13 ms·

Copyright was a way to give rightsholders incentive to do what they do, while still ensuring that the work enters the public domain, which is and always has bee

by LocalH 3y ago

Copyright was a way to give rightsholders incentive to do what they do, while still ensuring that the work enters the public domain, which is and always has been the absolute endgame of copyright. Today's copyright is much different, due to massive lobbying efforts by those who would benefit most. Authors life + what, 100 years or so, is way too long (and that's completely discounting those who would want copyright to be perpetual). So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access. Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. Those are the two most important things to restore copyright to a proper moral standing. Otherwise, copyright as it stands right now is immoral and unjust, and thus (some of) those who pirate are doing so for fully ethical reasons, and are on the better side of history in the long run. Of course, some people just want free shit. However, those people will always exist no matter how reasonable copyright is. Hell, I don't mind getting free shit when I pirate something, even if I'm doing it for moral reasons.

dexen 3y ago
I subscribe to your and broadly follow your arguments. It's also worth pointing out the speed of information propagation, speed of manufacturing, and speed of distribution & logistics has dramatically increased since 14+14 years was the pragmatic standard. At present, the same economic effect is achieved in much shorter cycles. Keeping economic and moral parity would entail shortening the protection times a fair bit.
loupol 3y ago
Agreed on all points, the tweet feels like an allergic reaction to what copyright has morphed into, which is a tool for big corporations to extract money from existing IP for an insanely long duration. But it's important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach. That would create a big disincentive for independent creation of IP. Like you, I would just prefer if copyright was kept in place but its duration decreased drastically compared to now. It doesn't seem likely given the lobbying strength of the corporations that benefit from the current situation sadly.
- LocalH 3y ago
  The DMCA has also been abused far past its original intentions. It was basically originally intended to stop people copying DVDs. Now it's used to protect these asinine little "digital locks" inside of everything that prevents independent repair by pairing parts using cryptographic exchanges.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  That’s what they already do today. OpenAI is an obvious example in our industry but another one is where companies steal clothing designs from indigenous communities all over America. These people can not really defend or assert themselves in US copyright system, so US companies just engage in full on resource extraction without any compensation.
  - sveitly 3y ago
    New or traditional stuff? Copyright shouldn't be how you defend your traditional stuff. It's more something for the Protected Designation of Origin / PDO
  - chrismcb 3y ago
    Clothing design is difficult to copyright. I'm pretty sure just about anyone can defend themselves in the US copyright system. Sure it becomes difficult when you are a small fry (whether indigenous or not) against a big fish, but it can be done.
- sharperguy 3y ago
  As a consumer why would I pay spotify $15 a month for ripped off content that doesn't even go to the artist, when I can just paypal my favourite artists $5 now and again, giving them infinitely more revenue from me than spotify does even now, while I torrent/share/sample/remix/cover their entire collection?
  - sojuz151 3y ago
    For convince? There is a single app with all the music, recommendations, and everything. Also, Spotify would be far cheaper. Most people would just use the app with the biggest catalogue, and not a single dime would go to the artists.
PicassoCTs 3y ago
And lower resistance to that becoming reality, by allowing established copyright to happily smolder on.. its just new works. Worked perfectly well with driver licenses in the EU. Old folks kept all the licenses, the young pay through the noose for every variation. Zero resistance to that policy change.
contravariant 3y ago
Destroying the DMCA will go quite a way in improving the whole DRM situation, but frankly we're at the point where we need to fight back hard. We're heading in a direction where nobody can truly own their own devices, because some people want to be absolutely sure no unauthorized (e.g. free, open source) software runs on it, because god forbid anyone should have any agency. We should make clear that copyright is about publishing not using and that any usability infringements are infringements on ownership i.e. stealing.
- Chris_Newton 3y ago
  I’d be in favour of excluding certain types of work from copyright protection entirely. Copyright isn’t there to create a barrier to interoperability or a way to artificially prevent competition in markets, so IMHO things like data formats and APIs should not be copyrightable. This isn’t to say that no real creative work is involved in producing those things, only that the damage to society from allowing them to be protected in this way is too great. Curiously, the US does recognise this concept to an extent in its legal treatment of fonts, but unfortunately that remains the exception rather than the rule, and even that exception is not recognised in the global copyright treaties. There is still a long list of software and hardware that is protected from otherwise normal competition by repurposing copyright to prevent things like easily exporting a user’s own data to use with different software or swapping out a failed hardware product for an after-market alternative that wasn’t made by the original manufacturer. In this respect, copyright now acts like bad patents, subverting the original intent and corrupting any reasonable moral/economic arguments behind it, and instead merely providing a legal weapon for powerful incumbents to inhibit creative work it was supposed to encourage.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    I don't think API copyright is recognized, even in the U.S. Logically speaking it shouldn't constitute a copyrightable work, but you never know sometimes. The documentation could be considered copyrightable, though you could just reverse engineer it. It's kind of the same category as fonts and recipes, which you can figure out by inspection mostly. If you want to protect something like that then a patent might be in order, though let's not get into that mess...
rich_sasha 3y ago
These things are not unrelated. The author can only sell their rights for a sizeable chunk of money precisely because the big corpo can then milk the profits. You take that away, and suddenly creating valuable "content" doesn't pay.
- dmurray 3y ago
  Historically (and now, for the most part) books were copyright the author, but a large of the profits accrued to the publisher. That system worked fine.
  - Alpha3031 3y ago
    Would be nice if a higher proportion of the profits accrued to the author though.
- f1shy 3y ago
  It do pays. Means more work maybe. Doing recitals, or whatever…
