5 ms·

> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to

• nandomrumber 1y ago
  How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
  • latexr 1y ago
    Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation? Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-contract-terms/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
    • philipallstar 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • latexr 1y ago
        > "Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit. > It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely". From my first post: > If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
        • philipallstar 1y ago
          > If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely. How do you define "swindle"?
          • wffurr 1y ago
            Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are. Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for.
          • Forgeties79 1y ago
            This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions? If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).
            • philipallstar 1y ago
              If the statement is that any right that can be signed away can be swindled away, then I think something needs defining to make it a non-fatuous statement. I can sign away 4 years of my life to the military. Does that mean my life can be swindled away?
              • deleted 1y ago
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          • falcor84 1y ago
            That's what we have courts and juries for. If a jury unanimously agrees that a typical person in a reasonable situation and with full understanding of the conditions would not be willing to sign such a contract because it would strongly go against their interest, then the person who did sign it has likely been swindled.
      • tempfile 1y ago
        It is really not any harder to define than "freely". Presumably by "what I signed up for freely" you mean "what I signed up for without any coercion, threat of violence, etc". The people using "exploitation" here just mean that those conditions also include the implied threat of not having money to live. This is a real material condition which affects what people are prepared to agree to (even if they might be able to find a better offer by shopping around). It is not hard to understand, and I suspect you are not trying to understand it.
        • deleted 1y ago
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    • isodev 1y ago
      > I don't like what I signed up for freely I believe the post makes a good case that "freely" doesn't mean by choice at all. In other words, not what people consider freely.
      • latexr 1y ago
        I think you meant to reply to a different post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032573
        • isodev 1y ago
          Oh yes, it was peer comment. Oh well, too late now and you made the same point :)
• 7bit 1y ago
  That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away. In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
  • oniony 1y ago
    So how does ghostwriting work then? Lots of books have unaccredited ghostwriters.
    • Lerc 1y ago
      Not a Lawyer, but this seems like work-for-hire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire I assume Germany has something like this (possibly a EU requirement). It would cover more than just ghostwritten books. Most software is written in a similar manner. Microsoft didn't write windows, lots of ghostwriting programmers did.
    • Lariscus 1y ago
      This is handled in the employment contract. The "Urheberrecht" is not transferable only inheritable, but you can grant "Nutzungsrechte" which means "rights of use". So in your contract you just grant your employer unrestricted and exclusive rights of use.
    • pbhjpbhj 1y ago
      The author never had the rights, as they worked under contract, so they don't need to sign them away. But we also the right to be named as author is not a requirement to be named as author.
  • vidarh 1y ago
    In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions. But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
• johannes1234321 1y ago
  > should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ... Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • jimbokun 1y ago
    You answer your own question. Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights.
    • NetMageSCW 1y ago
      Why?
      • jimbokun 1y ago
        Ease of copying.
    • CamperBob2 1y ago
      No, they're not different. If I can't sign away the title to my car, it's literally worthless. Exactly the same is true of my IP rights.
      • falcor84 1y ago
        What? Car leasing is a massive market, and a large percentage of people and companies are very happy to pay to access cars and trucks without owning the title. Same goes for companies happily building on top of leasehold properties whenever it makes financial sense for them. And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless.
• cnnlives8472 1y ago
  > You have to wait half a lifetime?! I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us. With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary. (Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • fragmede 1y ago
    Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
    • IAmBroom 1y ago
      That's not what the statistics indicate. Not at all. 7% have uncertain lifetimes, >= (current value).
• Ntrails 1y ago
  > You have to wait half a lifetime?! Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property. I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
  • jimbokun 1y ago
    How about 14? Which as the article explains was the original copyright term.
    • tptacek 1y ago
      He of course leaves out that the term was doubled in 1831, and that renewability became assignable at the turn of the 20th century almost 15 years before Disney was even founded.
• xhkkffbf 1y ago
  No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years. My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
  • toast0 1y ago
    > Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years. Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names. You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.
• cptnapalm 1y ago
  Termination of Transfer is what happened to the Friday the 13th franchise. The screenwriter wound up owning the name Jason Voorhees, but not the adult visual of Jason. As I understand it, the F13 franchise owners could have made movies with adult Jason Voorhees as long as they don't call him Jason Voorhees. All in all it was a mess. I think it's all resolved now, but the situation did tank the online game that a lot of people enjoyed.
• crazygringo 1y ago
  > It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about. Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...? Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
• CGMthrowaway 1y ago
  The real cheat isn’t the 35-year wait, it’s work-made-for-hire and assignments of future unknown rights (VR, AI, metaverse, whatever - in 1995 for example it was the digital-performance right in sound recording)