[HN Gopher] What will enter the public domain in 2026?
___________________________________________________________________
What will enter the public domain in 2026?
Author : herbertl
Score : 467 points
Date : 2025-12-02 03:23 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| Arainach wrote:
| To avoid the advent calendar, this may be more useful:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew
| story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public
| domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school
| when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the
| computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
| Fordec wrote:
| What really sends home just how ridiculously long it takes
| public domain to kick in to me is that Mein Kampf is on that
| list.
|
| It feels like something that even in 1996 would have been a bit
| eye-raisingly overdue.
| chistev wrote:
| What does it mean to be in public domain
| fsckboy wrote:
| that the Hitler estate can't sue you for copyright
| infringement if you publish it yourself and distribute
| copies.
| chistev wrote:
| Interesting that he still has an estate. And thanks for
| explaining what it means
| gbear605 wrote:
| In practice, there was not a Hitler estate - the
| government of Bavaria (a state in Germany) took ownership
| of the copyright.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Hitler did have a nephew by blood
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston
|
| and I guess a few others, but dwindling
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_family
|
| https://nypost.com/2018/10/08/some-of-hitlers-last-
| relatives...
| j2kun wrote:
| ...did they exercise it?
| realityking wrote:
| Estate is a common law concept. There's no direct
| equivalent in German law.
| teraflop wrote:
| That question is answered by the first sentence on the page
| that this thread is discussing:
|
| > At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of
| works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy,
| share, and reuse for any purpose.
| estsauver wrote:
| That is only for Spain, which has copyright of Death of
| Author + 80.
| rzz3 wrote:
| Then why is he listed in that table? I don't get it.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Because that table is "Entering the public domain in
| countries with life + 80 years".
| mikae1 wrote:
| Are you mistaking William Faulkner's mustache for Hitler's?
| culi wrote:
| It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do
| with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse.
| Every single time his expiration came up they managed to
| lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current
| mess of a system
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know the connections between Mickey Mouse and
| Mein Kampf ran that deep. ;-)
| Oarch wrote:
| I was like you once...
|
| _takes long drag from cigarette_
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I see that _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ is on
| there. I 'm looking forward to the inevitable _And Zombies_
| adaptation coming in 2027.
| al_borland wrote:
| So is the Diary of Anne Frank, that will surely get some sort
| of zombie remix in poor taste, I'm sure.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| One could even combine How to Win Friends and Influence
| People, the Diary of Anne Frank, the works of Einstein and
| Adolf Hitler into a some strange gory anime and others
| could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless.
| lukan wrote:
| "and others could do nothing about that. The
| possibilities are endless."
|
| Well, I wouldn't be so sure about it. Just because other
| people have no more copyright legal angle, there are
| still other legal and plenty of non legal ways to bother
| you, if you manage to piss enough people off.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Well yeah, but that's just being part of this universe
| and applicable to anything.
|
| If one were to write fanfic with all those things
| combined, legally there are no repercussions, but people
| have indeed been tried and burned for less.
|
| Imagine all the weird generative AI now these works all
| go public. Don't have to like it, but just imagine. So
| much crap will be produced in 2026.
| weberer wrote:
| There's already the new musical, Slam Frank, which gives
| the story of Ann Frank the Hamilton treatment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam_Frank
| walthamstow wrote:
| Is this a reference to a public domain zombie reboot that
| already happened, or just sounds like something Hollywood
| would do?
| tefkah wrote:
| https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pride_and_prejudice_and_zo
| m...
| nottorp wrote:
| Pretty sad that even a well intentioned non profit thinks it
| has to resort to "engagement" shenanigans.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| pretty sad you don't realize non-profits need money to keep
| running and "shenanigans" help with funding
| nottorp wrote:
| They need money to recover the money they spent on
| "engagement" "experts"?
|
| You get predatory tactics in part because you accept them
| as normal.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Do they? Do they really think I'm going to come back each
| day to see what the new reveal is, and on the 17th day I'm
| going to decide "Oh, hey, maybe I should send them some
| money"?
|
| No. No, I'm not. I'm gone and I'm not coming back. Ain't
| nobody got time for games like this.
| jama211 wrote:
| I would've loved to see some notable highlights in this article!
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Something about this page doesn't seem to work for me. Clicking
| the tiles doesn't do anything. It's not ad-blocker-related, I
| disabled those to test.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's in the style of an advent calendar, the other days will be
| available later on in the month.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I
| walked away with basically no new information other than some
| stuff will enter public domain at new years.
| a96 wrote:
| The comments here seem to link many better lists (in case
| they didn't before).
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| > In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what
| lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December,
| we'll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public
| domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled -- look out
| for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if
| you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new
| entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
| driverdan wrote:
| It's tracker blocking. If you're using pihole or some other
| DNS-based blocking it won't work.
|
| Even if it did work it's a bad UX. Just give us a list we can
| easily read.
| acabal wrote:
| For a literature-focused list of items entering the US public
| domain on 2026, Standard Ebooks has 20 ebooks prepared for
| release on January 1: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-
| domain-day-2026
| fsckboy wrote:
| I don't think that they are allowed to prepare copyrighted
| items for release in advance of them being in the public
| domain.
| kec wrote:
| Why would that be the case? Copyright (at least in the US)
| only restricts distribution, performance and derivation.
| fsckboy wrote:
| no, it restricts copying, making copies
| kec wrote:
| "Copying" here refers to distribution and derivation, at
| least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of
| media for personal usage for instance (so long as you
| aren't circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to
| write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a
| typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright
| includes creation, not just distribution
| panja wrote:
| Better let AO3 in on that
| kec wrote:
| What you describe would almost certainly be considered
| fair use until point of distribution - it's non
| commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact
| on the market value of Harry Potter.
|
| Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while
| I'm not a lawyer it feels like it'd be a hard case to
| make that work being conducted in private is going to
| have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew
| novels in the next 30 days.
| 93po wrote:
| Market harm is not required for something to count as
| infringement, but it matters for certain defenses and
| damages.
|
| Simply writing new adventures for existing copyrighted
| characters is usually treated as creating an unauthorized
| derivative work. Writing Harry Potter from the
| perspective of the Weasley twins, for example, is not
| fair use.
|
| Distribution is one part of fair use but it isn't the
| focus of it - fair use is a defense against infringement,
| but it's still infringement.
|
| You're really missing the crux of fair use:
|
| "Noncommercial, educational, critical, or transformative
| uses (like commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody,
| or research)"
|
| How closely does writing Harry Potter fanfiction align
| with commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or
| research?
|
| Fair use is more about: writing a critique about Harry
| Potter. Or a Weird Al style song about it. Or presenting
| parts of it in a paper you're writing for class.
|
| This is all easily searchable stuff. Copyright is
| extremely draconian when you really look into it.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#4._Effect_upon_wor
| k's...
|
| Seems to say that market harm is the single most
| important factor in fair use, and it's basically
| impossible to show that a person writing their own fan
| fiction without any distribution would prevent an author
| from exploiting their own work.
| jrflowers wrote:
| If you think about it, writing "Harry Potter" on the
| internet could be infringement because those words might
| be in the book, and most worrisomely you are inducing
| people to make "copies" of the books in their minds.
| There's no way to calculate what you owe Rowling from
| this post, it could be infinite.
|
| (Thankfully I've never read those books so I can say the
| name without infringing)
| 93po wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted. It's factually correct
| and is said in what I believe to be a fairly neutral way?
| nemomarx wrote:
| Is it factually correct? Has anyone been able to prove
| infringement or apply a fine for writing fanfiction in
| your own journal or something?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because people insist on discussing copyright as if there
| is any part of it that makes sense, and as if it operates
| how they think it should.
|
| They derive a history of it from all of these principles
| that they made up, then propose a future which is always
| a moderate compromise between the guiding principles that
| they made up and the history that they made up from the
| guiding principles that they made up.
|
| Things are as they are because powerful people made them
| that way, and built on that. The length of copyright is
| justified by the fact that it got past Congress and
| judges. What you're allowed to do is vague _know it when
| I see it_ stuff, and has always been a patch on top of
| what you 're _not allowed to do_ which is always very
| clear: anything you don 't have a written grant of
| permission to do.
|
| People talk about "fair use" like it is a real abstract
| principle, rather than being some weird legal wording by
| a judge from a few court cases where something felt just
| too minor and silly to be a violation _but was obviously,
| by the letter of the law, a violation._
|
| I'm fairly sure that under the letter of the law you're
| allowed to read a book you own or listen to a record you
| own more than once, but I wouldn't bet on it. For all I
| know it could be an exception called "private repeat
| performance of licensed material" which is not a law but
| actually guidance written by the counsel for the
| Librarian of Congress based on two court cases from the
| 1930s.
|
| edit: when I was a kid, you wouldn't put the song "Happy
| Birthday To You" in a movie, and you would edit it out of
| a documentary. This was never determined not to be a
| violation, it just got so embarrassing that it was
| somehow determined that the copyright had lapsed.
| Archive.org was in a years-long kerfuffle about _78s._ It
| 's not about sense, it's about power.
| kec wrote:
| Fair use and the 4 criteria for determining if it applies
| to usage is literally written into the letter of the law,
| passed by congress in 1976:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
|
| Its squishy and specific application relies on
| interpretation guided by precedent, but that's true of
| just about everything in legal systems guided by common
| law.
| fsckboy wrote:
| from the about page:
|
| _Standard Ebooks is organized as a "low-profit L.L.C.,"
| or "L3C," a kind of legal entity that blends the
| charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the
| ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C._
|
| corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted
| works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft
| office
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > corporations cannot make "personal copies" of
| copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of
| microsoft office
|
| That would surely be a license violation, not a copyright
| violation?
|
| They absolutely can (and do) make copies of the Microsoft
| office binary and shuttle it around their
| network/backups/etc, activating licenses only when they
| need to assign a copy to a particular user
| robin_reala wrote:
| I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard
| Ebooks, and I'm not in the US so I'm definitely not covered
| by US copyright law on my own machine.
| hristov wrote:
| The maltese falcon (the book, not the movie) is entering the
| public domain next year!
| hristov wrote:
| Also of interest is vile bodies, which is a very good but
| characteristically depressing book by evelyn waugh.