- kibwen 3y ago
  People were creating art for thousands of years before copyright became perpetual. People were creating art for thousands of years before their art became feasibly monetizable. Hell, people were creating art for thousands of years before the concept of money even existed. I harbor precisely zero concern that shortening copyright to a "mere" 28 years will suddenly cause all human capacity for art to evaporate.
  - melagonster 3y ago
    but this is first time authors and musicians can get their money
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      I'm currently reading about how folks who produced & performed 14th century plays supported themselves. So much that govs took in a healthy amount of taxes.
heliodor 3y ago
You talk about moral but I don't see in your proposal what's moral about not allowing two entities to trade things fair and square. To see what I mean, it rubs me the wrong way when I buy a used car and lose the warranty by doing so.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I don't see in your proposal what's moral about not allowing two entities to trade things fair and square. I'm not sure I follow your point. Copyright operates by preventing trade. If something is under copyright, ~every person possible is banned from freely trading that thing.
  - heliodor 3y ago
    You're trading the copyright itself. But you're proposal would ban that.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > it rubs me the wrong way when I buy a used car and lose the warranty by doing so. That is because the warranty grantor chose to write that into the warranty, is it not? Or do you see someone else being the cause?
  - heliodor 3y ago
    I wasn't asking for an explanation. Just pointing out it feels wrong. Same way, it would feel wrong to have copyright protection and have it go away if the item is sold to someone else.
Buttons840 3y ago
What do you mean by 14 + 14? (Why not just say 28?)
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  14 years by default, then an additional 14 if you renew it.
- gwd 3y ago
  Default 14 years copyright, an extra 14 years if explicitly renewed. The explicit renewal was required when the Constitution was written; and renewal remained a requirement for some time, which is why (for example) many of Philip K. Dick's stories from the 50's are considered to be in the public domain (as I understand it). The current regime for individual creators is automatic life + 70 years, which is just way too long. For example, Lewis Carroll died in 1898; if the current regime had been in place, Disney would have had to get permission from Carroll's estate to make Alice in Wonderland all the way through 1968.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  I believe the idea is that if the copyright holder doesn't care enough to renew, it'll enter the public domain faster.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. And then, dismantle the patent system just as well. Particularly "patent trolls" that just sit on patents and don't even actively license them at all are a scourge on innovation, and companies like Qualcomm that do use their patents but refuse to license them in a way that can be described as "reasonable" to anyone but lawyers aren't much better. Patents used to be a good thing but have devolved into just another way for the largest players in capitalism to bully competition, and (like copyright) it incentivizes predatory rent seeking behavior over what's healthy for society at large.
- kibwen 3y ago
  We'd be gloriously ecstatic if the copyright system was only as broken as the patent system. At least parents expire after 20 years.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    If this is true, it's weird how on HN people tend to be more warm to the idea of patent abolishment even though it's actually less broken than copyright.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Because copyright has enough fair-use bypasses that it actually doesn't impede people that much, and where fair-use doesn't apply (e.g. in music with remixes), there is a relatively working and reasonably fair and accessible system that's been established for many decades. It's not perfect as cases like the TV show "Cold Case" demonstrated that wasn't ever distributed on VHS/DVD due to licensing issues involving the soundtracks [1], but these are rare. And even if you stretch the boundaries of the law too much, unless you're a large-scale commercial infringer, it's a few hundreds to a few thousands of dollars in fines and that's it. Patents however? There's reports about lawsuits just about every month or two here on HN [2], more than enough cases of small shops getting sued left and right - and even corporate giants like Apple are virtually defenceless in patent courts. Software patents make the issue even worse. On top of that, patents are useless against China. The only thing Western companies can (and regularly) do is to prevent the sale of infringing stuff in Western markets, but no one in China and many other places of the world gives any fuck about Western patents. Another issue - particularly in pharmaceuticals - is: even if you patent a molecule, say an insulin derivative, you don't have to patent and thus reveal how you produce the stuff. That means that even after the patent for a specific variety of insulin has expired, a generics competitor still can't readily use that patent because the precise steps of manufacture are still proprietary. Meanwhile, the original manufacturer just makes a tiny variation of the insulin molecule, ceases production of the old one, and charges "new medication" prices from insurances because it's technically not the old medication any more. It worked in the past for simple, chemically synthesizable molecules, but it doesn't work for the more complex stuff that needs GMOs as a production/harvest vector. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Case#Home_media_and_streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Case#Home_media_and_strea... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=patent%20lawsuit&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
zugi 3y ago
Mostly agreed, but can you elaborate on the "exception"? Why should selling the copyright extend its total duration from 28 to 42 years? I'd be fine with just a fixed 28-year duration of all copyrights. That way you don't have to worry about whether the original author (who could be a company) is dead or alive.
- danaris 3y ago
  You have misread the GP. Their "exception" is the exact opposite: if the copyright is sold, its total duration cannot exceed 28 years, while if it is retained by the original (human) creator, it can extend to 42 years.
  - zugi 3y ago
    I see, thanks for the clarification. A fixed 28-year duration would be shorter and simpler.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I think the idea is that individuals who grow their own business benefit longer from their creation than a billion dollar company you sell it to. So it's a way to incentivize more entrepreneurs and less aquisitions that conglomerate everything towards BigCo.
ForHackernews 3y ago
