6 ms·

All copyright is way too long but authors go completely off-piste at anyone who suggests that it should be something more reasonable (I kinda like 21 years myse

• andyferris 3y ago
  Shorter copyright would be great. I could imagine an argument for harmonising the duration with patents for even more simplicity. Another interesting consequence is a lot of GPL code would become public domain. I haven’t really thought about that before.
• ethbr1 3y ago
  There's an unexplored (to my knowledge) middleground where copyright expires more rapidly with regards to derivative works, but not the original. E.g. At x+10 anyone could make a new sequel to Zork, but the rights to the published Zork are retained for x+25 That feels fair.
  • mlyle 3y ago
    And there's a sibling to your comment proposing the exact opposite https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37895648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37895648 I can think of arguments why derivatives should get more favorable and less favorable treatment than overall copying. To me it feels like a wash and they should probably be treated similarly-- though trademark can provide some limited protection beyond copyright terms if the work's use in commerce has been continuous.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      My reasoning is: The original thing has already been created, and proceeds benefit whoever created it (or who they sold rights to). Whether they choose to continue to actively market it or not, while under copyright, can't be influenced by copyright. Abandonware under copyright is still abandonware. But! There's a class of derivative works, built on top of the original, that currently can't get made. If they were, we'd all be better off. Arguably, I can even see an aggressive sunsetting for derivative works being net positive for the original work's commercial value ("See the original").
  • dagw 3y ago
    At x+10 anyone could make a new sequel to Zork Would the copyright holders of Zork get royalties in this scenario, like with cover versions of songs? The other problem is that in this scenario people will just be slapping the names of things that were popular x+10 years ago on literally anything. People will just make the lowest effort loot box laden pay-to-win mobile games you can get onto the App Store, and advertise them as sequel or tie-in to that old popular game/book/movie.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      > royalties Debatable. Some sort of FRAND-level payment, for a limited period, seems fair? Not enough to torpedo the economics of anyone using a property. But enough so an originator has a revenue stream for wildly-popular IP. > slapping popular names Would this be that bad? If there were Harry Potter crap... how would that be different? Expect there'd be more stuff out there.
      • dagw 3y ago
        Would this be that bad? It's essentially a case of brand dilution. Today 'Harry Potter' is a brand that has certain values. If a new Harry Potter book shows up on the shelves tomorrow I can be very sure it's a kid friendly, easy to read, book about wizards. People can feel safe buying as a present for their niece or grand child that likes Harry Potter. In this alternate future a 'Harry Potter' book could be literally anything. If that is 'good' or 'bad' is left as an exercise to the reader, but something would definitely be lost.
• nordsieck 3y ago
  > All copyright is way too long but authors go completely off-piste at anyone who suggests that it should be something more reasonable (I kinda like 21 years myself). > Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation. My favorite scheme is that all copyright last for 10 years by default. You can register it for $100 for another 10 years. And every 10 years after that, the cost goes up by 100x. That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly. Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked a bit, but I think the idea is fundamentally sound.
  • nostromo 3y ago
    This scheme seems to protect the largest companies with the largest bank accounts the most. Why would we want a system like that? I actually have the opposite view: I'm more worried about a small-time author that say, makes living on a low-volume text or training book, than I am protecting Mickey Mouse.
    • mlyle 3y ago
      It's nice to make works that no longer have commercial value enter the public domain by default. Another justification: if the harms increase for giving an author exclusivity for a longer time, society should demand a larger payback. This may only be justified for the most prominent works It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more, and then 100x for every 10 additional years. Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price, and then the price ramps steeply so that very few works are registered beyond 40 years. A tiny proportion of works will be worth the $50k step, let alone the $5M one. Even Disney will not pay $5M for most things. And, of course, things that are forgotten or devoid of commercial value will lapse at 20.
      • shiroiuma 3y ago
        I think only 5 years should be free, then maybe $100 for another 5, then exponentially increasing after that. A lot of stuff simply has no commercial value after 5 years. This is for software, BTW; for movies or books, different terms might make more sense.
• audiodude 3y ago
  Another annoying thing about the 1976 Copyright Act/Berne Convention is that copyright is automatic. You don't need to register with any organization, any "original work of authorship fixed in a tangible form" is copyright. This is the real problem with public github repos that don't have a license file, because they also likely lack a copyright imprint with a date. This is not related, but another problem with current US copyright law is that there's no exception for companies that go out of business. The works are still copyright encumbered even if no one exists that can enforce that right. Based on the former two points, you end up with works where you can't find out who holds the copyright, and it doesn't matter if they're dead or whatever because it's still copyrighted. This leads to the "assume everything is copyrighted" posture that stifles so much creativity.
  • kmeisthax 3y ago
    That's not the most annoying thing about the 1976 Copyright Act. The most annoying thing about the 1976 Copyright Act is that copyright is only nominally automatic. To be clear, it casts a huge shadow over all creativity that would have otherwise been uncopyrighted. But on the other side, there's still a registration system. You need a registration in order to sue infringers, and you don't get statutory damages on infringements that happened before registration[0]. This trips up loads of creatives, and especially photographers, because it's a lot of boring bureaucracy that never gets explained to them up until they've already talked to a lawyer who says "no you can't get $$$ out of this big company that used your Facebook uploads without permission, because copyright lawsuits are never worth pursuing without statutory damages on the table". The cruel irony of US copyright law is that, while we only half-implemented Berne, we still use Berne as a thought-stopping cliche for why we can never claw back copyright protection from the half-dozen publishers and creative artists that actually benefit from owning your childhood. Because the base assumption of copyright is that only the creative upper class is worth protection. Protecting artists as a class requires syndicalism and mass unionization, not atomizing everything into individually held psuedo-property rights that are financially ruinous to assert against anyone who won't fold immediately and settle. The orphan works problem you're talking about is deliberate. Publishers like the idea that when they knock out a less-scrupulous competitor, their creative works spill out onto the ground like Diablo loot, and they can collect all that up and just idly hoard it forever. At the very least, a work that nobody knows how to license or can't afford to license is a work that has been taken off the market and can't compete with them. Funnily enough, GitHub repos without a LICENSE file are covered by a fallback license in GitHub's ToS that basically says you're allowed to fork and PR. They've probably also explicitly added a "and we can train GPT on your code too" EULA ruffie in there too. [0] There is a short grace period for this, of course. I think it's 90 days.