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff is one of my
| favourites on that list.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Nothing in Japan from what I could find here or elsewhere...
| don't understand why
|
| edit: thanks to the dead commenter for clarifying. that sucks.
| shuoga wrote:
| The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of
| protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30,
| 2018.
|
| In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle,
| be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after
| publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym,
| or in the name of a corporate body).
|
| Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement
| will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of
| protection).
|
| Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for
| the next 20 years.
|
| From Japan Library Association:
| https://www.jla.or.jp/hogokikan-encho/#:~:text=%E4%BF%9D%E8%...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022.
| Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public
| domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I'm adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks' Tanizaki
| collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into
| US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on
| the translation date, not the original language.)
|
| [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/tanizaki-
| junichiro/short-f...
| bentley wrote:
| > Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the
| original language.
|
| It's based on both. For example, a translation or other
| derivative work whose copyright expired "early" in the US due
| to non-renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of
| the original. That's basically what happened to _It's a
| Wonderful Life_ --the film is technically in the public
| domain, but is still held in Paramount's iron grip by way of
| the renewed copyright of the original short story.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Fair point!
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the
| work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in
| Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both,
| possibly.)
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I make https://reader.manabi.io for a living
| jonah-archive wrote:
| We'll be celebrating this at the Internet Archive! As a lead-up,
| we're again hosting our Public Domain Film Remix Contest:
| https://blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2026-public-domain-day-r...
|
| We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in
| January as well, details to come!
| ricksunny wrote:
| Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders
| and users about how to go about uploading and downloading
| copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the
| geographical differences from region to region on copyright
| expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its
| servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law
| operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more
| lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally
| uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their
| respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at
| their own risk)?
| telesilla wrote:
| Finally! We'll get the Hollywood cinematic version of How to Win
| Friends and Influence People..
| samir123766 wrote:
| nice
| shevy-java wrote:
| > works by people who died in 1955
|
| 70 years. After death.
|
| The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
| tombert wrote:
| I was actually extremely surprised that Disney didn't bribe
| congress and stop Mickey Mouse from ending up in the public
| domain.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| They did. Before it was 50 years and get extended several
| times just before Mickey would enter public domain.
| culi wrote:
| Yeah they've done a lobbying campaign about a dozen times
| when Mickey was set to enter public domain. I think GP was
| saying they're surprised they didn't do a 13th time. Like
| why give up now?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Because in reality it hasn't entered public domain
| completely, only the very first movies and the way it was
| drawn in the 1930's. They are still protecting the one
| most people all know better.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| The funny thing is that Mickey Mouse barely registers for
| kids these days. We went to Disney World this year and
| Mickey had a bit part in some of the shows. Elsa, Moana
| and the other modern characters were the real stars.
| prmoustache wrote:
| It is not even figuring in the Disney logo.
| miniwark wrote:
| Not exactly true, they have hacked the end of the
| copyright for SteamBoat Willie, by adding a few second
| extract of it, as part of the actual "Walt Disney
| Animation Studios" actual logo.
|
| They cannot sue anymore for copyright infringements, but
| they may do it the registered trademark way, by saying
| "It's in our logo !".
| bentley wrote:
| The last (general) copyright extension in the US was the
| CTEA in 1998. What's happened since then? Google, who has
| power, money, and incentive to lobby against future
| copyright extensions.
| permo-w wrote:
| I'm sure I'm being obtuse here, but what's Google's game
| in the copyright sphere?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the
| amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and
| even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in
| obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to
| the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and
| comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude
| larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's
| effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested
| enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of
| serialized publications that might have been issued throughout
| the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be
| essentially unknown.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any
| relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me
| like they're two orthogonal issues.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Because every-time this comes up it is the same Mickey
| mouse complaints over and over. If you're young and your
| read this the first time I'm sure you're outraged.
|
| Meanwhile there are 1000's of works that people are free to
| take. Better yet, there are 1000's of works that will be
| destroyed and not preserved that are open that should be
| preserved and used.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I'm not sure what the argument is here.
|
| That because there's a large corpus of public domain
| works, then the long copyright protection is ok? That
| people want a short copyright protection because they're
| done with everything in the public domain?
|
| Would that also imply that if the number of public domain
| works gets large enough, then the duration copyright
| protections should also increase?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Long copyright protection is not okay, but letting the
| huge corpus of _existing_ public domain works languish in
| obscurity is not okay either; that does a lot more damage
| to our shared culture, and in a way that 's even quite
| easy to address. But the damage done by keeping works in
| copyright is easier to see than the damage done by not
| making remarkably similar works accessible at all.
| mlrtime wrote:
| I think it's selective outrage and people really don't
| care what happens to Micky Mouse.
|
| I'm not a fan of Disney, but I don't think my life would
| be better if we saw a bunch of clones from China because
| it's now "public domain".
| account42 wrote:
| Part of the reason for that is precisely that copyright is
| too long so works get lost or forgotten before they enter the
| public domain.
| mlrtime wrote:
| No, it's because people don't care about it. If it had
| value they would.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Offtopic.
|
| Want to see something cool?
|
| Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
|
| "Does the following comment make logical sense:
|
| <insert OP comment above>"
|
| The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and
| coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
|
| THEN
|
| run this prompt:
|
| "let's not be too hasty here.
|
| we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but
| the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
|
| p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
|
| p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
|
| it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected.
| As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public
| domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger
| (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
|
| Enjoy!
| fragmede wrote:
| You wanna link a chat of that for us to read ourselves?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I'm very sorry, no, I'm too afraid to leak something.
| lkqjweflkj wrote:
| FastGPT (+ Notepad for maintaining context):
|
| ===
|
| Does the following comment make logical sense? "Sure, the
| term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount
| of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and
| even Internet-accessible in some form but simply
| languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made
| comprehensively accessible to the general public (via
| digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive
| classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger!
| There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively
| free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to
| put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized
| publications that might have been issued throughout the
| 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be
| essentially unknown."
|
| ---
|
| Yes, the comment makes logical sense. It argues that while
| copyright terms are long, there's a vast amount of public
| domain material that is not easily accessible due to lack
| of digitization and organization. The commenter suggests
| focusing on making this "low-hanging fruit" accessible
| instead of solely focusing on copyright issues.
|
| ===
|
| let's not be too hasty here.
|
| we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long;
| but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
|
| p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
|
| p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
|
| it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically
| connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the
| public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern
| larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?
|
| ---
|
| The comment does present a logical argument, although it's
| an argument by juxtaposition rather than direct logical
| entailment. Here's a breakdown:
|
| P1: Copyright terms are long. This is a statement of
| fact/opinion about the duration of copyright protection.
| P2: A vast amount of public domain work is inaccessible.
| This highlights the existence of a large, underutilized
| resource. Implicit Argument: The commenter implies that
| effort might be better spent on making existing public
| domain works accessible rather than focusing solely on the
| length of copyright terms. The "but" signals a contrast and
| a suggested alternative focus. You're right that P1 and P2
| aren't directly logically connected in a way that P1 causes
| P2 or vice versa. The connection is more pragmatic:
|
| Opportunity Cost: The commenter suggests that focusing on
| copyright reform might divert attention and resources from
| the readily available opportunity to make existing public
| domain works more accessible. Practical Benefit: Making
| public domain works accessible provides immediate cultural
| and educational benefits, regardless of copyright law. The
| commenter isn't saying long copyright terms are okay
| because of the amount of public domain work. They're saying
| that focusing solely on copyright is perhaps missing a big,
| easily addressable opportunity. The absurdity you introduce
| (infinite copyright terms being okay) doesn't follow
| because the commenter isn't trying to justify long
| copyright terms. They're shifting the focus to a different,
| potentially more immediately beneficial area.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Thankfully this is already happening thanks to the glorious AI
| - revolution. AI crawlers just ignore copyright - and any other
| rules and laws. ;-)
| bacchusracine wrote:
| As do people. Which ends up weakening copyright even further
| as it becomes a law everyone ignores, on the level of
| speeding or jaywalking. The same knock-on effects as
| Prohibition, we become a nation of scofflaws.
