11 ms·

I can't help but feel that it would be fair for copyright to stay with an author until they die.

by ollysb 12y ago

RexRollman 12y ago
That's how I feel about it too. When the author dies, so should the copyright. There is no valid reason for copyrights to last as long as they do; corporate greed aside.
- JasonFruit 12y ago
  I think that too, until I remember the piano concerto Bèla Bartók struggled to finish as he was dying, so he could provide transitional financial support to his young wife. I think that's a valid use of post-mortem copyright.
- mikeash 12y ago
  I think a fixed, short term might be better. Considering two extreme cases: Author A writes something incredibly popular and dies the moment he wrote the last word. His children end up in the poor house because they don't get any royalties from sales. Author B writes something incredibly popular at the age of 15 and is still living large off his royalties at the ripe old age of 100. If you just set it to, say, 20 years and it's done (or IMO better would be an exponentially increasing fee for renewal, $1 for the first year, $2 for the second, $4 for the third, etc.) then it seems to be more predictable and cleaner.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    I agree entirely. A fixed term, ideally with ongoing maintenance required to maintain, seems far fairer than tying it to a particular individual. You'd need a fixed term regardless to handle works for hire, so fairness would argue for using that same term universally.
  - ollysb 12y ago
    I don't see any reason you couldn't have the greater of: a fixed term (say 20 years) or when the author dies (I don't have any problem at all with an author living off their own work for as long as they live).
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I think that would be decent. I don't particularly think a person should still be getting income from a copyrighted work they created the better part of a century ago just because they happen to still be alive, but I'm not strongly opposed to it either.
      - mcb3k 12y ago
        I think that using just the fixed term would be better, just for simplicity's sake. How would it work if you have a collaborative novel? One author dies, the other continues living. What if the author goes missing? Changes their name, moves and leaves no forwarding address? How much effort do you need to put in to track down an author in order to re-print their works, or to tell if they're in the public domain? It's much easier to just do a standard, fixed term for all copyrights.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      >(I don't have any problem at all with an author living off their own work for as long as they live). // It corrupts the copyright deal to some extent. Copyright in part is to encourage creation of new works in the hope that they will benefit society. If we (the people) allow authors to rest on their laurels we potentially deprive ourselves of much of the benefit that could be elicited from their creativity. We also to some extent lock up important works that would otherwise allow the inspiration of others - creators of derivative works - to be rewarded. We want to reward creativity, but not so much so that those who happen to have societally enriching creativity don't need to exercise it more than once!
  - tzs 12y ago
    20 years would be culturally terrible. That would make it so just around the time your kids are old enough for you to introduce them to the great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood it would enter the public domain and become widely used in advertising and low budget productions. You are not going to be able to share the magic of, say, Calvin & Hobbes, with your kids if your kids have already been saturated by those characters as TV pitchmen for toys and junk food.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I don't see any correlation currently between things that are in the public domain and things that are used on TV to pitch toys and junk food.
      - tzs 12y ago
        Yes, but isn't that because the edge of public domain is very far back? Some random character from the early 1900s that no one today recognizes is not going to be all that useful. Move that edge to be just 20 years back, and it picks up a lot of things that are still well known. 20 years is not nearly as long as it sounds. Harry Potter, for instance, is already 17 years old. I bet a lot of advertisers 3 years from now would jump on the chance to use Harry Potter characters.
        mikeash 12y ago
        There are plenty of classic, well-known characters in the public domain. Sherlock obviously being one, given the context of the discussion. Frankenstein. Robin Hood. King Arthur. Jesus.... On another note, it doesn't affect your point all that much, but while Harry Potter the character would go into the public domain in 2017, the first movie wouldn't go into the public domain until 2021. In that interval, you could use the characters but you couldn't replicate their likenesses from the movies without some sort of agreement.
    - eikenberry 12y ago
      I think you have it exactly backwards. A reasonable length copyright (like 10-20 years) would be awesome for culture. You'd see loads more great new comics, cartoons, movies, music books all remixing, reworking and drawing inspiration from an renewed and thriving public domain. Advertisers and branding wouldn't find much use for them because they were public domain. They gain value from these things by limiting the use through exclusive deals enabled by copyright.
  - mcb3k 12y ago
