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Lifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.
by brador 1y ago
Lifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.
- Zambyte 1y agoZero (0) years for corporate copyright, zero (0) years for human copyright is the golden zone in my book.
- School-Cotton 1y agoWhy?
- Zambyte 1y agoIt took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-post-copyright.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThe first article is saying that "Copyright is bad because of corporations", and I can kind of get behind that, especially the very long term copyrights that have lost the intent, but the second article says that artists will be happier without copyright if we just solve capitalism first. I don't know about you, but that reads to me like "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe". If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
- Zambyte 1y ago> If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software). > If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing. Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago> The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree. > Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art? Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
- Zambyte 1y ago> You don't simply make software because you love it, right? I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time. > Should people not be able to make money off their effort? Is anyone arguing otherwise?
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoRemoving copyright is removing a lot of the protections that enable users to get paid for their efforts. How would a novelist make money, and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
- dmonitor 1y agoYou need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.
- pitaj 1y agoThere can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc
- Zambyte 1y ago"Early access" doesn't work in this context, but yes for the other means.
- dmonitor 1y agoThere's no reason FreeSteam can't also do that, though. There's no copyright, so just have an extension of the steamapp that changes it to point to your server when downloading games / checking ownership. Piracy stops being a service issue when pirates are allowed to make nice services.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zelphirkalt 1y agoJust to challenge that idea: Why?
- dmonitor 1y agoPeople would use that service instead of Steam, publishers would add annoying DRM to mitigate lost sales, etc etc. The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).
- whamlastxmas 1y agoBecause the concept of owning an idea is really gross. Copyright means I can’t write about whatever I want in my own home even if I never distribute it or no one ever sees it. I’m breaking the law by privately writing Harry Potter fanfic in my journal or whatever. Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging intangibles, and the reality is that it only massively stifles it
- redwall_hp 1y agoWhole genres of music are based entirely on sampling, and they got screwed by copyright law as it evolved over the 90s and 2000s. Now only people with a sufficiently sized business backing them can truly participate, or they're stuck licensing things on Splice. And that's not even touching the spurious lawsuits about musical similarity. That's what musicians call a genre... It makes some sense for a very short term literal right to reproduction of a singular work, but any time the concept of derivative works comes into play, it's just a bizarrely dystopian suppression of art, under the supposition that art is commercial activity rather than an innate part of humanity.
- flats 1y agoI don’t believe this is true? I’m pretty sure that you’re prohibited from making money from that fan fiction, not from writing it at all. So I don’t understand the claim that copyright “massively stifles” creativity. There are of course examples of people not being able to make money on specific “ideas” because of copyright laws, but that doesn’t seem to me to be “massively stifling” creativity itself, especially given that it also protects and supports many people generating these ideas. And if we got rid of copyright law, wouldn’t we be in that exact place, where people wouldn’t be allowed to make money off of creative endeavors? I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire. That, to me, sucks.
- achierius 1y agoWell what we're getting is lifetime for corporate, and zero (0) for human. Hope you're happy.
- Zambyte 1y agoI'm not, because that's not what I asked for.
- GuB-42 1y agoThe issue with lifetime (vs something like lifetime + X years) is that of inheritance. Assuming you agree with the idea of inheritance, which is another topic, then it is unfair to deny inheritance of intellectual property. For example if your father has built a house, it will be yours when he dies, it won't become a public house. So why would a book your father wrote just before he died become public domain the moment he dies. It is unfair to those doing who are doing intellectual work, especially older people. If you want short copyright, is would make more sense to make it 20 years, human or corporate, like patents.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoThen make it the greater of 20 years or the lifetime for humans. Comparing intellectual property to real or physical property makes no sense. Intellectual property is different because it is non exclusive. If you are living in your father’s house, no one else can be living there. If I am reading your fathers book, that has nothing to do with whether anyone else can read the book.
- GuB-42 1y agoThat intellectual property is non exclusive doesn't change the inheritance problem. If you consider it right to get value from the work of your family, and you consider that intellectual work (such as writing a book) to be valuable, then as an inheritor, you should get value from it. And since the way we give value to intellectual work is though copyright, then inheritors should inherit copyright. If you think that copyright should not exceed lifetime, then the logical consequences would be one of: - inheritance should be abolished - intellectual work is less valuable than other forms of work - intellectual property / copyright is not how intellectual work should be rewarded There are arguments for abolishing inheritance, it is after all one of the greatest sources of inequality. Essentially, it means 100% inheritance tax in addition to all the work going into the public domain. Problematic in practice. For the value of intellectual work, well, hard to argue against it on Hacker News without being a massive hypocrite. And there are alternatives to copyright (i.e. artificial scarcity) for compensating intellectual work like there are alternatives to capitalism. Unfortunately, it often turns out poorly in practice. One suggestion is to have some kind of tax that is fairly distributed between authors in exchange for having their work in the public domain. Problem is: define "fairly". Note that I am not saying that copyright should last long, you can make copyright 20 years, humans or corporate, inheritable. Simple, gets in the public domain sooner, fairer to older authors, already works for patents. Why insist on "lifetime"?