Our current copyright is far far too long. 20 years would be far more reasonable. We can talk about side issues all we want, but at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit. 20 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit.
> at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit
That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators.
20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.
Not just that, you only get protection (in a specific country) if you make it reasonably simply available in said country.
I live in the balkans (but still.. part of EU, we have credit cards, internet, everything), and many many media (movies, music,...) are unavailable to buy here... not on netflix, no hulu here, not on any other streaming provider, not released on dvd, not available to buy any other way here...
...but somehow, if I download that movie/episode from a torrent site, i'm somehow causing them financial loss with my download...
Even in America, I've had to pirate TV shows from England because they simply weren't available here, won't air here, and aren't sold anywhere, even in England.
I can't watch Big Fat Quiz of Everything legally at all. My options are to break copyright to pirate it after it airs, not watch it at all, or to move to England. I choose the first. I'd gladly pay for it if given the option, but I have no moral qualms with illegally downloading something I can't even pay for in the first place.
This illustrates the sheer inefficiency of the market in this case.
While distribution is basically free (pirates do it at a very low cost), having a payment system set up for these "unusual" purchases costs more than the revenue is worth.
The best part is that the second hand market satisfies the legal criteria of ownership, but doesn't reward the creators in the slightest.
I've bought a number of media second hand to make sure I own them, and it's remarkable how there just is no way to pay any original producer for things in a lot of cases. I can download a movie easily, but there's no way for me to pay anyone for having done so - meanwhile if I buy a physical copy of that movie from someone else...the creator doesn't make any money from me at all, but it's all completely legal.
This is not entirely true: Selling on the second hand market reduces the cost for the original buyer, allowing them to buy more media than they would/could without the second hand market.
That's assuming second hand prices below the original price. Inflated prices for rare works (which could be easily republished as digital media by the creators) are a different story.
The big guys (Disney, big discography labels, ...) can afford to open a branch in every country. The small guys that made an independent film are screwed.
yes naturally of course you are. Its your responsibility to take a plane to a country where they do sell this, you buy it there, you buy all the region locked devices to play the media also in the region and bring it back home, where you consume the content. Only watch it yourself, if your friends want to watch they need to come on the trip too and buy the same stuff themselves.
How is that not obvious, that's clearly what the hollywood executives expect you to do, to comply.
Surely all use cases can't be the same amount. If I write a song and Disney uses it in a Marvel movie presumably, I should be paid more than if some local high school kid uses a 10 second sample of the song during their garage bands production.
What if a bunch of neo-nazis want to use my song in their propaganda video? Shouldn't I be able to stop them? Their use would be a detriment to not only the commercial value of my work but potentially to myself as well.
If copyright licenses on works could be had for cheap, everyone benefits. Sure, disney benefits a lot, since they can make use of the work more efficienty in large productions, but the result of _their_ work could also be had for cheap (such as someone else taking the disney movie and remixing it for low cost).
> Shouldn't I be able to stop them?
no you shouldn't, if said neo-nazi propaganda wasn't illegal to begin with.
Well if Disney made the same amount of money as the high school kid, and relied on your song to the same degree, then presumably they would pay the same.
As for what percentage of the derived-work revenue needs to be paid to you, let the deriver pick something that they think is fair (it just can't be $0). It'll be part of the metadata on that work so everybody can see how much of what they're paying is being passed along.
Then we create a culture of amplifying works that are fair to their dependencies. As for those that are doing the bare minimum, we name and shame (and sabotage?).
If it turns out that attributions coverage on 0.00000001% then we can talk about codifying the amounts, but I really think that if we just mandate the transparency, culture will handle the rest.
I was surprised to see WKRP in Cincinnati in the TV listings. It was my understanding that all the old music in those shows made them impossible to broadcast anymore, because (1) the copyright owners wanted too much money, and (2) for some of the music, it was impossible to find the owners.
Maybe they got past that, at least for some of the episodes.
Maybe they replaced the music? That's what they did in order to be able to release the series Daria on DVD. Included in the package was an apology letter explaining why they had to replace all the music.
They might have also secured some of the rights and just dropped the episodes containing songs where they couldn't. That's what Disney did when they put The Muppet Show on Disney+. A few episodes are missing because even with Disney's money they couldn't get the rights to all the songs.
OK, you made me look at that channel again. I thought WKRP was on at 5:30 (remember the days when you could only watch a show when it was "on"?) but it turns out it was 9:30 today.
I only heard a few seconds of Another One Bites the Dust and I'm not sure if it was the Queen version or not.
The closing music was custom, I think. So maybe they are just using the non-problematic episodes.
So fun to visit the backwaters of the TV world. They had a commercial for a product that helps you GAIN weight!
I don't have an online guide handy, but I do have a digital antenna (something I've written about before). (If you have line-of-sight with the tower, you can still watch major sports events for free. It's not dead.)
However, I think I saw WKRP in the "broadcast TV" popup on my TV. You can tell that they're going out on the web to get it, because at first it says "no information available" and then it populates the channels. It was on Channel 1 in the Bay Area, which shows almost all ancient shows.
You actually meant your local TV listings! I thought there was a TV listings section in the article, lol. I was confused as to how WKRP could've been in the public domain.
I’ve always thought the patent system should work the same way. If you don’t produce a product from or reasonably license the invention, you lose the right to hold the patent.
I'm a total GPL fanboy, but that would not only invalidate GPL, but make it legal to disassemble, modify, and redistribute all proprietary software less than 10 years old.
I don't think it's a great thing, or a horrible one; the positive and negative ramifications are difficult to even estimate. The software world that we live in would be vastly different in very many ways.
The GPL was a best effort, given the state of US copyright. There is no dissenting Open Source group who lobbies for the existing state of copyright because they consider the GPL as more important. Another version of the license can be written.
GPL found a way to utilize an evil law to do some good. What we need is to first scrap the evil law, then pass a FOSS protection act. (Besides, a 10 year copyrighted is so long that GPL would still be mostly enforced.)
Open source licenses exist to try and prevent attack on open-source by groups privatizing otherwise freely distributed code. It's an arms race. In a world where copyright's expire on reasonable timeframes, the value of copyleft licenses is vastly reduced since useful code becomes freely available within a reasonable timeframe.
I imagine they'd have to be reimplemented under the new legal framework. Attaching addresses to IP isn't so different from attaching predicates like "must be open".
It just shouldn't converge on takedowns is all I'm saying. No legal paths to censorship.
Information about the fact that more original work is prevented by copyright than protected by it? Only anecdotes about people I know who gave up on their dreams because they can't afford a lawyer to fight for their right to do art.
Information about the bullet points? That's my first draft of an alternative formulation.
> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.
What are you referring to exactly, US copyright law or earlier laws from other countries? US Copyright law from the beginning (1790) was written in part to preserve the economic property rights of authors and publishers. Part of the point always has been protection of profit. [1] [2]. Initially it only applied to books, not to art. You can’t really separate the granting of a limited-time monopoly over a work from the promotion of new creative works, they go hand in hand, to say economic protection was never the point is not accurate.
‘In 1783 several authors' petitions persuaded the Continental Congress "that nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."’ [2]
The earlier British Statue of Anne says similarly:
“Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted” [3]
Note that both quotes reference economic protection as the first reason, and promotion of creativity second.
> The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers
I think it's far more likely that they're about making sure that the wrong sort of bible, or the wrong sort of pamphlet, doesn't get printed. Whatever "for the economy" or "for the creators" verbiage is in there was added after the fact by marketing.
Actually, it’s almost exactly the other way around. The Gutenberg Bible may be famous as the first thing printed but publishing exploded in the second half of the fifteenth century across all genres.
The competition was intense and with no copyright law, it was a race to find and publish as many works as possible before they were picked up by competitors and copies flooded the market. In order to keep the presses profitable the printers published tons of material that went against Church doctrine. Anti-Church material was often the most profitable because the printers didn’t have to pay the authors for the content. The printers were driven by economics and the Church couldn’t reign them in.
The first copyright laws established regional monopolies so that printers could be controlled for the benefit of God and country but governments did it by freeing them from the laissez fare competition that dominated the early printing industry. By giving printers exclusive rights and banning foreign copies, governments created stable revenue streams for the printers so that they had the option of saying “no” to new authors. The Church exploited “for the economy” rhetoric from the beginning.
The Wiki article is something I wish I had time to edit. Yes, there was an attempt to ensure that the right sort of thing be printed, but it was also about making sure that no one else could print certain documents. You'd license a bible text to be able to regulate that it's the correct type of bible being printed, yes. You'd then see who else was printing bibles and shut them down. Okay, that's all correct, but there's more to its foundation than that. For example, in the UK, one individual had the sole right to profit off the last testaments of people to be hanged in Newgate Prison. In the 17th C, Parliament gave this power was to a preacher who in turn designated a specific printer. That power is what allowed the preacher (and the printer) to profit: no one could (legally) copy it. Regulating printers was the only way to ensure profit for an author and it was an attempt to guarantee conformity.
I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.
I'll have to brush up on my history of the protestant reformation, but I'm under the impression that for a very long time the church had a monopoly on people with enough dedication and support to sit around copying books by hand. There was no need for copyright law because it was totally legal to kick the rabble rousers out of the monastery for any old reason.
In this way, the church had been asserting copyright on the Bible for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the invention of the printing press that they needed a law for it.
It's easy to find legal text today that says it's for one thing but if you're in the know it's clear that its purpose--the side effect without which it wouldn't exist--is unstated or hidden. I'm skeptical that our picture of the 1700's is good enough to solve the same puzzle that far in retrospect, but my hypothesis is that if it was, we'd find things were a bit less about protecting authors economically than a surface-level read would lead us to believe.
There are some interesting vestiges of the origin of copyright, still floating around in contemporary legal systems.
In the UK, and in other countries patterned after the UK constitution, works of the government are technically under royal prerogative. It's usually called "Crown copyright" but it isn't regulated by normal copyright law. Traditionally, the monarch reserved the right to ensure that laws were duplicated exactly, etc. It's the inherent right of the monarch, and that right has never actually been explicitly curtailed by law. For example, Canada's Copyright Act has a clause, asserting the Act does not curtail any rights or privileges of the Crown.
It's probably the purest form of "intellectual property" that exists. Anything the Crown creates is under Crown copyright. The copyright term is forever. There is no fair use or fair dealing with Crown copyrighted works. [1] The justification for the copyright is not derived from statute but, within the legal conceit we're working with here anyway, rather literally from God and traditional since time immemorial.
Speaking of which, The King James Bible is still under Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. James I paid for it and his heirs insist on their due. The Crown issued letters patent to several printers, those letters were acquired and now Cambridge University Press has the right to print the KJV Bible in England. It's one of the very few letters patent to somehow slip through the 19th and 20th century overhauls; nearly all have been abolished by acts of legislation.
Letters patent are the granting of an office or title or right or property by the state to an individual. The granting of such rights was historically, also another royal prerogative. Scope-limited monopolies were very common. A monopoly on farming salt on a particular beach. A monopoly on collecting taxes in a particular county. A monopoly on dying wool a certain colour in a particular town. Such letters were considered a form of property by the courts, and they could in some cases be traded.
This is, as I understand it, largely the intellectual/legal origin of modern copyright in the Anglo-American tradition. It was, at first, not focused on the work, the text, so much as the economic right of a printer, to have a monopoly on a specific work, and to not have that right infringed with unseemly competition. As more and more letters patent regarding printing were issued, it eventually became formalized and then regulated by statute, taking it out of the Crown's arbitrary hands. At the same time (I think we're at about 1750 AD now?) the proliferation of printing started reducing the economic significance of the book itself vs. the contents of the book, and we started to think more about the author than the printer.
[1] Of course, practically speaking, in modern times, the Crown has issued various directives over the years, culminating in a whole department to manage Crown copyrighted works, and it's policy that verbatim duplication and etc. of laws are just fine. But very technically, that privilege could be rescinded at any time by royal decree, though of course that won't actually happen.
I was talking about US law, where the purpose was 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." but even that very first copyright law written saw the need for the "Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books"
The US law, and the British law it was modeled after, were both trying to solve an existing problem of theft. You’re right that the rationale did include the notion that granting protection would be good for society and encourage creation of new work (because the alternative they witnessed in practice was to make money copying someone else). You’re right that this was part of the purpose, but the stated purpose from the very beginning was in fact to protect authors’ and publishers’ rights to make money. Not only was that always the primary point, but it is also the very mechanism by which they promoted new work: the only incentive to create new work is that you have legal protection from copiers for some time so you can make money. This is why these two reasons are inseparable, right?
> The US law, and the British law it was modeled after, were both trying to solve an existing problem of theft.
No, it wasn’t. Creation of novel property rights is never to solve a problem of theft, because theft only exists in the context of existing property rights.
> but the stated purpose from the very beginning was in fact to protect authors’ and publishers’ rights to make money
The original British copyright law did not apply to authors at all, but to printers only. As D f goodzw
> theft only exists in the context of existing property rights
Of course the law didn’t exist before it was written, but copying others’ content was viewed as stealing, which is why there was a push to turn it into real, legal theft. Apologies for using shorthand. What words would you have chosen? Maybe you can make my point better than I can, because the law was in fact written in response to an actual problem people had of being able to recoup their investments.
I don’t agree that ‘theft’ requires existing legal property rights to exist, that is not the definition of the word, so your claim is inaccurate. Theft is the act of stealing, which is taking something without permission. It can be one-sided from the perspective of the person who was taken from, and still be theft.
> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works
for profit, profit of money and profit of learning. The first copyright law in the world, the Statute of Anne[1] specifically mentions money in the preamble:
> Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books;
(As an aside, I'm so glad English moved away from German or we'd still be using capital letters everywhere!)
Authors of the time were arguing against censorship, monopolies formed by powerful printers, and to make money they felt they were owed. As Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, is quoted as saying in that article:
> One Man Studies Seven Year, to bring a finish'd Peice into the World, and a Pyrate Printer, Reprints his Copy immediately, and Sells it for a quarter of the Price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament
Let's not misrepresent history to fit our own dispositions today.
> That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Are there any studies showing that copyright actually does achieve its goal of promoting the creation of art? Can we show a causal link between copyright and art creation? Can we show a proportional effect where longer copyright terms lead to more/better art creation? I suppose it would be rather difficult. You'd have to find a control group that's otherwise just like the USA (or your comparable country) but without copyright.
Is copyright really the driving force, without which we wouldn't have creative output? I have my doubts. People were drawing on cave walls and parchments long before copyright. Would people simply not create art if copyright didn't exist? And if so, would we really miss that particular art?