    I think that having an exponentially increasing renewal fee seems like a good idea on the surface, but makes things more complicated than they should be. In order to do that, you have to have a central authority that actually keeps track of copyrighted works, who owns the rights to it, if they've been extended, if the fees have been paid, etc. On top of that, you need to think about the broke independent author who can't afford to extend the copyright on that 5th year because they got a divorce, got in a car accident, and landed in the hospital. Or the high schooler who wrote a book for NANOWRIMO, self-publishes it, but doesn't know the first thing about copyright law or needing to continually do extensions. The copyright inevitably lapses, and some publisher finds it, likes it, and starts printing copies and selling them because it's in the public domain. I really, honestly believe that we need to reform copyright, but I also think we need make sure that it doesn't favour people with money and people with access to intimate knowledge of copyright law. I think everyone probably has at least one copyrighted work to their name, so we should make it a goal that just about everyone should be able to understand copyright.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      Most countries already have that central authority, so that's not a particularly big hurdle. Note that for most of the history of copyright in the US, it wasn't automatic, and you had to register your work. Automatic copyright for simply creating something didn't happen in the US until 1989. There's still a central authority, as registration is still required for certain additional whatnot. Of course, "that's how it was" doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. But it's not completely disastrous. I think most of your objections would be solved by a sort of hybrid system that I hinted at. Don't start the exponential renewal until the 20 year mark. If you haven't learned about the need for renewal by then, you clearly don't need it. Start it at a dollar, so it's a tiny barrier for anyone making any money at year 20. By year 30 it'll be a thousand dollars, and by year 40 it'll be a million. This will start to scare off small time folks who aren't making a ton of money. Highly profitable properties will be able to afford the fees for a while longer, although year 50 will hit a billion dollars a year, and soon after it'll exceed the GDP of most countries. So in essence, it breaks down to a 20-year period for even the worst crap, a ~30 year period for obscure but selling works, a 40 year period for properties that continue to be fairly profitable, and maybe a 50 year period for Mickey Mouse class stuff. I think 20-30 years should be plenty to figure out how profitable something is going to be, so it shouldn't much depend on how much money people had before, but how much they can make from the work. If we consider that a proxy for how valuable the work is to society (a bad proxy to be sure, but perhaps better than nothing) then why not allow profitable works to last longer? Make some money for Uncle Sam too.
- duaneb 12y ago
  > There is no valid reason for copyrights to last as long as they do; corporate greed aside. I dunno about that. I think there should be a minimum term of, say, 15 years, so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve.
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    Or she could buy actual life insurance, rather than enforcing a bizarro version via a grant of monopoly whose value depends on the immediate commercial value of a creative work.
    - res0nat0r 12y ago
      I'm guessing most authors don't write a book for life insurance purposes, just that the fact that a standard 15 year term is probably more beneficial to most people than a term based on when you die.
  - dingaling 12y ago
    > so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve. If I died one month after starting a new programming job, my employer wouldn't pay a salary to my family for 15 years. I'm not sure why society has to take care of the family of an author but not a programmer.
    - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
      That's not really at all comparable. With writing, unless you get an advance on an unwritten book, you first work for months or years unpaid, and then (if you're lucky) you get an up-front sale payment and then royalties for a while. What would you think if you started a new programming job, kicked the bucket after 29 days, and your employer tried to claim that they didn't have to give your last paycheck to your family because you didn't finish the month? Death or 15 years seems fair to me.
    - rtpg 12y ago
      If you built a house one month after you died, would you expect it to be given to the state? IP is more about property than a job, I think.
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  since basically every reason to shorten copyright boils down to the personal greed for entertainment, or the personal greed to profit from the work of others, I have to ask; why is that automatically better?
  - thesteamboat 12y ago
    1) In my view the primary reason to drastically shorten copyright is so that it is easier to create new works. For example, documentaries have startling problems due to copyright, see for example http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html?_r=0 2) Isn't someone who holds a copyright other than the creator (say in this example the Conan Doyle estate) profiting from the work of others? 3) Like all sensible issues, deciding the proper term of copyright should be understood as a set of tradeoffs. Longer copyright terms may encourage more creative work by increasing the payoff, may give authors more creative control in how their creations are used and so forth. Shorter copyright terms may encourage more creative work by reducing the cost of remixing other's ideas, can provide a common pool of cultural resources for all to draw on, and so forth. What is necessary is to try to balance these competing interests against each other. It is not that shorter copyright terms are "automatically better", but I (and apparently many others in this thread) strongly believe that the balance right now has copyright terms that are too long to be socially beneficial.
    - mcb3k 12y ago
      Another good point is that for every book, movie, song, game, etc. that is very popular and keeps getting re-printed, re-published, re-released, or ported to new platforms, there are tens to hundreds of books that do not. Having long copyright terms makes the chances of vast swathes of works stop existing entirely, simply because of the decay of the medium that they are produced and stored on.
      - thesteamboat 12y ago
        Agreed. Yet another related point is that strict copyright regimes can be discriminatory against, say, the visually impaired, when rights holders are neither willing to expend the effort to translate works into a more suitable format nor willing to allow others to do so.
- signal11 12y ago
  > When the author dies, so should the copyright. But would this not increase the incentive to harm authors? If the author dies, film studios/HBO etc no longer have to pay for movie/TV rights to out-of-copyright work.
  - idlewan 12y ago
