5 ms·

Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?

by kps 3mo ago

Retric 3mo ago
People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective. What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
- eikenberry 3mo ago
  I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.
  - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
    Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money. There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me! And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish? Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published? Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote? Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument. Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense" on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic. There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise. Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!
    - protocolture 3mo ago
      >Really, all of them? Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness? Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.
      - dgellow 3mo ago
        Don’t mix Kings and Rowlings, he’s at a whole other level
        protocolture 3mo ago
        They are both filthy rich and combined represent a large % of book sales. They also both spend their time making idiots of themselves on tweeter. Kings the better writer but they are both in the correct category here.
    - spudlyo 3mo ago
      "Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject." -- Arthur Schopenhauer If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ
      - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
        I made a response on the Cervantes quote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363 that pertains here to some extent.
      - ralferoo 3mo ago
- gs17 3mo ago
  > But that’s true even if the creator was still alive. The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.
  - gblargg 3mo ago
    That ballpoint pen wasn't going to write itself.
- ekianjo 3mo ago
  > People do care about income streams for their descendants Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
  > People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective. It is once you make it to the other side of the marginal utility of a dollar. Suppose you write a popular work in your 20s. You make plenty from it, and then people keep buying it. As long as they do, why spend your time creating new works when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? As long as the copyright doesn't expire, you have all the money you need and thereby value having more time over having more money. When it doesn't expire for 70 years after your death, so do your kids. Whereas if it would expire after 14 years and you want to provide for your kids (never mind that they should maybe make a contribution of their own) then to do it you would have to keep making new works.
  - Retric 3mo ago
    Shorter copyright terms don’t prevent someone from retiring after making it big. To do that you’d need to cap how much they could make in total not the number of years their work was protected. Instead you’re essentially talking about hypothetical people rather than anything approaching a meaningful number of artists. Further lotteries attract suckers based on potential payouts. Just as the NFL or NBA convinces young kids to work hard, successful artists are a major part of pipeline of young kids practicing their craft.
    - ralferoo 3mo ago
      Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever. At that point, you're effectively saying copyright is only sensible for things produced by a single unaided person. Sadly, copyright term is the only sensible (and easily enforceable) metric, although whilst I'd agree that the term is currently too long, reducing it to shorter than the creator's lifetime can lead to other weird situations. For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it. Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable. Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work (e.g. a book where page 200 contained a spelling correction), etc. How would you decide the copyright term then? Would pages 1-199 and 201-end be out of copyright and only page 200 copyrighted? And assuming we think lifetime of the creator makes sense, then we would need a different rule for companies, because companies can last forever. What we have right now, seems approximately the optimal solution in most cases. About the only thing I'd change is when nobody knows who the copyright holder is, which is particularly an issue with old software. There really should be some way of legally distributing abandonware if nobody can prove that they own the copyright.
- semiquaver 3mo ago
  > People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations Society created the concept of copyright and intellectual property for a reason and it is emphatically not the protection of income streams after you are dead. Whether a person exists who cares about a thing is not a reason to preserve it.
  - Retric 3mo ago
    That reason was to generate more works. Before the conception of copyright artists would create physical works to be sold after they died to support their families in part because such works would be more valuable after they died. Indirect effects matter both for society and as a legal question. To this day many elderly / sick artists are working not for their own personal interests but for other people. Thus copyright not expiring as soon as people die is supporting the original goal of copyright. The total length of copyright is a different question.

Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?

by kps 3mo ago

Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?

People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective. What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

eikenberry 3mo ago
I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.
- bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
  Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money. There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me! And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish? Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published? Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote? Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument. Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense" on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic. There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise. Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!
  - protocolture 3mo ago
    >Really, all of them? Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness? Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.
    - dgellow 3mo ago
      Don’t mix Kings and Rowlings, he’s at a whole other level
      - protocolture 3mo ago
        They are both filthy rich and combined represent a large % of book sales. They also both spend their time making idiots of themselves on tweeter. Kings the better writer but they are both in the correct category here.
  - spudlyo 3mo ago
    "Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject." -- Arthur Schopenhauer If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ
    - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
      I made a response on the Cervantes quote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363 that pertains here to some extent.
    - ralferoo 3mo ago
gs17 3mo ago
> But that’s true even if the creator was still alive. The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.
- gblargg 3mo ago
  That ballpoint pen wasn't going to write itself.
ekianjo 3mo ago
> People do care about income streams for their descendants Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
> People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective. It is once you make it to the other side of the marginal utility of a dollar. Suppose you write a popular work in your 20s. You make plenty from it, and then people keep buying it. As long as they do, why spend your time creating new works when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? As long as the copyright doesn't expire, you have all the money you need and thereby value having more time over having more money. When it doesn't expire for 70 years after your death, so do your kids. Whereas if it would expire after 14 years and you want to provide for your kids (never mind that they should maybe make a contribution of their own) then to do it you would have to keep making new works.
- Retric 3mo ago
  Shorter copyright terms don’t prevent someone from retiring after making it big. To do that you’d need to cap how much they could make in total not the number of years their work was protected. Instead you’re essentially talking about hypothetical people rather than anything approaching a meaningful number of artists. Further lotteries attract suckers based on potential payouts. Just as the NFL or NBA convinces young kids to work hard, successful artists are a major part of pipeline of young kids practicing their craft.
  - ralferoo 3mo ago
    Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever. At that point, you're effectively saying copyright is only sensible for things produced by a single unaided person. Sadly, copyright term is the only sensible (and easily enforceable) metric, although whilst I'd agree that the term is currently too long, reducing it to shorter than the creator's lifetime can lead to other weird situations. For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it. Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable. Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work (e.g. a book where page 200 contained a spelling correction), etc. How would you decide the copyright term then? Would pages 1-199 and 201-end be out of copyright and only page 200 copyrighted? And assuming we think lifetime of the creator makes sense, then we would need a different rule for companies, because companies can last forever. What we have right now, seems approximately the optimal solution in most cases. About the only thing I'd change is when nobody knows who the copyright holder is, which is particularly an issue with old software. There really should be some way of legally distributing abandonware if nobody can prove that they own the copyright.
semiquaver 3mo ago
> People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations Society created the concept of copyright and intellectual property for a reason and it is emphatically not the protection of income streams after you are dead. Whether a person exists who cares about a thing is not a reason to preserve it.
- Retric 3mo ago
  That reason was to generate more works. Before the conception of copyright artists would create physical works to be sold after they died to support their families in part because such works would be more valuable after they died. Indirect effects matter both for society and as a legal question. To this day many elderly / sick artists are working not for their own personal interests but for other people. Thus copyright not expiring as soon as people die is supporting the original goal of copyright. The total length of copyright is a different question.