As you point out, I'm not sure how you would do that study without having two otherwise identical countries that differ only by copywrite law.
Still, we can make some guesses what would happen without copyright.
eBook readers could offer all books for free to improve sales of their reader. Amazon already gives books that are in the public domain for free on Kindle. If Amazon doesn't expand this to all books, some competitor will. Project Gutenberg would also expand their collection to include all books.
Physical books wouldn't be free, but there would be no guarantee the author would get any money from them. There'd be zero incentive for printing houses to pay authors. They'd be allowed to sell the books without the author's permission and keep all the profits.
Authors' best option may be to ask for donations or start a Patreon. This works for some people, but in general, you make orders of magnitude less money off donations than actually selling something.
Would less money going to authors stop people from writing books? Probably somewhat. The most popular authors will still have ways to make money. And there'd still be people who write books for free, as a hobby. But it would reduce the number of professional authors.
I do agree that artists are going to create no matter what. I do suspect we'd have less works if nobody could make a living doing it though. Especially things like film and animation which historically required crazy amounts of money up front. People were willing to fund those efforts because they could expect a likely return on their investment which without copyright protections wouldn't be possible.
We've gone way overboard, but I do think some level of protection for creators is for the best even now when it's easier and less expensive than ever to create.
i don't agree. fine artists will, but the bulk of consumed art is commercial art, it's a job, and most people only work if they get money for it.
I like the soviet model of commissioning people to write e.g. math and science books: the author got a stipend like any office worker, and copyright belonged to the commissioner (the country).
> i don't agree. fine artists will, but the bulk of consumed art is commercial art
The bulk of art consumed is advertising. The bulk of art created however is not commercial art. It's people who paint, write music, write stories, etc. as a hobby. Even if it's just writing bad fan fic or shitty furry drawings people are constantly creating and publishing in their spare time. If all the commerial art went away, we'd seek out more of their stuff.
In the end there are very few artists who would never create anything again unless they were getting paid to do it. Money isn't really the reason artists create. They tend to feel a need to express themselves and have a love for the work they do. It's why artists are so easily exploited.
The works we prefer to consume tend to cost a lot more to produce and those are the things we'd risk losing if there
copyright didn't exist at all. It'd be a sad state of affairs if all we had to read was fan fic. Even then though, a lot of people create impressive and popular works and release them for free.
> That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.
I wonder - if copyright expiration had been enshrined in something harder to extend like a US Constitution amendment, would we be better off? Or would the powerful media/entertainment forces try to convince the electorate that early expirations were problematic? Would we have a flourishing public domain or would HUAC have flipped on its head - looking instead for the enemies of the entertainment industry? Commies who don't want Mickey Mouse to make money.
- they force exclusive access to a technology for a while, promoting innovation and profit; but!
- they also force you to publish all the internals of how that technology works, promoting production of cheaper copies after the exclusive period has passed.
I'm not aware of copyright having any such function.
>20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
What about stuff that didn't land initially, but was discovered years/decades later and loved. Should they be denied the right to make a (belated) profit?
Seems like this could be handled by something like:
Either 10 years, or 10 years from when you collect your first dollar, so long as that first dollar is collected within the first 10 years - giving you potentially up to 20 years in total.
That's a ridiculous ad hoc argument. What if you make something, put it on a gumroad, and sell only one copy for 1 dollar (I actually started a shop on gumroad, all things for $1 and I got exactly one sale :D), but 10 years later you're discovered or some of the products is suddenly widely useful, or what if the one person that bought it now uses own reach to sell your product?
I'm not saying 10 years protection is not enough, but the "first dollar" approach I find ridiculous. Maybe there should be regulations where if you earn x% of the initial expenses (it would work at least for companies), then the work is released to public.
That was a means to an end, not the end itself. That's the point. The goal of copyright has always been very clear. It was for encouraging the creation of new works.
Done through the means of ensuring that the original artist may profit off of their own hard work and no one else can steal the hard work and profit off it. The abuse you're talking about is the extension of the same mechanism that allows rights owners to profit for much longer periods of time, which actually discourages the creation of new works. This can all be true because there aren't binary solutions and things need nuance.
Copyright is abused in may ways that go far beyond perpetually extended copyright protections. The DMCA has enabled copyright to be used as a weapon to silence criticism. Companies have created a revenue stream out of sending DMCA notices demanding that people (innocent or otherwise) pay settlements now or else face long and expensive court battles. Creators are threatened with lawsuits or dragged through the courts on highly questionable copyright grounds just to bankrupt them and prevent them from being a competitor.
Recently, the media industry has taken to suing ISPs for billions if they refuse to permanently stop offering service to customers who have been repeatedly accused of violating copyright. Without any court finding you guilty or any actual proof that a violation took place, if you are accused multiple times and your ISP doesn't disconnect your service forever they could be fined out of existence. Most of the ISPs sued so far have settled out of court, but the media industry has been winning in the courts as well.
Copyright is regularly abused to do things that go far beyond what it was intended to, and often to the determent of the creation of new works. Most of the people hurt by such abuses have no ability to fight it, and very little hope of actually winning even if they try.
Most of the copyrights nowadays are held by large conglomerates anyways and not artists, sure that's not a nuanced point of view but copyright isn't nuanced either
The nuance is with respect to the above conversation. I don't think anyone here is disagreeing that the system is being abused and that the copyright holders are abused by large conglomerates. I don't think anyone is arguing against the points you're bringing up.
Is it possible that the extremely long copyright time still succeeds in promoting the creation of new works? For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work, because it's not protected by the fair use clause. However, if you were to create something demonstrably different to the point where it does qualify for fair use, then suddenly you've created new media that you have the copyright for and can do whatever you wish (including sell it; whether or not it's used for commercial purposes is only a factor in fair use determinations, it doesn't instantly disqualify it for fair use).
The only thing the public domain seems to benefit is the ability to redistribute the work without iterating upon it in a way that makes it take on a new meaning.
> For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work, because it's not protected by the fair use clause. However, if you were to create something demonstrably different to the point where it does qualify for fair use, then suddenly you've created new media that you have the copyright for and can do whatever you wish (including sell it; whether or not it's used for commercial purposes is only a factor in fair use determinations, it doesn't instantly disqualify it for fair use).
Your understanding of fair use seems quite flawed.
Tell me, have you _ever_ seen Mickey Mouse used for _anything_ even remotely interesting that wasn't made by Disney?
One of the most well-known characters of all time, if fair use wasn't too restrictive, there'd be some derivative works out there, right?
The reason you don't is because what's allowed by fair use is _very_ limited and ambiguous (ie dependent on how much money you want to spend on a lawyer to defend yourself).
You can do reviews of shows/movies, you could probably do a really obvious parody, you could report on some Mickey Mouse news, and that's essentially it. Anything else will get you sued _hard_ and you will not win.
> Tell me, have you _ever_ seen Mickey Mouse used for _anything_ even remotely interesting that wasn't made by Disney?
No problem, just find and buy a copy of The Mickey Mouse Make-It Book [1]. It contains step-by-step instructions for making Mickey Mouse puppets and then encourages you to have fun with your creations. Straight from Walt Disney Production's mouth.
> The only thing the public domain seems to benefit is the ability to redistribute the work without iterating upon it in a way that makes it take on a new meaning.
No... fair use doesn't work like you think it does and it's a only a defense that has to be tested in court where you'll be up against the legal team of a billion dollar media industry that has connections and ties at the highest levels of the justice system
Once something is in the public domain you can use it to create new works that are completely transformative without risking losing everything in a lawsuit.
Vast amounts of new and truly innovative creative works are prevented from being created because of our existing copyright laws. Music is the worst at this where just a couple of notes being too similar to some other song can cause you lose everything. People have lost fortunes just for writing a new and unique song that just happened to be in the same genre as another song. (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...)
If those songs had been fully in the public domain, her amazing and transformative film (which I'd recommend to anyone) would have had no issues at all. How many artists aren't willing or able to go through what she did and just give up? How many musicians are writing songs that will never see the light of day because of fear that some song they've never heard before will be used to take everything from them? They can sign over all their rights to the RIAA and hope that's enough to protect them, or they risk being sued.
The public domain is critical for artists to be free to create entirely new works and build on old ones to create new works as well.
Most culture throughout human history has been iterative instead of anthologic. Often times the stories, myths, legends, and folk tales we have are because multiple people added to the story after the original author ended it to add a piece that relates to their own time or understanding. They didn't just say, throw sunglasses and a banana hammock on Beowulf and now he's Bae-o-wulf, original character, do no steal. The story of King Arthur for example has three different origins between the changeling child, the sword in the stone, and the commoner to king stories because for the longest time King Arthur's Court started in medias res. Then there's the fact that Sir Lancelot was a later addition to the mythology of King Arthur, appearing almost six hundred years after the popular stories first appeared in public circulation as a cultural response to the rise of the idea of courtly love. And the story of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight itself was a later addition as well to epitomize the growing ideal of chivalry. Even Alfred Lord Tennyson was adding to the story over twelve hundred years after it first appeared in response to gothic literature and it's focus on the beauty in decay and nihilism. To put it one way, Lancelot, Gawain, and Elaine were essentially fanfiction to the existing mythologies that became canon.
And the truest form of that iterative culture that still exists and continues building the mythologies or characters of these stories is fan fiction. People adding onto the characters and history of the fictional world, finding what works and discarding what doesn't, and slowly weaving together a full and rich story. This is in stark contrast to anthology style works such as traditional superhero comic books, where the creators work under direction and the rules of the world and the personas of it's characters are often not allowed to change. Unlike Guinevere who is eventually swayed from Arthur into courtly love with Lancelot, Lois Lane must always love Superman for example.
> For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work
You mean, exactly what Disney did? Create movies based on existing works (Brothers Grimm etc.) while ignoring copyright (Bambi) or against the direct wishes of the original author (can't remember which one right now)
Its the Mickey Mouse problem. Disney doesn't want Mickey or related works to enter public domain, because it would be a huge knock to their current empire.
Still, this seems rather easily solvable to naïve little old me.
20 year copyright by default, with a 20 year review cycle process an individual/company can apply to to ask for extension, on the condition that they can prove harm to newly generated IP, if the copyright is not-renewed. Still using Mickey Mouse to generate new works of non-derivative IP, and copyright of Mickey Mouse isn't causing damage to any other competing agencies (the way holding IP to a new drug or invention would)? Fine, renew granted.
Why should Disney get an infinite copyright? I think copyright should be limited to natural persons. No one involved in the creation of Mickey Mouse is still alive. Imagine if the Brothers Grimm, Inc. had just kept infinitely renewing their copyright claim? Disney wouldn’t even exist. Disney is a company that was built upon works in the public domain and now is depriving the rest of the world from the very thing that allowed Disney to flourish in the first place.
This to me is the right answer: have an intellectual property tax which goes up every year. Disney can pay to keep Mickey locked up but all of the less popular IP shifts the calculation from “keep it, we might use it some day” to a more balanced calculation.
The other thing I’d like to add is some kind of requirement that works be available (e.g. it should cost a lot more if they want to hide it in a vault) but that would need care to avoid publishers screwing creators if there’s a dispute, as is not uncommon - you wouldn’t want the threat of putting something in the public domain to be used to force the creator to agree to unfavorable terms. Maybe something like all assignment contracts are unconditionally voided without compensation if the company chooses not to make an item available for sale/license at standard rates for more than n days in a 5 year period?
I like your idea a lot, but I'll admit I don't know what a standardized rate or one-size-fits-all solution looks like. Or, I have different expectations for HBO than I do for an individual artist producing works as a hobby.
I also wonder about the implications for the copyright status of a "limited edition" version of a work. I'm not sure how that would play out.
Yeah, there would definitely need to be some thresholds for things like lifetime revenue and use (e.g. you wouldn’t want a service trying to play silly games pretending that they didn’t collect revenue for a movie because it’s a complimentary to their members with some other purchase).
Limited editions are interesting, especially if they’re not something easily compared to a mainstream release. Maybe you’d need an appeal process where someone could get a special exception by the Copyright office under certain circumstances.
Perhaps the fee would be a base per times renewed plus the worth of a portion of the total reported wealth that the IP has generated over it's lifetime, instead of just since the last renewal. So if you've made sixty thousand dollars over the first twenty years, you owe six thousand for the renewal. If you've made ninety thousand dollars over the next twenty years, you owe ten thousand dollars plus eighteen thousand for the renewal. The base fee scales to make it feasible for low earners, but increases to prevent copyright abusers from perpetually milking an unused IP like how Harmony Gold did with Robotech/Macross for thirty eight years.
I was being slightly facetious ;). However it is something I've thought about before, what happens to societies when no one dies, whether we'll keep the same customs and societal opinions forever, etc.
You might enjoy Kurt Vonnegut’s short story 2BR02B. The Wikipedia article[1] has links to several different places you can read or listen to it for free. (Though I’m a bit confused as to how his work is already in the public domain since he only died relatively recently?)
Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point.
Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
There is no "95 years after publication" rule in the EU, so you cannot say the Sonny Bono act was a "harmonization".
Wikipedia also states (with some sources), that "Since 1990, The Walt Disney Company had lobbied for copyright extension." It was in their best interest, they had the money, so no surprises there. I'm sure they weren't the only ones, but the largest, for sure.
True, although in this case the US law is perhaps better than the EU one; the EU lacks any exceptions for works of joint authorship, including works for hire, so it's 70 years from the death of the last surviving author, which would usually exceed 95 years.
Or, beyond 28 years, if the work is not released to the public domain, have an annual copyright tax based upon a "fair market" assessment of the property. To keep assessment real, perhaps let there be an auction starting at 2x the taxed value.
Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing?
Right now, especially without registration required anymore, there is no burden to owning copyrights "passively". If they had to enumerate and price them, that alone may make it worth shedding some of them.
> Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing?
I've come to the conclusion that this sort of property tax (on everything, including land, equipment, trademarks, and copyrighted material) is the only kind of tax that actually makes sense economically. Fundamentally, "property" is one person or entity taking something from society as a whole (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence); "taxation" is its natural inverse: society as a whole taking something back from a person or individual (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence). There's a pleasant symmetry that the people who have benefit the most from the setup of society should be the ones who fund it; and that in a sense, ownership must be continually "justified".
I'm actually surprised corporations aren't lobbying for this. Instead of coming up with original ideas, they can just take any works of art pre-2000 and just recycle them over and over.
Why spend billions buying Marvel when you can do it for free, why spend billions for parts of the LOTR series, why spend billions to buy Lucas Arts.