|
| People don't know copyright law. They _think_ they do and are
| alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But
| they don 't actually know what it says and does and means,
| otherwise they'd hate it much more.
| ronsor wrote:
| > They think they do and are alright with the construct
| they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know
| what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it
| much more.
|
| This is also why companies have slowed down on enforcing it
| too much: if people actually understood copyright, there
| would be too much pushback.
| mlrtime wrote:
| >70 years is way too long.
|
| Objectively, why? It's in our lifetimes, I'd say it's just
| about right.
| rhdunn wrote:
| If someone publishes a novel when they are twenty and dies
| when they are 90 the novel won't be in the public domain for
| 140 years. That's rediculous.
| nemomarx wrote:
| How often is 70 years in your lifetime? only if you read a
| book as a teenager or child, right?
| layer8 wrote:
| Just wait until they manage to keep creators artificially alive
| indefinitely.
| inasio wrote:
| A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:
|
| Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank
| and Einstein.
| boznz wrote:
| Weird Question, but who would even collect the royalties from
| Hitler or Goebels?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf
| (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria
| after he died.
|
| However various translations and abridgements were made with
| their own copyright.
|
| Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein
| Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the
| Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the
| British version even though the text is identical). During
| WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government
| confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
|
| Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full
| rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was,
| they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related
| charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to
| pocketing the money.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| > A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the
| money.
|
| The American way *salutes*
| pettertb wrote:
| Copyright has no business holding as long as it does.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a
| concept that should exist on human timescales.
|
| Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they
| consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need
| to make a living.
|
| I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right
| balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also
| guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they
| consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather
| than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving
| them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
| mchusma wrote:
| I love the original 14+14. I've heard proposals for
| exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to
| stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100,
| another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for
| $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key
| pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade
| off?
|
| So many ideas better than the current regime.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney
| will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from
| something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a
| mildly successful author won't be able to, leaving those
| works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
|
| The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor
| the same benefits.
|
| Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published
| 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in
| 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that
| they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement.
| Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could
| just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any
| conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
|
| So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996
| and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of
| which they'd have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations
| that grossed $1 billion each.
|
| Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I've said is
| inaccurate or incorrect.
| martiuk wrote:
| The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what
| universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with
| Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors
| being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to
| license the content just waiting out each 14 year term
| out to see if the author will renew instead of simply
| licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the
| Rings.
|
| The proposed system doesn't affect Disney that much, but
| it will negatively affect small timers.
| nathell wrote:
| Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?
| sd9 wrote:
| Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M
| for 14 years, for example.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite
| often, a novel will become popular only decades after
| publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit
| on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations
| tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the
| link with no reperations to the creator.
|
| Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first
| released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after
| 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main
| peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like
| Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached
| their peak in 2010.
|
| IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the
| wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
| raldi wrote:
| If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful
| you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have
| written them a little faster in that universe.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Or you can't because 57 new sequels were published the
| week before.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have
| completely killed famous book series? Me neither.
| nkrisc wrote:
| What fan fiction?
| hnben wrote:
| exactly.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Because copyright lasts longer than 14 years.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of
| the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have
| on how to improve things by making things worse for
| people who make less money, I don't think copyright is
| longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the
| original author of a series earns more money than fan
| fiction.
| fragmede wrote:
| This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry
| Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades
| of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.
|
| A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I
| know there's a ton more _illegal_ unlicensed! Harry
| Potter fan fic.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 50 Shades is decidedly _not_ a fanfic for the exact
| reason that it couldn 't be sold as one.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization
| for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/
| Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where
| a _tremendous_ amount of such fiction is archived.
| nkrisc wrote:
| So where can a mainstream consumer purchase or borrow a
| paperback edition of those stories?
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| I mean https://www.printingcenterusa.com/printing/book-
| printing
| nkrisc wrote:
| Someone who buys books at Barnes & Noble is not going to
| print online fan fiction on demand. If you think this is
| something a "mainstream consumer" would do, I think
| you're very out of touch with the average person.
| thfuran wrote:
| Isn't reading stuff on the internet more mainstream than
| buying things at Barnes and Noble? Not necessarily those
| specific things, but the notion that something needs to
| be physically available at a bookstore to be relevant is
| at best dated.
| nkrisc wrote:
| If you spend a lot of time online, it would certainly
| seem that way.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Or spend a lot of time with certain demographics. My
| parents don't know what ao3 is, but a couple of female
| coworkers are huge fans
|
| Edit: according to [1] 93% of users are 44 or younger,
| and women outnumber men 10:1
|
| [1] https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-
| on-ao3/
| tialaramex wrote:
| I think you should also assume it's called "Archive of
| our own" because of the same sense that Woolf had in "A
| Room of one's own". This is _our_ space to do _our_
| thing, precisely _because_ if it was someone else 's
| space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good
| reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and
| it's destroyed.
|
| So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's
| authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming
| that they can thrive in a shared space and then
| discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason,
| they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar
| to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for
| breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by
| employers despite having the same skills as successful
| male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just
| have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to
| have a place of your own.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective, I hadn't considered
| that the name might be a reference to A Room of One's
| Own.
|
| My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is
| mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a
| predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by
| overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the
| community, which means everyone migrates to the next site
| which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3
| run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be
| the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree
| that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of
| disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of
| them
| actionfromafar wrote:
| No, but I think it might happen if copyright lapsed in 14
| years.
| Jolter wrote:
| But it would only lapse after 28, assuming the author is
| still interested in pursuing it. 28 years is plenty, IMO.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Presumably people would consider a Song of Ice and Fire
| sequel by GRRM to be "official" and everything else
| "fanfiction", even if the fanfiction manages to appear in
| bookstores
| Jolter wrote:
| For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca
| 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and
| publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not
| from the original author.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I mean, that sounds like a win from the point of view of
| copyright.
|
| The whole purpose of copyright is to promote the creation
| of new works after all. In GRRM's case, the more
| successful his works became, the _less_ he wrote which is
| kind of the opposite of what copyright was intended to
| do.
| kshacker wrote:
| How do the sequels affect this? I read this once more in
| the same discussion so I am curious.
|
| Let's assume the 1st book goes public. I should be able
| to use those characters and their known relationship in
| any which way, no? What's wrong with that, copyright
| wise?
| glimshe wrote:
| So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of
| maximum protection. That would cover your examples and
| require active renewal to send abandonware to the public
| domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active
| renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.
| mcny wrote:
| 14 years is already too long.
|
| Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid.
| Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid.
|
| Your opinion does not make that fact.
| mcdonje wrote:
| The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not
| talking about physical things. They're made up rules
| about made up things. It can all be different if we agree
| to make it so.
|
| IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for
| all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or
| humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected
| by cultures that claim to care about it.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not
| outright _invades_ the conversation about who owns what
| data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but
| something worth hashing out since we live in an age of
| information that is both accessible and under threat, so
| the real question is where do we want to collectively
| steer this ship?
| psychoslave wrote:
| Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should
| say and do.
|
| Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of
| someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with
| one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and
| someone psychological traits are indeed more property of
| the person but they can make it lasts through some
| expression of it only in external support which are
| distinct from their proper self.
| philipallstar wrote:
| IP is just the umbrella term for
| copyright/design/trademark/patent, isn't it?
| eesmith wrote:
| It is. A common argument against using "intellectual
| property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land
| and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent,
| etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a
| false narrative.
| mcny wrote:
| My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to
| defend -- even if you agree with copyright, patents,
| trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as
| individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella
| term as it muddies the waters.
|
| Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball
| game from copyright. To group them together confuses
| everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who
| wish to fish in troubled waters.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Not really - you have IP lawyers who might do all of it.
| mcny wrote:
| It is good for those lawyers, sure.
|
| You can also have people who do both plumbing and
| electrical work or electrical work and home Ethernet
| wiring...
