[HN Gopher] All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US...
___________________________________________________________________
All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain
in 2022
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 216 points
Date : 2021-12-07 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| macksd wrote:
| _does the Charleston_
| hippie_queen wrote:
| Can't wait to finally sample Thomas Edison on the phonograph for
| my Soundcloud tracks, and not having to worry about the police
| knocking at my door!
| Clubber wrote:
| Or getting sued for twice your current net worth.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Hey be careful what you wish for!
|
| Check out "I am the Edison phonograph" from 1906
| https://youtu.be/EQC9CjFezrQ
|
| I'd use that, totally would.
| btilly wrote:
| Sadly, that's still under copyright.
|
| The problem was that various music copyrights were being
| dated from the 1970s for historical reasons despite the music
| itself being much older. Congress passed a law fixing a whole
| lot of that in one lump. Which is why music from the 1920s
| becomes public domain at the same time as movies from the
| early 1930s.
| odiroot wrote:
| Knowing Edison, he can get up from the grave any day, to sue
| you into bankruptcy.
| filoeleven wrote:
| Alternatively, with a reinforced casket mounted on a turbine,
| his grave-spinning could be a viable and fitting alternative
| to fossil fuels.
| toast0 wrote:
| Prior art, I believe that's where Disneyland gets its zero
| carbon energy to power the park.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Grave spinning? Sounds like that dangerous Alternating
| Current malarky. Don't you know that AC can kill an
| elephant??
| LocalH wrote:
| He probably had a patent on doing that, so be careful
| marcodiego wrote:
| 99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| i think this is fair and we will likely see it extended
| further.
|
| the media works of today cost way more than they did before.
| some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of
| millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the
| longevity of media has increased over time.
|
| we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from
| the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even
| longer since the production value is so high
|
| i think we will see this in video games the most. they will
| continue to be revenue sources in digital formats and companies
| will be defensive over losing them
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies
| from the 50s and 60s.
|
| When you take the time value of money into account, an
| expectation of big amounts of revenue multiple decades out is
| worth very little at the time of production. And on top of
| that, those old movies tend to be licensed at very cheap
| rates, so now it's a _small_ amount of revenue getting
| exponentially discounted.
|
| Cutting copyright after a couple decades won't have a big
| impact on profits.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Why is the cost of media a major factor on whether or not it
| is "fair"?
|
| Ostensibly, the point of these restrictions is to incentivize
| the people who make IP.
|
| But no one actually considers revenue 99 years into the
| future, so it doesn't work as an incentive.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of copyright is to
| shift money made from selling copies back into the production
| of new works; and anything else is just blatant rent-seeking
| at the expense of the larger economy.
|
| High-budget songs, movies, and video games will either make
| back their budgets _immediately_ , or they will be written
| off as a loss. There are very few cases where a work's
| financial success is predicated on money made five or ten
| years out. Hell, for video games, ten years out and you need
| to port your game to a new platform, which costs money, since
| the industry's investment into emulation technology[0] is
| piss-poor.
|
| Furthermore, the production values of a work don't have much
| to do with it's longevity; you can't spend twice as much to
| get a work with twice the relevance decades down the line. In
| fact, most of the works from the past that still are relevant
| today were made on budgets that would be considered shoe-
| string today. If anything, I'd argue that longer terms make
| cheap cash-ins a safer bet than riskier experimental
| projects, even though the latter is more likely to be
| relevant. Do you really think that, say, Ghostbusters:
| Afterlife is going to last longer than the original
| Ghostbusters?
|
| [0] Counterexamples: PC gaming, Steam Proton, and Xbox
| Series/PS5 backwards compatibility. All of these rely upon
| having built their games on technologies with long-term
| compatibility support built-in (Windows, x86), or upon
| community re-implementation efforts (WINE). The game industry
| cannot ever seem to afford to write their own one-off
| emulators.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| this is totally false. world of warcraft was released 15
| years ago and is still generating real profit. because
| video games receive updates and have continued micro
| transactions they do not necessarily make the most of their
| revenue immediately upon release
|
| production value has a huge impact. why would rockstar
| spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain
| after 10 years? it's still the cash machine that runs the
| business today and it's 8 years old
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If world of warcraft hadn't added any content in 15 years
| it wouldn't be making much money.
|
| > why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if
| it was public domain after 10 years?
|
| Because that's still a ton of money. Also every time they
| update the game with more content, that's something you
| can only get if you buy or wait even longer. And it's
| easy for them to require payment to use GTA Online.
|
| > it's still the cash machine that runs the business
| today and it's 8 years old
|
| I don't think it would be a tragedy if they had to put
| out a new game at some point in the next few years to
| keep making as much money.
|
| Also the game was already completely free for a week in
| 2020.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| WoW and GTA5 both made back their costs shortly after
| launch. The fact that there is more profit to be made
| _afterwards_ isn 't an argument for or against longer
| copyright terms. The point of copyright is not to enable
| the author or publisher to capture 100% of the profit -
| otherwise, we'd just issue perpetual copyright title and
| call it a day. The point is to encourage the production
| of new works by giving people who create them a "bite at
| the apple", so to speak. So the length of copyright title
| needs to be calibrated to allow creators the chance to
| make a profit, but to not gate further creativity or re-
| use behind a paywall.
|
| This is, of course, very poorly bargained-for in present
| law.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Okay, but for all modern media at those price tags, the
| overwhelming majority of the revenue is seen within the first
| year, often within the first month or even _first few days_
| (consider pre-orders on video games-- RDR2 reportedly made
| $725M in its first weekend).
|
| Why should this content be locked up for decades past the
| point where it has already made 90% of the money it's ever
| going to make? So the Disney company can have a century's
| worth of exclusive material ready to go when they launch D+,
| creating an absolutely impenetrable barrier to entry for an
| upstart?
| criddell wrote:
| > some songs cost millions to produce
|
| Nobody is investing millions in a song that they think could
| take 95 years to earn enough to justify the investment.
|
| Copyright is there to incentivize creating new works. If the
| copyright was shortened to max(life of the artist, 50 years),
| how many artists do you think would stop creating?
|
| Frankly, there's an argument to be made that shortening the
| length of copyright to 25 years would encourage more new
| works simply because you can rest an your laurels.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds
| of millions. some video games billions of dollars
|
| Seems like the cultural ROI isn't there. The extra money may
| bring extra revenue but it doesn't improve the quality at
| all. Why not force a market correction?
| [deleted]
| mattl wrote:
| What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the
| concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of
| works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so
| said works could participate in the market. But in the
| information age, where copying information is as close to
| free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense
| than it used to. That's without even considering that giant
| corporations have subverted this system and exploited many
| producers of works while profiting well past the deaths of
| the creators.
|
| It is my opinion that we need an alternative mechanism for
| funding the creation of information-works that doesn't rely
| on artificial scarcity.
| mattl wrote:
| But how would that begin to work in practice? Someone makes
| an album or a book and everyone an just copy it without any
| fee?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Yes. And why not? That I can do that so easily today even
| with copyright just goes to show how post-scarcity
| information is.
|
| The problem, of course, is that the creators of the work
| still need to participate in a scarcity economy to live.
| There are examples of efforts being made to fund creators
| outside the traditional scarcity-based mechanism, such as
| patreon funding, github sponsorship, and the like,
| although I admit they appear to only currently be useful
| for those who would be unable to leverage the traditional
| system effectively anyway.
|
| While I may not have the answer to funding creators, I
| firmly believe that we'd be going backwards to insist on
| forcing scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
| splitstud wrote:
| Then we would be well advised to listen to the creators of
| such work, who largely tend to describe the type of system
| you want to do away with.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| You have said it was originally to help out the market, and
| you have said copying information is now nearly free, but
| you forgot to say how or why the first part is incongruous
| with the second. Why does it make less sense than it used
| to? Which of our new capabilities could be leveraged by a
| new system?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| You used to have to recoup the costs of publishing as
| well as fund the author. Binding books was and is not
| free, but copying bits effectively is.