I mean Disney is built on taking public domain works and reworking them into their own classics. Imagine if they could do that with the biggest cultural uptake in human history of the 1900s instead of the relatively unknown 1800s stories.
Don't forget streaming services like Netflix who shell out billions to get Seinfeld and Friends. Lobbying for 20 years means they get ALL the 90s instead of shelling out billions.
Seeing as the USA's ultra affluent crust is grossly crowded with generational wealth, I don't think they'd like the idea of removing any of their profits, however long ago and however void of any of their own toil, regardless of the overall good it would do.
The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth - and power law distribution of wealth really matters.
That said, I agree there is a problem with intergenerational wealth, although possibly more through family political power and influence than their raw financial power.
> The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth
Not sure what you mean by that. Just going through the wikipedia articles they certainly seem to have inherited some part of their fortune. Using money to make more money isn't particularly complicated. You also inherit the social standing which makes successful investments much easier.
The money they “inherited” is a tiny percentage of the money they made. The other things they inherited matter: education, political and financial connections, and if they hit $0 they usually have backup options.
What I am trying to say is that the money is almost irrelevant. If money were the only relevant issue, then the top ten would have all come from “ultra affluent” families and the top ten should all have recognisably older wealth surnames, like Windsor, Rockefeller, Washington.
Inter-generational wealth matters, but where does Ford come into the Forbes list? Certainly the poor are less likely to move up (who on the Forbes list had parents from 1950s China?)
Most importantly, the majority of arguments about the wealthy fail the smell test, as soon as you see the billions of people in the world who desire to be as well off as a poor person in the US. Don’t just look at those that are far wealthier than you, look at the number that are far poorer, and the arguments they would make about how you inherited your wealth.
If I write a best seller at age 25, I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45. I'd also argue that heirs should also have some period of exclusivity as well. Using the best seller at age 25 example, were I to die an untimely death at age 32 I would again hope that my very young daughter would still be able to receive benefit from my creative works. So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me.
In the case of a non-human copyright holder, 50 years seems reasonable can broadly comparable to that of the life of a human creator.
> I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45
Write more best sellers then.
> So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me.
Yeah, of course a life+20 year monopoly on bits is great. For you. Instead of sitting down and working on more books so humanity can benefit, you get to sit down and collect rent from your past successes until you die. And then your children get to collect that rent for 20 years. You only need to strike gold once to be set for life and provide for children too.
Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? It shouldn't. The social contract was "we'll pretend we can't easily copy this stuff so you can make money for a few years before it enters the public domain". This life time monopoly bullshit is a clear violation of this contract. A society whose public domain rights were robbed has zero incentive not to use libgen for everything.
Come on, that’s flippant response to a valid point. Best-sellers are a function of luck. Copyright laws are intended to encourage more creative output by offering original work some protection. Suggesting that individual authors should have less protection and pump out more work and just get lucky isn’t realistic.
> Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking?
Calling it absurd and being outraged and incredulous weakens your argument here, when this has been established over centuries (millennia arguably) by many many smart people.
The rent-seeking, as you call it, provides two functions: 1) to allow time for authors to collect returns on their creativity and time investment, and 2) to act as a force to encourage more creative output from society. The limited time monopoly that authors enjoy is the reason that it becomes an incentive to create new work. It should be attractive to author new things and unattractive to steal and publish others’ work. If you make the protection period too short, it won’t work, it won’t be an incentive, it will become a disincentive and we’ll get both artists going broke and less creative work and more stealing. (There are countries in the world today with weaker copyright laws than the US that already exhibit high rates of IP theft and low rates of original creative output.) I don’t know what social contract you’re referring to, but since copyright is the law, it is the de facto contract today.
> Come on, that’s flippant response to a valid point.
It's the best I can do when faced with people who feel entitled to lifetime and posthumous rent for doing a bit of intelectual work. I mean, there's an artist in the comments lower on this page who wants up to lifetime+100 years of rent seeking for him, his children and his grand children to enjoy.
Keep working if you want to keep making money. That's literally the most polite way I can put it.
> when this has been established over centuries (millennia arguably) by many many smart people
Well, those smart people didn't exactly count on computers existing. It was easy to enforce copyright when you needed to be a major industry player owning expensive printing presses to infringe copyright at any appreciable scale. Now copyright infringement is trivial, people do it without even realizing it simply because they can. People infringe copyright every single time they download a random picture off of some photographer's website or something.
The world will never be like it was before and it's time to accept that. Copyright is a thing of the past. To put that genie back in the bottle, you'll need tyranny the likes of which really ought to offend every single user posting here on Hacker News. It's simply not possible without destroying everything hackers stand for, the computing freedom we cherish. And of course it's exactly what the copyright industry is lobbying for.
> The limited time monopoly that authors enjoy is the reason that it becomes an incentive to create new work.
I have no idea why you think a lifetime+posthumous monopoly can be considered "limited time" in any way. You'll be long dead by the time it expires. It is functionally infinite.
Limited time is 5 years, 10 at most. Then the cultural works I grew up with would be public property by the time I'm an adult. That's limited time. You can observe its duration being limited. That's tolerable.
> If you make the protection period too short, it won’t work, it won’t be an incentive
And making it too long creates rent seeking and robs us of our public domain rights.
> There are countries in the world today with weaker copyright laws than the US that already exhibit high rates of IP theft and low rates of original creative output.
Oh please. The countries you speak of? Many of them don't even have universal basic sanitation. They have better things to do than police the imaginary property of americans.
The US Trade Office being a mouthpiece of US "stakeholders" is straight up offensive. US corporations using the might of the US government to sanction sovereign countries. The only possible reason not to be outraged is you're profiting off of this.
> I don’t know what social contract you’re referring to
The one that expects us to believe we can't just go to libgen literally right now and download a copy of your book for free.
Always extending copyright durations until it's functionally infinite. You're not keeping up your end of the public domain bargain. Why should we keep ours?
FWIW, this is literally what copyright law is saying. Instead of copying someone else, seeking rent for something you didn’t invest in, taking away from someone else’s investment, go make your own stuff to copy & distribute & sell.
Sure, as long as the copyright term is valid. After that, the works are in the public domain where there are no restrictions to what we can do with our shared culture.
Why do you conveniently forget that the law also talks about public domain? The same public domain that contained works that artists like Walt Disney drew from in order to strike it rich, only to subsequently lobby the government to rob us of the same rights he enjoyed time and time again?
These functionally infinite copyright terms rob us of our rights and turns copyright infringement into civil disobedience.
No, the whole idea behind copyrights of any term length is to provide and incentive for people to make something new instead of copy someone else’s work. The retort you used, “Keep working if you want to keep making money” applies to people who seek to copy or remix work as much as it applies to people who seek to protect their work from copies or remixes.
I really would love to hear a compelling argument that convinces me, I want a stronger argument for a reduction in term length (and I do think it should be shortened), but this hyperbole isn’t doing it. You’re complaining about rent-seeking, but failing to understand that this isn’t an argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not. This is an argument about who gets to seek rent, the person who did the creative work, or someone else who ‘borrowed’ the work without adding value. Personally, I’d certainly rather default to giving creators money over copiers, wouldn’t you? Copyright was established to avoid the second kind of rent-seeking, which has historically been a real economic drain.
> You’re complaining about rent-seeking, but failing to understand that this isn’t an argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not.
It absolutely is. Copyright in its current state is the epitome of rent seeking and its ever expanding lengths are the perfect example of regulatory capture. Copyright is people and corporations collecting rent from works they made over half a century ago and using the profits to lobby governments into extending their monopolies even further.
At some point it stops being about fair incentivization of creators and it became about rent seeking. I really have no idea what's controversial or "hyperbolic" about this statement.
> Personally, I’d certainly rather default to giving creators money over copiers, wouldn’t you?
For five to ten years, sure. After that much time, works belong in the public domain.
I agree, and I haven’t argued against that anywhere in this thread. You seem to have missed my point entirely. The part you’re not addressing is that copying others’ work is also rent-seeking, it’s trying to take value for yourself that someone else created.
> For five to ten years
So you’re okay with rent seeking for authors for a certain period of time. Good, we agree there. Now, how did you come up with five to ten years? What justifies that term? Does it work for all creators? How do you know?
That's not what I meant. What I wanted to say is that it absolutely is an "argument over whether there will be rent-seeking or not".
Copyrights, truly time limited, are a lot of things but not rent seeking. Rent seeking is when you just collect rent from existing successful properties without having to create new works. If the copyright terms are short and limited, creators have no choice but to create new stuff or lose their revenue.
> So you’re okay with rent seeking for authors for a certain period of time.
I'm not okay with any rent seeking at all. I simply don't think it is rent seeking if the duration is short enough.
Copyrights, even short ones are rent-seeking. That is the explicit and more or less stated point of the law. They don’t use that word, so your terminology and framing is slightly hyperbolic and negative spin. It’s a bit more common to say copyrights grant a “monopoly” over a work for a period of time, or simply that the work is protected for some time. I really don’t have a problem with calling it rent-seeking, and I think it’s inaccurate to claim that a shorter term makes it not rent-seeking. It’s still rent-seeking, for a shorter time, nothing more and nothing less.
Why do you claim copyrights aren’t “truly” time limited? That’s not factually correct. We’re commenting on the batch of material that enters public domain. Yes the time limit is long, yes it has been extended, but it is not “infinite”. I said it before, but exaggerating isn’t helping you. Your argument could be more compelling if you stuck to facts.
> I simply don’t think it is rent seeking if the duration is short enough.
It’s less time rent-seeking by the creators, and more time rent-seeking by the copiers. The problem that led to copyright laws existing is unscrupulous copiers who seek rent for something they didn’t create. It happened before, and would happen again if copyrights were abolished. It would be even worse today with companies like Google and Amazon, because they have de facto monopolies on the digital distribution channels, and they can steal and promote content made by individuals without giving them any slice of the pie… even more than they already are.
> If the copyright terms are short and limited, creators have no choice but to create new stuff or lose their revenue.
And if they’re longer, then copiers have no choice but to create new stuff or lose their revenue. There’s a symmetry here you keep trying to avoid. Every argument you have so far in favor of shortening copyright has an analogue argument that would favor increasing the term length. The law currently acknowledges this and is trying to balance these two forces. It might well be off balance today in favor of creators, but if you want to get copyrights shortened, it will require demonstrating a better balance point. What won’t work is trying to claim there isn’t one.
Not everyone can consistently write books that get popular. Most authors only have a single book or series get popular and the rest of their books do not sell anywhere near as well.
Most authors have zero big hits. But authors that get one hit are more likely to get future hits.
Most people have to work until retirement age. If you happen to get a big hit that earns you enough money to retire at age 28, then congratulations, you're one of the lucky few. But society doesn't owe you the right to make a lifetime worth of money off of a single book. You can work until retirement age like everyone else.
Also, long copyright terms only affects retirement age for a very small percentage of authors. Most authors aren't well known, have no big hits, and each of their books gets most of its sales in its first few years. These authors have to work their whole life regardless. Authors with a really big hit, like J.K. Rowling, have enough money to retire after that one book, regardless of whether copyright is only 20 years or longer. It only makes the difference for those authors who have a small hit that won't quite earn enough to retire in 20 years, but will earn enough over 40-60 years. That's rare. Books usually earn the vast majority of their profits in those first 20 years.
That doesn't justify giving them lifetime government enforced monopolies. If they want to keep getting paid, they should have to keep creating new works. Anything else is rent seeking. Having to give them monopolies at all is bad enough but the current state of copyright is completely unacceptable.
Also, their children are owed exactly nothing by society. At most they should be able to inherit still valid copyrights with no change to their durations. Heirs getting a completely new two decade monopoly just so they could "benefit" is absurd and intolerable.
It's "real" because it exists in the real world. It's naturally scarce as a result since two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. There's only so much land available.
It's a completely different matter compared to imaginary artificially scarce cultural property which boils down to ownership of unique numbers. That's what's ridiculous.
Things entering the public domain should be considered in the context of lowering the cost of access more than the work being the basis of new dirivative works. It's far more important that millions of people can read or watch something without having to pay a fee to the publisher than it is for someone to use the work as source material for a new work.
Copyright should be much shorter so that everyone can access culturally relevant art and books even if they have very little money. Right now the only option for many is piracy because the works their peers are seeing work enter the public domain until decades after they die.
I disagree. Reusing, reimagining, and retelling are fundamental concepts and key to human development. Copyright is almost unjustifiable as a concept in from that perspective.
Copyright sets an arbitrary limit on what is considered "original". The vagueness of that limit is then used to crush and suppress related ideas, with no care as to whether they were discovered entirely independently.
The goal of ensuring that people are recognised and rewarded for their work is noble. Copyright is just an awful way of doing so. It runs contrary to how our brains work and enforcing it is in the same ballpark as thought policing.
Copyright for X years since first publish makes sense. Lifetime copyright makes sense too.
But "Lifetime + X years" just rewards those for whatever reason has a longer life. There's no reason a work should be protected for a longer time because the author lived longer.
I don’t understand what “lifetime” means. What if multiple people publish it?
How does this affect open source software? A lot of software uses restrictive licenses such as AGPL. There could be many people that own the copyright or an organization. The intent of AGPL software is that it isn’t used without giving back to the community.
Who not a guaranteed minimum of 25 years after publication (for posthumous works and authors who kick the bucket shortly after publication) with the expectation of lifetime of the author should they live more than 25 years after publication? The heirs of the long-lived authors will have to take the personal responsibility to have their own creative ideas instead of trading on their father's legacy.
Honestly, everyone should be able to sustain themselves 20 years later if they can write a best seller once. If you can't well then you are either extremely unlucky, have health issues or are just plain lazy - we shouldn't base this particular law on this.
Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.
Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.
Without it big publishing companies would just publish stuff without paying royalties, because they could can just do that. With 75 years it will be also some inheritance for authors children - should we also let publishing companies just take that?
There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
Could always leave the timescales as-is, but have a break clause — if your work generates more than $xM in sales it's now out of copyright.
Would protect the non-Star Wars/Harry Potters, but also let us recognise that SW/HP/LotR _have_ become part of our shared culture and it does wider society little benefit to give one company a monopoly on them
So the business model "write once, get paid for the rest of your life" should get built into law? I'm trying to think of an analogous situation. Should Architects get commission on rent for the rest of their life?
> There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
There are many more non successful books, I agree. I doubt many of them are still available, much less making noteworthy money, after 20 years. This is based on my experience trying to buy obscure books, I tried to find actual numbers but was unsuccessful.
> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.
Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?
> Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.
I would argue the opposite: that for non-bestsellers, income after 20 years is completely negligible. NO one is buying 2nd rate fiction 20 years after it was first published, only bestsellers will still sell a significant fraction after that long.