> Of course, some people just want free shit. People deserve free shit. If it costs ~$0.00 to copy something, the morally just thing to do is to give everyone who wants it a copy. If we could generate infinite socks for free, it would be outrageous to tolerate anyone living with cold, blistery feet. The only reason copyright exists is to incentivize the creation of new shit. If we need to fund sock R&D, maybe we need a revenue stream for that.
- jpc0 3y ago
  Please let me know your address, I will send you storage medium and you copy all contents of your hard drive please.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    That's a privacy violation. Different things.
    - jpc0 3y ago
      The property you own or rent is not private information. I never said the address needs to be your home address, you could send a PO Box register to a shell company and have a hobo pick it up and transport it across the country for you if anonymity is an issue but privacy certianly isn't an issue here.
      - CaptainFever 3y ago
        I was referring to the hard drive part. Though yes, this would be more of an anonymity concern.
        jpc0 3y ago
        Ah that would be true, I didn't have your private files in mind, more code, audio tracks, movies, series, artwork ( I want them monkeys ) you get the drift. Biggest one for this audience would be code (since in high likelihood if you have the other's its likely pirated unless you are streaming your own ripped media ) if you would even be allowed to redistribute the code you have written, you probably would have some deep seated issue eith just handing it off to some stranger for free unless of course, you like me, are a big proponent of OSS. But even then I have several proprietary codebases that I own but sure wouldn't share willingly.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
Which political candidate/party do I vote for to make this happen?
- swayvil 3y ago
  We have the freedom to choose among the options that they allow us.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    What's more frustrating is that things like copyright terms are often part of trade agreements (negotiated in secret). So you don't get any say in what they are in your own country AND they get forced down the throats of other countries if they want to participate in the global economy.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    It's even better. Partyism is baked right into to local governments who administer and fund party elections protect party power thru primary voting restrictions - and then by doing all that gift parties a veneer of gov authority (which helps lock out competition).
  - iti7 3y ago
    Fortunately humans age out of life. Millennials and GenZ that grew up on the web are sticking to center and center-left political positions. Political policy of the day that deflates their buying power of necessities not just PS5, is not endearing them to preserve the status quo. Electoral turnovers flush corruption and improve economic power for general public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766 https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766 The drop off in allegiance to religion since the 00s has broken thousands of years of socialized obligation to maintain a specific historical story. Our brains devalue sources of information after a certain amount of time: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen-neuroscience https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen... It’s been roughly 15 years since the cloud app boom really took off with users, people are tired of social media. Seems likely this trend of getting sick of the same old holds throughout life. Lack of obligation to historical story is revealing interesting things about our ebbs and flows. See also dwindling interest in comic book movies, a trend that took off with iron man… 15 years ago iPhones -> goggles within a similar timeframe 15 years before that, in the early 90s the information super highway was taking off 15 years before that we got sick of the oil crisis triggered by policy 15-ish years before Reagan (3-5 year margin of error) Thomas Jefferson is said to have written the Constitution ought to be rewritten every 19 (15+4) years or else the dead rule by fiat decree. Today we find the philosophy is embedded in our biology.
Lerc 3y ago
The underlying principle for all laws should be that they should serve society, not individuals. Unfortunately influence is more often wielded by individuals. I think this causes an inevitable drift away from societal benefit but there are people pushing against that tide. It is rather odd seeing a such a visceral reaction to a tweet that is, in essence, true. Copyright exists for the reason you give, and that's what the tweet is alluding to. I think we should always be reassessing the reasons for our laws. I'm inclined to think that while copyright is "a monetization strategy that enables some information related business models at the expense of others" It is one that overall benefits society, albeit I would also like to see changes along the lines of what you suggest. Having said that I don't think it inevitable that it will always be the case. Should there be one-day a post scarcity world where no-one is required to earn money to survive, perhaps it would be better to make all information un-owned. I am put in mind of a map I once saw showing the world map stretched to show an even population density, and then the birthplaces of the greatest intellectuals and artists that the world has produced. Realized creativity came from where the money already was. Vast populations of poor regions would have been producing individuals with a similar potential. Potential that went unrealized. That may seem unrelated to the topic of copyright, but I'm not sure it is. If we are to make decisions about which way we are headed, it is worth thinking about where we could go.
alberth 3y ago
> ”So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.” The root of your argument seems to be that the public has a right to free access of someone’s work, why?
- hn_acker 3y ago
  I think what LocalH was referring to by "rightful free access" was that copyrighted works are supposed to fall into the public domain after the copyright term expires. The public is entitled to unrestricted access to works whose copyright terms have expired. Excessively long copyright terms impeded that access. In the US, copyright is the means to incentivize people to make creative works. Copyright is a limited-time exclusive right. When that right expires, the First Amendment is no longer constrained by the Copyright Clause. (I wrote more about the Copyright Clause in a different comment [1].) In other words, sharing and modifying public domain works is protected by freedom of expression. Copyright is a social contract. The author receives: exclusive copying rights to the author's creative works. The public receives: the author's creative works at some point in the future, though the author (or rather the rightsholders, should the author partially, temporarily, or permanently give the copyright to other people) can set licenses for certain people (such as buyers and remixers) to access/copy the works now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812469
