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> 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

• 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.
    • pydry 3mo ago
      >Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever. I'm not sure we'd be any worse off as a society if, say, Disney wasnt incentivized to make 34 marvel movies. There are things where we desperately need large scale investment (e.g. manufacturing, green energy) but big budget artistic productions is probably one area of the economy where we could easily live without it.
      • ralferoo 3mo ago
        Would be be worse off as a society without Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Jungle Book, Mary Poppins, the Herbie series, and any of the many more recent films? If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them. Sure, film companies often make a quick buck from sequels, but it's interesting that copyright on characters is distinct from copyright on works. If anything it's surprising that you're arguing something other than the usual issue that's brought up around Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.
        • basilikum 3mo ago
          > If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them. The people who get most of the money from these movies are the shareholders of huge media conglomerates, which is the only reason why these works still have copyright. Authors and their families are purely a pretense for this. The point of people deserving a monopoly over aspects of culture long after they created a work and deserving to censor the works of others who do not pay royalties to their monopoly – this is what copyright means – is weird. It sounds good as long as you read it as a feel good story without thinking about it, but it is ultimately moot. No, they do not. The argument is bizarre. We do not grant this privilege to anyone else. Everyone else gets paid for their work when they do it. They can even invest the money like everyone else. When you've hit it big with a creative work you are set for life. But when I build a house for you, I get paid once. I cannot get back to you 20 years later and demand payment once again because you are still living in it and benefiting from my work. It would be absurd. Obviously in creative works there is usually uncertainty. Most works are not created in exchange to a previously agreed commission by one party, but are created as an advance investment and then offered to the general public. We have to grant copyright to these works for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work. There is no reason to extent this copyright beyond this limited time period and to grant authors such a special privilege. On the contrary there is all the reason not to do this as copyright is ultimately censorship and must be limited to the utmost minimal necessity. > Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories. That is perfectly fine. No one in their right mind would argue against that. The evil of disney is not creating derivative works of works in the public domain, but after the fact lobbying to retroactively extend copyright forever so that no work will ever fall into the public domain again; so that no one will be able to do the same as them – creating derivatives to decades old works that ought to be in the public domain; so that they can effectively own culture.
• ralferoo 3mo ago
  Reworking that a bit, suppose you work hard in your 20s and have a skill that many others don't have and can command a good wage for your work. You can make plenty from it, so why spend your time in your 40s and 50s doing more work when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? Why can e.g. programmers profit from their specialism and then have early retirement, but e.g. popular singers or authors not do the same if they wanted? Why shouldn't they be allowed to continue to make money from the original work they've created that nobody else could / did? Why should a programmer be allowed to leave a huge legacy to their children in the form of vested stocks, but artists not be allowed to in the form of continuing royalties? Creating works of art that people want is as much of a specialised skill as e.g. programming, but the payoff doesn't come as a large monthly paycheque, but as a small amount on each copy sold that you hope to recoup by selling more volume over time.