| iamben wrote:
| Honestly, I don't mind the idea that you the creator,
| personally, holds the copyright for life. If I write a song
| in my 20s that sets the world on fire and I can still live a
| good life at 80 off the back of it, great.
|
| The minute I sell that copyright to someone else (or it's
| inherited), a time limit begins to apply. Perhaps here you
| move into the '20 years' or something category.
| toast0 wrote:
| For popular works, tracking the life of the creator is
| doable. For less popular works, figuring out who the
| creator is can be rather difficult. And then figuring out
| if they're alive isn't always easy either.
|
| The screen actors guild has somewhat of a highlander
| policy, but if I release something Copyright My Name,
| there's hundreds or thousands of people it could be,
| including a Pulitzer Prize winning author who will likely
| predecease me.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Life of the author+0 years.
|
| Most people expect to inherit money and property from their
| parents but not to be paid for work their parents did years
| ago. I don't see why children of authors should have
| different expectations.
| LanceH wrote:
| Creates the odd incentive for people to die.
| C19is20 wrote:
| Is it the kids combining or the companies that bought the
| golden goose?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| IMHO you have to start with the justification.
|
| The previous justification was to incentivize creators by
| protecting their financial interests and the interests of
| their offspring. It's very clear to see that those interests
| are no longer being met when you sell your blockbuster song
| to a record company for $500.
|
| IMHO make copyright non-transferable and make corporate
| copyright 14 years with an application to double. That way it
| works for the little guy without big guys abusing it (e.g.
| Disney).
| danielrpa wrote:
| 25 years
| DenisM wrote:
| Copyright should be taxed every year based on the cumulative
| earnings for the first 10 years.
|
| This allows the rights holders to milk the bulk of the profit
| and yet quickly pass the orphaned works to the public domain
| - both benefitting the development of arts and sciences as
| stipulated by the US constitution.
|
| Heck, even taxing works for $1 a piece per year would free up
| a huge number of orphans.
| jcranmer wrote:
| One of the rights that copyright protects is the right to
| make derivative works--such as sequels and film adaptations.
| If you consider that someone like Terry Pratchett can
| productively write a literary universe for decades, it feels
| to me like the best answer is around 30-50 years.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Isn't that trademark?
|
| IOW, when Steamboat Willie's copyright expires, it doesn't
| give you the right to make a new Mickey Mouse film. Disney
| still has a trademark on Mickey.
| jcranmer wrote:
| No, trademark is entirely different IP. Copyright very
| explicitly protects the right to make derivative works.
|
| (See 17 USC SS106
| (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106) for the
| full list of what copyright actually protects.)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| But if your copyright has expired, you can still prevent
| derivative works via trademark. Disney has trademarked
| Mickey Mouse.
| ncallaway wrote:
| The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to
| extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.
| _jal wrote:
| I can see scaling it by change in life expectancy, to keep
| the bargain roughly the same.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Life expectancy of adults hasn't changed much (ie your
| life expectancy when you're in your 20s). The life
| expectancy number you're most familiar with is largely
| driven by infancy because it's the mean and high
| infant/child mortality skews that. We're really good at
| saving the lives of children now but I don't see why that
| matters for copyright.
|
| More hypothetically, let's say human life spans got up to
| 500 years. Copyright is intended to promote the creation
| of art for the public good, not to fund the artist for
| their lifetime.
|
| If you created a popular piece of art of music in your
| 20s, why is it useful to society to help fund the next
| 480 years of life in any way?
| KarlKemp wrote:
| This is mostly an urban legend. Yes, some amount of the
| increase in life expectancy is due to reduced infant
| mortality. But it's nowhere near the bulk of it.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| How are you defining urban legend? Here's from Wikipedia
| [1]
|
| > Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality
| was approximately 40-60% of the total mortality
|
| > Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy
| during the 12th-19th centuries was approximately 55
| years.
|
| > ... even in preindustrial times as is demonstrated by
| the Roman Life Expectancy table, which estimates life
| expectancy to be 25 years at birth, but 53 years upon
| reaching age 25
|
| Here are actuarial tables for people in the US today [2].
| The life expectancy if you reach 25 is.... 52 or 57
| depending on if you're a man or woman.
|
| We're certainly better at reducing all cause mortality
| even in adults but it's not as stark of a difference as
| you might imagine, particularly its effect on the _mean_.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
|
| [2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
| mbrubeck wrote:
| You are not comparing these numbers correctly.
|
| Your second link shows years of _additional_ life
| expectancy. For example, at age 80 it shows 8.43 years of
| life expectancy, meaning that the average 80-year-old
| lives to age 88.43.
|
| So the average 25-year-old in the US has 52-57 years of
| life remaining, and will live to age 77 or 82, according
| to your link.
|
| This is a very big increase over the pre-twentieth-
| century adult life expectancy of ~55 years of age! You
| claim that "life expectancy of adults hasn't changed
| much" but your own links show that it increased about 50%
| in very recent history.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. So we're at a 45% increase.
| Typically life expectancy is reported as the "from birth
| number". That's gone from ~20 to 80.
|
| The claim was that the bulk of the life expectancy number
| being driven by the mortality rate prior to adult hood
| was an "urban myth". Life expectancy in adult hood is a
| ~1.4x increase. Life expectancy from birth is a 4x
| increase. I'd say the bulk is driven by saving the lives
| of children and is not an urban myth.
| mbrubeck wrote:
| You're still not doing apples-to-apples comparisons. The
| source that _you_ cited says 12th-19th-century life
| expectancy at birth was 25-40 years when infant /child
| mortality is included, and 55 years when it is excluded.
| There has not been any "4x increase" in this time period.
| (Even if you start in the bronze age, life expectancy at
| birth has not increased four-fold.)
|
| Since the time period you chose, life expectancy at birth
| has increased by about 40 to 55 years. Near-elimination
| of infant mortality accounts for 15-30 years of increase,
| while increases in adult life expectancy account for an
| additional 25 years.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| North America has a life expectancy of ~80 years. I
| eyeballed it so closer to 3.2x the 25 year life
| expectancy in the 12-19th century. What am I missing?
| mbrubeck wrote:
| Yes, if you start from a base of 25 years (which is the
| extreme low end of the range from your source), then we
| have 30 years of increase from reduced infant/child
| mortality and 25 years of increase from reduced adult
| mortality.
|
| Can you really look those numbers and say that one of
| them is highly significant while the other "has not
| changed much"?
|
| Translating this into percentages or "fold" increases is
| misleading because you are using a different denominator
| for the two increases. E.g. you are claiming that reduced
| infant mortality is a 2.2-fold increase (55/25) while
| reduced adult mortality is "only" a 1.45-fold increase
| (80/55), even though the number of years gained is almost
| the same.
|
| And if you use the other end of the 25-40 year range,
| then reduced infant mortality is "only" a 1.38-fold
| increase (55/40).
| Retric wrote:
| In 1920 at birth a males life expectancy was ~54, at 40 a
| man could be expected to live to ~70. Current estimates
| are almost unchanged between birth and 40 at 76.23 vs
| 78.75. That's a 25% increase in life expectancy at 40,
| but that a long way from the 41% increase from birth.
|
| I chose 40 because it wasn't medicine that made the
| biggest difference for 20 to 40 year olds but war. And
| actuarial tables can't predict wars only account for past
| wars which make current estimates misleading. Aka we
| don't have a lifetime of data for people born after 1920
| only estimates.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Yes, your original post was indeed correct by hedging a
| bit, speaking of "adult life expectancy" vs.
| "infant/child mortality".
|
| People read that and it registers as infants dying within
| days after birth. But life expectancy for 10-year-olds
| has doubled: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.
| I doubt that your comment makes people think of dead
| teenagers, even though your post doesn't contradict that
| interpretation.