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I don't think anyone minds a shorter copyright length. the 100 years crap is way too long. But that doesn't mean DMCA as a whole needs to expire. It just needs to be reeled the hell in and especially punish blatantly false claims.
    - hn_acker 3y ago
      Copyright law in general, including online-oriented parts such as DMCA 512 (17 U.S. Code § 512 [1])), needs meaningful penalties for false copyright infringement claims (including automated mass reports with negligent/no human review) that are no more than one magnitude smaller than what would be the corresponding penalties for infringement. (Equal magnitude might intimidate too many lower-wealth authors from filing rightful infringement suits.) Currently, successfully fighting an infringement lawsuit with a fair use defense will still ruin you because of the attorney fees and court fees. A DMCA infringement notice requires only good faith from the rightsholder even if the claim turns out to be patently false, yet someone filing a counter notice against a false infringement claim does so under penalty of perjury [2]. Meanwhile, the current safe harbor standard requires service providers with user-uploaded content to remove material as soon as possible solely based on a claim of infringement with respect to that material [1]: > upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity. Again, these infringement notices can be automated or BS [3] (whether intentional or not), but the service provider has to comply to avoid third-party liability. The obvious result is overblocking. The safe harbor standard should be modified to require the service provider to take down allegedly infringing content only after the service provider receives an according court order to do so. That would be a huge improvement to DMCA 512 on its own, though it shouldn't be the only one. DMCA 1201 (17 U.S. Code § 1201 [4]) is unfixable in my opinion. That's the part on technical restrictions: bypassing technical restrictions to access copyrighted copyrighted material is treated as copyright infringement of that material, even when the actions the person does with the locked-down material wouldn't be infringing. For example, you can't modify DRMed software (requires bypassing the DRM) on your own computers i.e. the rightsholder has control over how your computer runs the software. Because of that, DMCA 1201 is one of the key obstacles to right to repair. (The US Copyright Office periodically evaluates requests for specific, narrow exceptions to DMCA 1201 which expire every three years. People have to ask for a small portion of their rights back every three years [5]. But as I mentioned, I don't think DMCA 1201 should exist at all, unlike with DMCA 512.) [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 [2] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/dmca-counter-notice-does-it-work-correct-erroneous-takedowns https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/dmca-counter-noti... [3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/04/google-takes-down-downloader-app-again-after-bullshit-dmca-complaint/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/04/google-takes-down-downlo... [4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 [5] https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Everything below this line is bonus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Both regular copyright law and the technical restrictions portions prohibit people from copying the files/software they bought for their personal use. Want to modify DRMed software on your own computer as I mentioned before? Double infringement. Want to copy music from a DRMed DVD to your computer or phone for easier listening? Double infringement. Want to copy a DRMed e-book so you can read it using a different app/e-reader? Double-infringement. Regular copyright law alone has yet more problems than those within DMCA 512. For example, copying copyrighted works to preserve them is infringement, even if the preservationists/archivists would never publish any copies until after the copyright terms expire. Combined with excessively long copyright terms (life of the author plus 70 years for most works in the US, flat 120/95 years regardless of death in a few cases [B1]), preservationists are forced to let copyright material on old media disintegrate while copyright holders do nothing about it [B2]: > The verdict is in: adding an extra 20 years to the US copyright term was a “big mistake.” This is not a quote from someone who is equivocal about copyright; it is a quote from the former head of our Copyright Office. Another former Director of the Copyright Office proposed shortening the copyright term by 20 years unless copyright owners “assert their continued interest in exploiting the work by registering with the Copyright Office in a timely manner.” Copyright holders such as Disney could readily secure “the full benefit of the additional twenty years,” while all of the works no longer being exploited would enter the public domain, fulfilling copyright’s goal of benefiting the public. > Indeed, there is a consensus among policymakers, economists, and academics that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits. Why? The benefits are minuscule—economists (including five Nobel laureates) have shown that term extension does not spur additional creativity. At the same time, it causes enormous harm, locking away millions of older works that are no longer generating any revenue for the copyright holders. Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits. (See studies like the Hargreaves Review commissioned by the UK government, empirical comparisons of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works, and economic studies of the effects of copyright.) [B1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Duration_of_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... [B2] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ By the way, Tom Scott has an insightful video called "YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is." [B3] on problems with copyright law which exist worldwide. One of the issues Scott discusses is misplaced ire toward YouTube's takedown system. [B3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
127361 3y ago
Restricting who can profit from work you created sounds reasonable to me. I don't have any problem with that aspect of copyright.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
Mostly agree. You are missing the economic jargon as to why copyright is bad (it causes deadweight loss to society by arbitrarily pricing above marginal cost) and why it might be good (maybe more creative work production because profits from works are higher). From the economics springs the right tjing to do: minimize deadweight loss, which means always eyeing ways to reduce copyright while maintaining output. From that i would argue i stead ofa fixed term makerenewal cost exponential by term. I thibking setting term to 10 years, giving first term for free then swt renewal at 100^n for each additional n terms would do the trick and cause nearly all works to enter public domain after 1 or 2 terms and the enduri gly profitable stuff (i.e. mickey mouse type stuff) to be unprofitable to renew after 50 years or so, preserving the fantasy of a gargantuan paypff to stroke the egos of content creators.

