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Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? I think copyright should be as long as ownership of any other asset. If I spend

Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? I think copyright should be as long as ownership of any other asset. If I spend $20m on building a house or creating a computer game, why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not? I would have a monopoly on this specific building and on this specific creative work, but anyone is free to build/create anything else. If J. Rowling created Harry Potter universe, why her family can't own it indefinitely? We somehow accept this notion for other assets, but treat copyright differently. p.s. creative work is more valuable as it has something that money can't buy (authenticity, taste, sincerity, etc)

Ekaros 22d ago
>If I spend $20m on building Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.
- achempion 22d ago
  > Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house They do, some build to rent indefinitely or sell to other who rent out the property.
  - Ekaros 22d ago
    I mean the actual workers. I do not get royalty checks for the building I helped on during one summer. Homeowners don't send monthly money to workers that build their house or renovated it.
    - achempion 22d ago
      It's the same in creative work creation, no? Filming crew / game devs don't own any copyright and property rights. They explicitly give it up under contract/hiring terms.
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]
californical 22d ago
Her family can own their copies of Harry Potter forever. But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore? For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.
modeless 22d ago
> why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright. If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.
- achempion 22d ago
  Public doesn't pay a creative tax. You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. This is different with other assets though, you have to pay someone indefinitely to rent a place to live, even though building (or land) was built hundreds years ago and just gets inherited by new generation of landlords every 75 years.
  - dvdkon 22d ago
    > You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers. Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.
  - ItsMonkk 21d ago
    Any price above the marginal cost produces dead-weight loss. Dead-weight loss causes less value to be created than is possible. What we need is a system that subsidizes the value created by the inventor, without any restrictions for the rest of society. Without any restrictions will allow every innovation to maximize the value that it is able to create. Currently an innovation can be hampered because the person who created that innovation is not the one best able to utilize that innovation. One way to accomplish this is through an Innovation Prize Model while Patents and Copyrights be abolished. The way it would work is that once you've come up with some innovation, you have a choice. You can either keep it secret, or you can reveal the secret. If you reveal the secret, the government could grant you a 30 year bond based on the value of this innovation. The bond will have a minimum value, and if it's discovered within the 30 year window that the innovation is more valuable than previously suspected, value will be added to that bond. You would then have an option, to keep the bond for the 30 years, or you could sell a portion of this bond to others to instantly get cash. There could be a market for these that made it easy to trade and discover expected values. It's clear from the dead-weight loss portion that overall value will be much higher than the existing scenario, so this payment will be much higher than any profits that copyright holders currently accrue.
sophrosyne42 22d ago
>Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.
- yorwba 22d ago
  Owning the copyright to a work grants the exclusive right to profit off that work, but so does owning a house grant the exclusive right to profit off that house. House ownership is not a monopoly because there are other houses, and you can build a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. Similarly, copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works, and you can make a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. The negative economic effects of monopolies stem from a lack of competition leading to insufficient supply, but there's no lack of competition or insufficient supply of copyrighted works. Even if copyright were indefinite like other property rights, it wouldn't stymie the supply of new works, but rather expand investment due to raising the future expected profit.
  - chii 22d ago
    > copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works they are not fungible, unlike houses. Also, if you could copy a house like you could copy digital goods (i would download a car), i am also going to claim that the "monopoly" on the house must also be shortened.
    - yorwba 22d ago
      Sure, there are idiosyncratic preferences and some people really want that one famous work, but there are also idiosyncratic preferences when it comes to houses, and particularly famous houses command a premium, but that doesn't render houses nonfungible. For most people, any house they enjoy living in will do, and any content they enjoy consuming will do. You would download a house or a car, but the people making new houses or cars would only offer them for download if they can charge enough for each copy to make back their original investment. So houses and cars could be expected to cost about as much as a movie ticket or book or game. That those are currently much cheaper is also an indication that competition is successfully working to drive down prices close to the cost of production.

Ekaros 22d ago

>If I spend $20m on building Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.

achempion 22d ago
> Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house They do, some build to rent indefinitely or sell to other who rent out the property.
- Ekaros 22d ago
  I mean the actual workers. I do not get royalty checks for the building I helped on during one summer. Homeowners don't send monthly money to workers that build their house or renovated it.
  - achempion 22d ago
    It's the same in creative work creation, no? Filming crew / game devs don't own any copyright and property rights. They explicitly give it up under contract/hiring terms.

deleted 22d ago

[deleted]

californical 22d ago

Her family can own their copies of Harry Potter forever. But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore? For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.

modeless 22d ago

> why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright. If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.

achempion 22d ago
Public doesn't pay a creative tax. You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. This is different with other assets though, you have to pay someone indefinitely to rent a place to live, even though building (or land) was built hundreds years ago and just gets inherited by new generation of landlords every 75 years.
- dvdkon 22d ago
  > You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers. Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.
- ItsMonkk 21d ago
  Any price above the marginal cost produces dead-weight loss. Dead-weight loss causes less value to be created than is possible. What we need is a system that subsidizes the value created by the inventor, without any restrictions for the rest of society. Without any restrictions will allow every innovation to maximize the value that it is able to create. Currently an innovation can be hampered because the person who created that innovation is not the one best able to utilize that innovation. One way to accomplish this is through an Innovation Prize Model while Patents and Copyrights be abolished. The way it would work is that once you've come up with some innovation, you have a choice. You can either keep it secret, or you can reveal the secret. If you reveal the secret, the government could grant you a 30 year bond based on the value of this innovation. The bond will have a minimum value, and if it's discovered within the 30 year window that the innovation is more valuable than previously suspected, value will be added to that bond. You would then have an option, to keep the bond for the 30 years, or you could sell a portion of this bond to others to instantly get cash. There could be a market for these that made it easy to trade and discover expected values. It's clear from the dead-weight loss portion that overall value will be much higher than the existing scenario, so this payment will be much higher than any profits that copyright holders currently accrue.

sophrosyne42 22d ago

>Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.

yorwba 22d ago
Owning the copyright to a work grants the exclusive right to profit off that work, but so does owning a house grant the exclusive right to profit off that house. House ownership is not a monopoly because there are other houses, and you can build a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. Similarly, copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works, and you can make a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. The negative economic effects of monopolies stem from a lack of competition leading to insufficient supply, but there's no lack of competition or insufficient supply of copyrighted works. Even if copyright were indefinite like other property rights, it wouldn't stymie the supply of new works, but rather expand investment due to raising the future expected profit.
- chii 22d ago
  > copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works they are not fungible, unlike houses. Also, if you could copy a house like you could copy digital goods (i would download a car), i am also going to claim that the "monopoly" on the house must also be shortened.
  - yorwba 22d ago
    Sure, there are idiosyncratic preferences and some people really want that one famous work, but there are also idiosyncratic preferences when it comes to houses, and particularly famous houses command a premium, but that doesn't render houses nonfungible. For most people, any house they enjoy living in will do, and any content they enjoy consuming will do. You would download a house or a car, but the people making new houses or cars would only offer them for download if they can charge enough for each copy to make back their original investment. So houses and cars could be expected to cost about as much as a movie ticket or book or game. That those are currently much cheaper is also an indication that competition is successfully working to drive down prices close to the cost of production.