I also don't see how potential income 20 years later could ever effectively motivate or enable a person...
I'd much rather solve the problem of starving people separately from copyright, maybe some form of Universal Basic Income. That way we can handle it for everyone who is in a rough situation without requiring them to get lucky enough with a moderately successful book.
> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings.
I'm sorry but there are certain lines of work that are simply not profitable. Maybe earning a living by being a not popular author is (should be) just not possible?
As much as I dislike big corporations abusing the system, like Disney, that’s a good point. In particular for novelists and artists, it can take decades for discovery and subsequent appreciation of their work.
All of this IP law was written well before the large-scale adoption of the internet which has greatly accelerated the proliferation of ideas and and largely commoditized ingenuity. It's insane we haven't lowered the current timeline. Some commenters are mentioning the current folks in power who stand to lose a lot pushing back on change. That's probably the most plausible reason I can think of but curious of any others.
OTOH, there's a huge amount of content out there that's formally and legally in the public domain already but not really findable/discoverable via detailed cataloging, or easily usable (and reusable) by 21st-c. standards. Zillions of random page scans up on Google Books, Hathitrust and the Internet Archive. If what you genuinely care about is expanding access to the legacy of our intellectual history, the low-hanging fruit really is very low.
Beyond clear cases like ensuring preservation of materials that are obviously at risk, it's kinda hard to argue and lobby for a shorter copyright term when we're collectively ignoring what's long been available for the taking.
I really don’t understand your justification here. A consequence of Sturgeon† is that most public domain material was unpopular in its day, and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022. Why does that imply copyright terms shouldn’t be shortened?
If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today.
> and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022
How could you tell, when most of it hasn't even been seriously looked at by anyone? Good cataloging is key to making existing material more relevant to more people.
> The website was not accessible within Germany, as a result of a court order from S. Fischer Verlag regarding the works of Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin. Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany.[25] This judgment was confirmed by the Frankfurt Court of Appeal on 30 April 2019 (11 U 27/18[26]). The Frankfurt Court of Appeal has not given permission for a further appeal to the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), however, an application for permission to appeal has been filed with the Federal Court of Justice. As of 4 October 2020 that application was still pending (Federal Court of Justice I ZR 97/19). According to Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,[27] "In October 2021, the parties reached a settlement agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires. Under the terms of the settlement, the all-Germany block is no longer in place. Other terms of the settlement are confidential."
> The website has been blocked in Italy since May 2020.[28]
I get the sentiment but writing the Great American Novel is no easy proposition. Everyone who is saying 20 years are plenty should first make sure their wealth doesn't come from a salary. Creators are taking the risk so deserve the reward. I'm fine with ending with the creators death. This does push the creator to keep creating to maximize earnings for their estate prior to death. Creation is hard and it shouldn't be like art where paintings are only valuable posthumously.
the problem is that very rarely creators own the copyright, most of the time it's transferred to corporations. in principle I agree with you, but corporations should have restrictive limits (i.e. 20 years after first copyright transfer from a natural person) - and just to be sure, make it so that royalty contracts are null and void if they cover a duration longer than 5 years, so that corporation cannot workaround the issue buying new property for pennies using forever exlusive royalties and preventing renegotiation once the property becomes famous (i.e. avoid the current musicians/labels contracts where unknowns get scouted early and chained forever)
Life expectancy is 2.5X what it was when these laws were first conceived and the majority of creative people have a relatively short peak creative period where most of their valuable output comes - eg. Typical recording artists last no more than 10 years & to be able to achieve their peak, they have to often give up on things that promise stable careers for people (advanced college degrees, internships and starter roles in the 20s) not in the creative industry. So why not let them enjoy the benefits of their creativity through royalty in their old age if someone streams their song decades later? There are a lot of senior artists who would be facing very significant hardship if not for their royalties. You can see this much more often in athletes who don't have a royalty stream.
Life expectancy was mostly shorter due to infant mortality. The average person who made it to 5 years old didn’t have an expectation to die at 35 at all.
What about a compromise where the original works (and republishing verbatim) are protected for the life of the creator, but derivative works (e.g. writing a new novel with the same characters/setting) are only prevented from being created for 10-20 years?
Copyright shouldn't last even one decade. Most of the profits of games and movies are made in the first few weeks. Give them like five years of protection in order to be exceptionally generous and allow for exactly 0 extensions.
That's it. That's how copyright should work in order to be tolerable. Anything else is pure rent seeking.
> Most of the profits of games and movies are made in the first few weeks.
This is mostly straw man, it only applies to big-budget AAA titles, it doesn’t apply to indie games & movies, it doesn’t apply to artists or musicians, especially most small-time artists. It doesn’t apply to books or to software or to journalism or to educational or corporate content. Your claim isn’t really even true for Marvel movies or whatever either, box office is complicated and movie profits are now based on global sales and streaming and ancillary rights and merchandising and all kind of things that don’t happen in the first few weeks.
Copyrights might be too long now, but these laws have been around for many centuries, and ala Chesterton’s fence, you seem to be failing to consider the reasons that copyrights appeared in the first place, and the ramifications of significantly reducing or abolishing copyrights. The problem that led to copyrights is IP theft, unscrupulous people publishing work as their own and rent-seeking all the profit they can. This will happen at a massive scale if we cut the period down to 1 decade or less. You might want to consider the possibility that if copyright were shortened to less than a decade or abolished today, it might not really hurt Disney and other big media corps at all, it might just kill independent artists because large corporations can control the internet and legally steal your independent creative work before you can make money from it.
It's really not. It either makes more money than it cost or it doesn't. If it does, it's considered a success. If not, it's a flop. That's how everything I've ever read about the copyright industry puts it. I don't really see a need to complicate this.
Yeah, corporations make additional money from licensing, merchandising and whatnot. Making toys and stuff is fine but this licensing bullshit really should end after a few years once the work enters the public domain. They've already made their money, they're done and it's time for the work enter the public domain.
> The problem that led to copyrights is IP theft, unscrupulous people publishing work as their own and rent-seeking all the profit they can.
And how is the copyright solution working out for them? Days ago I saw someone here posting about how their web game was cloned by someone else. Did they sue? No, it's too expensive. Meanwhile corporations will kill your YouTube videos and steal your advertising money if someone walks by on the street playing a song they own.
You might consider the possibility that this trillion dollar copyright industry has already coopted this so called "system". They turned it against the very same people it was designed to protect.
> It either makes more money than it cost or it doesn’t.
You moved your own goal post, you were talking about when it makes it’s money, not whether. Your claim was that it reaches that point in a few weeks, which is 1) not generally true, and 2) irrelevant to most creative works. Copyrights aren’t only serving movies, they’re serving artists and musicians and magazines and websites and many other industries too. The amount of time it takes for a movie to recoup it’s costs has no bearing on what copyright terms should be.
> this trillion dollar copyright industry has already coopted this so called “system”
There’s no question terms are a bit too long and that big business is profiting, there’s no question whether things are messed up. They are, I’m not arguing with you there. I’m just not sure that tossing out the baby with the bath water and raging against the machine is going to be fruitful. Copyrights do protect many independent artists somewhat, despite your anecdote.
> Copyrights aren’t only serving movies, they’re serving artists and musicians and magazines and websites and many other industries too.
Which is why I wrote "give them like five years of protection" instead of a few months. That ought to be more than enough for most if not all to make their money back and then some. Maybe 10 years at the absolute most.
Certainly not this lifetime plus 70 years insanity.
> there’s no question whether things are messed up. They are, I’m not arguing with you there.
I'm happy you agree.
> I’m just not sure that tossing out the baby with the bath water and raging against the machine is going to be fruitful.
I'm sorry, it's just so hard for me to watch the copyright industry just destroy the computers I love so much because they harm their rent seeking. Every year it's some new DRM bullshit with new ways to usurp control of my computer for their own ends. They have such immense lobbying power they made it illegal to break into and take control of my own system. It just feels so hopeless. I really don't know what else to do at this point.
> five years […] That ought to be more than enough for most
Why? You have not established this. The only example you gave is not valid for most content. Books and art and music frequently make the bulk of their return more than 5 or 10 years later. Why “most” and not all? Have you researched how many people make money on creative output? Personally I’m not very convinced by armchair opinions, this needs more careful reasoning.
What if draconian copyright is today right now having the intended effect of encouraging people to make new work and not remix existing content? What you’re complaining about is the inability to legally copy current work, while there is no restriction on making new things (and you get legal protection if you do!)
Maybe we should talk about what specific things you want to copy that you feel should be legal?
> Maybe we should talk about what specific things you want to copy that you feel should be legal?
Anything older than 5-10 years should be in the public domain. That means music, movies, games, books, literally anything copyrighted.
Nintendo should not be selling the same NES Mario game to people for the 100th time. They've already made their money like a billion times over. Let it go. This is honestly shameful.
Why? If you’re okay with 5 years of copyright, then give reasons and evidence why 5 years is the appropriate term. This has been litigated for centuries, so I cannot take your opinion as holding any value without at least some reasoning. You gave only one reason so far having to do with movies, which isn’t relevant to copyright law in general, and you have not yet defended your claim that copyright ought to end once you’ve recouped your costs (as opposed to having the opportunity to make a return.)
An invalid reason IMO to shorten copyright is to cite companies that have made profits, small or large. It does not matter if Nintendo has made their money. (And you’re dragging up side-baggage by implying that all their Mario games are exactly the same.) Copyright terms need to be designed for all artists and authors who are not Nintendo, so your anger at Nintendo’s profits are clouding the criteria for designing copyright limits.
I'm not okay with any amount of time. I think copyright should be abolished straight up. Five or ten years is just a length of time that I believe would make copyright tolerable enough not to turn copyright infringement into civil disobedience.
> you have not yet defended your claim that copyright ought to end once you’ve recouped your costs (as opposed to having the opportunity to make a return.)
I never claimed that to begin with. I said 5 years is more than enough to make your money back and then some. If your creation is successful, you're gonna sell enough copies to turn a profit and enjoy a generous protection period. If not, it's a failure and that's fine too.
> An invalid reason IMO to shorten copyright is to cite companies that have made profits, small or large.
Why? The purpose was to incentivize creation. They made profit. Therefore they were properly incentivized. Nothing invalid about it.
The whole point is they should not get these incentives forever. They should be time-limited. Truly time-limited, not this lifetime+70 bullshit.
> It does not matter if Nintendo has made their money.
It absolutely does. The fact they made money means you cannot claim they were not properly incentivized.
> you’re dragging up side-baggage by implying that all their Mario games are exactly the same
Nintendo sells people the exact same Mario ROMs from the 80s every console generation. Not just Mario either, pretty much every single franchise of theirs. Not just Nintendo either, pretty much every game company that's been around that long. Not just the games industry either, pretty much the entire entertainment industry does this.
Obviously if they make new content it's a new copyright but it's been half a century already and there's no reason for works created that far back to not be in the public domain.
> so your anger at Nintendo’s profits are clouding the criteria for designing copyright limits
I don't care about their profits. I care about the fact their works from 40+ years ago are still protected.
> I’m not okay with any amount of time. I think copyright should be abolished straight up.
Well in that case, see Chesterton’s Fence. Do you know why copyright exists? Do you understand the problem that the law was created to solve? What was the problem, can you summarize it? You don’t get to abolish copyright until you actually understand the history that got us here. You haven’t yet managed to acknowledge that some copying is bad, bad for the economy and bad for incentivizing creators. Some copying is done without any intent to add value, it is done purely for private financial gain. Your argument and stated opinions are not addressing the problem of people who seek to simply take value from creators. You’ll need to make a case for why people should be able to straight up steal and sell others’ work if you want to say copyright should be abolished, and you haven’t even begun to justify that position here.
As creator and author, as part-time musician, part-time artist, and full time writer of software, I’m glad copyright exists. I’ve already had cases in my life where people wanted to take my work for free and use it for their own profits. I’d be okay with some reduction in copyright term length, but I’m glad that people who just want to pirate stuff while hypocritically raging about corporate greed online don’t make the laws.
I do understand, which is why right after the part you quoted I wrote about making it tolerable. Since you basically ignored all the other things I wrote and called me a hypocritical pirate, I'm just gonna address that instead of continuing this pointless conversation.
You don't get to call me a "pirate". I've paid for way too much stuff to just allow that. I pay for streaming services of all kinds. I pay for video games, probably over a thousand titles by now. I pay for physical books. I've even paid for art through patreon, albeit anonymously. I paid for fucking Windows Vista.
You're damn right I'm a hypocrite though. Even though I have extreme opinions on copyright, I actually believe in supporting people like you. I unwittingly support the copyright industry despite advocating for its abolishment because right now I can't support creators in any other way. I put my money where my mouth is and actually purchase the works I enjoy. Only to get called a "raging pirate" anyway.
As a programmer and author, I really couldn't care less if someone copies something I've published. I have no interest in ever litigating such a case either. I understand that there is no controlling the information once it is out there. That's why the things I don't feel like sharing I keep secret.
I didn’t call you a pirate, I’m sorry I left that impression. I was talking about all the people who want to copy without paying and complain that they can’t. They are the people your whole argument is failing to address. I don’t know what you mean by “tolerable”, but you said explicitly that you’re not okay with any amount of time. That is, as you say, a very extreme position to take, one that assumes copyright doesn’t solve any problem, and despite all our talking I still haven’t yet heard any justification for it, even if you say you would reluctantly concede to leave a small term in place.
A lot of great indie games wouldn't even have been finished when their copyright expired if it lasted only 5 years (Factorio, Minecraft, Terraria).
And Cave Story wouldn't have made any money. It was released for free in 2004 but few people knew about it at the time. It wasn't until 2010/2011 when it released on Nintendo and Steam (paid version) that it took off.
Minecraft kept being updated during early development, so unless you wanted to play a five year old version it would still have been under copyright. I agree it probably wouldn't have sold for a billion dollars, but they were making a lot of money before the sale.
Cave Story I'm less familiar with, but again the Nintento and Steam versions would probably be different and have new copyright. But I think you're saying the game sold well despite a free version being available. Isn't this an example that you don't need any copyright to make money off a game?
Yeah, the first 3 games were (and still are) being updated. Still seems problematic to lose your original copyright before your even finished making your game. People looking to make a quick buck could put old copies of your game on Steam, same name and everything.
The Cave Story Steam version had some minor graphics changes but no major differences. Mainly, a lot of people hadn't heard of it before then, and people weren't necessarily aware there was a free version. Copyright was important here; without it, someone else would have put it on Steam years earlier.
