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70 years feels so long for movie or book. I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies but damn it’s 3 generations. Something my grand gr

70 years feels so long for movie or book. I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies but damn it’s 3 generations. Something my grand grand father may have seen, that’s insane. 25 year, a single generation would make sense. I’d argue that by then all the money would have been made and you would allow new generation to grow up with the greatest art from previous generation, it would be like a virtuous circle. Next generation would improve based on previous one And so on.

adamc 2y ago
I think that's too short. Lifetime of the author or a min. 50 years would make sense to me. Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable. The crazy long Disney thing, though, is what it is because of lobbying muscle.
- deleted 2y ago
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- ronsor 2y ago
  I think that's still too long when copyright was originally supposed to be a compromise between society and the author, not a indefinite guarantee for an author. I understand the concern of providing for family, but keep in mind that the average person works continuously to provide for their family and has to be responsible enough to save money. It is not society's responsibility to ensure that; and alternatively if it is to be society's responsibility, there are better mechanisms than copyright.
  - account42 2y ago
    Exactly, copyright was never meant to be a retirement plan or to act as wellfare for orphans.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable. I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to continue to make money after you are dead. Earn enough during your lifetime to provide for your surviving daughters, sure, but I don't like the idea of someone being able to posthumously put a gag on people's ability to express themselves just so that their kids can get a nice inheritance.
  - seizethecheese 2y ago
    Perhaps not, but the point of copyright is to provide incentive for creating work. Since earning beyond the grave is an incentive, there’s an argument to protect it (within limit). Another example is Grant’s autobiography, which he wrote as he was dying of throat cancer. No way he would have done that without copyright.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > No way he would have done that without copyright. Why not? For centuries people wrote books so that they would have a legacy and be remembered. They wrote because they felt it was the right thing to do, or because they wanted to control the narrative around their lives. Do you have any specific reason to believe that Grant wrote his autobiography to provide for his successors, rather than just to have written it? I understand the theory about incentivizing people to create, but honestly I'm not convinced that what we get from that deal is worth it. Too often it feels like extended copyright creates a similar set of incentives to advertising—sure, we get more works, but the best works would have been written even with a much shorter copyright because the author had something they wanted to say. The works that are being incentivized by long copyrights are the ones that we could do without.
      - Quillbert182 2y ago
        Grant wrote his autobiography pretty much entirely out of desperation to provide for his family after his death. He had lost everything he had in a Ponzi scheme and was heavily in debt as he was dying from cancer, and the autobiography was his last chance to make money for his family.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  his daughters were in their mid to late 20’s - wtf does he need to support them from his grave
  - lolinder 2y ago
    To be fair to him, this was an era where their ability to support themselves was limited—if not in practice at least by strong cultural stigma. The same cannot be said of most people today, and I therefore agree that it's a bad argument for long copyright terms in a modern context.
- modeless 2y ago
  Authors can provide for their children the same way the rest of us do. With the money they made while they were working.
  - seizethecheese 2y ago
    All of us working in development of any kind create value well into the future with our work. The only question is whether you monetize immediately with wages or with ownership
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I agree, with the caveat that a literary work can be seen as an asset that has value which pays out over time. It takes a large investment upfront and then pays out slowly. So having a limited ability to pass on that asset if you die prematurely seems only fair—you'd have the same option if you were building something physical—but we shouldn't use inheritance as an argument for longer copyright. The question of how long someone should be allowed to earn money from a work should be orthogonal from the question of whether that right to earn money should be inheritable. This is the flaw in life plus 70—it assumes that copyright should last indefinitely during one's lifetime and then provide for successors. I'd rather see a flat rate for how long we're comfortable locking up a work in copyright, successors or otherwise.
