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As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author. Even current regime i
by theragra 7mo ago
As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author.
Even current regime is ridiculous.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7mo agoIt's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for free - while a piece of land pays property taxes.
- ivell 7mo agoIPR is a form of incentive for creators in service of betterment of the society (it also could be detrimental like Mein Kempf though). On the other hand real estate does not need such extra incentives. Need or greed is enough.
- GuestFAUniverse 7mo agoThe book title is "Mein K_a_mpf". It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not.
- simonh 7mo agoCreators pay tax on their income. We all get legal protections for our property.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- boomlinde 7mo agoReal property owners also pay tax on their income. Income is taxed. Real property is taxed. Intellectual property is not.
- brookst 7mo agoIP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land. It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
- closewith 7mo agoThis is actually a solved problem. It is self-assessed valuation with compulsory sale at declared value, known as the Harberger Tax.
- ralferoo 7mo agoThis is only a solution if you think it's fair to have a regular ownership tax on top of the tax paid when purchasing / selling something.
- closewith 7mo agoIt's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to fairly value IP. This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agothe solution to how to fairly value IP was provided by the owner, capital gains tax happens on sale of IP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210 capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally. These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
- closewith 7mo ago
- stevekemp 7mo ago> while a piece of land pays property taxes. In some countries taxes are annual. In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
- lanceflt 7mo agoCouncil taxes are property taxes and are monthly.
- dghf 7mo agoWell, technically they're annual, but you're allowed to pay them in arrears over 10 or 12 months.
- stevekemp 7mo agoCouncil taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for rubbish collection & etc. However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those. In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing.. (And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
- mvc 7mo agoThey're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs.
- piaste 7mo agoThe enforcement isn't the issue, it's the scarcity.
- tacticalturtle 7mo agoThe state isn’t enforcing your rights for free - you still have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself. The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so. This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
- cestith 7mo agoCopyright infringement in the United States has both civil and criminal elements at law.
- tacticalturtle 7mo agoTouché. This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses. I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
- cestith 7mo agoSometimes for physical property the police take it and the owner can get it back from them. That much is sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it I would have had to get it from the thief. Often the property is never found and returned.
- kstrauser 7mo agoRetail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I fully support copyright enforcement being funded by intellectual property taxes: * You declare your property’s worth. * You pay IP taxes on that worth. * You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves. And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M. Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
- SolarNet 7mo agoLand is scarce. Also, generally, property taxes are paid to the city/county that makes that land desirable to live in.
- kube-system 7mo ago> It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention. Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dghlsakjg 7mo agoIn the US, you do not need to register your copyright. It is entirely optional, and you can still enforce an unregistered copyright.
- kube-system 7mo agoRight, that's one of the terms of the Berne Convention that I am referencing.
- freejazz 7mo agoHow often do you see the US enforcing copyrights?
- Breza 7mo agoThe government enforces your claim and you pay taxes on anything you earn from it. I bet most IP generates a whole lot more money for the government than enforcing the copyright costs.
- edent 7mo ago"Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright.
- cubefox 7mo agoMaybe 100 years after birth instead.
- cestith 7mo agoThat’s a disincentive to authors in their later years if it’s a straight rule. We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something.
- notarobot123 7mo agoImagine being in the last phase of life and finding your only motivation to create or share anything is the opportunity to extract as much value from society as possible.
- kube-system 7mo agoMany people find motivation to give to their heirs in their last phase of life.
- freejazz 7mo agoI don't see anyone here judging you for going to work and wanting to be compensated for your efforts. But suddenly authors are "extract[ing] as much value from society as possible"? That's just rude. If we're being honest, it's much better for society that an author gets that money than someone working at Facebook.
- cestith 7mo agoImagine being in the last phase of life and finding you have to work full time as a Walmart greeter because you can’t support yourself as a working artist anymore due to ageist pricks being in charge of policy.
- damnitbuilds 7mo agoAlmost all works make all their money in the first five years after creation. 5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us. Fuck the copyright cartels.
- AJ007 7mo agoGenerative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of copyright to society. There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined. Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal. These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve? What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?) Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
- freejazz 7mo agoA human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are premised on complete misunderstanding.
- freejazz 7mo agoIf its the term that's the issue, it's the term, not copyright itself. Which do you think it is?
- observationist 7mo ago0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain. Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing. No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics. Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this. Until it changes, pirate everything.
- goku12 7mo agoWait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
- kube-system 7mo agoThe first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and 21 years for works already in production. The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.