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Property isn't real either.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had
| middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series
| exploded in popularity
|
| Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series,
| and not the book.
|
| > IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from
| the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
|
| In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened
| then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's
| books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > The author's books got popularity based on other
| people's efforts.
|
| LMAO the serie would not even exists if not of his books
| philipallstar wrote:
| I'm not saying it would. Sorry to spoil the laughter.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > The author's books got popularity based on other
| people's efforts.
|
| The author's book got popular based on the efforts of
| others based on the author's book.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and
| some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that
| sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and
| generates cash.
|
| What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did
| better out of the TV production than vice versa.
| cedilla wrote:
| That's true of course, but the book series wouldn't have
| become a cultural phenomenon that makes billions.
|
| Unlike, for probably the only example, Harry Potter,
| which was already a cultural phenomenon when the first
| film was announced.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Nah it was popular among people who read books long
| before the tv show.
| philipallstar wrote:
| I read it too before the series came out, but it wasn't
| the same level of popularity.
| eesmith wrote:
| "Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly
| underestimate the number of new novels published each year.
|
| Your first two examples would have been covered under a
| 14+14 copyright period.
|
| I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept
| Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was
| a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
|
| I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases
| should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for
| Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species?
| Marx's Das Kapital?
|
| The justification for US copyright is "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." The problem
| you point out is that right can be transferred to
| publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible
| for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years,
| which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
|
| What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors
| to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-
| telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if
| you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now
| write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it
| doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the
| movie, which is still under copyright.
| gwd wrote:
| > IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from
| the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
|
| I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large
| degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music
| labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to
| sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights
| is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being
| stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your
| kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
| csallen wrote:
| What's interesting is that this is true of all creators,
| not just artists.
|
| Making money means running a business, and running a
| business requires more than just creating something. You
| also have to identify a good market for that creation,
| and find a way to distribute to them, and provide a
| viable model for them to pay for it, and (the hardest
| part) out-compete all the other businesses who are doing
| the same.
|
| This is true for cooks. It's not good enough to create a
| meal. You have to also scope out the local market, find a
| good location, build a restaurant or a stand, attract
| customers, and sell your meals. And if you aren't willing
| to do that, then you either need to accept cooking for
| free, or going to work for a restaurant who's going to do
| all those hard parts and take the bulk of the profits.
|
| This is true for computer programmers. It's not good
| enough to write a program. You also have to build a
| business, find customers, attract them through ads or
| marketing or viral growth, collect credit carts, and sell
| your product. And if you aren't willing to do that, then
| you either need to accept coding things that make no
| money, or go to work for corporation or startup who will
| pay you a salary while collecting bigger profits.
|
| Etc.
|
| For some reason artists are the only group that makes a
| big stink about this situation, and feels that they
| should get the benefits of running a business without
| doing the work or taking the risk of running a business.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Artists are not the only ones who make a stink about
| this; it's inherent to the capitalist mode of production.
| Everyone involved in a venture is risking _something_ ,
| but the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with
| equity ownership over the venture. Other kinds of risk
| are solely rewarded with monetary wages at sub-profit
| margins. That's why labor unions exist, and why the
| nation's elites work tirelessly to stop them.
|
| But with artists, there's a particular extra wrinkle, in
| that the law created a middle tier of reward specifically
| for the efforts of creative workers. Copyright was
| specifically intended to allow authors to have their own
| business ventures without necessarily having to share in
| the same risks that equity owners do. So, naturally,
| those equity owners all colluded with one another to
| steal this other form of equity and wear it as a second
| shell.
| csallen wrote:
| > _the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with
| equity ownership over the venture_
|
| I would argue that it's not solely the law rewarding that
| kind of risk, it's the market. There is no law that says
| that only equity owners can enjoy massive profits. Some
| employees get paid 7 figures, 8 figures, or more, even
| without equity.
|
| Generally speaking, the rewards go to the hardest parts,
| the riskiest parts, the parts with the least supply and
| the most demand.
|
| You are taking _far_ more risk by being a business
| creator and blazing a new trail, than you are by studying
| a fixed set of knowledge and techniques to train to
| become a Front End Software Engineer or some other kind
| of well-defined high-demand pre-defined role. And the
| evidence for this is the fact that there are millions of
| people who 've shaped themselves into that safer mould,
| and very few who have done the former.
|
| And this doesn't just apply to owners vs employees, it
| applies _within_ each group, too. There are far more
| restauranteurs than search engine founders, as the former
| is simply a less risk and less competitive endeavor.
| (Competing with your local market vs competing with the
| world.) And artists who create unique works tend to earn
| a lot more than copycats. Artists who master rare skills
| tend to earn a lot more than people generating stuff off
| Midjourney. Etc. Risk tends to go hand-in-hand with
| reward.
|
| Of course there are exceptions, e.g. rent-seeking,
| sabotage, monopoly, collusion, etc. that can earn you a
| lot without you providing a lot of value or taking a lot
| of risk. And a huge role of the law is to make as much of
| this illegal as possible, to force people into more
| value-creating activities by process of elimination.
| sp0rk wrote:
| > Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was
| first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was
| only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.
| Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell,
| some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985
| but only reached their peak in 2010.
|
| Using your example and the rules suggested in the
| grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to
| initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay
| $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a
| similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
|
| This still seems very reasonable to me.
| bnj wrote:
| Keep in mind that under such a system, corporations would
| have a financial incentive to wait just a bit longer to
| do an adaptation
| ronsor wrote:
| I find it strange how people are so invested in spiting
| $BigCorpThatMightDoBadThing that they're willing to harm
| the public at large as well.
| wongarsu wrote:
| GRRM is already beating them at that game by publishing a
| new book in the series every couple decades. That might
| become a common tactic in such a copyright environment
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Keep in mind that under such a system, corporations
| would have a financial incentive to wait just a bit
| longer to do an adaptation_
|
| Meanwhile they are _currently_ buying up IP and locking
| it up for decades in such a way that no one can build on
| it.
|
| Sherlock Holmes, who was created in the _1800s_ , only
| became public domain (but _not all of it_ ) a few years
| ago:
|
| * https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/sherlock-
| holme...
|
| * https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/01/how-
| sherlo...
|
| BigCorps could do a lot of things under a new regime, but
| they are already doing shitty things. I'd rather deal
| with the current problems and then see if/what kind of
| new issues crop up, and then course-correct then.
| pydry wrote:
| >IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from
| the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
|
| Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never
| the intent.
|
| Similar to the Patriot act.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from
| the wealthy
|
| IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you
| know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of
| book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms
| taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could
| access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a
| persecuted fringe group.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had
| middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series
| exploded in popularity.
|
| Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends
| were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil
| Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing
| R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not
| giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he
| may never complete the series).
|
| It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to
| 2011.
| msabalau wrote:
| I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at
| all.
|
| The series was already remarkable commercial success before
| the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the
| NYT list in 2005.
|
| The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series.
| That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy
| novel by orders of magnitude.
|
| If the books sold even more copies after being adapted,
| that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of
| anything the author did.
|
| And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost
| it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the
| all the rest of books in the series would still under
| copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the
| ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been
| published yet. The most HBO could have done without
| Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified
| fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits
| about any similarities to any later books in the series
| under copyright.
|
| Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the
| first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all
| of society from benefiting from using, building on, or
| remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a
| handful of exceptionally rare winners get.
|
| An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's
| maximalist copyright regime.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in
| 1985
|
| It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret
| Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even
| back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet
| her.
|
| Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not
| enable them to make a killing.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A person who wants to coast off the success of a single
| creation for eternity and not feel compelled to make
| future creations is _not an artist_.
|
| They are a capitalist.
|
| Artists create, despite the destitution, because they
| _want_ to create and feel strongly _compelled_ to create.
| Art is about that compulsion.
|
| An artist wants enough money to pay rent/mortgage, raise
| a family, have a hobby, not be in debt, etc. But when
| Daniel Hardcastle received 0 pounds from his book because
| the publisher was a scammy cunt, he doesn't stop writing
| because there's no money in it, he continues to write
| _despite_ the lack of profit. Because that 's what he
| feels compelled to do.
|
| When youtube made it impossible for animators to make
| money on Youtube, Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) started paying
| people to make animations out of his content, including
| people who started out doing it entirely without their
| permission. When many channels make pure profit from
| creating clip shows or compilations of their content,
| instead of throwing lawyers or the Youtube machine at
| those people, he paid someone to make official versions.
|
| Compare how those two jackwads acted (the fine brothers),
| trying to trademark the concept of a "reaction video", to
| all the different channels and groups that do "Power
| Hour" or variety content like Good Mythical Morning. They
| even joke about how they are all stealing from each
| other. They know that their audience is looking for
| _their unique output_ , not a specific format, and that
| protecting such a format would be a waste for everyone.
|
| Because a real artist does not say "How dare you make
| better product with my formula", a real artist says "Aww
| man they used my formula to make something great, I
| should figure out how to make something great and up my
| game".
|
| The sin in artistry is someone taking your style or
| content and shamelessly stealing it because it's a
| profitable business, rather than riffing on it or
| iterating on it.
|
| Weird Al generally gets permission to do his work despite
| the law being clear that he does not have to because
| artistry is about respect and effort and collaboration.
|
| More importantly for copyright law, despite no legal
| protection for a "Power hour" format, _many_ groups are
| able to profit off it simultaneously, because art is not
| some winner takes all market. Copyright is not about
| enabling you to profit off of a work indefinitely,
| copyright is about ensuring that Greedy McBusinessman
| cannot take your book and sell it for cheaper because he
| doesn 't have to pay your rent and does that for a
| hundred other artists. It's about who owns the Rights to
| Copy a work.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer
| than a patent lasts for.
|
| Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier
| term than that of an inventor?
|
| (And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular
| Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that
| doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not
| guaranteed.)
| mrec wrote:
| > _Why should we protect the work of an author for a
| lengthier term than that of an inventor?_
|
| Well, independently coming up with the same solution to a
| given problem is a lot more likely than independently
| writing the same novel. Personally, the chilling of
| independent invention is the thing I find most obnoxious
| about patents.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I might independently invent a cartoon character of a
| black mouse with a tan face that wears white gloves and
| red bibs and wish to publish a comic book featuring that
| character on the cover, but I'll never be able to do that
| -- no matter how long I wait: We have trademark law in
| the way.
|
| Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they
| _never_ automatically time out as a mere function of the
| calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse,
| they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and
| others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It
| will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney
| Company.