3-5 years AT MOST. 20 years is an eternity in today's world. Most of the revenue a creative work generates comes in the first few months after its release anyway. For movies, the revenue from outside of cinema screenings is not even considered for statistical purposes.
It would also make some sense to make copyright non-transferable.
I agree, but authors will scream blue murder and claim that you're depriving of their chances of any kind of security in retirement if you do so.
Do they have a point? There are undoubtedly some creators making money from their old works, but I'd bet the vast majority of creators who do make a living from their work at some point (a small fraction of those who write or compose) make the vast majority of the royalties from their work in the first 20 years of its existence. Even more so when you apply appropriate present values to future royalties.
But when I looked for actual evidence to support or refute this point the quality of evidence in the public domain is extremely weak - either anecdata from prominent authors, or very poor-quality aggregate data from economists supporting liberalizing copyright.
If I didn't need to earn a living would be fun and useful to do a PhD examining this question properly.
As it stands, all the myths of our culture are only allowed to be told by giant media conglomerates. Nobody but the House of Mouse, for instance, can tell the stories of Darth, Luke, Han, and Yoda.
50 sounds very reasonable. Not only is it plenty long to monetize a work but it may also incentivize aging legends to have a second golden age of creativity at the end of their career.
One of my favorite all time musicians is still touring (and sounding great!) but his entire set list is music he wrote in the 60s and 70s. I suspect he still has it in him to write amazing new music.
I'm not fully convinced 20 years is the right answer. Things made 20 years ago are still often in pop-culture (The Matrix Trilogy, the first 7 seasons of South Park, the first 5 Harry Potter books), and these entering the public domain would create significant pressure to avoid the names of these series becoming legally generic. Managing the rights of these also feels like it would create significant stress on platforms trying to stem off piracy - is that 5 min clip from the Simpsons from seasons 1-15 (legal), or 15-34 (illegal)?
Somewhere between the two feels more significant. Few series will run that long, and anything that does enter the public domain will be unambiguous due to its look, feel, and sound. Something like the original Star Wars (45 years old) is clearly older and is distinct from modern media in its look and feel. Something like The Lord of the Rings on the otherhand is hard to differentiate.
Even if the IP is continuing to be used by the original creators, they can set the "canon" while competition might force them to do a decent job of using the IP in future.
For example, the Matrix. It had definitively entered the cultural meme pool after 20 years. If other creators could make money telling stories from that universe - whether through images, music, video - then the populace at large wanted that content. And if film number 4,5,6 are any good they make money as well.
You're only looking at the commercial value of copyright - making sure an IP stays as profitable as possible for as long as possible. But cultural value is just as, if not more, important, as is the premise (lost in modern society) that culture should be driven by people rather than manufactured by corporations.
Copyright should end soon enough for public adoption of a work to still be culturally significant, even if that interferes with its market viability.
And then people won't release their works. Why should I invest time/energy/my money/long nights not spent having fun to create something that I won't own, have control over, or profit from? What is my incentive. Sure, some people are down for that, but we created copyright laws because otherwise we miss out on a ton of valuable stuff to society, more valuable than handing over copyright works to the public. Society decided this and has benefited hugely (as in hands). You want to re-write the rules because 'it doesn't work' makes no sense. We have record amounts of IP being created, how does it not work? Are there not books being written? So it's working. Are there movies being made? So it's working. Are there video games being made? So it's working. Is there music being made? So it's working. Are business processes being improved? So it's working. Show HOW it's not working on a level that we risk destroying all of that creation and those creators livelihoods and incomes. And not 'it's not working, 20 years only!'. That is not an argument.
First there's a lot of content which isn't produced because of the restrictions, you just don't see it. Remixes, different takes into existing content.
Secondly and this is where the current system fails the hardest is that you have to preserve culture.
Most of the older niche content is actually preserved by piracy right now and would be gone otherwise. There's no way to preserve content in the current model, content is just created and then thrown away.
>Why should I invest time/energy/my money/long nights not spent having fun to create something that I won't own, have control over, or profit from?
You get an exclusive monopoly and profit for twenty years, that seems long enough. Expecting the gravy train to run for the rest of your life, if not longer, is excessive. And I disagree with the premise that all human creative effort would cease were that to change.
>You want to re-write the rules because 'it doesn't work' makes no sense.
I don't know why you're quoting an argument I didn't make, or why you wasted the bulk of your comment rebutting it.
I'm not sure what you mean with "culturally significant public adoption".
Whatever the definition, I'd probably argue that the movie The Matrix succeeded, even though it's still under copyright. That is: long copyright need not preclude that.
More to the point, I also don't mind long copyrights per se. if an individual produced a work that ensures a steady income for the rest of their life, I prefer that individual enjoying those benefits over having a free-for-all. Eg, in my opinion, a one-hit-wonder from the 80s should still profit from their one hit if that hit still generated profits.
That applies to individuals/small groups though, not for media companies. That is, I don't want the folks responsible for works that are still in our hearts and minds decades later to miss out; don't care much for businesses after initial run.
> Copyright should end soon enough for public adoption of a work to still be culturally significant, even if that interferes with its market viability.
Why? That notion is not part of the current reasoning behind copyright, and I don’t buy that it should be. Feel free to make a case for it.
It seems like this idea could backfire dramatically in today’s fast-paced meme-based globally connected environment. It could be used to argue that copyrights should end the moment something becomes popular, which would undermine both the economic protection for the author, as well as the greater social good force to incentivize creating new and culturally relevant work. It could lead to the opposite of what you say you want, it could lead to lower overall cultural value.
What I'm looking at is the clarity value of copyright - do I know what things are and aren't copyrighted? I'm working on a social media startup right now, and managing copyright is tricky as it is. My concern here is that if copyright were only 20 years, removing copyrighted content would become even harder, making it even more difficult to compete with Meta / Google / etc.
I can't imagine finding out if something is older than 20 years would be prohibitively expensive - especially when those other platforms would have to do the same thing were copyright limits to change, meaning infrastructure would probably rapidly be developed to enable it. Most platforms don't even care, and Google just lets anyone claim anything and leaves it to the claimants to sort out.
I want to see what would happen if we abolished all IP law except for trademarks. No patents, no copyrights. I personally doubt it would actually discourage anyone from producing art or innovating in science/technology, but it might have other unexpected negative effects.
One negative effect might be that you don't get to hear the music, read the book or view the art because you are not the wealthy patron or one of their friends. That's the way it used to work.
> 0 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit.
How is it any more absurd than a trademark? Why should someone be able to write and sell a book about Harry Potter but not sell their own Iphone?
The purposes of those concepts are totally different.
The purpose of trademarks is customer safety. If it wasn't illegal to infringe trademarks, it would be much easier to distribute fake products, and companies would have less incentive to build their brand on quality.
The motivation for copyright is similar in that it exists to incentivize beneficial behavior (creating valuable works). But it's different because it also limits the distribution of the works. If this "cost" is too high, there is no economical sense in having so long copyright.
Trademarks are not intrinsically valuable (to society). Limiting their use has no cost.
Artistic control is major aspect of copyright; as an artist you might not want to allow Disney to make hack adaptation of your story, or someone use your song in an ad, or gazillion other things. Of course such protection can be made into separate law, but I think just slashing copyright would be problematic.
I like the idea of an extension with a hefty tax. After an initial period of ~10 years, you have to declare the value of the IP each year and pay 10% of that p.a.
Anyone willing to provide your declared value to the public coffers can then have it placed in the public domain.
I agree about how excessively long the current copyright laws can be, but there's a few things I wonder about that has to be done before that can realistically happen, along with several other related questions I got. Regardless of what happens in the end, any amount of copyright term reduction, even if that's only like 10 or 20 years, is better than nothing.
* How will the Berne Convention from the early 1900s be dealt with? Since multiple countries signed onto that, how can that be overridden or be repelled so that at least some countries can start to reduce copyright terms? I know there's a few countries that didn't sign onto this convention, but they don't enough power to cause major reforms to occur.
* I wish I could do it all myself, but I don't have enough money to convince most politicians to support such reforms. There's got to be some way I can easily gather like people who support such reforms. It's even harder if this has to happen outside of the United States for any meaningful reform to start. Where could I possibly get started on gathering like people for this purpose?
* I know about fanworks (such as fanart, fanfiction, and fangames) and the like, but unfortunately, such things aren't tolerated when they're mixed with open-source software or anything with similar licensing. How come many of those can stay up while being legally dubious (by way of using characters and/or settings from pre-existing mass media without explicit permission from the original rightsholder(s)), but open-source software doesn't get that same pass, even if only for non-commercial purposes? Even if many rightsholders would ignore such things for not being worth their time to take down, it still doesn't feel totally right if the law was strictly followed.
* If a (non-open source like) work gets delisted or removed from online stores or websites to the point where it can't be legally obtained anywhere (and hence can only be acquired via piracy), would that count as a publisher or author saying that they effectively revoked rights to such a work? Then if that work cannot be legally obtained anymore, would that also mean that that work can never enter the public domain unless it becomes available again in the future?
I ask these questions in order to reduce the likelihood that I end up with a DMCA notice sent against any of my fanworks, that could potentially hurt my chances for getting future jobs. Then that could have a domino effect of making my life very hard if this gets bad enough because of not being able to find a source of income because people got scared of me infringing their copyrights. I may be exaggerating these worries, but that's what could happen if I strictly followed the law.
At least for the Berne convention, is Americans can start by unseating incumbents and electing senators who do not care what treaties their predecessors have ratified.
A lot of famous writers today lived in poverty and obscurity and sold very few books until their old age. Seems like it would be unfair for them to not profit from their life’s work just because it’s more than 20 years old.
Yet copyright persists a constant number of years after the author's death. Is there anyone seriously arguing that a person should profit from their life's work even after they're dead?
To grandfather in the existing copyrights, any new ones will have one year shortened every year until the 20 year mark reached. Then all copyright work have 20 years. That's it.
Interesting effect of this is that it would release a truly massive amount of previously copyrighted work in a short timespan. Assuming this takes effect next year, some time in 2073, all copyrighted material created between this year and 2053 will be in the public domain.
As was posited in another comment, if we're encouraging innovation here, that would help the point. Encourage creators to have to create again.
As an aside - I'd imagine for most works, the vast majority of earnings would come from the first 20 years. I mean, people aren't flocking to the theatre to see Titanic anymore, yeah? I'm sure there's some streaming deals and licenses to show and whatnot, but nothing like theatre earnings.
Copyright is not the same as patents nor is innovation the only or necessarily the most relevant concern.
Authors have rights, especially artists are often not immediately discovered, and a lot of large businesses would be able to suppress new works for 20 years.
This shows ignorance on how creators make money. Creators don't make money purely through producing new works, per se. They create money with a robust set of works whose long tail collectively forms enough money for them to live off of. This relies on the notion that the intellectual property of the creator is theirs for a significantly long time. This is because the money made upfront is unpredictable [a novel's upfront payment is often just a few thousand dollars, but takes over a year to write, edit, and produce...]
The "long tail" of works makes practically zero money. Most of them simply go out of print and into a copyright-induced memory hole. Works that still make money decades after their creation are quite exceptional.
This is only true in the sense that all creative people are generally paid exceptionally little for their work, and make practically zero money. But of those that do make a living, it is through having a robust and regularly selling body of work that is still paying money years or decades later.
This is also partially why royalties were a huge fight against Disney a little while ago, when Disney started to refuse to pay royalties for Star Wars and Marvel works after acquiring the companies that owned them. Those works were still selling years/decades after their original creation and those creatives were still owed that money.
So we should subject all works to extreme copyright lengths on the mere off-chance that a tiny fraction of them might still be making appreciable amounts of money decades later? Looks like a total non-starter.
20-years is nothing in the terms of the life span something. If you look at a lot of the authors they spend their lifes writing. Just like you'll spend more than 20-years working, so will they. But it seems you want to hamstright their earning rights. To me it's absolute greed and stealing from the working man.
The entire point of allowing things to go public domain is they is no need for copyright protection anylonger. But if people are still earning their living off of that work then someone would be getting hurt.
And this talk of a total non-starter. You need to explain why 20-years is enough. Because it's 100+ just now. So you're the one on a total non-starter.
No, I'm saying 20 years is too short because it destroys the livelihoods of the already-few creatives who can make a living off of their work, because 20 years is based off of a completely ignorant idea of how creatives earn livings.
This does not sound convincing to me; I can not imagine ANY realistic scenario where artistic activity is only viable because of profits earned more than 20 years later: Not for individual authors/creators and especially not for companies.
I think this point of view only appears reasonable because of how ridiculously extensive copyright terms are right now...
Imagine companies paying bonuses for work that was done >20 years earlier: That sounds to me neither reasonable nor helpful in any way.
> Society is not obligated to provide life time rent for you
Society should be obligated to pay me for work that I've done if they wish to enjoy that work. If I write a book and 20-years later you want to read that book, why should you get it for free? Why shouldn't demand that you pay me money for that book?
Society is not entitled to free shit. Remember Society isn't obligated to provide payment, just the people who want the creations.
It's called our public domain rights. Culture belongs to everyone, that's the natural way of things. We willingly chose to pretend that we can't copy and distribute your book infinitely at negligble cost so you could make some money and be rewarded for your efforts. We sure as hell didn't do that so you could have functionally infinite rent seeking all the way down to your grand children.
Authors and the copyright industry as a whole lobby the governments with the intent to systematically rob us of our fair use and public domain rights. You're not keeping up your public domain side of the bargain. Why should we keep up our end? We shouldn't. We won't.
The entitlement of thinking you're owed eternal monopoly rights over information. The entitlement of thinking you can own unique numbers. How ironic.
Public domain is a right and its existence is implied by the words "time-limited" in copyright law. The whole objection to copyright is based on the fact they have made a mockery of the concept by simply extending copyright durantions whenever works of rich corporations are about to expire. There is no such thing as public domain if the copyright is never actually allowed to expire.
>Would it be ok if I came and took stuff you physically made 20-years ago and say it's ok - you made it 20-years ago.
Yes. I would be thrilled if anything I made had enough cultural value after 20 years that the commons still had a use for it. Better that than, say, a publisher deciding it no longer has market value and simply never printing any more and pulping the rest.
And as far as the publishers getting paid, the publishers are always getting paid. You signed away part of your rights to them to begin with, and if they couldn't get paid, they wouldn't publish your work to begin with. You've already decided they have the right to profit from your work, what's under debate is how long anyone else has to wait to do the same.
> I would be thrilled if anything I made had enough cultural value after 20 years that the commons still had a use for it.