|
| Even for the 40-year-olds, life expectancy increasing
| from 68 to 82 years means a >50% increase in "time
| remaining" which isn't something to sneeze (cough?) at,
| although I have to reluctantly acknowledge that I
| remembered it being even larger than that.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I'm fine with that, if you use the life expectancy for an
| adult. Infant mortality has contributed the largest
| component of life expectancy gain since 1790, and we
| weren't incentivizing the creation of toddler art with
| the life expectancy gains.
|
| So, if you scaled it from the life expectancy of an
| 18-year old in 1790, to the life expectancy of a 18-year
| old in 2021 then I'd agree with that.
| loceng wrote:
| I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost,
| perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if
| the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then
| the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over
| it.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned
| work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the
| rights holders _are_ for a particular work.
|
| A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at
| least create a public registry of the current owner for a
| particular right.
| natechols wrote:
| This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business
| all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music
| that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it
| will be decades before any of it can be legally shared.
| Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the
| composers would feel about it.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yep, I really liked the copyright change to make
| copyright protection automatic, instead of requiring a
| filing.
|
| But it _should_ require active regular renewal, to create
| the record of continued ownership.
|
| You should get a (reasonable) protected period of time
| automatically, to give you time to figure out which works
| are worth the effort to continue protecting. But it
| should require (minimal) active ongoing effort to
| maintain that protection.
|
| For me, this is especially relevant when it comes to
| abandoned digital content (like video games and other
| applications). It'll be *so* much harder to archive and
| preserve content that's 140 years old, than it will be
| content that's 14-28 years old.
| jedberg wrote:
| I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned
| works and I think registration should be required to
| solve that.
|
| That being said, what in reality would happen if you
| release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there
| wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could
| just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA
| takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights
| holder.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is just extending the rent seeking. If the work is
| so valuable the owner can continue to extend their
| copyright, the public should receive that value after the
| 14 years (by which point, the owner has been made whole
| through collecting rents for those 14 years) versus the
| owner ratcheting up the cost to pay to maintain the
| copyright monopoly on the work in question.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Eh, if the price rises enough year over year, and you
| dump that funding into the National Institute for the
| Arts, or other programs to provide grants and funding to
| low-income artists, I could see it being a potentially
| useful tool to spread the wealth around from very
| commercially successful works.
|
| I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some
| positive outcomes from the approaches.
| SlimyHog wrote:
| This would just mean that rich companies/people will get
| to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this
| whole situation where things don't enter the public
| domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.
| jerf wrote:
| On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking
| hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even
| Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be
| picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n x
| number of works) every year.
|
| Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I
| consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big
| company and you want to own your stuff forever. But
| behind the laws protecting those companies there's a
| _ton_ of stuff that the owner doesn 't care, nobody even
| _knows_ who the owner is, etc. etc. (There 's a lot of
| stuff that is _de facto_ in the public domain because
| nobody owns it anymore in any _practical_ sense, but
| there 's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the
| risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies
| are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If
| we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they
| want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything
| else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly
| steep fee for the benefit.
|
| Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how
| long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd
| like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything
| produced ever.
| nitrogen wrote:
| This would definitely be better than the current system
| of basically forever minus one day, but still leaves the
| problem that a few giant corporations _own_ giant chunks
| of our hearts, minds, and childhoods.
|
| The zeitgeist of our time should belong to us, at least
| after a decade or two.
| Fordec wrote:
| 50%+1 of a standard living persons actionable career. Do
| assuming 18 to 70. That makes 52/2 = 26 and +1 = 27. For sake
| of even numbers, you can fight over 25 or 30. I don't mind
| either way, both are far better than the current status.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Maybe 10 years. We are moving at breakneck speed in just
| about every corner, but copyright protections. A decade is
| forever in today's world.
| dahart wrote:
| Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a
| startup? Sometimes it takes longer than that to break
| even...
|
| All law moves slowly. The law is supposed to move slowly,
| that's (mostly) a feature, not a bug. You don't want the
| existing laws to change every year, driving would be more
| of a nightmare than it already is.
|
| Copyright was originally about protecting a creator's
| ability to make some money from their works. Despite the
| fact it was extended in part to help Disney make money
| forever, we should still have some protection for artists
| and small businesses, right? We don't want to shorten the
| copyright term just because NPM has a lot of churn, do we?
| That doesn't seem like a good reason.
| criddell wrote:
| But think of all the businesses that might be built on
| the work of the original business that never took off.
| What we are trying to maximize is overall benefit to
| society, so we grant a monopoly to a creator for a
| limited term to incentivize new work.
|
| Ten years may or may not be too short. How often does ten
| year old software make the difference for a company
| taking off this year?
| dahart wrote:
| > we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to
| incentivize new work
|
| That's a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. Copyright
| is intended to protect individual works of authorship,
| and allow the author to leverage their work, even when
| they only produce a single work.
|
| > How often does ten year old software make the
| difference for a company taking off this year?
|
| It happens all the time in software companies! The early
| software foundation of a company is often integral to
| where it is when it starts making money. It's common for
| the core ideas and algorithms to sit around for many
| years while the company is building marketing and payment
| and integrations and customer support and waiting for
| business to catch on. Sometimes companies wait on their
| patents to be granted before even starting to try to
| monetize some software, and it can take a couple of years
| just to get the patent.
|
| From a copyright perspective, it's important to
| understand and recognize that business, like law, often
| moves very slowly. While I'm firmly in agreement that 99
| years is too long, I also think 10 years is too short.
| And to reiterate: the term length shouldn't be set
| because tech moves fast, it should be set by considering
| what's long enough to recoup an investment and when it's
| fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it
| for their own financial gains.
| criddell wrote:
| > That's a nice goal, but not entirely accurate.
|
| I based my statement on
| https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-
| explai...
|
| > it should be set by considering what's long enough to
| recoup an investment and when it's fair for the copiers
| to come take your work and use it for their own financial
| gains
|
| I don't think we disagree really. I said the goal was to
| maximize overall benefit to society and I think you did
| too. Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the
| issue is studied.
| dahart wrote:
| > Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the
| issue is studied.
|
| I disagree. Plenty of people already know 10 years is too
| short, and it doesn't take a study to show it. Lots of
| businesses take longer than that to get established, even
| the very fastest-moving fastest-distributing businesses
| like software startups.
| criddell wrote:
| It might be bad for you if code you wrote ten years ago
| is no longer protected by copyright, but what about
| society in general? Maybe five new start ups can take
| that old software and build something better than you
| were able to. Would that disincentivize creators? Maybe.
| Would the copyright expiration make a thousand flowers
| bloom? That's what would need to be studied. What the net
| benefit or harm is, isn't obvious.
| dahart wrote:
| True, this is a valid point. I'm under the impression
| that it has been studied, though I don't have a source
| off the top of my head. It's definitely been debated
| vigorously and often.
|
| Anyway, keep in mind that this net benefit needs to
| incentivize people to get over the static friction of
| starting in the first place. We don't want to make a
| point of handing content and ideas over to incremental
| producers because that will disincentivize people from
| trying in the first place.
|
| Also important is that part of the net benefit to society
| is a trickle-down argument that we need to reward the
| authors first in order for society to reap the net
| benefit. The point is not to encourage business at the
| fastest possible speed be letting people borrow the ideas
| and inventions and content of others, the point is to
| protect the people who do the actual original work for a
| reasonable period of time, and to allow for the fact that
| they might be less good at business than someone who's
| only reselling content.
|
| Might be worth stating that study the economics of social
| net benefits is incredibly difficult, and can take a
| very, very long time, longer than you and I have left.
| The environment is a great example of how we've made
| disastrous business choices that were rationalized by
| "social benefit", but turned out to be wrong.
| skywal_l wrote:
| It took 7 months for the Sonny Bono Act (of Sonny and
| Cher and at the time congressman) to extends the
| copyright from 50 to 70 years. I would call it pretty
| fast when you think it took several years for congress to
| vote the last "infrastructure" law (remember 2017's
| infrastructure week?).