|
| The _addition_ of copyright makes it all a double-whammy.
| Trademarks can already last as long as time itself;
| copyright doesn 't also have to be that way at all.
|
| 14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively
| control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and
| Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose,
| if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would
| be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well,
| and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the
| impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.
|
| (Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently
| invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things
| that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's
| annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of
| those is timing out soon and I really should check on
| it.)
| jandrese wrote:
| Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the
| 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although
| the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years
| is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than
| that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal
| corporations.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| 14+14 seems to cover these two scenarios? Lifetime+whatever
| is far too on the other end of this seesaw.
| basilikum wrote:
| Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be
| extended after the fact for already being profitable? That
| only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright
| already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
| gwd wrote:
| It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current
| situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for
| people), and would love to return it to something like
| 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind _not_ doing
| that is massive, and I think most of the population have
| been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that
| there will never be populist support for it.
|
| But there _might_ be populist support for releasing old
| stuff that nobody 's using. More people would agree, for
| instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the
| 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but
| those who think they might own some part of it threaten to
| sue).
|
| And who knows, once people get used to the idea that
| copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more
| amenable to the idea that they should be something more
| reasonable.
| basilikum wrote:
| I don't think the problem is most people being against
| shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I
| don't think a compromise with the devil will change
| anything about that.
| gwd wrote:
| Right; so according to your own assessment, for the
| "14+14 no extensions" thing , you're always going to have
| have "a minority of opinionated geeks" on one side, and
| "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests
| willing to fight tooth and nail for a gold mine" on the
| other side. You're never going to win that one.
|
| Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you
| have a minority of opinionated geeks _and_ at least a
| little wider net of people who see the irrationality of
| not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that
| nobody 's making any money off of any more, _and_
| politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn
| 't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of
| massively rich entrenched interests fighting for
| something not making them any money". There's at least a
| chance of winning this one.
|
| IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no
| extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice
| is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Can you write down your actual analysis of the
| disposition of political capital, factions, interest
| groups, etc.?
|
| People aren't just going to take your word that A
| outweighs B modulo C, or that B outweighs A modulo C.
| There needs to be some credible substance.
| gwd wrote:
| Sorry, did I accidentally wander into a political action
| group working meeting, and you're mistaking me for the
| chairperson or something? If you have actual money and
| people working on this, don't take your cues form some
| rando on the internet!
|
| I thought this was a site where we talk about ideas and
| see what people's perspectives are. @basilikum asked why
| on earth @mchusma would advocate "pay to extend" instead
| of "14+14 no extensions". I gave my own personal take.
| I'd be totally happy to be wrong about the political
| viability of "14+14 no extensions". If you have actual
| data, or even just a different take on the situation, I'm
| all ears.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| So then "You're never going to win that one." was just a
| random guess?
|
| Why pretend if there's no substance at all backing it up?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Good luck with that.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get
| screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world
| he would take it good and proper.
|
| https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-
| pete...
|
| Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure
| they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is,
| something else, let's put something in so big corporations
| can continue screwing people over if they think it is
| worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't
| be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name
| were Rowling obviously.
|
| finally, as always have to point out that while the argument
| about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S
| is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such
| it seems unlikely to translate to other countries -
| specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and
| thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media
| is an international business nowadays.
| amelius wrote:
| Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like
| Disney did with Mickey Mouse.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep
| their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their
| rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain
| a reasonable number of years after that sale.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > So many ideas better than the current regime.
|
| Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe
| even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to
| patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is
| clearly better than what we have.
|
| The governments all over the world have been so incredibly
| corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost
| every public good in existence.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the
| copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time,
| and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow
| anyone to re-publish.
|
| It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't
| be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where
| something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee
| artificially high.
|
| (This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to
| publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked
| into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright
| holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and
| stores sell their work.)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.
|
| A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that
| created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is
| thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted
| anyway.
|
| But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where
| anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish.
| And it just so happens that you wish to license this work
| and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or
| something.
|
| Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| That's a good question. IMO:
|
| 1: The formula dictates what you pay.
|
| 2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow
| account.
|
| At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount
| of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the
| rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is
| forfeited.
|
| (What happens to the money at that point? I think this is
| a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of
| us get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
|
| (Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to
| someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a
| wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get
| the kind of copyright reform we need.)
| shagie wrote:
| Which government? Who controls the account?
|
| How do I claim it?
|
| How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how
| does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone
| in the US? How does someone in the US license a work
| created by someone in Wakanda?)
|
| What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or
| return the money to me after the period of time has
| elapsed)?
|
| What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the
| escrow and uses the money themselves?
|
| ---
|
| I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith
| in governments and their handling of money, record
| keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize
| individuals and countries.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I would contend that this suggestion puts too much
| faith in governments
|
| Copyright only works if you have faith in your government
| to create and enforce laws.
|
| Otherwise, if you don't have faith in your government,
| you have bigger problems than a poor system of copyright.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway, all of your points are wonderful things to argue
| about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.
| When we argue about details like this, we can assume that
| compulsory licensing is a good concept overall.
| shagie wrote:
| Which government do I need to have faith in for enforcing
| the copyright for a citizen of Wakanda who is infringing
| upon my work?
|
| The floor of copyright reform is set by TRIPS and the
| WTO. That's 50 years. If one wants to try to set another
| floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on
| that. Setting an floor that expires sooner is likely a
| non-starter given concerns about things getting slurped
| up into AI models.
|
| Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required
| to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works
| of photography, fiction, or software development to be
| mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it
| and make derivative works that I don't want them to.
| Consider how many people object to their CC work being
| included in AI models.
|
| Much of the suggestions of copyright reform would involve
| the relevant country to leave the WTO and withdraw from
| the TRIPS agreement. That is unlikely to happen.
|
| Resetting copyright to the floor dictated by TRIPS would
| be a possibility that a country could entertain.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required
| to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works
| of photography, fiction, or software development to be
| mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it
| and make derivative works that I don't want them to.
| Consider how many people object to their CC work being
| included in AI models.
|
| You just made the argument for mandatory licensing.
|
| Why?
|
| Piracy is about to become a lot harder to prosecute. (See
| the news coverage of the Cox case in the Supreme Court.)
| All those usages of your work that you object to (which
| many people consider fair use), are about to become much
| harder to prosecute.
|
| Thus, shortening the period of exclusive control and
| introducing a period of mandatory licensing allows you to
| get paid in situations where it is extremely hard to
| prosecute for copyright infringement.
| shagie wrote:
| Why should I be required to license my (non-stock)
| photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to
| make placemats of those images?
|
| Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model
| release) that I took be something I am required to
| license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is
| defamatory to the model?
|
| Why should I be required to accept the finances in
| licensing terms as someone who is posting neat
| photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs
| someone who is a well known photographer and selling
| prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs
| someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of
| thousands of dollars?
|
| Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs
| anymore?
|
| Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have
| the same rights as a company making a product and being
| able to refuse to accept a client?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Those are great answers.
|
| I'd like to propose the following additions to help tie
| it all together:
|
| Copyright must be registered. Registration requires
| sending a digital copy to some officious government body,
| such as the Library of Congress, for preservation. (It
| used to be ~about this way; it can be this way again.
| Disk is cheap. Git and email both exist. It can be
| figured out.)
|
| This registration will be open and publicly-available to
| query (online, of course, but also by phone, and mail,
| and just by walking in the front door and asking), so the
| question of "Who to pay" is always easily answered.
|
| All forfeited money from licensing goes to help pay for
| the preservation of the collected works, and for the
| ongoing expense of providing the registration database.
| It won't be nearly enough to cover those expenses, and
| that's fine: This means that the balance always has a
| place to land.
|
| Copyright should not span generations. It should still
| time out completely, and do so after a period that is
| shorter than a normal human lifespan.
|
| If a person saw a film when they were 5 that they really
| enjoyed, and if they manage to live long enough, then
| they should eventually be able to walk into the Library
| of Congress, give them some money, and walk out with a
| physical copy of it, and be able to freely upload that
| copy of it to YouCloud for their great, great
| grandchildren (and indeed, the world) to see, and be able
| to do all of this without becoming a criminal.
|
| (How much money? Something in the realm of 15 Big Macs
| worth of dollars sounds about right.)
| shagie wrote:
| > Copyright must be registered.
|
| https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.
| htm Members shall comply with Articles
| 1 through 21 of the Berne Convention (1971) and the
| Appendix thereto. However, Members shall not have rights
| or obligations under this Agreement in respect of the
| rights conferred under Article 6bis of that Convention or
| of the rights derived therefrom.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
| Author's rights under the Berne Convention must be
| automatic; it is prohibited to require formal
| registration.
|
| This would require the country to back out of the Berne
| Convention and TRIPS (and by implication the WTO).
| Protection of copyright is automatic and does not require
| registration.
|
| Just because I haven't sent the latest batch of
| photographs to the Library of Congress for registration
| (so I can collect punitive damages rather than just
| compensatory damages) doesn't mean that the images that I
| have created are not copyrighted and protected.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I'm aware of the Berne Convention. It can be vacated.
| Sweeping changes have sweeping effects.
|
| I can't conceive of a way for any of this hypothetical
| copyright system to work (ie, to _not_ fall completely
| apart) without requiring registration.
| shagie wrote:
| How would this impact open source? Would I be required to
| register every repository that I have on GitHub?
|
| Would anyone be able to license that repository for
| $(legislated amount) and make it into a closed source
| product?
| ghssds wrote:
| >Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
|
| Create a non-government copyright collective[0] that
| manage copyright unrelated to music (musicians already
| have their).