You would be thrilled that you made something that good. Since something that good is very very rare. You would be very upset that I was getting all the value that it provides for free just because of how long ago you made it.
> And as far as the publishers getting paid, the publishers are always getting paid. You signed away part of your rights to them to begin with, and if they couldn't get paid, they wouldn't publish your work to begin with. You've already decided they have the right to profit from your work, what's under debate is how long anyone else has to wait to do the same. 100% if I take anything off you without paying for it, you're going to be screaming from the rafters about how unfair it all is.
When you enter into a publishing contract the deal is they make money and you make money. Entering into a contract where they make money and you make nothing is fundamentally not a contract, it is not legal is nearly every country. This is why contracts where they sell companies with massive debt but have assets such as for example Football clubs sell for 1 pound/dollar/euro. There must be an exchange. The idea that it's ok for one entity to stop paying another entity just because "you knew I was going to be making money" is disgusting.
Personally, I think to disagree with the idea it's fair someone gets paid for their work is just pure greed. It's absolutely disgusting to think it's fair a company gets to make money off someone's work without paying them. I think people who think along those lines a morally bankrupt.
As an artist by trade, you're damn right I want my kids & grandkids to profit from my IP (though I'm no Walt Disney), whether 20 or 100 years later. Art is different my friend. I'm not piecing together code from StackOverflow. Why should my heirlooms be sold to the highest bidder outside of my family due to copyright legal loopholes?
Well I assume you are happy with a portion of you and your work's income for the next 100 years going to your teachers ( art and other subjects ) without who you could not have created the work.
Also any medical people who treated you or your parents.
Teaching and Medicine are skilled jobs that took years to learn. It is hardly fair that you and your heirs get to profit from some teacher's or Doctor's work without them getting a share.
Family heirlooms? Your art is not a heirloom. It's just information, transferred from your mind into your medium of preference. Information is just bits, nothing but a unique number whose discovery you feel entitled to.
You think yourself superior to people who "piece together code from StackOverflow"? You're not. They will prove it to you with machine learning AI.
> "Your art is not a heirloom.... you're not entitled to..."
What? An heirloom by definition is something passed down in a family for generations.
If I created Mickey Mouse for example, why does my future offspring have to give away its rights, perhaps to someone that may use the character in nefarious ways for profit?
I fail to see the logic of having a free-for-all on an artist's work just because they're potentially deceased and therefore let someone else receive profits instead of the original creator's family?
> What? An heirloom by definition is something passed down in a family for generations.
Maybe if you paint a picture on a canvas you could call that physical canvas a heirloom. The copyrights associated with it have nothing to do with that. Anyone can produce a copy.
> If I created Mickey Mouse for example, why does my future offspring have to give away its rights
> I fail to see the logic of having a free-for-all on an artist's work
It's called our public domain rights. Our culture is ours and it belongs to everyone. That's the natural way of things. Public domain is the default.
We willingly chose to pretend that we can't copy and distribute your art infinitely at negligble cost so you could make some money and be rewarded for your efforts. We sure as hell didn't do that so you could have functionally infinite rent seeking all the way down to your grand children.
It's clear that you're not keeping up your public domain side of the bargain. Why should we keep up our end? We can just stop pretending that your art is artificially scarce. Suddenly, it ceases to be. Just like that.
> "It's clear that you're not keeping up your public domain side of the bargain."
Again, my argument doesn't retain to anything related to engineering and the like (eg. aviation software or an entire aircraft). I'm talking about stylized artwork for the sake of art... I'm saying very specific characters and such that would only be [legally] bought in the future purely as an investment, not to iterate or improve upon because the new owners are so passionate about any sort of paintings/drawings/etc.
Funny quip, but my children aren't going into creative fields, the topic at hand. And for what it's worth, they're both graduating high school early to pursue medicine.
> Jan 1, 2023 will also be a fine day for film in the public domain, with Metropolis, The Jazz Singer, and Laurel and Hardy's Battle of the Century entering the commons. Also notable: Wings, winner of the first-ever best picture Academy Award; The Lodger, Hitchcock's first thriller; and FW "Nosferatu" Mirnau's Sunrise.
Metropolis is so influential that I'd call it a must-watch for... well, basically any fan of popular media of any kind. Film, literature, graphic arts, video games, music(!). Its influence is everywhere.
Sunrise is one hell of a roller-coaster of a movie. As with anything in the silent era (especially the non-comedy films) it's a bit of an acquired taste but it's among the earliest films that I didn't just find interesting or funny, but that really got me on the edge of my seat, several times. It's got some real "yell at the screen" moments :-) I enjoyed it way more than the director's more-iconic Nosferatu. Though, for my money, it's no M or The Passion of Joan of Arc, as silent film dramas go. Still, really good, and I think a lot of critics hold it in far higher regard than I do.
Haven't seen the rest.
> On the literary front, we have Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, AA Milne's Now We Are Six, Hemingway's Men Without Women, Faulkner's Mosquitoes, Christie's The Big Four, Wharton's Twilight Sleep, Hesse's Steppenwolf (in German), Kafka's Amerika (in German), and Proust's Le Temps retrouvé (in French).
Damn, what a powerhouse year in literature. And look at that, my favorite novel (To the Lighthouse) is about to be public domain!
The Holmes news is awesome, too. Bunch of copyright troll dicks have been making doing anything with Holmes risky for years. Great that everyone can more-easily ignore them.
This is the craziest thing about copyright law. Maybe it's fair that an author and his family should receive compensation for their work even after their deaths.
But Sunrise was released 95 years ago - the odds are that there is nobody alive who worked on this movie, nobody alive that even saw it in theaters. Why is it not publicly available? I doubt anyone is earning significant money off of an extremely old movie that caters to a niche audience - if the media is so old that it is both literally and aesthetically irrelevant in society, it's astounding that it wouldn't have been in the public domain already. It's a massive shame that Disney's corporate plots have been a detriment to other media that isn't generating huge profits. I only wish that "Steamboat Willie" going into the public domain will bring about some sort of copyright reform.
I very much doubt that anyone involved in Sunrise is pushing for the “copyright extensions”.
Steamboat Willie on the other hand... Even when he finally goes, Disney will be arguing for every single version of Mickey Mouse as a separately-copyrightable entity and therefore keep hold of him for even longer.
Getting to see 'Metropolis' in a restored movie palace with a live organist playing the entire time was quite the nice experience. Not sure I want to watch it at home and taint that experience. Still nice for others to have the option and for free.
I disliked Metropolis quite a lot. Maybe it was influential and was probably a gamechanger at a time. But is it good in any way from today's point of view? I'm not talking about effects or scenography which could not technically be better at that era. I'm talking about acting and script which look abysmal to me. I would probably not have this kind of opinion but it's often on some kind of top list and my expectations were high. Maybe I'm missing something? Or is it just touted for historical significance?
It's not that I have a problem with old movies. Casablanca came out only 15 years after Metropolis and is perfect in every way I care about.
Acting in silent movies is entirely different from what came later. That's why most silent stars didn't make it into the "talkie" era.
Just like aliens in 60s movies speak English and are obviously people in disguise, you just have to adhere to the conventions of the time.
Similarly, the ways to make the script go forward are usually quite different from what came later, because of the constant interruption required by text inserts.
Last, the musical score is important. A bad one can make of break a silent film (versions from archive.org and similar sites often have random music instead of a true score).
So you may need to learn the way of the silent movies before really appreciating them (out of slapstick comedy such as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton).
A lot of people feel the same way about Casablanca.
My advice is: you don’t have to like it.
If you are lucky you’ll stumble across an article or YouTube video that goes into details about how metropolis inspired movies _you_ love and on the back of that you can rewatch it as a sort of “behind the scenes” experience.
The thing that you're missing is the reappearance in other places of Metropolis's visual style. It's probably easier to see if you're a fan of Art Deco. It might also be easier to see if you watch Tron, which also was influential via visual style (in a different direction and lesser degree than Metropolis).
Silent-era sensibilities are very different from even WWII-era talkies. The field developed whole bunch, very fast. A lot of those films are difficult to appreciate without active effort to acclimatize oneself to them, much the same way lots of people bounce off classical music or jazz (or hip-hop, or heavy metal, or most musical genres, really) until they've had a bit more exposure and learned how to enjoy them. Plus, a lot of them were leaning really hard into one movement or another, and Metropolis is one of those (many) cases, so what it's aiming to do well isn't necessarily the same set of things most modern films would aim to do well (and indeed, off the beaten path you can find plenty of modern films that similarly target some particular effect or art movement, which can also take a bit of adjustment to one's expectations to enjoy)
Acting in particular has gone through some serious changes as fashions come and go, and most any style one encounters aside from what's now in-vogue tends to come off as corny. Even Casablanca, which is ahead of its time in many ways (for an American movie, anyway—the US lagged in some film technique developments at the time, compared with other markets) features acting that's less-naturalistic than what's popular now. Also, changes in editing have really made a difference in how performances come across, which is part of why watching a scene being filmed from a behind-the-scenes camera can make the acting seem off or bad—because it's not being filtered through modern shot-framing and editing.
IMO the comedies suffer the least and remain fairly accessible (no matter when you were born, if you can't laugh at Chaplin and Keaton, there's something wrong with you) but, for most people, approaching the rest of the silent era is more a project than something you can just dip into here and there and expect to have a good time. The field was immature, the whole "silent" part of it takes some getting used to, and there was a whole lot of art-movement-influenced experimentation going on.
There is, however, a lot of variety in styles in the silent film era, especially in foreign film. If you don't like 20s German expressionist films, try films of the 30s (IMO the silent era got a lot better toward the end), try American films, try French, try Spanish, Russian, stuff like that. Weird absurdist Spanish films that evoke the atmosphere of Monty Python, shocking short films, heart-rending dramas, cheap action schlock, about-the-town documentary or semi-fictional films, heavy-handed allegory—lots of stuff to explore. Plus the comedies, of which many are excellent and most are fairly accessible to a modern audience.
[EDIT] If you want something a bit easier to chew on, from the same director as Metropolis, M, which I mentioned in my first post, is much closer to a modern film, in terms of its storytelling and its plot structure.
>Metropolis is so influential that I'd call it a must-watch for... well, basically any fan of popular media of any kind. Film, literature, graphic arts, video games, music(!). Its influence is everywhere.
And notice that it managed to be extremely influential WITHOUT being in public domain.
It actually could be kind of interesting to have AI fill in the missing segments. I believe there are only 2 remaining, and we roughly know what is supposed to be there, but not able to restore it because of how few original copies remain. So you should be able to do a supervised learning to interpolate the remaining scenes and be fairly confident that it matches the version that was premiered in 1927.
I wonder how the efforts to reassemble and restore Metropolis from the various archives factor into its legal status. Does that count as a derivative work with its own copyright?
At 75 years past the death of the creator it’s possible you cannot use anything that came out throughout your entire life. Nothing you grew up with, nothing that inspired you, nothing that speaks to the life you lived.
It’s even possible that your children and your grandchildren will not be able to use anything you knew. Definitely not anything they knew.
We’re in real danger of cultural death with these rules restricting our expression.
Thankfully current artists have the option of open licenses for their works.
If I could, I would flip a switch right now where I am only exposed to things with open licenses for the rest of my life.
I’m happy to forget about everything Disney ever made. They can go put it in the vault forever and protect it with all the lawyers and guards in the world. I will never ask them to release it and they can feel safe that no one will be able to “steal” it.
> it’s possible you cannot use anything that came out throughout your entire life. Nothing you grew up with, nothing that inspired you, nothing that speaks to the life you live.
What do you mean by “use”? You can’t sell someone else’s creation just because you like it, that’s true. You can’t copy it and send it to others or post it online. But why should you be able to do those things? Why are you implying that legal restrictions on stealing them for your own profit, or redistributing things for free alike, is akin to not being able to enjoy culture?
You are allowed to view/watch/listen/consume legally obtained copies, and be inspired by them. You & teachers/schools are allowed to made educational copies for school. You are allowed to pay homage to things you grew up with, artistically, and share snippets and some kinds of remix under Fair Use. You can copy styles legally without copying content, if you want. You are allowed to have and hold any culture you want. You are allowed to create new work and give it to anyone you want.
This seems like FUD. Copyrights have been longer than the average lifespan for more than 100 years and we still have plenty of culture - spread of culture has even been accelerating in many ways. Strong arguments do exist for reducing and/or weakening copyrights, but pretending that copyrights prevent the spread of arts and culture isn’t accurate. (And might be willfully blind to the intended and actual ways that copyrights successfully promote cultural development and incentivize new creative works.)
Talk to the people who have created games based on existing characters: they made their own original work because they loved it, put in hundreds of hours, released it for free, and had their work taken off the internet with a cease and desist.
We see examples like that all the time. When was the last time someone was able to make their own popular movie from existing characters without facing some type of legal action? And I’m not talking about the “30% different loophole” where creators have to figure out the balance between recognizable and alienating.
Can you share some specific examples? Using someone else’s existing characters is probably stealing/infringing. That is not 100% original work. I haven’t heard about this being a big problem, most people know you can’t borrow characters from big studio productions without facing legal action, so they don’t attempt it.
Edit to mention up higher that when using someone else’s characters is trademark infringement, that is completely different and doesn’t support your arguments about copyright at all.
Nintendo is infamous for this, not only games specifically but mostly any "works" that relate to their content at all, including YouTube videos and also mods to long extinct games.
Correct. The cases you’re citing are people who are taking Nintendo’s work and redistributing it. YouTube channels have been challenged when people include music from their games, which is copyright infringement. Mods to long extinct games are still distributions of Nintendo’s work, they are not original work. These are all examples of trying to use Nintendo’s IP and redistribute it without Nintendo’s permission. As much as we might not like it, and whether or not Nintendo is actively marketing it, what’s missing here is a valid argument for why people should be able to borrow Nintendo’s work.
BTW your example may be wading in to Trademark territory, which is not the same thing a copyright and doesn’t apply to this discussion.
Nintendo's work isn't a physical, limited good in their possession. It's not like a car or a handbag.
This type of property is protected by law. This isnt the natural state of things, once upon a time you could just retell a story you heard. We as a society have decided to give Nintendo a temporary monopoly. Why do we do this? Different people give different arguments, but for me the reason is that I like Nintendo games, and I want Nintento to keep making them, and they're more likely to make it if we give them an additional edge to make money making games.
With that perspective, I would argue that you should be able to use their work, as long as it isn't likely to stop them from producing more content. Mods to long extinct games seem like a clear example where this is the case.