by LocalH 3y ago

dexen 3y ago

I subscribe to your and broadly follow your arguments. It's also worth pointing out the speed of information propagation, speed of manufacturing, and speed of distribution & logistics has dramatically increased since 14+14 years was the pragmatic standard. At present, the same economic effect is achieved in much shorter cycles. Keeping economic and moral parity would entail shortening the protection times a fair bit.

loupol 3y ago

Agreed on all points, the tweet feels like an allergic reaction to what copyright has morphed into, which is a tool for big corporations to extract money from existing IP for an insanely long duration. But it's important to remember that no copyright at all would hurt small and medium creators immensely. Big corps could just pick things that are trending up, rip them off instantly and scale their ripoff much better thanks to their great workforce and marketing reach. That would create a big disincentive for independent creation of IP. Like you, I would just prefer if copyright was kept in place but its duration decreased drastically compared to now. It doesn't seem likely given the lobbying strength of the corporations that benefit from the current situation sadly.

LocalH 3y ago
The DMCA has also been abused far past its original intentions. It was basically originally intended to stop people copying DVDs. Now it's used to protect these asinine little "digital locks" inside of everything that prevents independent repair by pairing parts using cryptographic exchanges.
myaccountonhn 3y ago
That’s what they already do today. OpenAI is an obvious example in our industry but another one is where companies steal clothing designs from indigenous communities all over America. These people can not really defend or assert themselves in US copyright system, so US companies just engage in full on resource extraction without any compensation.
- sveitly 3y ago
  New or traditional stuff? Copyright shouldn't be how you defend your traditional stuff. It's more something for the Protected Designation of Origin / PDO
- chrismcb 3y ago
  Clothing design is difficult to copyright. I'm pretty sure just about anyone can defend themselves in the US copyright system. Sure it becomes difficult when you are a small fry (whether indigenous or not) against a big fish, but it can be done.
sharperguy 3y ago
As a consumer why would I pay spotify $15 a month for ripped off content that doesn't even go to the artist, when I can just paypal my favourite artists $5 now and again, giving them infinitely more revenue from me than spotify does even now, while I torrent/share/sample/remix/cover their entire collection?
- sojuz151 3y ago
  For convince? There is a single app with all the music, recommendations, and everything. Also, Spotify would be far cheaper. Most people would just use the app with the biggest catalogue, and not a single dime would go to the artists.

PicassoCTs 3y ago

And lower resistance to that becoming reality, by allowing established copyright to happily smolder on.. its just new works. Worked perfectly well with driver licenses in the EU. Old folks kept all the licenses, the young pay through the noose for every variation. Zero resistance to that policy change.

contravariant 3y ago

Destroying the DMCA will go quite a way in improving the whole DRM situation, but frankly we're at the point where we need to fight back hard. We're heading in a direction where nobody can truly own their own devices, because some people want to be absolutely sure no unauthorized (e.g. free, open source) software runs on it, because god forbid anyone should have any agency. We should make clear that copyright is about publishing not using and that any usability infringements are infringements on ownership i.e. stealing.

Chris_Newton 3y ago
I’d be in favour of excluding certain types of work from copyright protection entirely. Copyright isn’t there to create a barrier to interoperability or a way to artificially prevent competition in markets, so IMHO things like data formats and APIs should not be copyrightable. This isn’t to say that no real creative work is involved in producing those things, only that the damage to society from allowing them to be protected in this way is too great. Curiously, the US does recognise this concept to an extent in its legal treatment of fonts, but unfortunately that remains the exception rather than the rule, and even that exception is not recognised in the global copyright treaties. There is still a long list of software and hardware that is protected from otherwise normal competition by repurposing copyright to prevent things like easily exporting a user’s own data to use with different software or swapping out a failed hardware product for an after-market alternative that wasn’t made by the original manufacturer. In this respect, copyright now acts like bad patents, subverting the original intent and corrupting any reasonable moral/economic arguments behind it, and instead merely providing a legal weapon for powerful incumbents to inhibit creative work it was supposed to encourage.
- contravariant 3y ago
  I don't think API copyright is recognized, even in the U.S. Logically speaking it shouldn't constitute a copyrightable work, but you never know sometimes. The documentation could be considered copyrightable, though you could just reverse engineer it. It's kind of the same category as fonts and recipes, which you can figure out by inspection mostly. If you want to protect something like that then a patent might be in order, though let's not get into that mess...

rich_sasha 3y ago

These things are not unrelated. The author can only sell their rights for a sizeable chunk of money precisely because the big corpo can then milk the profits. You take that away, and suddenly creating valuable "content" doesn't pay.

dmurray 3y ago
Historically (and now, for the most part) books were copyright the author, but a large of the profits accrued to the publisher. That system worked fine.
- Alpha3031 3y ago
  Would be nice if a higher proportion of the profits accrued to the author though.
f1shy 3y ago
It do pays. Means more work maybe. Doing recitals, or whatever…
kibwen 3y ago
People were creating art for thousands of years before copyright became perpetual. People were creating art for thousands of years before their art became feasibly monetizable. Hell, people were creating art for thousands of years before the concept of money even existed. I harbor precisely zero concern that shortening copyright to a "mere" 28 years will suddenly cause all human capacity for art to evaporate.
- melagonster 3y ago
  but this is first time authors and musicians can get their money
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    I'm currently reading about how folks who produced & performed 14th century plays supported themselves. So much that govs took in a healthy amount of taxes.