    - modeless 2y ago
      > It takes a large investment upfront and then pays out slowly Does it really? Sure, timeless classics pay out over a long period of time but they are by far the exception. I'll wager that the vast majority of copyrighted works make the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? (Essentially perpetual because almost none of the works created in my lifetime will ever pass out of copyright before I die)
      - lolinder 2y ago
        > the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? I agree. I think OP's proposal of a fixed term of 25 years is more than reasonable. All I'm saying is that it should be inheritable and not based on when the author dies.
- Brybry 2y ago
  The problem that I see is not the Mark Twains but the vast majority of other authors. Their works go out of print but they're still copyrighted so people can't legally reproduce them (for profit or otherwise). My grandfather was a published author with some success but he's dead and his stuff is no longer in print. No one in my family is going to see revenue from his work. No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now. Most books written in the 20th century are basically gone from public availability.[1][2] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m... [2] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works_Disappeared_-_Paul_Heald.pdf https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works...
  - xienze 2y ago
    > No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now. Does the family not have rights to those works? A copy of the books? Scan them and release them copyright free if you want the world to see them.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
  Drug parents are only 10 - 20 years, and it works great. The creator gets to make enough money to finance their next drug, and the public gets cheaper generics after a decade or two. There's no reason any other IP should be longer.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Agreed. I think lifetime of the author, or moderate fixed term in the case of untimely death or corporate copyright, is perfectly reasonable. 10-20 years is way too short, it does not give enough consideration to the author's rights.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable. Why is that reasonable? Why should someone's daughters get a free ride instead of having to work for a living like everyone else?
  - poulpy123 2y ago
    Are you in favor of forbidding inheritance to everyone or just for authors ?
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      We're not talking about inheritance of real property or money, we're talking about "IP rights" or "royalties". The two are not the same. Why should someone's kid get money from their parent's book decades after it's been published? No other profession has this perk.
      - redwall_hp 2y ago
        And, sure, why not. Let's have a 100% inheritance tax beyond a maybe a couple million in protected assets. If we want to pretend to have a meritocratic system, then we can't have that joke of a loophole creating dynastic wealth. Either we have a system where people earn wealth on merit, or we have a feudal aristocracy with extra steps. It can't be both.
      - poulpy123 2y ago
        Why should someone's kid get the house from their parents decades after it's been built? The issue of inheritance is the same for physical and immaterial assets
ronsor 2y ago
I'm going to designate this as the obligatory "copyright is far too long" subthread. In my opinion, the ideal length (if we are to have copyright) is between 10 and 15 years, at least if a work is already monetarily successful. If a work has yet to be monetarily successful, then we can allow up to 25 years for it in particular.
- modeless 2y ago
  Has anyone done a study on when copyrighted works make their money? I'm guessing that the vast majority of the income is made in the first decade after creation. Timeless classics are by far the exception. And for those, does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels? The creation that copyright was supposed to incentivize already happened. At that point society benefits when works go into the public domain so derivatives can flourish.
  - ronsor 2y ago
    > does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels? In my opinion, it doesn't. In creative and entertainment industries, the idea of practically indefinite royalties has been normalized, but no other industries has this*. For example, it would be strange to continue paying a construction company after your home has been built. *As far as I can remember. I'm open to correction here.
    - lionkor 2y ago
      any subscription service that doesn't deliver new value each day or month, like the Adobe suite(s)
      - ronsor 2y ago
        In the case of Adobe, you're paying for continuous updates and their added cloud services (or other functionality which requires their servers). Also Adobe's subscription pricing (per-month) is significantly less than the retail cost for a one-time purchase of their software without future updates. Meanwhile one does not pay for continuous updates to a particular novel or a movie. Even if they do pay for new installments in a series, they do so separately.
