not all labor is created equal, nor should it be. It's not equal, it can never be equal. And there's nothing that can ever be done to change that, no matter how hard a state might try to force 'equal' distribution of unearned money. Society should value one form of labor different from another, it's good that it always has and always will. I've worked with plenty of very lazy bums that intentionally, knowingly do 1/3 of their job while other people have to work far harder because of them (or the business would fail and everybody loses). People like that are free riders, society should not be kind to them when they're repeatedly fired from jobs. All labor isn't equal, quite obviously, and treating it as though it is, is unfair to the vast majority.
      - isykt 3y ago
        If there are people working 3x as hard, why aren’t they negotiating for 3x the pay? It would create an incentive for the business to fire the people only doing 1/3 the work, or else cut their pay by 2/3rds in accordance with the value of the labor. This does not happen because the workers involved don’t have that kind of power. The power imbalance between the two parties is so vast that the laborers have no choice but to accept unfair terms.
        comprev 3y ago
- knorker 3y ago
  Well, should be capped by life of the author.
- echelon 3y ago
  Copyright should be an annual fee that increases by year. Year zero through five: free Year six: $500 Year seven: $1000 Year eight: $2500 Year nine: $5000 Year ten: $10,000 Year eleven: $25,000 Year twelve: $50,000 Year thirteen: $100,000 Year fourteen: $250,000 Year fifteen: $500,000 Year sixteen: $1,000,000 Year seventeen: $2,500,000 Year eighteen: $5,000,000 Year nineteen: $10,000,000 Year twenty: $25,000,000 ...
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Big publishers would love that sort of scheme. It puts copyright out of reach of basically everyone else.
    - echelon 3y ago
      Maybe my scale is wrong, maybe it's not. In the above case, big media couldn't afford to drag everything along forever. If every music track over 20 years old cost $25M per year to renew, they'd let tons of it expire into the public domain. This kind of increasing scale renewal fee forces them to make more impactful works that are worth paying for. If they're truly valued by society, they'll pay the tax to keep them for longer. It forces everyone to keep creating, which is good for employment and the economy. You shouldn't stop your output. There's probably some optimal scale that incentivizes everyone to make more, and more of the content to be excellent.
  - remram 3y ago
    Some things make more money than others. A uniform pricing means that Disney can afford to keep their work protected for decades while my non-monetized short stories/illustrations/blog posts will be protected for a year. How do you even price that per item? Do I pay once for the blog? Once per post?
- codazoda 3y ago
  What about software? I was thinking about this last night. Should I use a license agreement that gives my proprietary software to the public domain when I die? What about my open source software that I can no longer maintain? In my case, the software is probably not popular enough to continue without me. Should it keep a GPL license or be converted to MIT or to public domain? What if I do have a hit someday and it provides income to me? My family might rely on that income, at least for a time, if I die early. I’d love to give a business to my kids and them to their kids. Anyway, just rambling. I agree that copyright is probably too long.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    I was always sort of surprised nobody invented a clear declaration for that sort of thing-- a pre-packaged, battle-tested paragraph you could put in your will that says "On my death, all my copyrights immediately revert to the public domain." Market it in a cute way, like "content donor" analogous to the "organ donor" tickoff on the driver's license form.
  - beej71 3y ago
    I have an unwritten dying wish to grant all my writing to the public domain when I pass away, but still need to figure out where to cram that in the will and need to set it up with someone to update the licenses and copyright notices for me.
api 3y ago
If AI destroys anyone it would be the artists, since labels with distribution networks could use it to create content without ever needing to pay anyone. The Internet should have taught us that if there is a portal the owner of that portal and the network effect around it has all the power. Look at Twitter. Half its users hate its new management and spend much of their time there complaining about it, but they are still using it. Why? Because people are still using it.
- prepend 3y ago
  Copyright is no threat to artists as artists create for their own drive. Copyright will kill millionaire artists. Currently the system has poor artists and millionaire artists. The millionaire artists will be hosed. The poor artists are already poor so not much changes for them. Most music is produced by people at home and with friends chilling. Look at guitar center and all those stores. Lots of instruments sold. Same for art supplies. There are only a few thousand wealthy artists.
Asooka 3y ago
Yes it should. Property is property. It is insane that some property somehow becomes unownable after an arbitrary length of time. If I own land, that land will go to my heirs or, if none exist, on auction. Then someone else will own it. It won't become permanently public and non-property. Intellectual property ought to work the same way. The great part is that we can create an infinite amount of intellectual property, so everybody has an equal opportunity to own as much as their fingers can write. Land is finite, art is infinite. If there were a lot of art available entirely for free, people would never pay for any new art and we will stagnate. I guess patents could be forcibly taken by the government and licenses minted for free, if the current holder is determined to be maliciously setting the price for licensing too high and holding back science.
- raincole 3y ago
  > Property is property. It is insane that some property somehow becomes unownable after an arbitrary length of time. If I own land, that land will go to my heirs or, if none exist, on auction. Then someone else will own it. Yes and in almost every country properties like land are taxed by their values. If copyright lasts forever, it should be taxed by its value too (not by income!).
- beej71 3y ago
  I see no reason why the laws around IP need to be the same as the laws for real estate.
- account42 3y ago
  So-called "intellectual property" is no property at all but a government-protected monopoly on distribution. You do not "own" copyright. This monopoly isn't free for society - both the enforcement and the loss due to restrictions on other peoples basic rights (namely, freedom of speech).
spamizbad 3y ago
Oh labels love AI: they can train their catalogs and produce “new” works from dead artists. Contracts already have AI clauses which, if an artist isn’t careful, gives the label rights to use their works to have AI produce new content under their name.

dumpsterlid 3y ago

[dead]

tptacek 3y ago

I'm sure that whatever the labels are doing here is odious, and that there's no validity to the suit, but "all the artists are dead" isn't a valid argument. Artists receive, during their lifetimes, funds valued based on the duration of the label's rights to their work. Copyrights that terminated with the life of the author would drastically reduce the compensation authors got in their own lifetimes.