heliodor 3y ago

You talk about moral but I don't see in your proposal what's moral about not allowing two entities to trade things fair and square. To see what I mean, it rubs me the wrong way when I buy a used car and lose the warranty by doing so.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> I don't see in your proposal what's moral about not allowing two entities to trade things fair and square. I'm not sure I follow your point. Copyright operates by preventing trade. If something is under copyright, ~every person possible is banned from freely trading that thing.
- heliodor 3y ago
  You're trading the copyright itself. But you're proposal would ban that.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> it rubs me the wrong way when I buy a used car and lose the warranty by doing so. That is because the warranty grantor chose to write that into the warranty, is it not? Or do you see someone else being the cause?
- heliodor 3y ago
  I wasn't asking for an explanation. Just pointing out it feels wrong. Same way, it would feel wrong to have copyright protection and have it go away if the item is sold to someone else.

Buttons840 3y ago

What do you mean by 14 + 14? (Why not just say 28?)

CaptainFever 3y ago
14 years by default, then an additional 14 if you renew it.
gwd 3y ago
Default 14 years copyright, an extra 14 years if explicitly renewed. The explicit renewal was required when the Constitution was written; and renewal remained a requirement for some time, which is why (for example) many of Philip K. Dick's stories from the 50's are considered to be in the public domain (as I understand it). The current regime for individual creators is automatic life + 70 years, which is just way too long. For example, Lewis Carroll died in 1898; if the current regime had been in place, Disney would have had to get permission from Carroll's estate to make Alice in Wonderland all the way through 1968.
xboxnolifes 3y ago
I believe the idea is that if the copyright holder doesn't care enough to renew, it'll enter the public domain faster.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Restore copyright to 14+14 years (with a single exception, the original artist and only the original artist gets 28+14, if they sell their rights to the work then the recipient only gets 14+14). Destroy the DMCA. And then, dismantle the patent system just as well. Particularly "patent trolls" that just sit on patents and don't even actively license them at all are a scourge on innovation, and companies like Qualcomm that do use their patents but refuse to license them in a way that can be described as "reasonable" to anyone but lawyers aren't much better. Patents used to be a good thing but have devolved into just another way for the largest players in capitalism to bully competition, and (like copyright) it incentivizes predatory rent seeking behavior over what's healthy for society at large.

kibwen 3y ago
We'd be gloriously ecstatic if the copyright system was only as broken as the patent system. At least parents expire after 20 years.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  If this is true, it's weird how on HN people tend to be more warm to the idea of patent abolishment even though it's actually less broken than copyright.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Because copyright has enough fair-use bypasses that it actually doesn't impede people that much, and where fair-use doesn't apply (e.g. in music with remixes), there is a relatively working and reasonably fair and accessible system that's been established for many decades. It's not perfect as cases like the TV show "Cold Case" demonstrated that wasn't ever distributed on VHS/DVD due to licensing issues involving the soundtracks [1], but these are rare. And even if you stretch the boundaries of the law too much, unless you're a large-scale commercial infringer, it's a few hundreds to a few thousands of dollars in fines and that's it. Patents however? There's reports about lawsuits just about every month or two here on HN [2], more than enough cases of small shops getting sued left and right - and even corporate giants like Apple are virtually defenceless in patent courts. Software patents make the issue even worse. On top of that, patents are useless against China. The only thing Western companies can (and regularly) do is to prevent the sale of infringing stuff in Western markets, but no one in China and many other places of the world gives any fuck about Western patents. Another issue - particularly in pharmaceuticals - is: even if you patent a molecule, say an insulin derivative, you don't have to patent and thus reveal how you produce the stuff. That means that even after the patent for a specific variety of insulin has expired, a generics competitor still can't readily use that patent because the precise steps of manufacture are still proprietary. Meanwhile, the original manufacturer just makes a tiny variation of the insulin molecule, ceases production of the old one, and charges "new medication" prices from insurances because it's technically not the old medication any more. It worked in the past for simple, chemically synthesizable molecules, but it doesn't work for the more complex stuff that needs GMOs as a production/harvest vector. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Case#Home_media_and_streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Case#Home_media_and_strea... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=patent%20lawsuit&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

zugi 3y ago

Mostly agreed, but can you elaborate on the "exception"? Why should selling the copyright extend its total duration from 28 to 42 years? I'd be fine with just a fixed 28-year duration of all copyrights. That way you don't have to worry about whether the original author (who could be a company) is dead or alive.

danaris 3y ago
You have misread the GP. Their "exception" is the exact opposite: if the copyright is sold, its total duration cannot exceed 28 years, while if it is retained by the original (human) creator, it can extend to 42 years.
- zugi 3y ago
  I see, thanks for the clarification. A fixed 28-year duration would be shorter and simpler.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I think the idea is that individuals who grow their own business benefit longer from their creation than a billion dollar company you sell it to. So it's a way to incentivize more entrepreneurs and less aquisitions that conglomerate everything towards BigCo.