Aloisius 2y ago
The length should be no more than would be required to maximize the creation of works and not a moment longer. Long terms prevent the creation of derivative works which at an extreme could be reducing the number of works created as well as disincentivizing creators from creating new works if they've been especially successful early in their careers and decided to coast.
- thrance 2y ago
  Then I'd say the ideal length is probably zero. I don't buy that derivative works negatively impact revenue that much.
  - chipotle_coyote 2y ago
    Derivative works aren't really the primary problem copyright law was created to address. In the early days of novel publishing, it wasn't uncommon for a popular book an author had sold to a publisher on a royalty basis to just be reprinted by other publishers who kept all the money for themselves. It wasn't unheard of for the majority of an author's books to be published by people who weren't giving any money to them until the law stepped in. I think people have a tendency to focus on corporations and super-successful individual creators as the primary beneficiaries of copyright, and I get it, but George R.R. Martin should not be your yardstick: the long tail applies here. A lot of authors have books that might keep bringing in a thousand dollars or less a year in royalties over a couple decades; if those authors are able to put out a book a year, that "back catalogue" might end up being most of their writing income. And the rise of ebooks has probably created more authors in that boat, not less. The original US copyright act in 1790 set the term at 14 years, with a near-automatic extension of another 14 years granted upon request. I'd be happy enough going back to that, but I don't think I'd want to see less, honestly.
stephen_g 2y ago
Absolutely. There's also absolutely zero sense that if there's any term based on the lifetime of the authors, that it should extend a single day after their death. I'd definitely prefer a 20-30 year fixed term, but if it was going to be based on lifetime then it should only be until the death of the author.
- devsda 2y ago
  The problem with that is some ridiculous edge cases. Young book author agrees to a profit share agreement with publisher and works most of the time. Has an accidental death at launch party, his work is in public domain now, and the publisher & author's family are in trouble ? Or it simply makes publishers reluctant to work with old authors and be biased towards healthy young writers.
  - aucisson_masque 2y ago
    What's it got to see with publisher or family ? Publisher takes risk every time they publish book, sometimes they loose money sometimes they earn a lot. This wouldn't deter them from publishing young author, maybe even the opposite because statistically they would have more chance to live long. If I'm alive and I work, I provide for my family. If I'm dead then im not providing for my family anymore. why should it be different for authors ?
  - stephen_g 2y ago
    Yes that's why it shouldn't have any bearing at all on lifetime, and why I prefer a fixed term of 20-30 years.
  - criddell 2y ago
    I don't have particularly strong feelings on this particular issue, but I do take issue with worrying about edge cases. By definition, edge cases are infrequent and unlikely occurrences. Trying to account for every possibility is a way of making sure nothing ever changes. It's a form of perfect being the enemy of good. For this particular scenario, I would tell publishers and authors to take out a life or accidental death insurance policy.
nemo44x 2y ago
I disagree entirely in that I believe government shouldn’t determine this but rather the market. The rights to an intellectual property should be transferable/sold in perpetuity and at some point the work will become less and less valuable as newer works outcompete for attention. This will differ depending on how great the work was as judged by the market but it’s still the commanding force. Any particular time for transfer from market control to public domain is arbitrary. If it’s worth anything it should be traceable not stolen. Everything will eventually have too little demand to be defensible and control will be let go and at that point it becomes public domain because it became public domain.
- panja 2y ago
  If you want the market to determine then why do you need IP at all? That's just government intervention...
  - nemo44x 2y ago
    The government exists to protect the property of its citizens. You can’t have a reliable market without the threat of violence (prison, fines, etc) and judiciary from an authority and government is suitable for that purpose. It’s their main purpose in fact.
    - account42 2y ago
      The government exists to protect all basic human rights of its citizens, including their right to free speech and self expression. Copyright is a severe violation of those rights that is only allowed for a very specific purpose of encouraging more creation.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  So no copyright then? How would "the market" prevent publishers freeloading the works of authors? Suggest you look up why copyright was invented (and all the other thousands of ways simplistic markets don't work the way we'd like them to).
