7 ms·

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 gre

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.

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.