ForHackernews 3y ago

> Of course, some people just want free shit. People deserve free shit. If it costs ~$0.00 to copy something, the morally just thing to do is to give everyone who wants it a copy. If we could generate infinite socks for free, it would be outrageous to tolerate anyone living with cold, blistery feet. The only reason copyright exists is to incentivize the creation of new shit. If we need to fund sock R&D, maybe we need a revenue stream for that.

jpc0 3y ago
Please let me know your address, I will send you storage medium and you copy all contents of your hard drive please.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  That's a privacy violation. Different things.
  - jpc0 3y ago
    The property you own or rent is not private information. I never said the address needs to be your home address, you could send a PO Box register to a shell company and have a hobo pick it up and transport it across the country for you if anonymity is an issue but privacy certianly isn't an issue here.
    - CaptainFever 3y ago
      I was referring to the hard drive part. Though yes, this would be more of an anonymity concern.
      - jpc0 3y ago
        Ah that would be true, I didn't have your private files in mind, more code, audio tracks, movies, series, artwork ( I want them monkeys ) you get the drift. Biggest one for this audience would be code (since in high likelihood if you have the other's its likely pirated unless you are streaming your own ripped media ) if you would even be allowed to redistribute the code you have written, you probably would have some deep seated issue eith just handing it off to some stranger for free unless of course, you like me, are a big proponent of OSS. But even then I have several proprietary codebases that I own but sure wouldn't share willingly.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

Which political candidate/party do I vote for to make this happen?

swayvil 3y ago
We have the freedom to choose among the options that they allow us.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  What's more frustrating is that things like copyright terms are often part of trade agreements (negotiated in secret). So you don't get any say in what they are in your own country AND they get forced down the throats of other countries if they want to participate in the global economy.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  It's even better. Partyism is baked right into to local governments who administer and fund party elections protect party power thru primary voting restrictions - and then by doing all that gift parties a veneer of gov authority (which helps lock out competition).
- iti7 3y ago
  Fortunately humans age out of life. Millennials and GenZ that grew up on the web are sticking to center and center-left political positions. Political policy of the day that deflates their buying power of necessities not just PS5, is not endearing them to preserve the status quo. Electoral turnovers flush corruption and improve economic power for general public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766 https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766 The drop off in allegiance to religion since the 00s has broken thousands of years of socialized obligation to maintain a specific historical story. Our brains devalue sources of information after a certain amount of time: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen-neuroscience https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen... It’s been roughly 15 years since the cloud app boom really took off with users, people are tired of social media. Seems likely this trend of getting sick of the same old holds throughout life. Lack of obligation to historical story is revealing interesting things about our ebbs and flows. See also dwindling interest in comic book movies, a trend that took off with iron man… 15 years ago iPhones -> goggles within a similar timeframe 15 years before that, in the early 90s the information super highway was taking off 15 years before that we got sick of the oil crisis triggered by policy 15-ish years before Reagan (3-5 year margin of error) Thomas Jefferson is said to have written the Constitution ought to be rewritten every 19 (15+4) years or else the dead rule by fiat decree. Today we find the philosophy is embedded in our biology.

Lerc 3y ago

The underlying principle for all laws should be that they should serve society, not individuals. Unfortunately influence is more often wielded by individuals. I think this causes an inevitable drift away from societal benefit but there are people pushing against that tide. It is rather odd seeing a such a visceral reaction to a tweet that is, in essence, true. Copyright exists for the reason you give, and that's what the tweet is alluding to. I think we should always be reassessing the reasons for our laws. I'm inclined to think that while copyright is "a monetization strategy that enables some information related business models at the expense of others" It is one that overall benefits society, albeit I would also like to see changes along the lines of what you suggest. Having said that I don't think it inevitable that it will always be the case. Should there be one-day a post scarcity world where no-one is required to earn money to survive, perhaps it would be better to make all information un-owned. I am put in mind of a map I once saw showing the world map stretched to show an even population density, and then the birthplaces of the greatest intellectuals and artists that the world has produced. Realized creativity came from where the money already was. Vast populations of poor regions would have been producing individuals with a similar potential. Potential that went unrealized. That may seem unrelated to the topic of copyright, but I'm not sure it is. If we are to make decisions about which way we are headed, it is worth thinking about where we could go.

alberth 3y ago

> ”So you have a situation where a person creates a work, a large rights owner buys it up, and then they get to milk all the benefits while preventing the public from having their rightful free access.” The root of your argument seems to be that the public has a right to free access of someone’s work, why?