theshrike79 2y ago
The most important factor should be that if something isn't commercially available (not used, new), it should fall to Public Domain faster. If you're not selling your game published in 2005, it should be free for everyone to grab - you clearly don't care about it anymore. If you did, you'd let people pay money for it.
coldtea 2y ago
>I'd argue that by then all the money would have been made Not by a long shot. They're still milking famous books, movies, songs, from 50 years back and more. But I'd argue that by 25 years all the money being made for the original owners should have been forced to stop. Similar as with patents. Once concern is when a creator isn't making money (e.g. from a book), and the work takes off after the 25 years (say, it becomes viral).
- ElectricalTears 2y ago
  We'd just end up with Seinfeld and Friends reruns on every channel.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    Probably even less so than today. When something is available for every channel to rerun, it would be even less of a differentiator than a channel getting the rights to Friends or Seinfield today. So Channels wanting to attract people would need to come out with new material still - as Seinfeld and Friends would be able to be played by any other channel.
- themaninthedark 2y ago
  Just for argument, if we set the limit at 25 years. The Fellowship of the Ring, published 29 July 1954, would have been out of copyright by 1981. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring) I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980. Frodo Lives!(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Lives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Lives!) notwithstanding. I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >Just for argument, if we set the limit at 25 years. The Fellowship of the Ring, published 29 July 1954, would have been out of copyright by 1981. I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980. So? Tolkien after all died in 1973. The fandom would exist even without copyright past 1981. >I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone. What would waiting for 25 years achieve? And what is "format shift" this context? "The book is copyright free, but the movie coming out after the book's 25 years is not"? Wouldn't that be an improvement over today which neither is?
globular-toast 2y ago
Where are you getting 70 years from? In the UK etc it's lifetime plus 70 years. These will be works whose authors died before my retired father was born. It says authored 1929 for the US which seems to indicate 95 years? I've lost track of how long these ridiculous lengths are now.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  For works produced by a company's employees and owned by the (immortal) company, its 95 years. For works produced by a mortal human it's that author's life + 70 years. That's how it is in the US and most of Europe.
poulpy123 2y ago
While I agree with you, I'm struggling to find a good argument why intellectual property should be treated differently from physical property
- andrewclunn 2y ago
  "Hey, I like that table, I'm going to commission somebody to build one for myself!" Totally legal. No loss to first individual. The fact is that intellectual property IS treated differently, and was justified as being required to incentivize invention and creation NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon. Now that it arguably gets in the way of innovation and creation, what justification is there for these ADDITIONAL legal restrictions.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    >NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon grandma not sharing her best recipes, and children calling each other "copycat!" is an argument for a natural right. It is innately how humans feel, and there is a supporting argument that we don't want grandma's secret innovations dying with her, to incent sharing.
- csdreamer7 2y ago
  > While I agree with you, I'm struggling to find a good argument why intellectual property should be treated differently from physical property 1) First reason, it is not physical property. 2) Second, many of the creators who lobbied for longer copyright terms benefited from a rich public domain when they did not have anything. In the case of Walt Disney, he made a film series based on Alice in Wonderland, which never had copyright protection in the US, and it's copyright expired in the UK in 1907. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Early_career:_1920%E2%80%931928 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Early_career:_1920...
  - a57721 2y ago
    Disney also used "Le Sacre du printemps" in "Fantasia" after meeting Stravinsky, who was offended by the idea. However, Disney informed him that he would use it anyway since it was not protected in the US. Stravinsky was paid pennies.
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onetokeoverthe 2y ago
next generation would improve based on previous one hopefully, ideally
account42 2y ago
> I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies It really isn't.

