10 ms·

The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales. Ideally, a child could legally provide their ow

The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales. Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living. I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.

mchusma 11mo ago
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off? So many ideas better than the current regime.
- testdelacc1 11mo ago
  I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al. The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits. Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate. So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each. Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
  - martiuk 11mo ago
    The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?
    - testdelacc1 11mo ago
      Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings. The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
  - OfficeChad 11mo ago
    [dead]
- nathell 11mo ago
  Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?
  - sd9 11mo ago
    Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.
- Aromasin 11mo ago
  I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator. Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010. IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
  - raldi 11mo ago
    If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
    - actionfromafar 11mo ago
      Or you can't because 57 new sequels were published the week before.
      - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
        Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have completely killed famous book series? Me neither.
        nkrisc 11mo ago
        What fan fiction?
        hnben 11mo ago
        exactly.
- basilikum 11mo ago
  Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
  - gwd 11mo ago
    It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it. But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue). And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
    - basilikum 11mo ago
      I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
      - gwd 11mo ago
        Right; so according to your own assessment, for the "14+14 no extensions" thing , you're always going to have have "a minority of opinionated geeks" on one side, and "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests willing to fight tooth and nail for a gold mine" on the other side. You're never going to win that one. Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one. IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
- throwaway81523 11mo ago
  Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act
- bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
  I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-peter-s-beagle-reclaims-rights-to-work-after-long-legal-battle-203492.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete... Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously. finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
- amelius 11mo ago
  Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.
- mikkupikku 11mo ago
  It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  > So many ideas better than the current regime. Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have. The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
- gwbas1c 11mo ago
  I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish. It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high. (This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
  - ssl-3 11mo ago
    Let's work through this statutory licensing concept. A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway. But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something. Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
    - gwbas1c 11mo ago
      That's a good question. IMO: 1: The formula dictates what you pay. 2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow account. At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is forfeited. (What happens to the money at that point? I think this is a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of us get the kind of copyright reform we need.) (Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
      - shagie 11mo ago
        Which government? Who controls the account? How do I claim it? How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?) What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)? What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves? --- I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
- teddyh 11mo ago
  Nobody who uses the word “copywritten” can be taken seriously.
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  >exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture. That's the point. The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies. Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective. Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them. Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work. A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
- whycome 11mo ago
  Why No ip is created in a vacuum. It’s built on the ideas and concepts that came before it. It’s built on the shared open culture that we all own.
zozbot234 11mo ago
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
- retired_account 11mo ago
  While your end goal is admirable, it’s more fun to share new experiences with others. Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.
  - testdelacc1 11mo ago
    I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.
    - lukan 11mo ago
      "I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand." Maybe you should have enjoyed more xkcd: https://xkcd.com/606/ https://xkcd.com/606/
- jrimbault 11mo ago
  When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.
  - gwd 11mo ago
    At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).
badmonster 11mo ago
True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?
- phkahler 11mo ago
  "Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can afford it for long.
- account42 11mo ago
  Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more fans who deserve to own their childhood.
HPsquared 11mo ago
We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.
ketzu 11mo ago
> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter? (I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)
- ttctciyf 11mo ago
  > Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter? This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!
- mcdonje 11mo ago
  Shorter copyrights would lead to less beatings of dead tauntauns or thestrals.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- rhdunn 11mo ago
  It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
psychoslave 11mo ago
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive? The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one. Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that. The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions. [1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login=false https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...
- vladms 11mo ago
  If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few. I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving. In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
  - psychoslave 11mo ago
    >If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.
ultratalk 11mo ago
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
- user3939382 11mo ago
  Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
dismantlethesun 11mo ago
> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales. I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect. As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects. An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
- ronsor 11mo ago
  > They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect. Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
  - adventured 11mo ago
    > their interests are not absolute The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all. That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.
    - ronsor 11mo ago
      I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S. Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently, but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
    - 11mo ago
VikingCoder 11mo ago
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value. Give 14 years free. Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that. Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
throw10920 11mo ago
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it. Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
shagie 11mo ago
This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement > Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14) > Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9) --- 14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it. Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.
- BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
  Perhaps Trumpian madness will do something good for once.
drob518 11mo ago
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
- nmz 11mo ago
  It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
  - drob518 11mo ago
    I don’t blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he ever become public domain?
    - officeplant 11mo ago
      Well his origin "Steam Boat Willie" became public domain last year.
      - drob518 11mo ago
        The film is in the public domain and the original versions of Mickey and Minnie are public domain. But that does NOT apply to the later versions of Mickey that you'd find Disney pushing today (e.g., at parks, on apparel, etc.). Further, Disney has been trying to continue to assert copyright even over the original version of the character. See here for more info: https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-public-domain-testing-the-boundaries-of-copyright-and-trademark-law/ https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-publi...
bilsbie 11mo ago
Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially increasing fee. Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.
moralestapia 11mo ago
>Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. Why?
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI. Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
madduci 11mo ago
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
- snickerbockers 11mo ago
  This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.
shadowgovt 11mo ago
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume. And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.