|
| By the way, that law was sponsored by Mary Bono, Sonny
| Bono's widow (Sonny Bono died during that year) and also
| congresswoman.
|
| All this is a neat little circle of people voting laws
| for their own benefits. This has nothing to do with
| artists or small businesses.
|
| I think it is fair to say that once the original author
| of the work is dead, the copyright should go with it. And
| if a corporation buy the copyright, then they should be
| able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10
| years is not that huge with all the means of electronic
| distribution we have today.
| dahart wrote:
| > they they should be able to recoup their investment in
| a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all
| the means of electronic distribution we have today.
|
| It's neither fair nor accurate to point at the speed
| distribution as an indicator of the speed of building a
| viable business. It's a fact that it's common for a
| business to need a decade to build it's business pipeline
| before the business is viable and fully supporting its
| employees. Don't forget this system needs to support
| small businesses and not just megacorps.
|
| From the perspective of law, and of copyright
| specifically, it's also a mistake to assume that all
| business can move at the pace of electronically
| distributed software. Physical hardware goods frequently
| take more than a year to design, manufacture, and stock
| prior to distribution. Today we can add in an extra year
| of COVID related delays for the ordering and distributing
| pipeline ... how many things are on insane back order
| delay as we speak? Copyright needs to be long enough that
| things like today's situation don't prevent a business
| from even starting to recoup, right?
|
| > I would call it pretty fast when you think it took
| several years for congress to vote the last
| "infrastructure law"
|
| The point I was making is that law moves slower than
| tech. You would agree that infrastructure funding happens
| on a glacial pace compared to what's hot on GitHub or
| what new ideas are being incorporated into neural network
| training, right? It's fine to think of a few years being
| "fast", but that's a subjective opinion that isn't
| relative to something specific. I was trying to make a
| comparison between law and the things presumably parent
| was calling "breakneck speed", which is clearly referring
| to things that move faster than law.
|
| I also mentioned "existing" laws for a specific reason -
| new laws can and sometimes do come up quickly. But laws
| we need to know in order to comply with need to be mostly
| stable. And by and large, most of our law doesn't change
| every year, we have small nips and tucks mostly in places
| that don't affect the majority of the population.
| skywal_l wrote:
| > From the perspective and of copyright specifically,
| it's also a mistake to assume that all business can move
| at the pace of electronically distributed software
|
| I think you are confusing copyrights with patents or
| trademarks. Copyright do not protect physical hardware or
| goods.
|
| As far as I know, almost all copyrightable works can be
| transferred electronically. After all, we are talking
| about the right to copy (and distribute) a work (make
| more of them to sell it). Goods that cannot be copied are
| not copyrightable.
| dahart wrote:
| > Copyright do not protect physical hardware or goods.
| [...] almost all copyrightable works can be transferred
| electronically
|
| Don't conflate "can be" with "are". Copyrights absolutely
| protect books and posters and phonograph records;
| physical goods is how the law originated, and physical
| copies is a big part of what the law's language still
| protects to this day. There are big problems with
| copyright law because it hasn't yet been adequately
| adapted to the invention of the internet.
|
| There is plenty of overlap when it comes to the business
| of physical goods. Copyrights do protect parts of the
| designs of many physical goods, and the sources and
| driver software of computer hardware, for example.
| Copyrights also protect marketing and advertising
| material and many other parts of a fledgling business.
|
| What are we discussing at this point? I agree with you
| that copyright should probably end with the author
| (though I would say there should be a minimum term, to
| account for the many reasonable possible scenarios like
| being part of a business, accidental death, old age,
| etc., etc.). I don't think 10 years is enough, and I
| don't think that tech moving quickly is a valid reason to
| shorten copyright. There are valid reasons to shorten
| copyright, so we should discuss those instead.
| sovnade wrote:
| But there's plenty of things made 10 years ago that are
| still very relevant and still generating money for the
| creators. I think that's the concern.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah. New Order are still making good money from Blue
| Monday from 1983, and clearly there's a lot of interest
| in The Beatles still.
|
| Maybe a shorter period of time with an option to extend
| it like a snooze feature on an alarm clock.
| mnsc wrote:
| But does having a work enter public domain automatically
| mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams
| via legitimate services like Spotify?
| mattl wrote:
| That's something that's probably not been figured out
| yet. Probably won't be figured out until popular stuff
| from the 50s and 60s starts hitting PD.
| criddell wrote:
| Why would Spotify pay anybody for playing a public domain
| song?
| mnsc wrote:
| Good point! :D
| vmception wrote:
| The option to extend it being priced by the royalties
| collected and requiring substantial accounting of such.
|
| Patents, for example, have maintenance fees that are
| quite high. So even that 20 year length is not really
| automatic and guaranteed, while already seen as
| problematically long to many.
| ben_w wrote:
| Not OP, but I think it makes very little difference whatever
| number you pick between "none" and "forever".
|
| Earlier this year a few authors whose work I enjoy tweeted
| furiously about this topic. Similar arguments may apply to
| audio and visual copyright.
|
| If, for example, copyright lasted 14 years, then _The
| Atrocity Archives_ (Stross) would already be public domain,
| which reduces incentive to create more in the series (not
| sure why, I would have expected new novels have new
| copyright, but I trust an author to know what their own
| motivations are, and I refuse to second-guess).
|
| Now, these various authors on Twitter argued that being an
| author is poorly paid (it is), and that they would like to
| offer someone an inheritance comparable to a widow/er
| pension.
|
| I can sympathise with that.
|
| But, sales in most things decline over time. Sequels more,
| apparently (I wouldn't know, one of the authors tweeted
| that). If income falls off exponentially with time, half the
| income for some specific work will be in the first x-months,
| 75% in 2x months, 99.9% in 10x months -- I'm saying months
| rather than years because of how fast best-seller lists
| change, I don't have real data.
|
| Conversely, the reason for such a decline is that almost all
| the people who care will have bought the work soon after it
| is published. Making copyright last 100(average of all x)
| _fails to harm_ society by preventing the work from becoming
| public domain, but only by the same[2] as it _fails to help_
| creative people commercialise their creativity, and for
| exactly the same reason: almost nobody cares any more. _This
| remains true even if the income curve isn't exponential, as
| the benefit to society is simply not having to pay for it_
| [3].
|
| Certainly I'm not rushing out to download some copy of inter-
| war music, radio broadcasts of whatever category, or
| newspapers; and I don't even know if that's for lack of money
| because I don't care. I suspect I'm not alone in not caring.
|
| Indeed, I only oppose zero/infinite duration because of the
| edge cases.
|
| The point of copyright is to give creators an incentive at
| all besides the default of creative people being patronised
| or commissioned. This is already a thing -- furry art by
| commission; stories[0] and YouTubers supported on Patreon. As
| this is not the status quo, if we switched to "no copyright"
| I expect this will break stuff and bankrupt people who have
| come to rely on it (this also means I oppose sudden changes
| in general).
|
| If copyright was infinite, all works world eventually become
| lost in a legal quagmire of e.g. mergers and acquisitions
| where the actual owner ceases to be known.
|
| [0] https://www.patreon.com/HamboneHFY
|
| [1] except where the income per unit is too small to process
| ($0.001 per person times US population is still a lot of
| money).
|
| [2] or losing track of who owns it, or [1]
| keeglin wrote:
| I was going to go with 10 years. I mean, nobody cared about
| Madonna's "Ray Of Light" beyond 1999.
|
| On the other hand, artists - like Dolly Parton - have made
| long careers out of songwriting that have carried them into
| their senior years, so it's a balance.
|
| Clearly 99 years is absurd. Maybe 20 years is the balance to
| strike. Dolly would still be doing just fine with that term.
| siver_john wrote:
| As the patron saint of my state, I'd also point out that
| she has used the money from her music to invest in other
| things. She is quite a shrewd business woman and I think
| even with 10 years she would have been fine.
|
| Though I think 20 years is reasonable enough.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| "I am altering the deal, pray us megacorps don't alter it any
| further."