adamc 2y ago

I think that's too short. Lifetime of the author or a min. 50 years would make sense to me. Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable. The crazy long Disney thing, though, is what it is because of lobbying muscle.

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ronsor 2y ago
I think that's still too long when copyright was originally supposed to be a compromise between society and the author, not a indefinite guarantee for an author. I understand the concern of providing for family, but keep in mind that the average person works continuously to provide for their family and has to be responsible enough to save money. It is not society's responsibility to ensure that; and alternatively if it is to be society's responsibility, there are better mechanisms than copyright.
- account42 2y ago
  Exactly, copyright was never meant to be a retirement plan or to act as wellfare for orphans.
lolinder 2y ago
> Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable. I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to continue to make money after you are dead. Earn enough during your lifetime to provide for your surviving daughters, sure, but I don't like the idea of someone being able to posthumously put a gag on people's ability to express themselves just so that their kids can get a nice inheritance.
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  Perhaps not, but the point of copyright is to provide incentive for creating work. Since earning beyond the grave is an incentive, there’s an argument to protect it (within limit). Another example is Grant’s autobiography, which he wrote as he was dying of throat cancer. No way he would have done that without copyright.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > No way he would have done that without copyright. Why not? For centuries people wrote books so that they would have a legacy and be remembered. They wrote because they felt it was the right thing to do, or because they wanted to control the narrative around their lives. Do you have any specific reason to believe that Grant wrote his autobiography to provide for his successors, rather than just to have written it? I understand the theory about incentivizing people to create, but honestly I'm not convinced that what we get from that deal is worth it. Too often it feels like extended copyright creates a similar set of incentives to advertising—sure, we get more works, but the best works would have been written even with a much shorter copyright because the author had something they wanted to say. The works that are being incentivized by long copyrights are the ones that we could do without.
    - Quillbert182 2y ago
      Grant wrote his autobiography pretty much entirely out of desperation to provide for his family after his death. He had lost everything he had in a Ponzi scheme and was heavily in debt as he was dying from cancer, and the autobiography was his last chance to make money for his family.
bdangubic 2y ago
his daughters were in their mid to late 20’s - wtf does he need to support them from his grave
- lolinder 2y ago
  To be fair to him, this was an era where their ability to support themselves was limited—if not in practice at least by strong cultural stigma. The same cannot be said of most people today, and I therefore agree that it's a bad argument for long copyright terms in a modern context.
modeless 2y ago
Authors can provide for their children the same way the rest of us do. With the money they made while they were working.
- seizethecheese 2y ago
  All of us working in development of any kind create value well into the future with our work. The only question is whether you monetize immediately with wages or with ownership
- lolinder 2y ago
  I agree, with the caveat that a literary work can be seen as an asset that has value which pays out over time. It takes a large investment upfront and then pays out slowly. So having a limited ability to pass on that asset if you die prematurely seems only fair—you'd have the same option if you were building something physical—but we shouldn't use inheritance as an argument for longer copyright. The question of how long someone should be allowed to earn money from a work should be orthogonal from the question of whether that right to earn money should be inheritable. This is the flaw in life plus 70—it assumes that copyright should last indefinitely during one's lifetime and then provide for successors. I'd rather see a flat rate for how long we're comfortable locking up a work in copyright, successors or otherwise.
  - modeless 2y ago
    > It takes a large investment upfront and then pays out slowly Does it really? Sure, timeless classics pay out over a long period of time but they are by far the exception. I'll wager that the vast majority of copyrighted works make the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? (Essentially perpetual because almost none of the works created in my lifetime will ever pass out of copyright before I die)
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? I agree. I think OP's proposal of a fixed term of 25 years is more than reasonable. All I'm saying is that it should be inheritable and not based on when the author dies.
Brybry 2y ago
The problem that I see is not the Mark Twains but the vast majority of other authors. Their works go out of print but they're still copyrighted so people can't legally reproduce them (for profit or otherwise). My grandfather was a published author with some success but he's dead and his stuff is no longer in print. No one in my family is going to see revenue from his work. No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now. Most books written in the 20th century are basically gone from public availability.[1][2] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m... [2] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works_Disappeared_-_Paul_Heald.pdf https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works...
- xienze 2y ago
  > No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now. Does the family not have rights to those works? A copy of the books? Scan them and release them copyright free if you want the world to see them.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
Drug parents are only 10 - 20 years, and it works great. The creator gets to make enough money to finance their next drug, and the public gets cheaper generics after a decade or two. There's no reason any other IP should be longer.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Agreed. I think lifetime of the author, or moderate fixed term in the case of untimely death or corporate copyright, is perfectly reasonable. 10-20 years is way too short, it does not give enough consideration to the author's rights.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable. Why is that reasonable? Why should someone's daughters get a free ride instead of having to work for a living like everyone else?
- poulpy123 2y ago
  Are you in favor of forbidding inheritance to everyone or just for authors ?
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    We're not talking about inheritance of real property or money, we're talking about "IP rights" or "royalties". The two are not the same. Why should someone's kid get money from their parent's book decades after it's been published? No other profession has this perk.
    - redwall_hp 2y ago
      And, sure, why not. Let's have a 100% inheritance tax beyond a maybe a couple million in protected assets. If we want to pretend to have a meritocratic system, then we can't have that joke of a loophole creating dynastic wealth. Either we have a system where people earn wealth on merit, or we have a feudal aristocracy with extra steps. It can't be both.
    - poulpy123 2y ago
      Why should someone's kid get the house from their parents decades after it's been built? The issue of inheritance is the same for physical and immaterial assets

ronsor 2y ago

I'm going to designate this as the obligatory "copyright is far too long" subthread. In my opinion, the ideal length (if we are to have copyright) is between 10 and 15 years, at least if a work is already monetarily successful. If a work has yet to be monetarily successful, then we can allow up to 25 years for it in particular.