mchusma 11mo ago

I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off? So many ideas better than the current regime.

testdelacc1 11mo ago
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al. The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits. Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate. So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each. Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
- martiuk 11mo ago
  The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?
  - testdelacc1 11mo ago
    Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings. The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
- OfficeChad 11mo ago
  [dead]
nathell 11mo ago
Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?
- sd9 11mo ago
  Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.
Aromasin 11mo ago
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator. Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010. IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
- raldi 11mo ago
  If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    Or you can't because 57 new sequels were published the week before.
    - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
      Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have completely killed famous book series? Me neither.
      - nkrisc 11mo ago
        What fan fiction?
        hnben 11mo ago
        exactly.
basilikum 11mo ago
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
- gwd 11mo ago
  It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it. But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue). And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
  - basilikum 11mo ago
    I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
    - gwd 11mo ago
      Right; so according to your own assessment, for the "14+14 no extensions" thing , you're always going to have have "a minority of opinionated geeks" on one side, and "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests willing to fight tooth and nail for a gold mine" on the other side. You're never going to win that one. Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one. IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
throwaway81523 11mo ago
Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act
bryanrasmussen 11mo ago
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-peter-s-beagle-reclaims-rights-to-work-after-long-legal-battle-203492.html https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete... Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously. finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
amelius 11mo ago
Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.
mikkupikku 11mo ago
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
marcosdumay 11mo ago
> So many ideas better than the current regime. Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have. The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
gwbas1c 11mo ago
I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish. It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high. (This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
- ssl-3 11mo ago
  Let's work through this statutory licensing concept. A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway. But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something. Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
  - gwbas1c 11mo ago
    That's a good question. IMO: 1: The formula dictates what you pay. 2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow account. At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is forfeited. (What happens to the money at that point? I think this is a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of us get the kind of copyright reform we need.) (Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
    - shagie 11mo ago
      Which government? Who controls the account? How do I claim it? How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?) What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)? What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves? --- I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
teddyh 11mo ago
Nobody who uses the word “copywritten” can be taken seriously.
mrguyorama 11mo ago
>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture. That's the point. The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies. Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective. Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them. Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work. A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
whycome 11mo ago
Why No ip is created in a vacuum. It’s built on the ideas and concepts that came before it. It’s built on the shared open culture that we all own.

zozbot234 11mo ago

Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.

retired_account 11mo ago
While your end goal is admirable, it’s more fun to share new experiences with others. Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.
- testdelacc1 11mo ago
  I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    "I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand." Maybe you should have enjoyed more xkcd: https://xkcd.com/606/ https://xkcd.com/606/
jrimbault 11mo ago
When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.
- gwd 11mo ago
  At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).

badmonster 11mo ago

True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?

phkahler 11mo ago
"Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can afford it for long.
account42 11mo ago
Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more fans who deserve to own their childhood.

HPsquared 11mo ago

We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.

ketzu 11mo ago

> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter? (I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)

ttctciyf 11mo ago
> Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter? This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!
mcdonje 11mo ago
Shorter copyrights would lead to less beatings of dead tauntauns or thestrals.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
rhdunn 11mo ago
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.

psychoslave 11mo ago

What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive? The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one. Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that. The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions. [1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login=false https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...

vladms 11mo ago
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few. I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving. In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
- psychoslave 11mo ago
  >If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.

ultratalk 11mo ago

Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.

user3939382 11mo ago
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption

dismantlethesun 11mo ago

> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales. I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect. As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects. An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.

ronsor 11mo ago
> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect. Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
- adventured 11mo ago
  > their interests are not absolute The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all. That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.
  - ronsor 11mo ago
    I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S. Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently, but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
  - 11mo ago

VikingCoder 11mo ago

I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value. Give 14 years free. Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that. Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.

throw10920 11mo ago

Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it. Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.

shagie 11mo ago

This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement > Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14) > Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9) --- 14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it. Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.

BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
Perhaps Trumpian madness will do something good for once.

drob518 11mo ago

Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.

nmz 11mo ago
It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
- drob518 11mo ago
  I don’t blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he ever become public domain?
  - officeplant 11mo ago
    Well his origin "Steam Boat Willie" became public domain last year.
    - drob518 11mo ago
      The film is in the public domain and the original versions of Mickey and Minnie are public domain. But that does NOT apply to the later versions of Mickey that you'd find Disney pushing today (e.g., at parks, on apparel, etc.). Further, Disney has been trying to continue to assert copyright even over the original version of the character. See here for more info: https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-public-domain-testing-the-boundaries-of-copyright-and-trademark-law/ https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-publi...

bilsbie 11mo ago

Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially increasing fee. Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.

moralestapia 11mo ago

>Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. Why?

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI. Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.

madduci 11mo ago

And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.

snickerbockers 11mo ago
This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.

shadowgovt 11mo ago

Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume. And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.