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That's somewhat hilarious.
|
| Last time I looked into trying to get pricing from ASCAP
| and BMI so I could legally stream some music for a small
| number of people, I found the following to be true:
|
| 1. There is no public pricing. (Why? Because _fuck you_ ,
| that's why!)
|
| 2. If I insisted, then the simplest way to get a price is
| to stream whatever I want and wait for a nasty letter
| from one or more lawyers that will most assuredly tell me
| how much I owe.
|
| 3. The only safe way to proceed is not to play the game
| at all.
|
| That's gonna be a "no" on the cartels for me, boss. We
| might as well just throw all of the money and all of the
| copyrighted stuff into the memory hole for all the good
| they do.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| See if the scheme that BMG / Columbia house still works.
| (Apparently they would send a check to the rightsholder,
| and if they cashed it, it was considered payment.)
|
| (But don't quote me, I'm not an expert.)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A reasonable copyright term _makes abandonware not a thing_
|
| If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years,
| it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or
| hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it
| accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it
| anymore full stop.
|
| Abandonware is only a thing _because of_ copyright.
|
| >A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over
| which media and stores sell their work.
|
| This is the _entire point_ of copyright. Abandonware is an
| _intentional_ right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able
| to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at
| least until their rights run out after a decade or two.
| Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants
| of a creative profit from something that was made a century
| ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing
| around with intellectual property of an entire previous
| generation.
|
| Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly
| correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's
| copyright existed when they first started, they would have
| likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only
| hurt artists and the public.
| zenoprax wrote:
| I was about to respond to your comment yesterday about
| closed protocols but this is a better article!
|
| > A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control
| over which media and stores sell their work. > This is
| the entire point of copyright.
|
| Not only is the entire point, it is the thing that
| matters most when discussing "piracy" productively.
| Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side,
| infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by
| _distributing_ the media. "Consuming" intellectual
| property can never be piracy by definition because you
| are not providing anything.
|
| If Netflix screws up their licensing agreements and
| provides too many seasons of a show and people watch it
| no one would be considered "pirates". Netflix is simply
| in violation of a licensing agreement. If they had no
| agreement whatsoever then they are directly infringing on
| the "IP holders exclusive right to control the
| distribution and sale".
| teddyh wrote:
| Nobody who uses the word "copywritten" can be taken
| seriously.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to
| stay copywritten longer
|
| The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth
| it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the
| exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public
| domain to mix in to future culture.
|
| That's the _point_.
|
| The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community
| should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you
| accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely
| milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing
| for economies and societies.
|
| Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work
| or creation is called _stagnation_ and is _bad_ , in the same
| way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a
| patent forever just because it was effective.
|
| Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy
| should _never_ have the resources to extend it past a short
| time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with
| milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, _not a
| creative or artist_ and copyright is not intended to protect
| them.
|
| Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short
| while to spend time creating your _next_ work. Copyright is
| not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
|
| A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources
| _at all_ is inherently anti-meritocratic.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The
| "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the
| necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities;
| and today you could add "classic" works from other literary
| traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded
| approach.
| tonypapousek wrote:
| While your end goal is admirable, it's more fun to share new
| experiences with others.
|
| Also, there's a lot of really good albums from the past 70
| years you'd be missing out on.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go
| on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never
| occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing
| with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch
| and it was an absolute blast. We're social animals, so of
| course sharing a new experience with others makes it more
| fun. I'm just surprised I couldn't figure this simple fact
| out before hand.
| lukan wrote:
| "I'm just surprised I couldn't figure this simple fact
| out before hand."
|
| Maybe you should have enjoyed more xkcd:
|
| https://xkcd.com/606/
| jrimbault wrote:
| When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by
| who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than
| Mickey Mouse is today.
| gwd wrote:
| At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what
| they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make
| Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's
| (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was
| safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so
| his copyright would have expired in 1950).
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content
| that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations
| are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff
| that's been translated in the past few decades and those
| aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but
| even going back 30 years, people would translate every
| foreign work in the style of the King James Bible.
| Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new
| thing.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > even going back 30 years, people would translate every
| foreign work in the style of the King James Bible.
| Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new
| thing.
|
| And yet, people used to read those older translations just
| fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't
| really impact the understanding of the text.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it
| does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read
| things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic
| English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of
| English.
| simondotau wrote:
| Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them,
| but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural
| participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The
| ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our
| social experience.
|
| It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is
| recognisable in our own lives. _Pride and Prejudice_ is a
| great book, but it 's arguably more alien than _Star Trek._
| asimpletune wrote:
| My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online
| for years, where we only read books in the public domain.
| It's been an amazing experience and I think we look forward
| to it each week. https://b00k.club
| rhdunn wrote:
| Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the
| public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying
| in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't
| enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
|
| Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s
| being released in the public domain. This limits the works to
| around the first world war. For example:
|
| - HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of
| the Worlds and The Time Machine.
|
| - LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne
| of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is
| in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the
| public domain there.
|
| With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
|
| - Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that
| incarnation of the character.
|
| - Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that
| incarnation of the character.
|
| So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that
| are nearly a decade old.
| cafard wrote:
| In _A Sinking Island_ , the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case
| that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright
| from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after
| the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death,
| had an arresting effect on public perception of what
| literature was: By inhibiting cheap reprints
| of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce
| a genteel impression that English literature itself had
| stopped about that date...
| badmonster wrote:
| True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success
| make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller
| creators?
| phkahler wrote:
| "Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for
| the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can
| afford it for long.
| account42 wrote:
| Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more
| fans who deserve to own their childhood.
| HPsquared wrote:
| We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is
| competing for that name also.
| ketzu wrote:
| > Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP
| they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
|
| Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial
| attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
|
| (I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what
| a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and
| arguments would be.)
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial
| attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
|
| This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be
| used to ban writing altogether!
| mcdonje wrote:
| Shorter copyrights would lead to _less_ beatings of dead
| tauntauns or thestrals.
| rhdunn wrote:
| It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds,
| reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game
| Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland
| series.
| psychoslave wrote:
| What about making people profit and enjoy life without having
| to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to
| make them worth having them alive?
|
| The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce
| something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is
| such a creepy one.
|
| Universal income or something in that spirit would make far
| more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to
| worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might
| chose to pursue on top of that.
|
| The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the
| opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can
| cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there
| is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the
| negative effects of our addictions.
|
| [1]
| https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...
| vladms wrote:
| If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on
| the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce
| the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much
| power to a few.
|
| I find more important what is the society's perceived
| "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the
| study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is
| considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable
| if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy /
| depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless
| and starving.
|
| In other countries "success" can be considered also about
| "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or
| sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try
| to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are
| not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the
| society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
| psychoslave wrote:
| >If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes
| on the rich I would choose the latter
|
| There no need to be exclusive, and actually having
| concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social
| construct. A society can also thrive without high income
| disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was
| captured from the non-rich.
| mlrtime wrote:
| >captured from the non-rich.
|
| What do you mean by this? The economy is not zero sum, it
| is possible for everyone to get "wealthier", even if the
| spread increases.
| myrmidon wrote:
| This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a
| fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth
| inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population
| will have a harder time competing for those.
|
| Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price
| development in terms of median income, and how the supply
| side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering"
| luxury appartments from the average citizens point of
| view).
|
| Increasing inequality is also problematic because it
| fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing
| (because this siphons _income_ from the poor side of your
| distribution to the wealthy one).
|
| It might well be better to be _less_ wealthy in a society
| with lower spread.
|
| You could also argue that _most_ wealth right now is
| accumulated /grown by "extracting" a bit of the value
| from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game
| distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They
| make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are
| their employees working ten times harder than average
| game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd
| argue that their company became very good at extracting
| value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does
| not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from
| taking a little bit from _lots_ of people.
| mlrtime wrote:
| The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with
| regulation and limits on building rights than with income
| inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and
| other constraints keep supply artificially low, which
| pushes developers toward higher-end units because the
| fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more
| building by right, supply would go up and prices would
| come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can
| help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is
| primarily an inequality problem.
|
| RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn't a meaningful
| way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a
| software distribution business just reflects scale.
| Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a
| big market, not because Valve is "extracting" in some
| zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the
| distribution market would become less efficient, not more
| equal, and consumers or developers wouldn't actually be
| better off.
| card_zero wrote:
| There are no prizes for effort. People reward you if you
| please them, not if you spin on a hamster wheel.
| psychoslave wrote:
| People that can be taxed at several order of magnitude of
| wealth compared to a median income obviously didn't work
| several degree of magnitude harder/longer/smarter. They
| more "efficiently" capture the benefits, certainly, but
| that's it. And even there, mainly through network effect
| and pre-existing social forces.