modeless 2y ago
Has anyone done a study on when copyrighted works make their money? I'm guessing that the vast majority of the income is made in the first decade after creation. Timeless classics are by far the exception. And for those, does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels? The creation that copyright was supposed to incentivize already happened. At that point society benefits when works go into the public domain so derivatives can flourish.
- ronsor 2y ago
  > does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels? In my opinion, it doesn't. In creative and entertainment industries, the idea of practically indefinite royalties has been normalized, but no other industries has this*. For example, it would be strange to continue paying a construction company after your home has been built. *As far as I can remember. I'm open to correction here.
  - lionkor 2y ago
    any subscription service that doesn't deliver new value each day or month, like the Adobe suite(s)
    - ronsor 2y ago
      In the case of Adobe, you're paying for continuous updates and their added cloud services (or other functionality which requires their servers). Also Adobe's subscription pricing (per-month) is significantly less than the retail cost for a one-time purchase of their software without future updates. Meanwhile one does not pay for continuous updates to a particular novel or a movie. Even if they do pay for new installments in a series, they do so separately.

Aloisius 2y ago

The length should be no more than would be required to maximize the creation of works and not a moment longer. Long terms prevent the creation of derivative works which at an extreme could be reducing the number of works created as well as disincentivizing creators from creating new works if they've been especially successful early in their careers and decided to coast.

thrance 2y ago
Then I'd say the ideal length is probably zero. I don't buy that derivative works negatively impact revenue that much.
- chipotle_coyote 2y ago
  Derivative works aren't really the primary problem copyright law was created to address. In the early days of novel publishing, it wasn't uncommon for a popular book an author had sold to a publisher on a royalty basis to just be reprinted by other publishers who kept all the money for themselves. It wasn't unheard of for the majority of an author's books to be published by people who weren't giving any money to them until the law stepped in. I think people have a tendency to focus on corporations and super-successful individual creators as the primary beneficiaries of copyright, and I get it, but George R.R. Martin should not be your yardstick: the long tail applies here. A lot of authors have books that might keep bringing in a thousand dollars or less a year in royalties over a couple decades; if those authors are able to put out a book a year, that "back catalogue" might end up being most of their writing income. And the rise of ebooks has probably created more authors in that boat, not less. The original US copyright act in 1790 set the term at 14 years, with a near-automatic extension of another 14 years granted upon request. I'd be happy enough going back to that, but I don't think I'd want to see less, honestly.

stephen_g 2y ago

Absolutely. There's also absolutely zero sense that if there's any term based on the lifetime of the authors, that it should extend a single day after their death. I'd definitely prefer a 20-30 year fixed term, but if it was going to be based on lifetime then it should only be until the death of the author.

devsda 2y ago
The problem with that is some ridiculous edge cases. Young book author agrees to a profit share agreement with publisher and works most of the time. Has an accidental death at launch party, his work is in public domain now, and the publisher & author's family are in trouble ? Or it simply makes publishers reluctant to work with old authors and be biased towards healthy young writers.
- aucisson_masque 2y ago
  What's it got to see with publisher or family ? Publisher takes risk every time they publish book, sometimes they loose money sometimes they earn a lot. This wouldn't deter them from publishing young author, maybe even the opposite because statistically they would have more chance to live long. If I'm alive and I work, I provide for my family. If I'm dead then im not providing for my family anymore. why should it be different for authors ?
- stephen_g 2y ago
  Yes that's why it shouldn't have any bearing at all on lifetime, and why I prefer a fixed term of 20-30 years.
- criddell 2y ago
  I don't have particularly strong feelings on this particular issue, but I do take issue with worrying about edge cases. By definition, edge cases are infrequent and unlikely occurrences. Trying to account for every possibility is a way of making sure nothing ever changes. It's a form of perfect being the enemy of good. For this particular scenario, I would tell publishers and authors to take out a life or accidental death insurance policy.

nemo44x 2y ago

I disagree entirely in that I believe government shouldn’t determine this but rather the market. The rights to an intellectual property should be transferable/sold in perpetuity and at some point the work will become less and less valuable as newer works outcompete for attention. This will differ depending on how great the work was as judged by the market but it’s still the commanding force. Any particular time for transfer from market control to public domain is arbitrary. If it’s worth anything it should be traceable not stolen. Everything will eventually have too little demand to be defensible and control will be let go and at that point it becomes public domain because it became public domain.