- observationist 7mo agoThis is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically. Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries. This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most. It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc. No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry. Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril. No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers. The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
- WalterBright 7mo agoI don't think Taylor Swift became a billionaire on copyrights of her songs - it was because she did very successful concerts performing them. CDs and streaming are just advertisements for the concerts.
- stego-tech 7mo agoI would argue that in a digital world, copyright should be inversely scalable to the size of the creator - that is, individual works by independent artists intended for exhibition rather than reproduction should receive more favorable terms than movies or games created by huge conglomerates intended for mass reproduction, licensing, and sale. Or more simply: if you’re not selling it presently, you don’t get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights are solved, and we can all move on.
- mastermage 7mo agoThis my fundamental problem with some of the propositions on this topic here. I fundamentally disagree to only for one example in a thread here have a copyright of 5 years for a Book Author. Many book authors could never finish their series without their first books becoming public domain or so. On the other hand Everything created by corporations i.e. where a corporation not a single human holds a copyright can get fucked.
- stego-tech 7mo agoExactly. This is something I’ve chewed on constantly for nigh on 20 years, and this is the best compromise I’ve been able to come up with. Smaller teams or individual creators need more copyright protections than large corporations, but the law doesn’t reflect that - and it’s why copyright is so widely abused as a result. This ain’t working for the interests of the public anymore, and AI has exacerbated it (large corps getting settlements, smaller creators getting shafted). We need a new model entirely that addresses these issues.
- freejazz 7mo agoCorporations don't create copyrighted work. Authors do and assign their rights over. I continue to think that people pontificating on this space would be well served to inform themselves about how the business is generally conducted, as I see so many comments made from assumptions about principles and not actual reference to actual copyright law.
- bobro 7mo agoJust to try to understand this, do you think anyone should be able to make, say, a Harry Potter movie right now paying nothing to the author?
- function_seven 7mo agoYes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to be published, with the author of those works knowing that they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been incentivized.
- jimmydddd 7mo agoWhat about the other 99.99999% of authors?
- Aerroon 7mo agoIf they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no? But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.
- OkayPhysicist 7mo ago> If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no? That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then a game development studio made a series of wildly successfully videogames based on his work, which definitely made way more money than his books, to the point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I struggle to imagine how it could be just that the videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him nothing.
- 7mo ago
- OkayPhysicist 7mo agoCopyright for nearly everything but software, is primarily a question of "can I reproduce this other person's creative work?". Fair use doctrine is so broad that I think it most everything else falls under most people's accepted "artists deserve to be compensated for their work" gut instinct. If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of that action.
- cedilla 7mo agoFair use is much more narrow than most people think, it's just that most rights-holders are not very belligerent. For example, streaming video games does not fall under fair right, most video essays critiquing films or series use way too much material commentated for fair right, remixing as a whole is not fair use, and most fan works are definitely not fair use. Legal protections don't help here, but the shit-storms companies like Nintendo of America had to endure when they tried to tighten the screws. And that's in the US, other countries have similar exceptions but they are also usually quite limited.
- saltyoldman 7mo agoIt's always funny seeing these threads, when it's about AI these people defend copyright to the death. Then when it's about a private IP owner holding onto their IP, it's "death to copyright"
- wredcoll 7mo agoAI involves a large corporation profiting from violating current copyeight standards in a way that enriches a small minority while appearing to harm to large majority, as well as being hypocritical. Random people arguing for expanded public domain is not the same thing.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoDifferent people hold different views. I know it can be frustrating to see wildly contradictory positions like that, but one needs to bear in mind that the urge to treat the community as a hive mind isn't rational.
- ottah 7mo agoOr maybe we have never needed an exclusive economic monopoly on a creative work to encourage the creation of art? Maybe we would all be in a better world were art and culture lived in the collective commons, free for anyone in the zeitgeist to adapt and proliferate? Can we really say commercial production of culture has been truly the best for society?
- mastermage 7mo agoFair point but not a very realistic outset. I think changing Copyright to be more fair is realistic. Removing Copyright entirely very unlikely.
- freejazz 7mo agoThat's pretty hypothetical. Do you not like music, movies and other art? Which art do you like? Which art do you think you'd see more of if there was no copyright?
- xhkkffbf 7mo agoUh, how are you creative when you make a copy of Mondrian's work? I can understand some of the arguments for a time limit on copyright, but are you really claiming that you're being "creative" when you cut and paste?