    It's very interesting to consider the effects. But why should we link death with the release of copyright? While temptation of assassination is probably reduced with extra-long copyright duration after death of author, it's a lot saner to assign a fixed-duration copyright from the original release date, not from (whole life of author + fixed duration). The problem goes away if you have a fixed duration from the start.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Shivetya 12y ago
  they should be assignable property as if they were physical goods. Just as the person can assign their physical wealth the copyright should be assignable as well. The expiration of copyright should be independent of the author's lifespan.
blhack 12y ago
I don't know about that... I doubt that we would have gotten things like The Lord of The Rings Trilogy without protective copyrights. That's really fantastic art, that adds to the collective culture in a meaningful way. Copyright should be there to protect things like that.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Why not? If anything, producing those movies should have been easier if LotR was in the public domain, since they wouldn't have had to negotiate with the Tolkein estate first.
  - Ricapar 12y ago
    I think it's partially because of the negotiations with the Tolkein estate that the movies turned out as great as they were. If no negotiations were needed, then anyone could have picked up and done a low-budget adaptation and called it a day. But, because there were some rather expensive and difficult negotiations to settle, the amount of people able to do the movies was limited to those who would be able to spend the money to get the rights. And with that sort of investment, there's a big incentive to also invest heavily in the quality of the production to ensure a good return.
    - idlewan 12y ago
      > If no negotiations were needed, then anyone could have picked up and done a low-budget adaptation and called it a day. And? Anyone can do a low-budget adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and call it a day. Copyright is supposed to incentivize authors to create more work (by having a return on 'investment'/time put in). Not to restrict those who can create 'work inspired by others' to the uber-rich.
    - mnutt 12y ago
      Are you familiar with the hilariously bad 1978 version of Lord of the Rings? It's animated, but at some points switches to rotoscoped live action to save on costs. And it doesn't even finish the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpmZyTK2dI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpmZyTK2dI But for all of that, I don't see how it stopped Peter Jackson's movie from being made.
UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
That's completely unworkable. Too many loopholes. Right now copyright, in theory, has a fixed term. That is a fixed term no matter the owner: corporation, individual, estate. It can be sold (technically licensed exclusively, but same thing) and yet the term continues to be fixed. What you're suggesting SOUNDS good but in reality it would just encourage authors to claim they wrote the work under licence for a non-living entity (e.g. their own business) and then transfer the business to their descendants. Plus under your scheme you have one rule for humans and another rule for corporations with the corporations coming out MASSIVELY ahead. If Warner Studios has a movie made it might get 115 years of copyright (or whatever it is now), but if joe shmoe produces a short film they only get whatever their natural lifespan in copyright protection (which I can assure you won't be 115 years). Bad idea. Sounds good, but that's because you guys haven't given it even the most modest amount of actual thought. The only real issue with copyright is that they keep extending it. 100 years was a nice round number that would allow most individuals to profit for their whole natural lives and for a little to roll onto their descendants. Now with the way things keep getting extending, it wouldn't shock me if for all intents and purposes a lot of works NEVER fell into the public domain, they'll just keep slapping on another 10 years here, 5 years there...
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Uh, we already base personal copyrights on dates of death.
- ddlatham 12y ago
  There's already a double standard for humans and corporations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States_of_America#Duration_of_copyright http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Sta...
ghshephard 12y ago
Everyone is bringing up the case of providing royalties to the descendants of the author. I wonder how common that is, and whether it ever motivates an author to create work they otherwise would not (which is the purpose of the copyright, to incentivize people to create). Do royalties add up to something meaningful for the estate of authors in 1% of the case? 0.1% 0.01%? And, just as importantly (perhaps more so), do authors take this into account when they are creating?
- mikeash 12y ago
  I think you have to consider the opposite question as well: would authors consider the situation with their heirs if copyright expired with the author? My guess is that most don't consider it now, but that could easily change if you enshrined it in law and horror stories got passed around of Joe Schmoe Author who died young and left a destitute family. However, the entire question of how copyright incentivizes creation is extremely murky and there seems to be roughly zero hard data on it, so that could be totally wrong.
  - claudius 12y ago
    On the other hand, Joe Plumber can just as easily die young and leave a destitute family. Does that mean that we have to make a law that all clients of plumbers have to make annual payments to their plumbers and their descendants for up to 70 years after the plumber’s death?
    - simonh 12y ago
      When a plumber does a job, they get paid for it in full immediately. When an author writes a book, the income comes in a trickle over an extended (but in theory fixed) time period. If a plumber and an author were to die young, the Plumber's family have already benefited in full from the results of work the plumber did before death, because payment in full was made immediately when the work was done. What you are arguing for is that the author's family should not benefit in full from the work the author did in life. Why is that?
    - 12y ago
inopinatus 12y ago