| grishka wrote:
| In an ideal world, copyright should last for maybe two or three
| years. It would still mostly fulfill its purpose to allow the
| creator to earn money, but would severely curtail the abuse
| potential. In an even more ideal world, copyright shouldn't be
| transferable.
| elzbardico wrote:
| It is complicated. For very popular artists yes, their music
| is commercially short-lived and most of the returns will come
| in the first six months. But for the more obscure composers
| and performers the reality is completely different.
| t-writescode wrote:
| It wouldn't. If a music studio needs to wait 4 years to not
| have to pay any royalties at all, then the song would be
| recorded (copyright created) and the music groups would
| just wait 4 years and then start playing it on radio
| stations.
|
| It needs to be something like 12 + 12 or 20 + 20, or even
| 20 + infinitely continuable for a gradually increasing
| cost. It still has the potential issue of waiting out that
| 24 to 40 years; but companies are less likely to do that,
| when a few years is basically nothing.
|
| It's been 2 years since covid started, for example.
| grishka wrote:
| Companies will go bankrupt. Their business models will
| break down. Yes. That's intended. There's no need for
| these middlemen in the age of the internet.
| rhines wrote:
| IMO if you want to end the commercialization of content,
| targeting copyright is not the most effective route. Big
| players will still be able to use their power to ensure
| that they have control over distribution, and will
| continue to profit off of content. Small players, such as
| the people coming up with new content, will find it
| harder and harder to make any money, to the benefit of
| the big players who no longer need to share profits with
| them.
|
| The more effective approach would be to simply remove the
| economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or
| whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish
| copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no
| one's able to profit off it in the first place and
| spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer
| penalized.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd be happy with it being short enough that middle-aged
| creatives could build on material from their childhood, and
| old ones, from their middle-age. Say, 20 years. People
| should, at least, have full ownership of a good portion of
| their contemporary culture.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Friend that's an IP lawyer had a rant that copyright law is
| applied for things it has no business being applied to. The
| law is built around single author books and sheet music.
| Where the authors lifetime output is small. And
| commercially valuable work smaller still. Not appropriate
| for things like ad copy, manuals, and software.
|
| It needs an overhaul. But the current system heavily favors
| entrenched interests so won't happen.
| t-writescode wrote:
| 2-3 years is no time at all. Someone could hand a movie
| studio a script in hopes of it being made a movie, the movie
| studio could _wait_ 4 years, and then make the movie, with no
| harm to them whatsoever.
| grishka wrote:
| Huh. A movie studio. Yes, my proposal also has a nice side
| effect of filtering out those who are in it for the money,
| not self-expression. The world would become a better place
| if there were no "entertainment industry".
| codyb wrote:
| No entertainment industry? So... nobody could sit and
| create a movie studio or a record label?
|
| What a weird thing to rail against. I'm certainly
| unconvinced the world would be magically better without
| people organizing to produce content.
|
| Maybe there's some issues with copyrights, but as far as
| I can tell, almost any organization would attempt to
| preserve profits. We, as a people, then go through and
| create legislation which curbs rampant abuses whether
| that's environmental pollution, or unsafe kids' toys, or
| overly lengthy copyright claims.
|
| But the idea people can't get together and make movies,
| that's a new one.
| grishka wrote:
| > almost any organization would attempt to preserve
| profits.
|
| Often at the expense of everything else, including common
| sense. Despite their current revenues already covering
| their expenses, many times over.
|
| > But the idea people can't get together and make movies,
| that's a new one.
|
| They can, but they will own shares in them, either split
| equally or proportionally to their contribution.
| californical wrote:
| How are there shares if there's no copyright? Do you own
| 10% of a movie that's worth $0 since anyone can copy and
| distribute it for no cost?
| grishka wrote:
| There is copyright, but it's non-transferable and only
| lasts for 2-3 years. After that time, yes, anyone can
| copy and distribute it.
|
| My idea here is that you would have the option of either
| paying right now, or waiting when the copyright expires
| and getting it legally for free. In our current system
| people don't even consider that copyrights have an expiry
| date, they operate as if they're effectively indefinite.
| And the current system doesn't work anyway -- the
| majority of the society just isn't having it. Everyone
| has pirated something at some point.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I think the big problem here is that 2-3 years is _almost
| no time at all_. With 2-3 years, basically everyone will
| wait for the next book in the Game of Thrones series to
| come out of costing money.
|
| Covid has been nearly 2 years, and for many of us it
| feels both like yesterday and also like forever ago, for
| example.
|
| And then you'll have people that want to watch the movie
| of something, so they're willing to pay the video company
| for instant access, but the movie is based off a script
| someone wrote, or a book someone wrote, and that book is
| at least 2 years old.
|
| RR Martin would make _zero_ dollars from Game of Thrones,
| for example.
| bena wrote:
| If you are in it for self-expression, you're entirely
| free to self-express to your heart's content. Copyright
| doesn't matter, publishers don't matter, studios don't
| matter.
|
| The minute you want to express yourself to others, you're
| no longer in it for self-expression.
|
| And regardless of your opinion on what should and should
| not exist, people should be fairly compensated for their
| endeavors, even if those endeavors are to create leisure
| activities for others.
|
| Copyright is an attempt to enable creators to get
| compensation for their work. This is one thing the people
| who rail about the ease of reproduction miss. It was
| never about the difficulty of reproduction, it was always
| about the difficulty of creation.
|
| How do we reward that when we are allowed to freely copy
| their efforts without the need to consider their
| contribution? It's one of the few things I like about a
| subscription or Patreon model. We're paying directly for
| the effort of creation.
| cgio wrote:
| How were artists living before copyrights? We've had
| quite a few of them delivering masterpieces. So we can
| reward efforts the same ways as before, art will not die
| just be less profitable maybe. If reproduction is easy
| what do we as a society earn by making it harder
| artificially? I don't believe any other worker is having
| these benefits. You do your job, paid for your effort by
| someone willing to do so, and then go on with your life.
| That includes other creative occupations and most of the
| employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly
| compensating _them_ for their work?
| notJim wrote:
| People who are in it for self-expression need to pay the
| bills too.
| grishka wrote:
| They usually start self-expressing just for themselves,
| so they still have a job. Most video bloggers started
| this exact way -- first a hobby, then they quit their job
| and turned their vlogging into a Serious Business(tm)
| with obnoxious sponsorships, a studio, a ton of
| ridiculously expensive equipment, and optionally a crew.
| splitstud wrote:
| Abuse implies a right. What kind of right does anyone have to
| see IP become public domain? The only reason that it should
| sunset at all is to release society from the burden of
| enforcing old IP at some point.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The term "intellectual property" is a relative legal
| novelty, and applying "IP" law to individuals, as opposed
| to rogue publishers printing works without a contract with
| the author and profiting from sales of that work, is an
| even more dubious novelty.
|
| The purpose of copyright protection, which was a
| controversial issue at the time the US Constitution was
| drafted, is written in the Copyright Clause: _" 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."_
|
| Anything beyond that stated purpose is hindering _" the
| Progress of Science and useful Arts."_
|
| That copyright terms are limited is essential, and should
| optimize the purpose, not the profit of publishers who go
| unmentioned.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Three years is probably too short, but certainly something
| less than 30 years. That gives people plenty of time to enjoy
| the profits from their work (basically their entire adult
| lives) while allowing it into the public domain while it is
| still somewhat useful.
|
| I don't think the system would function without transferable
| copyrights. A movie might have 10,000 people who've
| contributed to it. Managing the copyrights without some kind
| of legal agreement would be a nightmare. I get the spirit of
| the comment (to prevent generations of people from owning and
| profiting from the works of people they never knew), but
| eliminating copyright transfership probably doesn't solve
| that.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Most movies make most of their money week one. Most songs
| make the bulk of income within a 3 month period. 3 years is
| longer than necessary.
|
| Perhaps this would affect less known artists. I would be
| willing to keep the copyright until the first 100,000 or
| 1,000,0000 worth of product is sold.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Most movies make most of their money week one.