I'm not saying this is how the law is, I'm saying I think the law as it stands restricts people way to much for the purposes it serves to the people.
Copyright law today isn’t about physical goods, it’s now about giving the author of a work the right to control who can copy it. We as a society have decided to give all authors of all works a temporary monopoly, and the reasons for it are well documented.
I’m not sure I understand why wishing Nintendo to continue doing business supports the idea that you should be able to remix their work, which implicitly means you want people to be able to profit from their designs without necessarily adding value. There’s nothing at all stopping people from making new games, why do they want to mod Nintendo’s games without licensing them? Why should that be legal? And if it is legal, how do you continue to protect Nintendo when some of the “mods” will be people making straight copies, changing something trivial like the background color on the box, and selling it for full price while giving Nintendo none of the money? If you respond with, well put a standard for how much it must be changed in place, then consider why your standard should be any different than Fair Use.
You're saying "why should we allow people to remix?". I don't want to put words in your mouth, but this makes me think you're saying "We should forbid people from using works created by someone else, unless we have a good reason to allow it".
This isn't a perspective I argue from, because I disagree with it.
I think we should allow anyone to copy anything they want, unless we have a good reason to prevent that. So if you're going to stop people from remixing, I think you should be able to build an argument for that that doesn't start with assuming all the rights are owned.
I don't even like using the word "rights" for copyrights, as I really don't feel like it's in the same category as free speech of fair trial. But if I use other words the whole argument gets very confused.
Should Nintendo have the exclusive rights to games they make for 5 years? I think that argument is easy to make. Personally I'm a fan of slightly longer, maybe 20 years.
Should Nintendo have the exclusive rights to games they make for 100 years? I think that's excessive, and instead of serving to encourage create it encourages rent-seeking (Also, at this time scale a lot of material gets lost before it can be meaningfully archived).
Should someone be allowed to distribute a complete copy of a Nintendo game (still under copyright) with (possibly minor) modifications? I don't think so, I think this makes it much harder for Nintendo to make a profit for the limited time they're given.
Doing so in 20 years? Yes, Nintendo's had plenty of time to profit.
I think I agree largely with your opinion. It sounds like you agree mostly with mine, but I’m asking hard questions to try to extract some legitimate justification for remixes that copy significant value from the source material. A big problem with wanting to copy and remix is the unspoken desire to save time or money or to make money. IMO that’s not a great justification. Your position, like mine, starts from acknowledging the need for some protection time for creators, so I don’t think I need to defend that, do I? All we need to do is agree on a reasonable term, right? And Nintendo is not a good starting place to think about the term. The law needs to work well enough for people who don’t own a Mario franchise. It needs to work for photographers and painters and writers too. The law also needs to assume copies are not in good faith. The problem isn’t game developers who want to pay homage to Mario, the problem is unscrupulous people who want to make a quick buck without adding value. They are the reason the law exists, and the law needs to start with the assumption that will happen again.
> most people know you can’t borrow characters from big studio productions without facing legal action, so they don’t attempt it.
This fear is exactly my point. It even gets much thornier and much more chilling when the law isn’t as clear (since people proactively avoid things they think might result in legal action).
>We’re in real danger of cultural death with these rules restricting our expression.<
Isn't it sort of the opposite? Without these rules we'd be stuck drowning in an even larger and blander sea of retellings and reimaginings. The only time I see this considered noble or akin to staving off death is when the culture being preserved is already stagnating anyway.
> Without these rules we'd be stuck drowning in an even larger and blander sea of retellings and reimaginings
This experiment has been run in the form of open source software. The point of the GPL license, and other open source licenses, is to remove the restrictions of copyright from a work, and encourage people to reuse it, copy it, share it, modify it, etc.
Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software? Was the Xi Editor (RIP https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...) a bland remix of ed? Even moreso than proprietary editors like sublime text?
Has there been no progress in Haskell, an open source language, due to the lack of copyright's limitations? Is all non-bland (spicy?) innovation in software done under copyright, and licensed out to other developers so they may enjoy some type system or language?
Open source software to me seems like a very clear counter example to your fear.
> Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software?
By all means, yes! There are so many open source clones of proprietary software, lots of stuff that is solved, but fun to rewrite, so people do it. How many pointless gnome themes are there? How many web servers, media players, databases?
That’s survivor bias. The number of bland, irrelevant forks on GitHub far outnumbers the few relevant projects, it’s just that we, as software developers, have found ways to ignore those as we sift through options.
Right in this very moment there are hundreds if not thousands of musicians making music absolutely terrified that they will accidentally use prior works they can’t get permission for (or can’t afford).
Some are terrified they’ll use “the wrong sample” (is there a list of wrong samples? no), some are even terrified they’ll accidentally “create” a chord progression that someone else already has the rights to.
In these cases, that artist can end up getting a little popularity and maybe even a little income, then end up in debt with the song pulled from the internet, never to be played by them again.
Speaking as a part-time musician that knows a lot of musicians, I don’t know anyone who’s worried about accidentally using prior works… that sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless you’re talking about DJs & sampling & remixing specifically? In that case all samples are infringing, there doesn’t need to be a list of wrong samples, because all creative authors automatically have copy rights of their works, in the US. Sampling and remixing is somewhat tolerated as long as you steer completely clear of copying the whole song, and I’ve heard precedent tends to favor cases where people sample from multiple source and not just one other song.
Can you share some example cases of the debt you’re talking about? I’m not aware of any major problem along the lines you’re describing for people who are creating new music and not intentionally infringing a little bit.
I apologize because this will come off as dismissive, but I don’t mean it that way:
I’m specifically talking about musicians who make their living through music and who have enough exposure (say, through album sales) to have the attention of the rival record companies.
I say that because in the case of musicians who are “off the radar” the rules don’t really apply. Heck, it’s rare for a musician to get in trouble for playing an exact copy of a popular song at a small venue, but even then I think they all know that they could never release that song on Spotify or YouTube or anywhere else that’s “official” and that’s a demonstration of the kind of fear I’m talking about.
Can you share some specific examples? Which musicians? The ‘rival record companies’ comment hints that you’re talking about something different than copyright problems. But you’re also bringing up many vague fears and not citing examples. People can be scared of a lot of things, that doesn’t mean it’s reality. I’m trying to get a sense of what exactly you’re referring to because it sounds like you are tip-toeing around cases where people are actually infringing and trying to get away with it. Sampling is tolerated sometimes, but not legal. If you go down that road, you can’t necessarily expect to not be challenged.
Then there was sampling in the 80s which built the market for doing it on purpose. Of course your music has to be noticed and be making money before it really matters. Probably why most pop music today is devoid of melody and is just beats and sound effects.
Oh I agree it has happened, I just don’t believe that having it happen accidentally is a very big problem that musicians are sitting around worrying about, which is what @joshspankit claimed. This doesn’t happen very often, right? I’m ignoring sampling here, that’s copying on purpose, as you say, so far more likely to end in conflict.
Thanks for the example! I do wonder if Harrison would have had the same trouble today, those songs are pretty different despite the similarities. It’s not that surprising that among very simple three-chord diatonic major-key pop songs, a few would have a similar structure. The Harrison case might be just as much about opportunist money making as it is about copyright.
Is pop music devoid of melody these days? The term to me suggests Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Rihanna, Harry Styles, etc… I mean pop is (more or less) always vocals, which has melody (almost) by definition. I can’t think of much pop that can be summarized as just beats and sound effects… what artists are you thinking of?
I don't know if they are worrying about it as a whole, would need some sort of large study I guess. We do know that young people mostly don't worry about things like this, because they don't yet know they should. But probably there is still someone at a record company rejecting potentially costly pieces via software?
> What artists are you thinking of?
Radio stuff from mumble rap to Eilish. I'm sure there is some melody behind the vocals, right? At some point the musicians have to play something. But it is often ambient, obscured, and difficult to discern without repeated listens. Unlike earlier styles where the melody is central and you are hit over the head with it, Yaz or Van Halen come to mind.
Probably all the good sounding pop music chord sequences have been claimed at this point after almost a century of never-ending copyright. Though it is just a guess of mine, would be an interesting project if someone had the time and knowledge to map it out.
Right but in these scenarios the similarities to a prior work are the cause of the problem they might face. It's stifling to the musician sure but not in a way that's preventing anything actually unheard before.
Where's the limit? Perhaps we should award copyright over specific notes. After all we've all heard them before.
Music has so many variables that even direct covers often end up conveying something entirely original or unique. The chilling effect of Copyright results in humanity missing out on a huge number of valuable cultural contributions.
Those considerations were precisely why the phrase "even blander" was chosen and it's not clear to me from your post why expanding the number of people who can capitalize on the same storytelling ip would lead to greater variety rather than more homogeneity.
It is not always legal to do so; in some countries it is impossible to forego your copyrights. CC0 is a tool that allows to get as close as possible to a public domain dedication.
Question about how public domain works in the US, specifically with regards to this comment in the original post:
> Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. 2 They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.
Is the “20 year pause button” permanent, i.e. copyright term for all works moving forward will be 95 years? Or will that eventually expire and the term will revert to 75 years?
Permanent. The term is 95 years now, unless Congress changes the law. And reducing it would be very difficult legally, with copyright holders suing for their theoretical losses if Congress "deprives" them of 20 years of protection that they now consider their property.
I don't know if those suits would succeed. If Congress gives someone a benefit and then gets rid of it, then you can't sue the government to force them to keep giving it to you.
You can, and it'll go through the federal courts. Your case might be quickly dismissed, or it might eventually cause a Consitution question to the Supreme Court. Or not.
...that is, unless Disney can force another extension to Copyright law in the next couple days. I wouldn't be surprised if they did (or tried, at least)
Steamboat Willie doesn't go public domain until 2024, so there's technically another year.
Disney is unlikely to attempt to push through another copyright term extension (see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i... for fuller details). The two main reasons are that there is a much more forceful caucus in politics against copyright extension than there was 25 years ago, and the arguments for doing so are weaker (the copyright extension 25 years ago was partially driven by raising copyright term in the US from "life + 50" to "life + 70", in line with European standards).
If one pays careful attention however, one would note that Disney has, over the past few years, started using a clip from Steamboat Willie more aggressively in its films, which has led many to wonder if they're planning on taking down anyone who distributes Steamboat Willie on the basis of trademark violations instead.
I've noticed them putting steam boat willie in all of the credits, at the same time things were going into the public domain, I had always assumed that was the game plan.
Make steamboat willie trademark not copyright, and the laws become a lot more flexible around that.
Life + 50 was in much of Europe in 1886 with the Berne Convention. Germany had a copyright duration of 80 years after the death of the author at one point; blaming US corporations for this is absurd when Europe has had plenty of domestic publishers with entrenched interests in longer copyright durations.
European copyright laws have often been much stricter than in the US, in part because publishers have long been very close to the state (in countries like France and Germanu for example). If anything, Europe has been the bad influence historically, and has pionniered copyright treaties as the sibling comment mentions. It's crazy what some Europeans can blame the US for though.
They stopped doing that a while ago. They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it.
> They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it.
I don't have anything concrete to back this up, but it seems more likely to me
that they just don't see much potential revenue in content from the 1920's, so
they see little to be gained from further spending on copyright-extension
lobbying.
Put another way, they've already succeeded. Copyright terms aren't actually
unending, but in profit terms (or practical terms more broadly) the difference
is minimal.
Doesn't really make sense, as these same 20s works were the ones that were kept out of the public domain the first time around with the Copyright Term Extension Act.
Yeah, I realised my children, barely a decade old, don't really know the cartoon characters I took for evergreen as a child: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Yogi Bear, Woody Woodpecker and Rocky & Bullwinkle. I mean they could probably name all of them, but don't really have an attachment or think they belong to a pantheon of any sorts.
I assume that companies foresaw this coming and decided not to invest in further developing or promoting characters that they couldn't have exclusive merchandising rights for the foreseeable future. Just making money off a new movie isn't enough if you can't have sole rights to license the t-shirts and have the current children introduce it to their children.
* She knows Mikey and Minie, I was sure about that, but I asked her anyway what kind of animal they are. [Hi from Argentina. In Spanish(es-ar) it's not obvious that "Mikey Mouse" is a "ratón".] She likes them.
* Surprisingly, she knows Tom and Jerry, but she thinks it's a cat and two mice (??). I guess my brother show her a few cartoons (??), and in some of them Jerry has a friend (??).
* All the other are dead. They have been good characters.
They aren't stuck with 6 TV channels to choose from and they don't have the privilege of Saturday morning cartoons to introduce all of them. They have curated experiences on streaming apps.
Tbh it would have been better if we just allowed corporations to continue paying to extend their own copyrights forever and everything that's no longer commercially viable or doesn't have an entity owning it just gets freed quickly.
I strongly disagree. And not just because copyright in perpetuity is unconstitutional. The value in a rich public domain is vastly under-appreciated. The default position is that IP is not protectable by law, because the free exchange of ideas is extremely important to modern society.
Certainly we have carved out exceptions to that default position, but only for very clear and distinct policy reasons. 1. consumer protection (trademark) and 2. incentivizing innovation and expression (patent and copyright).
The idea that my great-great-grandchildren might want to benefit from my having written a book really does not factor into whether I might write a book. If I'm not incentivized by life of the author + 70 years, I would probably not otherwise be incentivized.
Also, corporations don't pay to extend their copyrights. Other than the money Disney pays their lobbyists.
Yes, they should be able to pay a fee to extend beyond a fair time (~50 years?) based on a declared value of the work. To ensure the declared value is realistic, they then must sell the work to anyone that offers more than the declared value.
I couldn't possibly see how studios would abuse buying up rights to content and shelving them...
looks at the fiasco related to content being shelved at WB for tax write-offs
Under that model corporations could buy up content that should become public domain, depriving the public of rights to it, and get a tax credit for it :P
If the fees were set appropriately, it would be difficult to abuse.
Under this scheme, "High Noon" would be leaving copyright this year. If the fee was 5% and the current owners said it was worth $500k they would have to pay $25k to keep it. If you thought 500k was a lowball number, you can buy it from them and declare your own value (to where nobody would force you to sell it to them) and pay the fee based on that.
The work is then in the hands of someone with incentive to create economic value from it, and the public gets a royalty on giving you that privilege. A company that is just hoarding content that they're not making money on would have a hard case to make to investors.
The idea is specifically to solve the orphan works problem.
Practically speaking, life+70 is not that far off from perpetual copyright anyway. Nobody cares if a book published today will be escheated to the public domain in 2093, and very few works from 1927 are valuable enough to retain copyright today. In fact, it's so valueless that the vast majority of works still under copyright do not have public documentation of title. The only way to find out who owns these works is to get sued for pirating them.