No. That would be discriminatory. Here's why: life expectancy matters. An author exploits their copyright by assigning rights and options under it. The price is based on the discounted future cashflows possible from the licensing project in question. If the scope of "future" is limited solely to the lifetime of the author, then the socioeconomic inequities that cause, say, race to be a significant factor in life expectancy will be directly responsible for enforcing that distinction further. Or more simply, it causes the same novel written by a rich young white man to receive a better licensing deal than if it were written by a poor old black man. This may of course already be the case, but any such rule would exacerbate matters. Today, that extra 70 year buffer helps at least to throw the present-value discounting beyond the foreseeable future.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  Wait, are you claiming to believe that the change in aggregate economic outcomes driven by a change in copyright assignment is enough to measurably affect aggregate life expectancy? Besides which, the average member of the population will spend far more money on creative works than they will receive in revenue on them; it would be to their benefit to have the price of creative works drop.
  - nkurz 12y ago
    No, the claim would be that it's discriminatory for a work by a person with a statistically short life expectancy to have less market value than a person with greater. Possibly true, but it's an interesting for of poetic justice for all works upcoming young black females to be inherently more valuable than than yet another bestselling sequel by an established octogenarian white male.[1] As for the price of creative works, a common fear is that if copyright protection was weaker, artists might no longer feel properly incentivized to make creative works, and an uncreated work is not isn't available at any price. I have trouble sharing this fear, although the impact would probably depend on your taste in art. [1] A slight poetic license, as statistically American black females have slightly greater life expectancy at every age than do American white males: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_07.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_07.pdf
javert 12y ago
I think copyrights should be perpetual. That will much more greatly reward authors, who can sell their works to investors. This will better incentivize more writing and good writing. The worst case (and unrealistic) scenario of a stingy heir just doesn't matter. If someone deprived us of Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter or Mickey Mouse or whatever, we would all be just fine. None of them are essential.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  How is that a good deal for the public, we promise to uphold a perpetual copyright and in return we get ...? Copyright is a deal, we uphold a legal defence for the author [or their successor] to monopoly rights on their work and they promise to put the work in the public domain when the term expires. The public domain release is the payment to society in exchange for the monopoly rights protection. Why would the public go for the deal that you suggest?
  - javert 12y ago
    As I said, > This will better incentivize more writing and good writing.
  - javert 12y ago
    As I said, > This will better incentivize more writing and good writing.
- decode 12y ago
  > I think copyrights should be perpetual. Here's Spider Robinson's take on this dystopia: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
- thesteamboat 12y ago
  In the US at least, perpetual copyright is explicitly unconstitutional [0] as copyrights are to be granted for a limited term [1]. I quote Mary Bono speaking on behalf of the Copyright Term Extension act: > Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress. Sources: [0] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1998-10-07/pdf/CREC-1998-10-07-pt1-PgH9946.pdf#page=7 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1998-10-07/pdf/CREC-1998-1... [1] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, (the Copyright Clause)
rayiner 12y ago
In a sense I agree with you, because I think the fairest thing to do would be for all property to escheat to the state at death (which should use the property to establish a trust fund for every child born the same year). Barring that level of social reorganization, I see no reason why it's more fair for copyright to end at death than it is for other property rights to so end. It makes no sense to me why my legal claim to a piece of land, which my predecessors stole from the Indians and which in any case existed long before humans roamed the earth and will exist long after, should be stronger than my claim to a unique work that exists solely by virtue of my creativity, intellect, and effort.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Well, much in the way that the land we have today exists due to how it was shaped by history (1000 years ago, there probably wasn't a paved road and electric wires run to the plot of land you have now), no creative work exists in a bubble. If you're writing a story, you're building on generations of story tellers that came before you. As powerful and social creatures, there is nothing we can do that is not either directly or indirectly related to tons of other people's work. Nothing exists solely by virtue of your creativity, intellect, and effort.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    If anything that argument supports making copyright stronger than other property rights. Even though my story, movie, or computer program builds on the past, it's still much more the result of my own effort than any land I own. I did very little of the work involved in stealing my back yard from Indians, clearing it, leveling it, running electricity, sewer, and water to it, etc.
    - lmm 12y ago
      > I did very little of the work involved in stealing my back yard from Indians, clearing it, leveling it, running electricity, sewer, and water to it, etc. But you paid people for that, or paid other people who paid people for that, or so on. You don't pay the people who created the culture you participate in (I mean, you might buy a few specific works - but the common cultural language, standard symbolisms, the very notion of the structure of a novel...). How could you fairly pay for those? And if you were charged for every iota of culture you osmosed, how could that possibly be done justly, without making you suddenly liable for charges every time you had a casual conversation, or even walked out your door and looked around?