|
| Most movies are fixed in a tangeble medium months before
| week one. Sometimes years. Component parts (principle
| filming, scripts, original music, if any) are routinely
| finished at least a year before release. A rush to get
| everything out to enjoy the full 3 years of income
| potential would further push out the couple of films a
| year made where people actually cared to do things right.
|
| 20-30 years might be right, though. Or one of the
| escalating fees for renewal after a reasonable period,
| preferably with a required deposit of the work so when it
| becomes public domain it can be easily distributed.
| jedberg wrote:
| Copyright on a movie doesn't start until it's registered.
| The component parts are copyrighted upon creation but the
| entire work is a separate copyright. For example the Star
| Wars re-release is copyright 1997, even thought the bulk
| of it was created in 1975-76.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Most movies make most of their money week one.
|
| Sure, under the current system.
|
| The question is how many people that would have bought
| the media would just wait out the copyright. Once you're
| into these short lengths of time, it's a lot.
| kube-system wrote:
| Only if:
|
| 1. You're only considering works published by huge
| multinational publishers with the gigantic marketing
| budgets required to get immediate traction
|
| 2. You assume that works are published on a large scale
| for their initial publishing
|
| Small time artists can spend years trying to get a work
| picked up by large publisher. Those who don't choose to
| use large publishers may be finding new audiences over
| longer periods.
|
| Assuming that copyright should be designed around the
| use-cases of Comcast or Disney is the reason we're in the
| position we're in now.
| kube-system wrote:
| Three years is too short. The people who need these
| protections the most are not marketing powerhouses that can
| achieve instant successes.
|
| I feel like a two or three year copyright could be even worse
| that current state -- large publishers would probably just
| wait out artists and steal their work.
|
| "Nice album kid, bet it'll sell great 3 years from now"
| grishka wrote:
| > large publishers would probably just wait out artists and
| steal their work
|
| But it's public domain. You can't exactly "steal" something
| that already belongs to everyone, _including you_.
| kube-system wrote:
| I am clearly using the word in a functional, moral, non-
| legal sense. The entire premise of my point indicates
| that I understand what public domain means.
| rhines wrote:
| Sure, but a big company can absolutely find some little-
| known creator's work, spin off their own products with
| it, and use their size to absolutely dominate search
| results, marketing, and distribution.
|
| While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it
| does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of
| only a couple years to find success with their work
| before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them.
| In creative fields it often takes many years to build up
| a portfolio and a following, if you've not been picked up
| by a major promoter.
| kragen wrote:
| Wouldn't have been a problem for Charles M. Schultz. One
| month of copyright would have been enough to keep him
| well fed. Same for Nassim Taleb.
|
| In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled
| product may have a hard time competing with the creator's
| website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of
| Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly
| Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think if we're going to time limit ownership rights to
| intellectual property we should time limit ownership rights to
| everything - including land, buildings, shares and stocks,
| bonds, art collections, all of it. Except maybe trivial items
| like home furnishings and portable tools.
|
| I've yet to hear any _credible_ argument - one that doesn 't
| reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing
| between these asset classes.
|
| If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is
| all property. If it isn't, it isn't. Any argument you can make
| about the benefits of putting intellectual work in the public
| domain, you can also make - more convincingly - about land and
| any other productive resource.
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| > I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't
| reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for
| distinguishing between these asset classes.
|
| Owning a physical thing and "owning" information is
| fundamentally different. Information can be copied, spread,
| redistributed without taking it away from someone.
|
| If you take land from someone they can no longer use it, if
| you copy information from someone they still have it
| themselves. You cannot build two houses onto the same place
| in the same property.
|
| Ownership is designed so that we can say who is allowed to
| use things with naturally exclusive use.
|
| Copyright is designed to make the use of naturally unlimited
| and reusable information exclusive.
| ddingus wrote:
| Super important point to make!
|
| This is also why we have the word "infringement" and why we
| should not be using the word "theft" in these contexts.
|
| To put this idea another way:
|
| Say Jane has an iObject. She uses it everyday.
|
| Bob takes the iObject. Jane now does not have her iObject,
| and cannot use it everyday.
|
| The iObject has value, and it's expensive to obtain another
| one. Jane must spend to obtain another iObject, assuming
| one is available for purchase.
|
| This is theft, and the key legal concept here is someone
| being deprived of their property.
|
| Joe has made a song. Joe has granted distribution rights to
| Larry, who collects money for people obtaining copies of
| the song. Joe makes money from Larry, who also makes money
| doing all these things.
|
| Ann gets a copy of Joe's song from her friend Jose. Larry
| and Joe did not get any revenue from Ann.
|
| This is infringement.
|
| Notably, Joe still has his song. Larry still has his right
| of distribution he obtained from Joe. They are not denied
| their property.
|
| Essentially Anne and Jose did, or experienced something
| they were not supposed to.
|
| Also of note, Larry and Joe could still sell Ann a copy of
| the song! Ann could further promote Joe's song to others in
| various ways, legally.
|
| There are some additional considerations.
|
| Part of the value in Joe's work is context. People who know
| Joe, understand his work, identify with Joe in ways that
| make using Joe's work important to them all represent
| value. Larry helps add value to Joe's work by doing the
| other work associated with distribution, and that's
| advertising, and other efforts that generally promote the
| work and add context.
|
| Unlike theft, there can actually be value created as a
| result of infringement!
|
| In the case of theft, the value of the iObject to Jane is
| associated with owning and using the iObject, and said use
| could be just looking at the thing, or it could be the
| iObject enables Jane to do things she would not normally be
| able to do, whatever. When theft happens, Jane no longer
| has that value and or whatever was possible when she did
| have her iObject.
|
| Infringement is weird.
|
| Ann gets a copy of Joe's work from Jose. Prior to that, Ann
| has no clue about Joe, his work, that it's available. There
| is some chance Ann would have stumbled on all that due to
| Larry being good at what he does, but there is also a great
| chance Joe remains undiscovered by Ann, who would never
| spend any money that Joe and Larry would receive.
|
| However, Jose promoting the work to Ann changes all of
| that!
|
| Now Ann knows who Joe is, has context (Jose) and now could
| spend money for any number of reasons.
|
| Joe and Larry received value from Jose's act of
| infringement (copy, distribute), and Ann added to that by
| her other act of infringement. (use)
|
| And that's it, just really want to underscore the
| difference.
|
| I've long held the view we won't really get workable laws
| on all this, until we discuss it using the proper words.
| The nuances are subtle, but they matter! As does the law
| and its impact on our lives and opportunities.
| vslira wrote:
| Copyright ant patents are monopolies on "infinite" resources
| to incentivize the creation of such resources. Property is a
| restriction on other people's utilization of a finite
| resource that belongs to someone
| EarlKing wrote:
| > I've yet to hear any credible argument
|
| You haven't given your criteria of credibility, so why should
| we listen to you?
|
| > If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease,
| so is all property.
|
| This is so malformed you're not even wrong.
| dahart wrote:
| Personal ownership is already limited by the owner's lifetime
| and automatically transfers when they die. Copyrights, on the
| other hand, outlive the creator.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Generational wealth is a significant problem as winner take
| all dynamics tend to concentrate wealth within families
| until they get so powerful that they form aristocracies.
| The US is new enough that it's aristocracy is just getting
| started. Several European countries lack them because war
| or revolution hit the reset button, but if you look at a
| country like the UK, you will see it alive and well.
| User23 wrote:
| Plenty of UK nobility has no substantial assets to speak
| of other than a house that's ten times bigger than they
| need and a constant money pit.
|
| The traditional way out is to marry a rich commoner who
| wants their children to be titled.
| nitrogen wrote:
| On the other hand, generational wealth below obscene
| amounts is a vital stabilizing force in a society. A
| middle to upper middle class family passing on a boost to
| each subsequent generation is a good thing. Grandparents
| help pay for their grandkids' schooling, kids have some
| sense of stability and a safety net, etc.