|
| If instead distribution of wealth was flatter in an
| equally wealthy society, a tax could still capture just
| as much.
|
| When vladms speaks about high taxes on the rich, it
| already assumes the continuation of social structure
| which exaggerates the uneven distribution of wealth.
| mlrtime wrote:
| This is great in theory, but not practice and not
| practiced anywhere. You could site some EU countries with
| a very homogeneous population and a GDP < half of the
| states, but it's not convincing.
|
| I don't think we currently have the most efficient tax vs
| productivity situation now, but I don't agree with
| equality being the goal.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Obviously no argument can convince a party which say
| literally that proofs will be rejected, even those which
| might be provided on some concrete example. All the more
| when this party doesn't align with the underlying praised
| values anyway.
| vladms wrote:
| It is about the practicality of convincing people to do
| something. Many people I know are inert and would say no
| to change. Even those that want change have a favorite
| topic.
|
| So, personally, when discussing economic topics I discuss
| the taxes part, which is so clearly unjust when explained
| (most countries tax less capital gains than work, which
| results in rich people able to accumulate things faster).
|
| Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know
| exactly what will work - humans are complex. So while I
| hope that it is possible to have "A society can also
| thrive without high income disparities.", proposing too
| many changes at once might result in an undesired result.
| There are enough examples in history where good
| intentions led to catastrophes.
| psychoslave wrote:
| > Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know
| exactly what will work
|
| Sure. It doesn't mean anyone else know better from some
| absolute perspective that we should blindly trust.
|
| >proposing too many changes at once might result in an
| undesired result. There are enough examples in history
| where good intentions led to catastrophes.
|
| Not proposing any change, letting the same egocentric
| people with selfish intentions always have the last word
| on what should change or not, also proved to be a sure
| source of great human catastrophic outcomes.
| Ajakks wrote:
| Success isn't real. All things are internal, but we
| make/pretend they are external. I dont care at all of your
| accolades or accomplishments. Exactly like you dont care of
| mine. If we ever do care about others' success, its not bc
| of the other people. We are just playing games with
| ourselves and calling it stuff like expectations,
| admiration, respect, and responsibility - its all bullshit.
|
| UBI allows a different life. You can only fail so much,
| only fall so far - rather than people being lazy, it will
| be a huge boon for creativity. The 9-5 for 45 is creative
| death.
| ultratalk wrote:
| Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs
| individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We
| could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the
| 14+14 thing for corporations.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability
| they're a group and no one is responsible. when they want to
| assert rights and make $ "they're an individual" it's
| complete corruption
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| > Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on
| human timescales.
|
| I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues
| in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they
| are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX
| years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their
| products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b)
| they want to control the output of their intellect.
|
| As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you
| can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer
| aspects.
|
| An example would be software developers thinking only of code
| copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the
| functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily
| reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions
| are also copyright protected.
| ronsor wrote:
| > They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their
| products are still in use or appreciated decades later and
| (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
|
| Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them;
| their interests are not absolute.
| adventured wrote:
| > their interests are not absolute
|
| The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also
| not an absolute either direction. In one culture the
| interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in
| another culture the exact opposite could be held as the
| value: no copyrights at all.
|
| That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable
| cultural variance across the globe on the matter.
| ronsor wrote:
| I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S.
| Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently,
| but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out
| of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
| hgomersall wrote:
| Isn't the question whether it's reasonable for people to
| be rentiers? Clearly lots of the population are, but
| wouldn't it be better if they carried on creating rather
| than sitting back and doing nothing for the remainder of
| their place on earth?
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > The question of interests is a cultural debate
|
| Not at all, that question has quite real and far reaching
| economic and political consequences, it's not about
| endless debating, it's about proper and timely deciding,
| precisely in the framework of economics and politics
| within the Constitution.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| > they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime
| of the owner + XX years "It is difficult to
| get a man to understand something when his salary
| depends on his not understanding it." ~Upton Sinclair
|
| Copyright is meant to reward innovators while it's still an
| innovation, and reward society once it has been fully
| inculcated.
|
| Would the original creator prefer to rest on his laurels and
| collect checks instead? yep.
|
| Would all the hundreds of people out there wanting to
| innovate on that copyrighted idea also like to make a buck?
| yep.
|
| It's all a balance of competing interests.
|
| Well. It's supposed to be.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents
| (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use
| for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting
| creative works, which are, by their nature, much much
| easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring
| it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can
| all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't
| turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling
| them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some
| legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to
| copy, that I can sell exceptions to.
|
| Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long
| copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent
| terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I
| can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.
|
| IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright
| over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have
| contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your
| rights to, including the production of derivative works and
| the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is
| codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable
| on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or
| something significantly different). For the next 2 decades
| after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use
| becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-
| all.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Of course they do, their bias is to keep all the cards in
| their favor. Our (the consumer's) bias is to shorten
| copyright.
|
| Remember, ultimately it is the consumer who pays the creator;
| thus the consumer has a vested interest in negotiating how
| long copyright should last.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| However, ultimately, few people really are holding any
| cards. Most will have to compromise a great deal, to be
| able to generate income and benefit from existing
| publishing infrastructure.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Which is absurd, because most creators would benefit hugely
| from an expanded public domain.
| codyb wrote:
| I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any
| artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
|
| And many content creators might benefit from an expanded
| public domain, or they might not... There's already tons
| of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually,
| some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or
| underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded
| quantities of available characters would necessarily
| change much.
| jandrese wrote:
| > Obviously any artist producing fully original music or
| art doesn't.
|
| I would suggest that artists who say they're producing
| fully original works are just poorly educated in art
| history. Making something that has no prior influences
| would be extraordinary in the modern world.
|
| Also, the entities most capable of exploiting long
| copyright terms are corporations. Individuals simply
| don't have the resources to keep something relevant
| decade after decade save for a very small handful of
| exceptions like J.R.R. Tolkien.
| codyb wrote:
| I'm not even really advocating for or against the
| copyright position.
|
| I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause
| you study lots of works and create an original creation
| which borrows influences isn't the same thing as
| requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.
|
| It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have
| no influences cause I classified works without any
| copyrighted material as original.
|
| My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted
| work becomes available does not necessarily imply
| creators and artists lives will be substantially
| different or better off.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| maybe 'creator' in the youtuber sense
|
| But most creative people I know aren't really that
| interested in trying to co-opt someone else's work
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Oh really? You don't think all the creators who do things
| like make video essays on 20 year old movies would
| benefit from not getting the rug pulled out from under
| them? You don't think they would prefer being legally in
| the right making money from analysis of media that was a
| _generation_ ago?
|
| You don't think the Techmoans and Technology connections
| would prefer having better demonstration material than
| whatever recordings from 1912 exist, so that they could
| actually show you what they are trying to demonstrate
| without having their livelihood threatened by a
| capricious and byzantine system hell bent on pleasing a
| few megacorps?
|
| You don't think the creatives who made "The Katering
| show" for example would prefer that more people watch
| their artistic output than have it locked behind some
| business leaving it languishing in a random digital
| storefront rather than letting more people buy it because
| they just cannot be assed? Oh, you don't actually have to
| guess, because they uploaded a youtube video where they
| encourage people to pirate their work so they can see it.
|
| Creatives and artists tend to _enjoy_ their work being
| consumed and riffed on (not plagiarized) and well
| adjusted artists recognize that there 's "nothing new
| under the sun" and that remixing and riffing are
| essential parts of the creative and artistic process.
|
| Hell, the music industry even understands this, which is
| why letting songs get licensed out for remixes and future
| use is common.
|
| What "Creative" people do you know?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living
| with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations.
| Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely
| will not be achieved by most of them.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Maybe, but their economic role might be more like an angel
| investor or VC-- fund a hundred failed efforts and hang on
| for dear life to the few runaway successes.
|
| The sweet spot would have been an initial term of 14years
| or something like that, and generous duration thereafter,
| limited to works that are registered and re-registered on a
| regular basis.