I can't help but feel that it would be fair for copyright to stay with an author until they die.

by ollysb 12y ago

I can't help but feel that it would be fair for copyright to stay with an author until they die.

That's how I feel about it too. When the author dies, so should the copyright. There is no valid reason for copyrights to last as long as they do; corporate greed aside.

JasonFruit 12y ago
I think that too, until I remember the piano concerto Bèla Bartók struggled to finish as he was dying, so he could provide transitional financial support to his young wife. I think that's a valid use of post-mortem copyright.
mikeash 12y ago
I think a fixed, short term might be better. Considering two extreme cases: Author A writes something incredibly popular and dies the moment he wrote the last word. His children end up in the poor house because they don't get any royalties from sales. Author B writes something incredibly popular at the age of 15 and is still living large off his royalties at the ripe old age of 100. If you just set it to, say, 20 years and it's done (or IMO better would be an exponentially increasing fee for renewal, $1 for the first year, $2 for the second, $4 for the third, etc.) then it seems to be more predictable and cleaner.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  I agree entirely. A fixed term, ideally with ongoing maintenance required to maintain, seems far fairer than tying it to a particular individual. You'd need a fixed term regardless to handle works for hire, so fairness would argue for using that same term universally.
- ollysb 12y ago
  I don't see any reason you couldn't have the greater of: a fixed term (say 20 years) or when the author dies (I don't have any problem at all with an author living off their own work for as long as they live).
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I think that would be decent. I don't particularly think a person should still be getting income from a copyrighted work they created the better part of a century ago just because they happen to still be alive, but I'm not strongly opposed to it either.
    - mcb3k 12y ago
      I think that using just the fixed term would be better, just for simplicity's sake. How would it work if you have a collaborative novel? One author dies, the other continues living. What if the author goes missing? Changes their name, moves and leaves no forwarding address? How much effort do you need to put in to track down an author in order to re-print their works, or to tell if they're in the public domain? It's much easier to just do a standard, fixed term for all copyrights.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >(I don't have any problem at all with an author living off their own work for as long as they live). // It corrupts the copyright deal to some extent. Copyright in part is to encourage creation of new works in the hope that they will benefit society. If we (the people) allow authors to rest on their laurels we potentially deprive ourselves of much of the benefit that could be elicited from their creativity. We also to some extent lock up important works that would otherwise allow the inspiration of others - creators of derivative works - to be rewarded. We want to reward creativity, but not so much so that those who happen to have societally enriching creativity don't need to exercise it more than once!
- tzs 12y ago
  20 years would be culturally terrible. That would make it so just around the time your kids are old enough for you to introduce them to the great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood it would enter the public domain and become widely used in advertising and low budget productions. You are not going to be able to share the magic of, say, Calvin & Hobbes, with your kids if your kids have already been saturated by those characters as TV pitchmen for toys and junk food.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I don't see any correlation currently between things that are in the public domain and things that are used on TV to pitch toys and junk food.
    - tzs 12y ago
      Yes, but isn't that because the edge of public domain is very far back? Some random character from the early 1900s that no one today recognizes is not going to be all that useful. Move that edge to be just 20 years back, and it picks up a lot of things that are still well known. 20 years is not nearly as long as it sounds. Harry Potter, for instance, is already 17 years old. I bet a lot of advertisers 3 years from now would jump on the chance to use Harry Potter characters.
      - mikeash 12y ago
        There are plenty of classic, well-known characters in the public domain. Sherlock obviously being one, given the context of the discussion. Frankenstein. Robin Hood. King Arthur. Jesus.... On another note, it doesn't affect your point all that much, but while Harry Potter the character would go into the public domain in 2017, the first movie wouldn't go into the public domain until 2021. In that interval, you could use the characters but you couldn't replicate their likenesses from the movies without some sort of agreement.
  - eikenberry 12y ago
    I think you have it exactly backwards. A reasonable length copyright (like 10-20 years) would be awesome for culture. You'd see loads more great new comics, cartoons, movies, music books all remixing, reworking and drawing inspiration from an renewed and thriving public domain. Advertisers and branding wouldn't find much use for them because they were public domain. They gain value from these things by limiting the use through exclusive deals enabled by copyright.
- mcb3k 12y ago
  I think that having an exponentially increasing renewal fee seems like a good idea on the surface, but makes things more complicated than they should be. In order to do that, you have to have a central authority that actually keeps track of copyrighted works, who owns the rights to it, if they've been extended, if the fees have been paid, etc. On top of that, you need to think about the broke independent author who can't afford to extend the copyright on that 5th year because they got a divorce, got in a car accident, and landed in the hospital. Or the high schooler who wrote a book for NANOWRIMO, self-publishes it, but doesn't know the first thing about copyright law or needing to continually do extensions. The copyright inevitably lapses, and some publisher finds it, likes it, and starts printing copies and selling them because it's in the public domain. I really, honestly believe that we need to reform copyright, but I also think we need make sure that it doesn't favour people with money and people with access to intimate knowledge of copyright law. I think everyone probably has at least one copyrighted work to their name, so we should make it a goal that just about everyone should be able to understand copyright.