|
| We need _many layers_ of safety nets and stabilizing
| forces, because every layer is prone to different types
| of failure. There is a natural and desirable support
| structure of individial - > family -> community -> state
| -> humanity that allows society and individuals to
| survive and thrive through changing circumstances. Too
| much reliance on any one layer, especially the state, is
| a recipe for fragility or tyranny.
|
| When every individual has an emergency fund, every family
| has a nest egg, every community pulls together in time of
| need, and every state provides a safety net of last
| resort, we can weather any storm.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Personal ownership is already limited by the owner's
| lifetime and automatically transfers when they die.
| Copyrights, on the other hand, outlive the creator.
|
| well personal ownership generally gets passed to your kids
| when you die and then to their kids etc. so as long as your
| descendants do not sell it, that lasts forever.
|
| Copyrights might last past you to your kids but probably
| not to your kids' kids and further.
| nicoburns wrote:
| A portion passes to your kids, the rest accrues to the
| state through inheritance tax. What the proportion is
| depends on where you live.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| well that's true, but are you under the impression that
| the value of copyrights are not ever taken into account
| in determining the value of an artist's estate and are
| thus not taxed at the time of death?
| at_compile_time wrote:
| What distinguishes land from all the other things you have
| mentioned is that there is a finite limit to its amount. You
| can issue new shares, make more goods, build new buildings,
| and write new songs, but the amount of land available is
| actually shrinking.
|
| We need a land value tax. The wealthy shouldn't be able to
| extort rent from the rest of society for having bought up a
| finite resource that gets its value from that same society.
| Land speculation is a scourge that drives people into poverty
| and homelessness while good land goes sits idle.
|
| https://librivox.org/progress-and-poverty-by-henry-george/
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Intellectual property can be used without depriving the
| original owner of its use.
| LocalH wrote:
| Thought experiment: If I could _duplicate_ any physical item
| you own exactly, would you have a problem with it? Other than
| the time taken to do the scanning process, you wouldn 't lose
| any access to your property. If so, why?
|
| IP and physical property are not fungible, so I find this
| argument slightly disingenuous. They operate under different
| physical laws.
| IiydAbITMvJkqKf wrote:
| There's _literally_ no difference between copying and
| stealing.
| lovich wrote:
| Is this sarcasm or have the kids getting blasted from birth
| with the "you wouldn't download a car" type propaganda
| entered the work force already?
| ddingus wrote:
| See my comment up thread.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29475492
|
| There are significant differences!
|
| The primary one being for theft to be a part of the
| discussion there must also be someone who is denied
| property.
|
| A copy does not deny anyone property. And the word for that
| is infringement.
|
| (whether it's OK to do is another discussion, and an
| important one that I'm not speaking to right now, just the
| basic difference)
| dougmwne wrote:
| How have I not heard this idea before? I find it a brilliant
| balance between capitalism and socialism. It reminds me of
| 99-year land leases. It's enough ownership to pass on wealth
| for 1-2 generations, then it goes back into the public trust.
| Miner49er wrote:
| If interested, this is sort of a part of mutualism:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)
| mediocregopher wrote:
| While I don't totally disagree, physical items add some
| practical issues due to their individual scarcity that
| digital ones don't have.
|
| What actually happens when my car goes back into public
| domain? Is it just fair game for everyone? Does someone from
| the govmt come to pick it up? Would there be some kind of
| library-esque system for all public domain'd property?
| harry8 wrote:
| 2 or more people wanting to use a given plot of land contend
| with each other to do so. My use impairs yours and vice
| versa.
|
| 2 or more people wanting to use given a sound recording do
| not as copying has a marginal cost approaching zero. My use
| can be entirely separate from yours and we may not even know
| of the existence of the other. Land, for example, cannot be
| copied with a very small marginal cost, or indeed, at all.
|
| These things are very different and those differences need to
| be taken into account in any regulation surrounding their
| property rights. I express no opinion here of what correct
| regulation for property rights for these two vastly different
| asset classes should be. Make your case for opposing property
| rights by all means.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| IP is not about physical goods, it's inevitably a creation of
| the mind. If I take your home or land, you lose it and can't
| access it anymore. If I "take" your intellectual property,
| you still have "it".
| kragen wrote:
| We should eliminate copyright. Zero years.
|
| Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book
| involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then
| printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that
| setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it
| enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held _a
| fortiori_ for phonograph records.
|
| It became fairly dubious in the age of photocopiers and tape
| recorders, but fortunately was little enforced, except in the
| USSR. A photocopier was useless without typeset or handwritten
| text to copy, and a tape recorder was no substitute for a
| recording studio, and the copies degraded every generation, so
| publishing houses were still needed.
|
| Now every computer is a book-copying and music-copying machine
| more powerful than the entire publishing industry a few decades
| ago: it can transmit a gigabit per second, and for a one-
| megabyte book, that's 125 copies a second, 10 million copies a
| day, 3 billion copies a year, so copyright is a constant danger
| to everyone. Fanfic sites are full of people sharing stories
| they wrote with no expectation of making money. Soundcloud is
| full of indie band recordings edited in Audacity. The age of
| the rich celebrity authors like Isaac Asimov or Ernest
| Hemingway ended decades ago, not due to xeroxes but due to TV.
| (We still have celebrity musicians, but it's not clear that
| helping the Rolling Stones buy cocaine is an important public
| policy objective.) The best software is free software, as
| copyright makes proprietary software untrustworthy, creating
| incentives to stuff it with malware. And, even if Elsevier were
| paying researchers instead of vice versa, the idea that
| copyright on research papers could fund research is as
| ludicrous as the idea that people would stop singing songs and
| telling stories without monopoly profits.
|
| Apps, videos, and websites constantly disappear due to (often
| groundless) accusations of copyright violations. Police evade
| accountability by playing copyrighted music, rendering any
| recordings of their abuses copyright violations. A friend of
| mine committed suicide after being prosecuted for copyright
| violations that might have been fair use; we'll never know.
|
| So, I would set the copyright term at zero years. Legal
| monopolies on preserving and sharing knowledge are not only
| useless in today's world, they are harmful, a monstrous menace
| to the integrity of the historical record and to private
| communication.
| andymockli wrote:
| To add to your point, the futility of copyright enforcement
| in the digital age created a new industry in the form of DRM
| and YouTube auto-takedown algorithms.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| It gets more odd for the next few years.
|
| See 'Sound Recordings Published' sections
| https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| This is a fabulous resource! I especially like that, unlike
| most guides, it also lists the dates going forward. Great way
| to show just how complex the system we've cobbled together
| is.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Steamboat Willie was in 1928 though, I wonder if anyone is
| sitting around thinking aw, when that comes out my evil plan can
| finally be put into motion.
| danielrpa wrote:
| 75-80 years late, so wonderful
| Hokusai wrote:
| So, anyone that had a personal attachment to that music is
| dead.
|
| The current goal of copyright is to let companies own the
| culture you grew with. All the movies, music, books and games
| that defined who you are will not enter the public domain until
| you are dead or very old.
|
| Companies like Disney were founded on well known stories. They
| will not allow anybody else too accomplish the same.
| Bayart wrote:
| >So, anyone that had a personal attachment to that music is
| dead.
|
| 1923 is right around the first few recordings of country
| blues, and I've got a few of them in my regular playlist.
| We're not dead, there are dozens of us !