hn_acker 3y ago
I think what LocalH was referring to by "rightful free access" was that copyrighted works are supposed to fall into the public domain after the copyright term expires. The public is entitled to unrestricted access to works whose copyright terms have expired. Excessively long copyright terms impeded that access. In the US, copyright is the means to incentivize people to make creative works. Copyright is a limited-time exclusive right. When that right expires, the First Amendment is no longer constrained by the Copyright Clause. (I wrote more about the Copyright Clause in a different comment [1].) In other words, sharing and modifying public domain works is protected by freedom of expression. Copyright is a social contract. The author receives: exclusive copying rights to the author's creative works. The public receives: the author's creative works at some point in the future, though the author (or rather the rightsholders, should the author partially, temporarily, or permanently give the copyright to other people) can set licenses for certain people (such as buyers and remixers) to access/copy the works now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812469
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I don't think anyone minds a shorter copyright length. the 100 years crap is way too long. But that doesn't mean DMCA as a whole needs to expire. It just needs to be reeled the hell in and especially punish blatantly false claims.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    Copyright law in general, including online-oriented parts such as DMCA 512 (17 U.S. Code § 512 [1])), needs meaningful penalties for false copyright infringement claims (including automated mass reports with negligent/no human review) that are no more than one magnitude smaller than what would be the corresponding penalties for infringement. (Equal magnitude might intimidate too many lower-wealth authors from filing rightful infringement suits.) Currently, successfully fighting an infringement lawsuit with a fair use defense will still ruin you because of the attorney fees and court fees. A DMCA infringement notice requires only good faith from the rightsholder even if the claim turns out to be patently false, yet someone filing a counter notice against a false infringement claim does so under penalty of perjury [2]. Meanwhile, the current safe harbor standard requires service providers with user-uploaded content to remove material as soon as possible solely based on a claim of infringement with respect to that material [1]: > upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity. Again, these infringement notices can be automated or BS [3] (whether intentional or not), but the service provider has to comply to avoid third-party liability. The obvious result is overblocking. The safe harbor standard should be modified to require the service provider to take down allegedly infringing content only after the service provider receives an according court order to do so. That would be a huge improvement to DMCA 512 on its own, though it shouldn't be the only one. DMCA 1201 (17 U.S. Code § 1201 [4]) is unfixable in my opinion. That's the part on technical restrictions: bypassing technical restrictions to access copyrighted copyrighted material is treated as copyright infringement of that material, even when the actions the person does with the locked-down material wouldn't be infringing. For example, you can't modify DRMed software (requires bypassing the DRM) on your own computers i.e. the rightsholder has control over how your computer runs the software. Because of that, DMCA 1201 is one of the key obstacles to right to repair. (The US Copyright Office periodically evaluates requests for specific, narrow exceptions to DMCA 1201 which expire every three years. People have to ask for a small portion of their rights back every three years [5]. But as I mentioned, I don't think DMCA 1201 should exist at all, unlike with DMCA 512.) [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 [2] https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/dmca-counter-notice-does-it-work-correct-erroneous-takedowns https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2017/01/dmca-counter-noti... [3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/04/google-takes-down-downloader-app-again-after-bullshit-dmca-complaint/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/04/google-takes-down-downlo... [4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 [5] https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Everything below this line is bonus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Both regular copyright law and the technical restrictions portions prohibit people from copying the files/software they bought for their personal use. Want to modify DRMed software on your own computer as I mentioned before? Double infringement. Want to copy music from a DRMed DVD to your computer or phone for easier listening? Double infringement. Want to copy a DRMed e-book so you can read it using a different app/e-reader? Double-infringement. Regular copyright law alone has yet more problems than those within DMCA 512. For example, copying copyrighted works to preserve them is infringement, even if the preservationists/archivists would never publish any copies until after the copyright terms expire. Combined with excessively long copyright terms (life of the author plus 70 years for most works in the US, flat 120/95 years regardless of death in a few cases [B1]), preservationists are forced to let copyright material on old media disintegrate while copyright holders do nothing about it [B2]: > The verdict is in: adding an extra 20 years to the US copyright term was a “big mistake.” This is not a quote from someone who is equivocal about copyright; it is a quote from the former head of our Copyright Office. Another former Director of the Copyright Office proposed shortening the copyright term by 20 years unless copyright owners “assert their continued interest in exploiting the work by registering with the Copyright Office in a timely manner.” Copyright holders such as Disney could readily secure “the full benefit of the additional twenty years,” while all of the works no longer being exploited would enter the public domain, fulfilling copyright’s goal of benefiting the public. > Indeed, there is a consensus among policymakers, economists, and academics that lengthy copyright extensions impose costs that far outweigh their benefits. Why? The benefits are minuscule—economists (including five Nobel laureates) have shown that term extension does not spur additional creativity. At the same time, it causes enormous harm, locking away millions of older works that are no longer generating any revenue for the copyright holders. Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them. The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off limits. (See studies like the Hargreaves Review commissioned by the UK government, empirical comparisons of the availability of copyrighted works and public domain works, and economic studies of the effects of copyright.) [B1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Duration_of_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... [B2] https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ By the way, Tom Scott has an insightful video called "YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is." [B3] on problems with copyright law which exist worldwide. One of the issues Scott discusses is misplaced ire toward YouTube's takedown system. [B3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

127361 3y ago

Restricting who can profit from work you created sounds reasonable to me. I don't have any problem with that aspect of copyright.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

Mostly agree. You are missing the economic jargon as to why copyright is bad (it causes deadweight loss to society by arbitrarily pricing above marginal cost) and why it might be good (maybe more creative work production because profits from works are higher). From the economics springs the right tjing to do: minimize deadweight loss, which means always eyeing ways to reduce copyright while maintaining output. From that i would argue i stead ofa fixed term makerenewal cost exponential by term. I thibking setting term to 10 years, giving first term for free then swt renewal at 100^n for each additional n terms would do the trick and cause nearly all works to enter public domain after 1 or 2 terms and the enduri gly profitable stuff (i.e. mickey mouse type stuff) to be unprofitable to renew after 50 years or so, preserving the fantasy of a gargantuan paypff to stroke the egos of content creators.