• atmavatar 3y ago
  Make a copyright cost 1$ to register. You have to re-register every year. Each year, the registration cost doubles.
  • sneak 3y ago
    Getting the congress to pass laws that say copyright is whatever you want it to be is cheaper for Disney than 2^100 dollars to keep the mouse under their control.
• elondaits 3y ago
  The conversation is hard because we’re thinking about being able to copy and distribute an old game… and some authors will be thinking about not losing rights to their original characters, music, story, etc. … so maybe it would be useful to have a law that protects the preservation of old media, allowing the public to legally break DRM, copy distribute and shift it to new platforms after a number of years… without necessarily granting rights to economic exploitation of the characters, story, etc. or making new derivative works.
  • Sakos 3y ago
    > some authors will be thinking about not losing rights to their original characters, music, story, etc. But this didn't used to be an issue. It was accepted that things would fall into the public domain and you couldn't benefit from something for eternity. It's unacceptable that we've finally reached a point where only the creator or owner can ever do something with a creation, regardless of how long ago it was created. Just because you created a thing doesn't give you an inalienable right to own it forever. We're just making it so because "commercial value" and other bullshit.
• TulliusCicero 3y ago
  20 years, same as patents. People aren't writing books because of the profits they might make 25 years from now.
  • rgmerk 3y ago
    Yes, but people who wrote commercially successful books 25 years ago will scream blue murder if you take what they see as their retirement nest egg away from them.
  • vlz 3y ago
    I have to disagree somewhat. People write books for a lot of reasons, but one alluring thought in many an author's head certainly is: "Sure, it might not be commercially viable directly now, but over time…" Writing books can be a pretty risky proposition from a financial point of view. Copyright should at least span an authors lifetime in my opinion. Thinking that an author could profit not at all from a work if it gains popularity 20 years after it was written also seems unfair, seldom though as that case may be.
    • rgmerk 3y ago
      The proportion of books that make money 20 years after publication, after languishing in obscurity for that time, is a rounding error. Like, how many such books can you actually name? I think it’s a little different for music, where people sometimes sample fairly obscure old songs and turn them into hits. But then, a lot of those old songs shamelessly ripped off even older works…
    • TulliusCicero 3y ago
      > Writing books can be a pretty risky proposition from a financial point of view. Copyright should at least span an authors lifetime in my opinion. Why is it accepted that patents can last only 20 years then? Like, do you think creating new inventions is easy? Why for one and not the other? But the bigger thing is that books making significant amounts of money after twenty years is an extreme exception. That's not the motivating thing. It's a "maybe that'd be nice" on top of the desire for revenue in the immediate future, in the first few years of the book coming out.
• jccooper 3y ago
  An explicit renewal regime with some reasonable fee would allow most works to pass into the public domain, and avoid objections from owners of still-valuable properties. (I like the concept of renewal fees escalating each period, a kind of dutch auction against the public domain, but I'd accept even a fairly trivial flat fee as the price of avoiding ever-longer universal copyright.)
  • toast0 3y ago
    Explicit renewal is also nice, because there's more likely to be updated contact information, which makes licensing more likely.
• bruce511 3y ago
  I doubt any would describe my voice as "loud", but I suspect I fall into the 0.01% you mention. I sell code (programming libraries, and commercial business systems) which have been under continual development sint 1996. So 27 years. Copyright in this context would be complicated in a "20 year" model. Last month saw a significant upgrade to a product first released in 2000. Should the 2K version be public domain now? I get the main complaint, especially in the context of old games like infocom (which are abandoned). It feels like those should move gracefully to public domain. But on the other hand there are those of us who do still make a living from old, but active, code. I do agree that current copyright is absurdly long, but I also understand why Disney et al see ongoing value in their creations and are prepared to lobby for that value. I don't think there's a simple fix here, one which covers such a wide set of circumstances. All the fixes I've seen proposed are "great for x, terrible for y".
  • mkesper 3y ago
    Would you be restricted/harmed if the version from 2000 was public domain by now? How?
    • bruce511 3y ago
      For yhe most part, Code-wise I would not be harmed by that. (We supply source code anyway so there are no secrets there.) Market-wise I could see a fair bit of confusion as an old (now public domain) version floats around with the same name (but different version number) to the commercial version. Of course this is likely immaterial anyway. Unless someone bothered to archive the version at the time, that version no longer exists. We can date it (from the release notes) but I no longer have that build in the archive. So maybe my wariness is unfounded.
  • dagw 3y ago
    under continual development Copyright timer would be reset for every new release. So the version of the library you released in 2000 would be out of copyright, but the version you released last month wouldn't be. I guess there is a risk that someone will take your version from 2000, reverse engineer it, and release a competing product, but it seems like a minor risk.
• dagw 3y ago
  authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation. Sure, but who should capture that value for those works. Is it more fair that all the value goes to the publishers and TV/movie studios making adaptations, rather than some of it being shared with the author.