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Disney was founded on Mickey Mouse. Yes, they made major
| motion pictures out of old myths and legends, like Cinderella
| and Robin Hood, but those stories have always been public
| domain and you can write a book or movie about them with no
| problem.
| VictorPath wrote:
| Disney was actually founded on Alice in Wonderland, Mickey
| Mouse was created years later.
|
| At the time, Alice in Wonderland would have still been
| copyrighted if it were under the copyright regime Disney
| etc. instituted since. The corporation pulled the ladder up
| after it.
|
| Incidentally, Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of
| Universal's Oswald the Rabbit.
| not2b wrote:
| Incorrect: Mickey Mouse was created in the 20s, Disney's
| Alice in Wonderland was released in 1951. You're right
| that the book would still have been copyrighted.
|
| Oswald the Rabbit was also created by Walt Disney, in
| 1927, and sold to Universal. He then created Mickey Mouse
| as a replacement character for his own movie.
| 9000 wrote:
| They aren't referencing the 1951 movie, but instead the
| 1920s shorts series called Alice Comedies, the first of
| which is literally called Alice's Wonderland.
|
| These weren't really retellings of the original stories,
| but it would nevertheless not be hard to imagine they
| would count as a derivative work under modern law and
| would thus have been illegal to produce without a
| licensing deal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Comedies
| Tagbert wrote:
| "Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of Universal's
| Oswald the Rabbit"
|
| Considering that Walt Disney created Oswald the Rabbit
| for Universal, it is no surprise that some elements
| carried over to Mickey. When Universal took Oswald away
| from Disney's control, he responded by creating the
| mouse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_the_Lucky_Rabbit#Uni
| ver...
| yesenadam wrote:
| Apparently Mickey and Oswald were both created by Ub
| Iwerks. I don't know why it's still repeated that Disney
| created them personally.
|
| "Disney asked Iwerks to design a character that became
| Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first cartoon Oswald starred
| in was animated entirely by Iwerks."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks
|
| Sounds a bit like a Jobs + Wozniak situation!
| not2b wrote:
| Alice in Wonderland was based on a book that was 86 years
| old when Disney's film was released. It was public domain.
| But Disney fought hard to prevent Mickey Mouse from going
| into the public domain, and got Congress to extend the
| copyright term to 95 years. Under such a rule Disney
| couldn't have made Alice in Wonderland without permission
| from the heirs of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll).
| Natsu wrote:
| Sort of, you have to be careful to stick to the originals
| and not accidentally insert any Disney-derived elements,
| which just creates a lot of extra risk for those who want
| to make use of their cultural heritages.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| > those stories have always been public domain and you can
| write a book or movie about them with no problem.
|
| Those stories were retelling of stories which were
| retelling of stories which were... Disney made it law that
| no one is allowed to retell their stories but them.
| Approaching or alluding to their retelling can carry stiff
| penalties. It's antithetical to a universal human
| institution that has existed since before recorded history.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Disney's egregious lobbying for
| extensions to maximum copyright time, for what it's
| worth.
|
| Agreed that by now it should be okay to make your own
| Mickey Mouse cartoon or merchandise and sell it without
| permission from Disney.
| adolph wrote:
| This is interesting to think about. The Disney retellings
| in some ways are evolutionary winners that are also dead
| ends. Outside of Disney they can't evolve unlike pre-
| Disney. The Disney retellings are so popular that other
| retellings are almost extinct. When Disney goes away,
| does the story lineages disappear? Do copies of older
| retellings resurge? Do totally different story lineages
| take the place of the Disney stories?
| datavirtue wrote:
| Those stories are dead. Most people think Disney came up
| with all of their ideas and have no idea that most of
| them stem from ancient stories--some existed before
| writing as we know it.
|
| They will probably dig up these stories from Sumeria
| (tablets in UK) or other yet un-studied texts some day
| and rehash them completely anew...starting the cycle
| again.
|
| Heck, the bible has a lot of good stuff if you can shed
| the religious/Christian connotations.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| It would be interesting to do a study on popular
| myths/fairy tales that have and have not been adapted by
| huge media companies.
|
| For example, if I search "Beowulf" in Amazon, the first
| link is for 2007 movie, the second for the book, and the
| third for a TV show. If I search for "The Little
| Mermaid", the whole page is dominated by the Disney
| franchise or some off-brand adaptations. Hans Christian
| Andersen's book is nowhere to be seen.
| cma wrote:
| Original style Mickey himself is mostly just a traceover of
| Oswald with different ears.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Right, but Oswald was created by Walt. He did it under
| contract for Universal.
| asdff wrote:
| Disney does not own the stories but it owns its films and
| all associated IP. If you sell a Cinderella T shirt that
| looks like their Cinderella, you will probably get
| something in writing from a lawyer before long.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Not sure about their finances back then, but I have to
| guess that their feature films were the money makers and
| the shorts less so.
|
| And I think the grandparent's point is that Mickey Mouse
| today is in some sense analogous to your Cinderellas and
| Robin Hoods in the 30s... only you can't make your own
| movie about him.
| Someone wrote:
| Back then, their feature films weren't money makers, as
| they didn't make them.
|
| Their first feature film was very profitable, but it was
| from about 15 years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarf...).
|
| However, their next two movies (Pinocchio, Fantasia) cost
| them money because they were released during World War
| Two, when they couldn't show them in large parts of the
| world.
|
| They needed Dumbo to make up for that
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbo#Box_office), then
| Bambi wasn't a huge success, either
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi#Box_office)
|
| So, I guess it wasn't till after World War Two that their
| feature films became profitable. They survived, so
| chances are the shorts brought in money.
| 9000 wrote:
| > So, I guess it wasn't till after World War Two that
| their feature films became profitable. They survived, so
| chances are the shorts brought in money.
|
| According to Wikipedia [0], "The U.S. and Canadian
| governments commissioned the studio to produce training
| and propaganda films. By 1942, 90 percent of its 550
| employees were working on war-related films." So, it
| seems they primarily survived by taking government
| contracts, not producing shorts. In fact, the next
| paragraph goes on to say, "With limited staff and little
| operating capital during and after the war, Disney's
| feature films during much of the 1940s were 'package
| films', or collections of shorts, [...] which performed
| poorly at the box office." So I wouldn't say their shorts
| were particular moneymakers during that time. After the
| war, they started releasing feature films again (Song of
| the South, etc).
|
| Although it does seem that in the 20s and early 30s,
| prior to Snow White, animated shorts and comics (and
| potentially related merchandising?) were most of the
| company's revenue.
|
| So, I think it's probably fair to say shorts financed the
| company through the release of Snow White, but not really
| any further.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company
| #1934%E...
| sneak wrote:
| May the force be with you.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ain't We Got Fun?
| clavicat wrote:
| This deluge of jungle music will turn your daughters into
| flappers and Gibson girls before you can say 23 skidoo.
| werds wrote:
| this could turn hare krishna into a bad boy
| phkahler wrote:
| Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who
| has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then
| claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Anyone else could create their own digital master though, so
| no.
| dahart wrote:
| No, because the original is still in the public domain.
| Copyright law is pretty good about defining "derivative works",
| and someone's remaster is not going to hold up as a
| copyrightable contribution.
| kragen wrote:
| While this is mostly correct, the mention of derivative works
| is a red herring; derivative works are copyrightable, they're
| just also subject to the copyright of the original.
| dahart wrote:
| Derivative works are relevant because they're subject to
| the original copyright, yes? Please note I didn't say all
| derivative works are not copyrightable; I'm saying that a
| basic remaster won't even qualify as a derivative work.
| kragen wrote:
| ok
| jedimastert wrote:
| To answer your question specifically, no. A derivative work
| needs to contain newly created/copyrightable material for the
| work itself to be copyrightable
|
| For more general answers, see this pamphlet from the US
| copyright office
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
| aardvark179 wrote:
| A simple copy of remaster won't cut it in the US, but if you
| did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would
| only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of
| the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those.
|
| There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and
| rights payments.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| No but if you're big enough, you can get YouTube and other tech
| companies to enforce your non-existing right for you.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Big enough or just willing to fill out phony takedown
| requests, knowing there's never any consequence.
| sovnade wrote:
| Doesn't it have to be changed in some way? Changing the storage
| format doesn't change the actual work. I assume you're talking
| about the Fair Use clause where something has to be different
| enough from the original to be re-claimed as new?
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _What will enter the public domain in 2022_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29420667 - Dec 2021 (229
| comments)
| paulpauper wrote:
| does this mean Beatles music will eventually be public domain
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