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Most countries already have that central authority, so that's not a particularly big hurdle. Note that for most of the history of copyright in the US, it wasn't automatic, and you had to register your work. Automatic copyright for simply creating something didn't happen in the US until 1989. There's still a central authority, as registration is still required for certain additional whatnot. Of course, "that's how it was" doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. But it's not completely disastrous. I think most of your objections would be solved by a sort of hybrid system that I hinted at. Don't start the exponential renewal until the 20 year mark. If you haven't learned about the need for renewal by then, you clearly don't need it. Start it at a dollar, so it's a tiny barrier for anyone making any money at year 20. By year 30 it'll be a thousand dollars, and by year 40 it'll be a million. This will start to scare off small time folks who aren't making a ton of money. Highly profitable properties will be able to afford the fees for a while longer, although year 50 will hit a billion dollars a year, and soon after it'll exceed the GDP of most countries. So in essence, it breaks down to a 20-year period for even the worst crap, a ~30 year period for obscure but selling works, a 40 year period for properties that continue to be fairly profitable, and maybe a 50 year period for Mickey Mouse class stuff. I think 20-30 years should be plenty to figure out how profitable something is going to be, so it shouldn't much depend on how much money people had before, but how much they can make from the work. If we consider that a proxy for how valuable the work is to society (a bad proxy to be sure, but perhaps better than nothing) then why not allow profitable works to last longer? Make some money for Uncle Sam too.
duaneb 12y ago
> There is no valid reason for copyrights to last as long as they do; corporate greed aside. I dunno about that. I think there should be a minimum term of, say, 15 years, so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  Or she could buy actual life insurance, rather than enforcing a bizarro version via a grant of monopoly whose value depends on the immediate commercial value of a creative work.
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    I'm guessing most authors don't write a book for life insurance purposes, just that the fact that a standard 15 year term is probably more beneficial to most people than a term based on when you die.
- dingaling 12y ago
  > so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve. If I died one month after starting a new programming job, my employer wouldn't pay a salary to my family for 15 years. I'm not sure why society has to take care of the family of an author but not a programmer.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    That's not really at all comparable. With writing, unless you get an advance on an unwritten book, you first work for months or years unpaid, and then (if you're lucky) you get an up-front sale payment and then royalties for a while. What would you think if you started a new programming job, kicked the bucket after 29 days, and your employer tried to claim that they didn't have to give your last paycheck to your family because you didn't finish the month? Death or 15 years seems fair to me.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    If you built a house one month after you died, would you expect it to be given to the state? IP is more about property than a job, I think.
oldmanjay 12y ago
since basically every reason to shorten copyright boils down to the personal greed for entertainment, or the personal greed to profit from the work of others, I have to ask; why is that automatically better?
- thesteamboat 12y ago
  1) In my view the primary reason to drastically shorten copyright is so that it is easier to create new works. For example, documentaries have startling problems due to copyright, see for example http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/movies/16rams.html?_r=0 2) Isn't someone who holds a copyright other than the creator (say in this example the Conan Doyle estate) profiting from the work of others? 3) Like all sensible issues, deciding the proper term of copyright should be understood as a set of tradeoffs. Longer copyright terms may encourage more creative work by increasing the payoff, may give authors more creative control in how their creations are used and so forth. Shorter copyright terms may encourage more creative work by reducing the cost of remixing other's ideas, can provide a common pool of cultural resources for all to draw on, and so forth. What is necessary is to try to balance these competing interests against each other. It is not that shorter copyright terms are "automatically better", but I (and apparently many others in this thread) strongly believe that the balance right now has copyright terms that are too long to be socially beneficial.
  - mcb3k 12y ago
    Another good point is that for every book, movie, song, game, etc. that is very popular and keeps getting re-printed, re-published, re-released, or ported to new platforms, there are tens to hundreds of books that do not. Having long copyright terms makes the chances of vast swathes of works stop existing entirely, simply because of the decay of the medium that they are produced and stored on.
    - thesteamboat 12y ago
      Agreed. Yet another related point is that strict copyright regimes can be discriminatory against, say, the visually impaired, when rights holders are neither willing to expend the effort to translate works into a more suitable format nor willing to allow others to do so.
signal11 12y ago
> When the author dies, so should the copyright. But would this not increase the incentive to harm authors? If the author dies, film studios/HBO etc no longer have to pay for movie/TV rights to out-of-copyright work.
- idlewan 12y ago
  It's very interesting to consider the effects. But why should we link death with the release of copyright? While temptation of assassination is probably reduced with extra-long copyright duration after death of author, it's a lot saner to assign a fixed-duration copyright from the original release date, not from (whole life of author + fixed duration). The problem goes away if you have a fixed duration from the start.
deleted 12y ago
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Shivetya 12y ago
they should be assignable property as if they were physical goods. Just as the person can assign their physical wealth the copyright should be assignable as well. The expiration of copyright should be independent of the author's lifespan.

