4 ms·
A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyri
by giancarlostoro 3mo ago
A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CLEARLY fair use, and even gets me to listen to the songs more, but they are stealing all revenue for a fair use video that took a lot of time and money to make to begin with, they are profiting from work they didn't even do. This is silly to me, I'm sure there's loads of other channels and videos out there screwed over by the record industry over 15 second samples from a song... Which should 100% be fair use and not be given to the record labels.
Issue is small streamers have no legal defense.
Edit, adding the channel I am referring to:
https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos
- Always42 3mo agoThis would create incentive to kill people
- ktm5j 3mo agoSo does life insurance.. but we still have that.
- fragmede 3mo agoWhat we don't have anymore though because of that, is tontines.
- dspillett 3mo agoThey are still around.
- account42 3mo agoAnd common if you count retirement funds.
- ralferoo 3mo agoNever heard of it, so just googled, but it's not obvious why these would be more preferable to annuities. As you get older above about 75, people tend to spend a lot less in general (assuming they don't need care support), so getting more money when you're unlikely to spend it anyway seems pointless. I'd speculate that the regular payments on annuities would therefore be higher than tontines because insurance companies would be able to factor in average life expectancy to the pricing more easily, rather than having to budget for possibly all the money continuing to be paid out to just one remaining person who happened to beat the odds and live well beyond 100 instead of the average around mid-80s.
- weberer 3mo agoI would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoI would accept that as well, but crank it down to like 62 years since their date of birth, presumably by the time they would retire.
- fn-mote 3mo agoWhat? Think this through some more. Authors and artists are still creating after that age.
- AussieWog93 3mo agoSo if an 86 year old writes a book they can't copyright it?
- duzer65657 3mo agoThis can't work: life expectancy (of humans) can differ more than 30 years around the world, plus there are significant differences between men and women, and corporations - which often own copyright on work for hire - can live in perpetuity.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
- inferniac 3mo agonot really, when copyright disappears, so does the profit motive sure, you don't have to pay royalties, but any other publisher can now publish too
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- monknomo 3mo ago20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.
- reorder9695 3mo agoIt also solves the issue of potentially not knowing when the author died, with a fixed period (the number isn't so important imo so long as it's sane), a work is out of copyright x years after the first known copy was published.
- monknomo 3mo agoreduces the ownership hunt problem, as well!
- marcosdumay 3mo agoEither that or some exponentially increasing tax so that Disney can keep their vault. (I'm perfectly fine with them keeping it if they pay some proper taxes.)
- monknomo 3mo agothe important thing is that copyright serves the public good, I do not think it currently does, at least not as well as it could
- joquarky 3mo agoThe whole purpose is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. The implementation is no longer in alignment with that constitutional requirement.
- Ikatza 3mo agoThey pay taxes every time that they make money off Mickey Mouse, regardless of copyright status.
- thdr 3mo ago> copyright should just die with the author That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are. The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)
- wiether 3mo ago> for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are If you hire them, then you own the work you paid them to do, no?
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoEither that or if it didn't work, insurance industry would've created a product that makes it work for commissioned works. Nothing happens in isolation here.
- graeme 3mo agoNot in every country, and secondly if you're basing it on life of the author then that does't solve corporate copyright unless you tie it to the live of a particular employee. You could do "life of author or X years, whichever is longer". Or include a period after death. But you see how the complexities come in.
- clort 3mo agoThe complexities are the problem. I've always thought a fixed term is best. Then, you can purchase a work - it says Copyright <dddd> on it. Then, you know that after dddd+term the copyright is lapsed. You don't need to hunt down the author to see if they died. No guessing, just written on the work that you purchased. No, don't have optional extensions - that just means you have to look it up. It should say it right there on the work you purchased when the copyright expires. It is said that the vast vast majority of works don't earn anything significant after a few years in any case, meaning the only possible reason to have long copyrights is so that a very few people can get stinking rich. But those people already got rich, in the first few years.. society does not benefit from them getting richer. 20 years fixed term is my proposal.
- Ikatza 3mo agoWhat if the copyright is owned by a corporation?
- Gee101 3mo agoI thought about this and what they are doing is writing the music industry out of the minds of the next generation who mostly uses Youtube etc. for entertainment. Most Youtube videos do not contain any copyrighted music as it takes too much revenue as you state. Again, its short term profit at the cost of long-term gain.
- account42 3mo agoI'd rather not involve the author's life in the copyright duration at all - it should be a limited time just enough for the author/heirs/whoever to recover costs plus make a modest profit and not a special kind of retirement fund or other kind of welfare scheme.