panja 2y ago
If you want the market to determine then why do you need IP at all? That's just government intervention...
- nemo44x 2y ago
  The government exists to protect the property of its citizens. You can’t have a reliable market without the threat of violence (prison, fines, etc) and judiciary from an authority and government is suitable for that purpose. It’s their main purpose in fact.
  - account42 2y ago
    The government exists to protect all basic human rights of its citizens, including their right to free speech and self expression. Copyright is a severe violation of those rights that is only allowed for a very specific purpose of encouraging more creation.
globular-toast 2y ago
So no copyright then? How would "the market" prevent publishers freeloading the works of authors? Suggest you look up why copyright was invented (and all the other thousands of ways simplistic markets don't work the way we'd like them to).

theshrike79 2y ago

The most important factor should be that if something isn't commercially available (not used, new), it should fall to Public Domain faster. If you're not selling your game published in 2005, it should be free for everyone to grab - you clearly don't care about it anymore. If you did, you'd let people pay money for it.

coldtea 2y ago

>I'd argue that by then all the money would have been made Not by a long shot. They're still milking famous books, movies, songs, from 50 years back and more. But I'd argue that by 25 years all the money being made for the original owners should have been forced to stop. Similar as with patents. Once concern is when a creator isn't making money (e.g. from a book), and the work takes off after the 25 years (say, it becomes viral).

ElectricalTears 2y ago
We'd just end up with Seinfeld and Friends reruns on every channel.
- coldtea 2y ago
  Probably even less so than today. When something is available for every channel to rerun, it would be even less of a differentiator than a channel getting the rights to Friends or Seinfield today. So Channels wanting to attract people would need to come out with new material still - as Seinfeld and Friends would be able to be played by any other channel.
themaninthedark 2y ago
Just for argument, if we set the limit at 25 years. The Fellowship of the Ring, published 29 July 1954, would have been out of copyright by 1981. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring) I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980. Frodo Lives!(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Lives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Lives!) notwithstanding. I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Just for argument, if we set the limit at 25 years. The Fellowship of the Ring, published 29 July 1954, would have been out of copyright by 1981. I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980. So? Tolkien after all died in 1973. The fandom would exist even without copyright past 1981. >I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone. What would waiting for 25 years achieve? And what is "format shift" this context? "The book is copyright free, but the movie coming out after the book's 25 years is not"? Wouldn't that be an improvement over today which neither is?

globular-toast 2y ago

Where are you getting 70 years from? In the UK etc it's lifetime plus 70 years. These will be works whose authors died before my retired father was born. It says authored 1929 for the US which seems to indicate 95 years? I've lost track of how long these ridiculous lengths are now.

HWR_14 2y ago
For works produced by a company's employees and owned by the (immortal) company, its 95 years. For works produced by a mortal human it's that author's life + 70 years. That's how it is in the US and most of Europe.

poulpy123 2y ago

While I agree with you, I'm struggling to find a good argument why intellectual property should be treated differently from physical property

andrewclunn 2y ago
"Hey, I like that table, I'm going to commission somebody to build one for myself!" Totally legal. No loss to first individual. The fact is that intellectual property IS treated differently, and was justified as being required to incentivize invention and creation NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon. Now that it arguably gets in the way of innovation and creation, what justification is there for these ADDITIONAL legal restrictions.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon grandma not sharing her best recipes, and children calling each other "copycat!" is an argument for a natural right. It is innately how humans feel, and there is a supporting argument that we don't want grandma's secret innovations dying with her, to incent sharing.
csdreamer7 2y ago
> While I agree with you, I'm struggling to find a good argument why intellectual property should be treated differently from physical property 1) First reason, it is not physical property. 2) Second, many of the creators who lobbied for longer copyright terms benefited from a rich public domain when they did not have anything. In the case of Walt Disney, he made a film series based on Alice in Wonderland, which never had copyright protection in the US, and it's copyright expired in the UK in 1907. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Early_career:_1920%E2%80%931928 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Early_career:_1920...
- a57721 2y ago
  Disney also used "Le Sacre du printemps" in "Fantasia" after meeting Stravinsky, who was offended by the idea. However, Disney informed him that he would use it anyway since it was not protected in the US. Stravinsky was paid pennies.

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onetokeoverthe 2y ago

next generation would improve based on previous one hopefully, ideally

account42 2y ago

> I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies It really isn't.