5 ms·

What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing. 14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a

What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing. 14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generations, not about incentivizing creativity. It undermines the public domain.

bluGill 1y ago
It takes more than 18 months for many good works to get through all the editing processes. You can tell when publishers skip on that time as the quality is worse.
Retric 1y ago
18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly. 5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17 Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now. But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care. >I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling. >5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.
  - Retric 1y ago
    > Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. Ethics > You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published. After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published. Published for profit. There are numerous other incentives to produce books. Schopenhauer has something to say about publication for profit: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Authorship https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Auth...>
      - Retric 1y ago
        Hogwash. Producing books without a profit motive requires some other means to support the vast time investment. Thus robbing the world of great works from those lesser creatures who still need to work for a living. The only loss is competition drowning out the works of well off but talentless people. We’ll get vanity projects either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.
        dredmorbius 1y ago
        Profit motive's not doing much for great works of literature: "The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024) Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses. <https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...> I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out). I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest. I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view. There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.

bluGill 1y ago

It takes more than 18 months for many good works to get through all the editing processes. You can tell when publishers skip on that time as the quality is worse.

Retric 1y ago

18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly. 5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17 Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now. But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care. >I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling. >5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.
- Retric 1y ago
  > Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. Ethics > You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published. After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published. Published for profit. There are numerous other incentives to produce books. Schopenhauer has something to say about publication for profit: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Authorship https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Auth...>
    - Retric 1y ago
      Hogwash. Producing books without a profit motive requires some other means to support the vast time investment. Thus robbing the world of great works from those lesser creatures who still need to work for a living. The only loss is competition drowning out the works of well off but talentless people. We’ll get vanity projects either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.
      - dredmorbius 1y ago
        Profit motive's not doing much for great works of literature: "The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024) Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses. <https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-have-killed https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...> I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out). I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest. I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view. There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.