2 ms·
I'm what way does it make sense to respect the intellectual property rights of a dead man?
by idiotsecant 22d ago
I'm what way does it make sense to respect the intellectual property rights of a dead man?
- dotancohen 22d agoThat dead man took the risk of not earning much in his lifetime, to continue feeding his family even after his passing. You might as well ask why does someone acquire life insurance.
- ceejayoz 22d agoIf IP rights end at death, there are some significant perverse incentives for offing big-name artists and authors and whatnot.
- rmunn 22d agoThe current "lifetime of the author + X years" rules in effect in the United States still carry the same perverse incentive, though the incentive diminishes rapidly as X gets larger; with the very large value of X in effect today the perverse incentive is so small as to be effectively non-existent, but it's still there in theory. Personally, I'd prefer a fixed term. I know enough independent authors making a living from selling their books that I'm willing to allow the fixed term to be large, like 50 years from date of completion of the work. (With a good definition of "completion" so someone can't cheat by editing a couple lines per year to keep something copyrighted indefinitely). The simpler the rule is, the easier it is to understand, and the harder it is to cheat it. The more complicated you make a rule, the more loopholes get found.
- idiotsecant 22d agoThere are significant perverse incentives for me shooting you with a gun and taking your money and running away too. It mostly doesn't happen.
- ceejayoz 22d agoI don’t have a billion dollars in my wallet.
- idiotsecant 22d agoSo it's just a matter of scale.
- ceejayoz 22d agoSure, that's why I said "big-name" artists in the first place.
- dofm 22d agoIt secures the benefits of copyright for work being produced by the creator up to death, for their heirs and dependents, which is why they were creating for money in the first place. People don’t just die after twenty years of resting on their laurels; everyone is creating copyrighted work. It’s a key part of the incentive to create lasting works of value. One can make the case that this period should be more limited, or that the combination should be capped, but life+X is the right formulation, I think.
- xienze 22d ago> for their heirs and dependents Why can't they do what the rest of us do? Earn and save money during your working life and leave _that_ for your heirs. Let copyright die with the author.
- dofm 22d agoWork is often only recently published when an artist or author dies but has taken years of non-earning to create. I know this them-and-us thinking is fashionable in the tech world but the reality is that the majority of creative people don’t earn much and never have, and copyright was developed not to give them extra power over the rest of us but to create a framework for creative work to earn them an income at all. You should read about it.
- SR2Z 22d agoSure, some number of years is reasonable - but what do you think that is? Because 70 is insane. A single bestseller should not be able to support an extended family over three generations; at some point the rent-seeking becomes excessive. If you publish a work, at some point it stops being yours. The fact that this takes a whole lifetime is already very generous.
- dofm 21d agoI don't disagree; personally I think you could go with life plus 35 and cap the whole thing at 80 years from publication. But I do think some potential post-mortem protection is essential for creative work to remain viable, and that means that any post-mortem buyer of an artist's estate has to be able to get value from recent work for a period of time. This whole discussion is somewhat fantastical now anyway, because copyright is fucked. But the intent was always to make working artists' lives possible; the various copyright extensions have always been for the benefit of corporate copyright holders, and it is unfair to vilify individual working artists for that.