So the idea is to create some kind of small formality that people have to jump through in order to retain ownership over a work, because vastly more works will hit the public domain even if it means Mickey Mouse will always and forever live in a cramped pet store cage shaped like a circle-C.
How to define "commercially viable" is... complicated. You can either make copyright fully pay-to-play to soak Disney, or you can err on the side of cheap renewals. I've also heard talk of sliding-scales based on taxable value of the property under copyright. I don't think it really matters as long as we have a reasonable process to strip orphan works of their copyright protection.
Mickey Mouse should be under copyright and Mickey Mouse should be taxed to an inch of his nasty rodent life are two separate questions and should be handled as such. A small fee should be fine (much less than the total cost of a patent, say) perhaps with a requirement to keep the work publicly available (print on demand and digital makes this relatively easy).
If the copyright makes more money than it costs to maintain, then it is financially viable. I often see this approach proposed alongside a renewal fee that rises each time it is renewed, so that works will eventually become too expensive to maintain copyright on and thus aren't held in perpetuity.
The law isn't making that determination, the entities paying to indefinitely extend its copyright are (presumably at exponentially increasing rates). If it isn't viable, they don't pay and the copyright lapses.
The copyright owner determines that. Put some price on renewal and let the owner decide if they want to pay it or not. For the vast majority of content, it's worthless after x years and they will just let it lapse.
We could then shorten copyright down to something like 20 years and anything still being sold or used can be renewed while completely obsolete gameboy games become freed.
Even if the fee was something like $10/year, probably the majority of copyrights would not be renewed.
Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point.
Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
For the CTEA (which is the one called the Mickey Mouse Act), that was only a few years after the EU copyright harmonisation in '93. Disney lobbied heavily for that, of course, and it was in their interest to do so, but it's likely it would have passed anyway if the EU had tied favourable trade deal conditions to harmonising copyright duration; the Senate report for the act specifically cites trade with the EU as a motivation.
The Copyright Act of 1976 increased the duration specifically in order to comply with the Berne Convention the US would end up joining. There's not a particular reason for why '76, other than legislators finally decided the US would join what was considered the international standard.
Both of these were more or less coincidences, in my opinion.
No extension in the next couple days, but there will be another 20+ year extension purchased within the next 11 years. Why? To make sure 1938 doesn't go PD.
I will leave it up to the reader as an exercise to determine what is special about 1938.
DC certainly isn't succeeding at a media empire lately, though I guess they have 11 years to go.
There's a lot of valuable stories in Golden Age comics. One thing that makes them unique(?) is so many of them are total surreal nonsense, like the writers hadn't slept in a month, or their studios all had carbon monoxide leaks. Don't think you'll get that from a modern work environment.
When Itchy & Scratchy teamed up for the war effort [0]? Documents on Prescott Bush, grandfather of Bush Jr, who happily sold steel to the Nazis and created the current Bush family pile [1]?
Disney is over lobbying for copyright and instead went for the legal gymnastics gold of extending Trademark protections (which never expire) to things that should fall under copyright law.
Please note that this list is for the U.S.A.. If you live in another part of the world, these books might still be copyrighted. For example, in the Netherlands (like most of the EU), it is +70 years, meaning we still have to wait 5 more years.
And in other countries, it's really unlikely you'll end up in prison or sued for using something that is both 75 years old and already public domain elsewhere in the world.
It's about equally unlikely that you'll end up in prison or sued for downloading copyrighted content in the United States, especially if it is PD elsewhere. In fact, if it is PD elsewhere, the chances of your being prosecuted for downloading it approach zero.
Works passing into the public domain have very little to do with people actually getting practically slapped around for downloading them. But they have EVERYTHING to do with creating derivative works. If you create a film based on a book that is PD-US but still copyrighted in the EU, you can expect to get sued.
PD terms also affect legal libraries and archive significantly.
Germany forced Project Gutenberg to take down a few books for Germans who used the site a couple years ago, despite the site being entirely operated from the US.
There are a number of books that are based on Winnie-the-Pooh and quoting fragments. For a long time, I have had the idea to write a kind of annotated version of the stories with references to all the books that reference the text.
I understand Disney has the rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh character and that they still might cause trouble for those who publish text from the books in Europe.
None of A. A. Milne's work will enter the PD anywhere in the EU until 2027, including all the elements of his character Winnie the Pooh, not counting elements introduced by other writers who added more later.
Some works from that era still have publishers enforcing the copyright wherever they can. I remember some disputes about the Sherlock Holmes books which expired in life + 70 countries but were still under copyright in the USA.
I came to the conviction that digital artworks, any form of digital property, really, needs a public clearinghouse.
You simply shouldn't be allowed to sell any digital license for a product you didn't register at that clearinghouse before. The task of that clearinghouse would be to provide the customer with the bought content in case of dispute or any other problems. So if, e.g, Amazon goes out of business, all my books would be available for me to download from said clearinghouse because I own the license. Same for steam games or Disney videos.
Many (but not all) of the problems with DRM or copyrighted works would vanish if we established this legal requirement.
Nowadays digital stores sell you the privilege to get access to said content, you own shit.
Making virtually unlimited profit on a limited initial amount of time, labour, costs is what's evil here. "X number of years" argument will never solve it (the shorter the worst the hype push will get).
Should be capped by a function of said time, labour invested plus costs and allowed profit adjusted for inflation.
I don't care how much one thinks he deserves to milk such work/invention. Look at what Nikola Tesla gave us and what he got in return.
Along these same lines, Tom Lehrer recently put all of his works (music and lyrics) into the public domain. Downloadable from his site [0] where there's a notice to this effect.
As did I, my father had talked my grandfather into buying them as they were released in Norwegian in the fifties, so I had some fifty books on my shelves and read them all, some several times.
I adored them, but in hindsight: Gawds, how formulaic they were. I bet with some practice, a ghostwriter could probably churn out a Hardy Boys book in a couple of days.
Excellent childhood memories, though - along with Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings books, I spent more time with Hardy Boys books during rainy summers than I care admit.
Fun copyright fact: content created today by anyone under 20 is likely to still enjoy copyright protection in the year 2151, when Star Trek Enterprise is set.
Excuse my ignorance: does this mean that anybody can "legally" (for example) torrent-download Metropolis? Or that can be a "free" Netflix-alternative created today with movies that are part of the public domain?
Edit: a lot of answers, thanks! But still, still kinda discussed. It certainly is an interesting topic.
But there are details you'd want to ask a lawyer about. Things like if you rip one of those movies from a DVD, and that DVD was made more recently, you have to be careful not to include any creative work done more recently - for example an adjusted end credits sequence, coloring, restoration work, or minor re-editing.
You'll often find these old silent movies with a more recently recorded soundtrack which may still be under copyright.
For truly free film, I believe you'd need to scan a print of the film. I'd be interested to know of any efforts to obtain and host truly free archival copies of these old films.
I am also trying to figure out what the average person would do differently with this information. It is cool and good, but I feel like if I wanted to experience any of these I would still go buy on Amazon Prime video or pull it up on Spotify or torrent. Is there a big change in consumer experience?
Yes. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Internet Archive already has torrents of public domain film.
There's also Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks for public domain books. Wikimedia Commons has a huge archive of public domain images and sound recordings.
>Not only can you legally download it, you can burn it to disk and sell copies if you wanted to.
What about a derivative work? Like if somebody recreated the film Metropolis into a 3D version, scene by scene. Ultimately the same film but using Blender or whatever so every scene is perfect as a 3D movie. Is that new film copyrighted to the person who did this work now?
Yes and yes (in fact, there are already plenty of websites you can find out there that do that—many of them seem to just be ads-filled scraper sites hotlinking / embedding from archive.org)
yes, you can now legally torrent metropolis. You can also make derivative works (e.g. you personally could make Metropolis 2: The Reckoning!) without fear of consequence.
To those that believe copyright should be limited to a decade or two, what is your answer to Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming? It has been around since 1962, and yes has had new volumes added over time. Should Donald have been forced to give up his copyright and revenue stream in the 80s for a book that is still popular today? The book is reasonably priced at around $60.
TAOCP is not a single entity; each volume has its own copyright term. The original purpose of copyright is not to enable rent seeking, but to encourage artists to keep making new works. So as old volumes of TAOCP fall out of copyright, it incentivizes Knuth to write new volumes. It would be the system working as designed.
Would you agree with: post copyright expiration, no one, original author or otherwise, should be able to profit from it?
Ie if I were to sell TAOCP after the copyright expired, can I sell it at a price above the costs of printing, distribution, etc? Because any profit would be rent-seeking.
That's not how rent seeking works. Rent seeking requires exclusive access to a resource, i.e. an apartment in the original metaphor. Nothing prevents the author from monetizing it, too, and they get first-mover advantage and other legs up besides.
if I printed book XYZ that is written by someone else, I'm creating value by creating the copy and enabling people to read it. Would you consider companies that sell bottled water as rent seeking? (assuming that natural fresh water is abundant in that area and free for all)
> Assume that we address both of these problems: we create an empathetic system which never denies a human being of their fundamental right to live, and we eliminate copyright.
So basically you advise solving world hunger and resource scarcity as necessary to avoid the need for copyright. That is literally impossible, there will always be someone who wants more than they have, who feels what a socialism-based society believes is sufficient is really not, and who are we as a society to judge the perceived needs of each individual? No thanks, I’ll take capitalism any day.
First, even if the book lost copyright protection people would still be free to support the author by buying copies,
Second, if the book lost copyright protection wouldn’t Donald, losing that revenue stream, then be motivated to replace it by writing a follow up book?
Artists should be able to benefit from their works, but your question implies (to me) that because a work is popular artists have a right to continue to profit. You ask if they should be “forced” to “give up their copyright”. I think it’s good to keep in mind that anything copyrighted is being withheld from society at large; that we collectively pay a tax to authors in the form of giving up our collective right to remix and recombine works and profit from them in turn.
Particularly in the modern world of effortless free duplication and distribution, that’s a heavy burden to pay and it makes no sense to me that we would collectively agree to pay it for many decades even after the original author is dead.
> First, even if the book lost copyright protection people would still be free to support the author by buying copies,
This would pale in comparison to the status quo. There’s just too many people who don’t pay to support free things. Just look at how open source projects often struggle to find funding, or relicense to non-open licenses. Or how often the open source project isn’t the persons full time job.
> Second, if the book lost copyright protection wouldn’t Donald, losing that revenue stream, then be motivated to replace it by writing a follow up book?
I can’t speak to anyone else’s motivations but my own, but for me, no, I wouldn’t even bother writing the first book.
> that because a work is popular artists have a right to continue to profit.
Authors like Knuth should benefit from the wealth they helped others created. TAOCP provides a wealth of knowledge the reader can use to improve the quality of their work product. This is still a benefit long past a few decades.
> I think it’s good to keep in mind that anything copyrighted is being withheld from society at large;
I don't see how his work should be an exception to what people are saying otherwise. Since it is popular, as you say, it should all the more be freed of copyrights.
Given Knuth's prolific bibliography, he has other revenue streams from more recent publications (including more recently published volumes). His name remains on the cover of the work, so he still gets social benefits from having written a deeply influential book (which will be even more accessible once freed of copyright!).
I also don't see how $60 for a single volume seems reasonable -- most books aren't that expensive and this price point constitutes a big barrier to entry.
Is there a resource that hosts public domain content in a browsable, searchable format? I am really excited to see that Metropolis will be in the public domain soon--but where would I go to download it?
So what? Nothing I grew up with is public domain. My culture belongs to corporations and I don't expect them to enter the public domain until after I'm long dead.
Hmm, how hard is Der Steppenwolf to read? I'm a (lapsed) intermediate level German speaker, but I remember reading the first bit of it in English in high school and liking it.
Also, https://www.fadedpage.com/ has stuff freely available under Canadian copyright law, which seems to have stuff from the 50s (70 years maybe?).
Yes. But they are black-and-white and silent, which severely limits the audience these days.
Some of these movies have circulated with more recent soundtracks, and those are off limits. In particular there’s a somewhat infamous 1984 version of “Metropolis” with music produced by Giorgio Moroder and Freddie Mercury. That won’t be in the public domain until 2079…
A streaming service could hire musicians to do a new score for public domain silent movies, they would then have the exclusive right to distribute the combined work.
Does anyone know any motions in place to adjust copyright to a more reasonable time frame, even providing exceptions for companies like Disney, which harm all of us by their continual extension? It'd be nice to know what group to throw money at and ask how I can help.
cue science fiction plot: the robots walk among us, but there's a gap in their knowledge that goes back one hundred years from their activation dates, after the great rights wars locked down robot access to nearly any copyrightable human knowledge.
the real ai wars end up being purely about intellectual property.
society flirts with repeating history as the mistakes of the past are revealed to half of us from a hundred years ago, year by year.
I always wondered what strings hold the Berne Convention (and similar treaties) together. It seems like they got adopted by incredibly broad swathes of countries-- ones with wildly different social and economic needs and norms. Why would countries that can't even agree on any other nuts-and-bolts matter suddenly all line up to defend Mickey Mouse?
My first guess was promises of reciprocality, but that seems like a hard sell to countries without a meaningful IP economy.
I can't imagine it being enforced with bullets. There's no way to rally troops to defend a copyright that doesn't make you look like the bad guy.
Was it smuggled in as part of other trade agreements? (If you want to sell us $resource_you_actually_have, you have to also agree to worship the almighty circled C?)
It was initially signed as a standalone agreement 150 years ago for the sake of reciprocity - rightsholders in different European countries were unhappy with pirate publishers over the border selling their works without payment.
Today though pretty much everything in the Berne Convention is part of agreements you have to implement to join the World Trade Organisation, which is a pretty big motivation to abide by it.
Copyright enthusiasts have done their best to have the 50 or 70 year term written into as many trade agreements as possible, e.g., WTO.
However, the US probably has enough weight that other countries would just have to adapt if it wanted a shorter term, but at present there's no evidence of much political efforts for one.
It's 70 in the US now. From the US Copyright Office: "As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors."
For something like img2img with Stable Diffusion, if the starting image is copyrighted by someone else I'd expect that the output image is a derivative work of the starting image.
The question is about new copyright in both cases, not subsisting copyright. You hold the copyright to the elements originating with you in a derivative work.
No publisher would want to sign a contract with an author that isn't likely to live much longer. It needs to be either a fixed amount, or Life + something.
Copyright, Trademark, and Patent Law should not exist. Contract law and trade secrets cover all necessary use cases. Checkout Stephan Kinsela @NSKinsella for more info.