blhack 12y ago

I don't know about that... I doubt that we would have gotten things like The Lord of The Rings Trilogy without protective copyrights. That's really fantastic art, that adds to the collective culture in a meaningful way. Copyright should be there to protect things like that.

mikeash 12y ago
Why not? If anything, producing those movies should have been easier if LotR was in the public domain, since they wouldn't have had to negotiate with the Tolkein estate first.
- Ricapar 12y ago
  I think it's partially because of the negotiations with the Tolkein estate that the movies turned out as great as they were. If no negotiations were needed, then anyone could have picked up and done a low-budget adaptation and called it a day. But, because there were some rather expensive and difficult negotiations to settle, the amount of people able to do the movies was limited to those who would be able to spend the money to get the rights. And with that sort of investment, there's a big incentive to also invest heavily in the quality of the production to ensure a good return.
  - idlewan 12y ago
    > If no negotiations were needed, then anyone could have picked up and done a low-budget adaptation and called it a day. And? Anyone can do a low-budget adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and call it a day. Copyright is supposed to incentivize authors to create more work (by having a return on 'investment'/time put in). Not to restrict those who can create 'work inspired by others' to the uber-rich.
  - mnutt 12y ago
    Are you familiar with the hilariously bad 1978 version of Lord of the Rings? It's animated, but at some points switches to rotoscoped live action to save on costs. And it doesn't even finish the story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpmZyTK2dI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpmZyTK2dI But for all of that, I don't see how it stopped Peter Jackson's movie from being made.

UnoriginalGuy 12y ago

That's completely unworkable. Too many loopholes. Right now copyright, in theory, has a fixed term. That is a fixed term no matter the owner: corporation, individual, estate. It can be sold (technically licensed exclusively, but same thing) and yet the term continues to be fixed. What you're suggesting SOUNDS good but in reality it would just encourage authors to claim they wrote the work under licence for a non-living entity (e.g. their own business) and then transfer the business to their descendants. Plus under your scheme you have one rule for humans and another rule for corporations with the corporations coming out MASSIVELY ahead. If Warner Studios has a movie made it might get 115 years of copyright (or whatever it is now), but if joe shmoe produces a short film they only get whatever their natural lifespan in copyright protection (which I can assure you won't be 115 years). Bad idea. Sounds good, but that's because you guys haven't given it even the most modest amount of actual thought. The only real issue with copyright is that they keep extending it. 100 years was a nice round number that would allow most individuals to profit for their whole natural lives and for a little to roll onto their descendants. Now with the way things keep getting extending, it wouldn't shock me if for all intents and purposes a lot of works NEVER fell into the public domain, they'll just keep slapping on another 10 years here, 5 years there...

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Uh, we already base personal copyrights on dates of death.
ddlatham 12y ago
There's already a double standard for humans and corporations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States_of_America#Duration_of_copyright http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Sta...

ghshephard 12y ago

Everyone is bringing up the case of providing royalties to the descendants of the author. I wonder how common that is, and whether it ever motivates an author to create work they otherwise would not (which is the purpose of the copyright, to incentivize people to create). Do royalties add up to something meaningful for the estate of authors in 1% of the case? 0.1% 0.01%? And, just as importantly (perhaps more so), do authors take this into account when they are creating?

mikeash 12y ago
I think you have to consider the opposite question as well: would authors consider the situation with their heirs if copyright expired with the author? My guess is that most don't consider it now, but that could easily change if you enshrined it in law and horror stories got passed around of Joe Schmoe Author who died young and left a destitute family. However, the entire question of how copyright incentivizes creation is extremely murky and there seems to be roughly zero hard data on it, so that could be totally wrong.
- claudius 12y ago
  On the other hand, Joe Plumber can just as easily die young and leave a destitute family. Does that mean that we have to make a law that all clients of plumbers have to make annual payments to their plumbers and their descendants for up to 70 years after the plumber’s death?
  - simonh 12y ago
    When a plumber does a job, they get paid for it in full immediately. When an author writes a book, the income comes in a trickle over an extended (but in theory fixed) time period. If a plumber and an author were to die young, the Plumber's family have already benefited in full from the results of work the plumber did before death, because payment in full was made immediately when the work was done. What you are arguing for is that the author's family should not benefit in full from the work the author did in life. Why is that?
  - 12y ago

inopinatus 12y ago

No. That would be discriminatory. Here's why: life expectancy matters. An author exploits their copyright by assigning rights and options under it. The price is based on the discounted future cashflows possible from the licensing project in question. If the scope of "future" is limited solely to the lifetime of the author, then the socioeconomic inequities that cause, say, race to be a significant factor in life expectancy will be directly responsible for enforcing that distinction further. Or more simply, it causes the same novel written by a rich young white man to receive a better licensing deal than if it were written by a poor old black man. This may of course already be the case, but any such rule would exacerbate matters. Today, that extra 70 year buffer helps at least to throw the present-value discounting beyond the foreseeable future.

