8 ms·

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

• 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.