fiatmoney 12y ago
Wait, are you claiming to believe that the change in aggregate economic outcomes driven by a change in copyright assignment is enough to measurably affect aggregate life expectancy? Besides which, the average member of the population will spend far more money on creative works than they will receive in revenue on them; it would be to their benefit to have the price of creative works drop.
- nkurz 12y ago
  No, the claim would be that it's discriminatory for a work by a person with a statistically short life expectancy to have less market value than a person with greater. Possibly true, but it's an interesting for of poetic justice for all works upcoming young black females to be inherently more valuable than than yet another bestselling sequel by an established octogenarian white male.[1] As for the price of creative works, a common fear is that if copyright protection was weaker, artists might no longer feel properly incentivized to make creative works, and an uncreated work is not isn't available at any price. I have trouble sharing this fear, although the impact would probably depend on your taste in art. [1] A slight poetic license, as statistically American black females have slightly greater life expectancy at every age than do American white males: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_07.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_07.pdf

javert 12y ago

I think copyrights should be perpetual. That will much more greatly reward authors, who can sell their works to investors. This will better incentivize more writing and good writing. The worst case (and unrealistic) scenario of a stingy heir just doesn't matter. If someone deprived us of Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter or Mickey Mouse or whatever, we would all be just fine. None of them are essential.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
How is that a good deal for the public, we promise to uphold a perpetual copyright and in return we get ...? Copyright is a deal, we uphold a legal defence for the author [or their successor] to monopoly rights on their work and they promise to put the work in the public domain when the term expires. The public domain release is the payment to society in exchange for the monopoly rights protection. Why would the public go for the deal that you suggest?
- javert 12y ago
  As I said, > This will better incentivize more writing and good writing.
- javert 12y ago
  As I said, > This will better incentivize more writing and good writing.
decode 12y ago
> I think copyrights should be perpetual. Here's Spider Robinson's take on this dystopia: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
thesteamboat 12y ago
In the US at least, perpetual copyright is explicitly unconstitutional [0] as copyrights are to be granted for a limited term [1]. I quote Mary Bono speaking on behalf of the Copyright Term Extension act: > Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress. Sources: [0] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1998-10-07/pdf/CREC-1998-10-07-pt1-PgH9946.pdf#page=7 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1998-10-07/pdf/CREC-1998-1... [1] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, (the Copyright Clause)

rayiner 12y ago

In a sense I agree with you, because I think the fairest thing to do would be for all property to escheat to the state at death (which should use the property to establish a trust fund for every child born the same year). Barring that level of social reorganization, I see no reason why it's more fair for copyright to end at death than it is for other property rights to so end. It makes no sense to me why my legal claim to a piece of land, which my predecessors stole from the Indians and which in any case existed long before humans roamed the earth and will exist long after, should be stronger than my claim to a unique work that exists solely by virtue of my creativity, intellect, and effort.

freehunter 12y ago
Well, much in the way that the land we have today exists due to how it was shaped by history (1000 years ago, there probably wasn't a paved road and electric wires run to the plot of land you have now), no creative work exists in a bubble. If you're writing a story, you're building on generations of story tellers that came before you. As powerful and social creatures, there is nothing we can do that is not either directly or indirectly related to tons of other people's work. Nothing exists solely by virtue of your creativity, intellect, and effort.
- rayiner 12y ago
  If anything that argument supports making copyright stronger than other property rights. Even though my story, movie, or computer program builds on the past, it's still much more the result of my own effort than any land I own. I did very little of the work involved in stealing my back yard from Indians, clearing it, leveling it, running electricity, sewer, and water to it, etc.
  - lmm 12y ago
    > I did very little of the work involved in stealing my back yard from Indians, clearing it, leveling it, running electricity, sewer, and water to it, etc. But you paid people for that, or paid other people who paid people for that, or so on. You don't pay the people who created the culture you participate in (I mean, you might buy a few specific works - but the common cultural language, standard symbolisms, the very notion of the structure of a novel...). How could you fairly pay for those? And if you were charged for every iota of culture you osmosed, how could that possibly be done justly, without making you suddenly liable for charges every time you had a casual conversation, or even walked out your door and looked around?