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| Yeah, this sounds very similar to people who vote as if
| they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires. "There's a
| minuscule chance my work will become super lucrative for
| decades, so I want a super long copyright" when they don't
| realize that a much shorter copyright can help them
| creatively in the near term.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Mmmm..
|
| I don't know man?
|
| I actually don't mind 14+14 for corps. Because corps could
| conceivably never "die". (In fact, I wouldn't even be too
| opposed to getting rid of the +14 part).
|
| But for individual people who make things, I think if
| they're alive, it should be theirs. And I'm a guy who's not
| a creative.
|
| I just think if you come up with a painting, or story, or
| video game, why should a big corporate be able to swoop in
| and just copy it while you're alive without paying you?
|
| The copyright should lapse after a reasonable amount of
| time following your death. But while you're alive, what you
| made should be yours.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Corporations can't create copyrighted works, only people
| can. The date of copyright expires is based on when the
| actual humans authors die.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > But for individual people who make things, I think if
| they're alive, it should be theirs.
|
| But _it is theirs_... well, until they sell it. We aren
| 't talking about the things they make but about _copies_
| of them. I can 't believe there are people who still
| don't understand the difference.
|
| The copies aren't theirs to begin with, copyright isn't
| natural property and it's not a natural right, that much
| is set in stone. Don't be confused by the ridiculous name
| "Intellectual Property".
|
| I'm not saying the legal right called copyright should
| not exist but it should be paired back to the terms it
| was originally limited to, there are good reasons for
| those limits.
| realusername wrote:
| Of course they are happy with that, they are not the ones
| affected by the problem and even benefit financially from it.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with
| colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they
| all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the
| owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy
| in case their products are still in use or appreciated
| decades later and (b) they want to control the output of
| their intellect._
|
| If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income
| for my offspring after I pass.
|
| Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that
| was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't
| profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then
| I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically)
| beneficial to society.
| kube-system wrote:
| > If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate
| income for my offspring after I pass.
|
| Because an accountant's work is timely and transactional.
| Creative works may have lasting value for multiple
| customers.
|
| As a contrasting example: pretty much all other income
| generating assets can be passed down.
|
| Copyright is a compromise between society and authors, and
| I think that's the right way to frame things.
|
| (Also some countries have this same compromise for assets
| such as land, where land "ownership" is subject to time
| limits)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| When asked "do you want more or less income?", most people,
| including me, will answer "more".
|
| That doesn't mean it's always the right decision.
| theknarf wrote:
| Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would
| consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no.
| Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up
| all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for
| the world.
|
| Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can
| be so blind to the world.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me
| money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25
| years ago, I'd _absolutely_ take that deal.
|
| ... it may not be in society 's best interest to offer it to
| me though.
|
| (Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all
| of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up
| from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we
| could do _a lot more_ writing, performing, and general
| making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit
| scientific exploration).
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view
| of value.
|
| Give 14 years free.
|
| Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how
| much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them
| some (smallish) percentage of that.
|
| Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of
| money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and
| then the work is in the public domain.
| throw10920 wrote:
| Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the
| copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into
| the public domain) that were released when they were in their
| teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing
| - I'd love to do that with _my_ kids, or hit up my parents and
| find a game from _their_ childhood and mess around with it.
|
| Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was
| only made 28 years ago is _categorically_ different than
| something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the
| commons would be huge.
| shagie wrote:
| This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw
| from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of
| countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati,
| North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
|
| > Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based
| on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)
|
| > Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon
| any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the
| Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
|
| ---
|
| 14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all
| of the other countries in the WTO agree to it.
|
| Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless
| with copyright, that might be a hard sell.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Perhaps Trumpian madness will do something good for once.
| drob518 wrote:
| Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture is a great read in this
| space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright
| terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse.
| Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney
| lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on
| culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have
| gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making
| animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales
| and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants
| to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes,
| we want creators compensated. But we can do that without
| letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of
| a global mega corporation like Disney.
| nmz wrote:
| It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their
| symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a
| child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer
| children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
| drob518 wrote:
| I don't blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying
| to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be
| compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he
| ever become public domain?
| officeplant wrote:
| Well his origin "Steam Boat Willie" became public domain
| last year.
| drob518 wrote:
| The film is in the public domain and the original
| versions of Mickey and Minnie are public domain. But that
| does NOT apply to the later versions of Mickey that you'd
| find Disney pushing today (e.g., at parks, on apparel,
| etc.). Further, Disney has been trying to continue to
| assert copyright even over the original version of the
| character. See here for more info:
| https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-
| publi...
| gausswho wrote:
| The irony of sticking your finger in the dyke with a
| racial slur long forgotten.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a
| copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially
| increasing fee.
|
| Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years
| you're welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP
| they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
|
| Why?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most
| people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and
| increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which
| eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different
| copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they
| would cost way above ROI.
|
| Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew
| every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so
| Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10
| years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere
| else anyway.
| madduci wrote:
| And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all
| hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that
| these are only limitations applied to private persons or small
| companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with
| an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer
| exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the
| entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica
| CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually
| want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a
| special exception because everything is supposed to
| unconditionally work in their favor regardless of
| circumstances.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing
| abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried
| about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
|
| And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at
| least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making
| people a little "hungrier" by _loosening_ the protection seems
| to be the way society should tilt.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband
| creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
|
| they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
|
| he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old
| house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the
| new villa was built on the old ground.
| dbspin wrote:
| This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that
| individual cities and states are large enough markets people
| can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A
| staggering difference from Europe.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| ...I'm in the EU - its not an US specific feature
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| This article and the articles linked in it only provide a
| selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone
| know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of
| them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of
| names.
| badmonster wrote:
| Interesting that copyright terms vary so much globally. Are there
| any notable works from non-Western countries entering public
| domain in 2026?
| zoobab wrote:
| No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is
| not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would
| exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
| yason wrote:
| As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more
| importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the
| explicit monopoly.
|
| Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit)
| from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said
| works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
|
| If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the
| protection of copyright.
|
| If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but
| it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature
| of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay
| annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that
| are no longer commercially viable.
|
| The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works
| so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have
| trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the
| profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it
| copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to
| your net income from current sales), but if you published an
| obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees
| would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd
| have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up
| the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall
| in public domain.
|
| Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in
| different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in
| 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably
| wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public
| domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright
| for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of
| the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these
| could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
|
| Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to
| but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted
| works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point
| each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have
| to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall
| balance approaches unprofitability.
|
| Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have
| shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair
| use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain
| conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold
| copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for
| decades and eventually, for centuries.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Yeah i think books that are out of print since decades should
| become public domain.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| > Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to
| profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market
| value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present
| them for sale.
|
| > If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy
| the protection of copyright.
|
| Suppose Lucy paints original portraits of Barbra Streisand and
| sells them on eBay. She makes no copies of them; there are no
| copies of them for her to sell.
|
| And Lucy is just a painter. She's not a printer. She's not a
| publisher. Again: Lucy only paints portraits of Barbra
| Streisand and sells them on eBay. That's all that she does.
|
| But because Lucy isn't selling copies, then the portraits
| become public domain and anyone is free to copy them.
|
| Why would that ever be a thing that encourages Lucy to paint
| more portraits of Barbra Streisand?
| jandrese wrote:
| At the very least a system like this might force publishers to
| not drop ebooks from their stores just because.
|
| But others would point out that being able to not distribute a
| work is part of having the copyright. If a corporation doesn't
| want to sell old works because they want to encourage people to
| only buy new works then that's their right. The government
| saying that it's fair game simply because there's no legal
| option to purchase it is an infringement on their right to
| withhold the work from the public. They could even have a
| policy of destroying all copies of the work once it goes off
| sale to make sure it never enters the public domain, that's
| also within their rights.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was
| a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't
| be that surprised it's entering public domain.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Read this to my daughters. What a great story! Wish I had known
| of it as a kid.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War
| happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I
| learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from
| Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs
| from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the
| deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the
| two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the
| conflict.
|
| In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of
| copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia
| etc have done with copyright since then.
| igsomething wrote:
| Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free
| (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government,
| for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or
| any work you created.
|
| This is likely going to change since the organism responsible
| for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public
| domain depend on where they were published. This is not true!
| It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if
| you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year
| country is in the public domain in said country, it would still
| be illegal to distribute in the US.
|
| Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in
| the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a
| death+50 year country.
| graemep wrote:
| I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of
| what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily
| not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used
| for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as
| charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
|
| That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have
| not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if
| you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its
| something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
|
| This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that
| copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers
| from normal people will be less than the current "author's
| lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is
| probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
| skirge wrote:
| "What I need should be copyrighted zero years and what I sell
| should be copyrighter indefinitely", this is an answer you will
| get.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Wasn't it 14+14 at some point? I wonder if that would be above
| or below the average response
| nancyminusone wrote:
| My answer is "a generation". There's so many ideas and
| behaviors that don't persist between generations that it seems
| as natural of a division as you could have.
|
| The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems
| about right.
| ronsor wrote:
| A generation is usually considered to be ~20 years, which is
| less than 14+14, not that I'm complaining.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry
| copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it
| distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just
| don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is
| caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever?
| Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand
| people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond
| that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if
| the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I
| don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make
| derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public
| domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The issue is with limiting creativity in all kinds of works and
| areas. It would be great, if we could organize society in a
| way, that makes artificial limits and boundaries to information
| sharing unnecessary.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| That is tautological. _Why_ is limiting creativity in works
| and areas "the issue"? What concrete problem is happening
| because Mickey Mouse was under copyright until recently?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| of all websites, hacker news dot com is not ready to discuss
| the abolition of the profit motive from society.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Why should the author have rights to my Harry Potter fan
| fiction idea? They only came up with the characters but somehow
| control the whole thing?
| snohobro wrote:
| My issue isn't so much derivative works, but the original
| content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it
| available to the public (for free or for sale) in any
| meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always
| enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I'd love to be able to
| regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube
| version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and
| there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I
| just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality
| version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it
| were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it.
| Now just because it's copyright free doesn't mean it magically
| appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who
| has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it
| available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable
| to stop that from happening.
| shagie wrote:
| As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of
| the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
|
| If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't
| the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that
| they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door
| without reimbursing me in any way?
| snohobro wrote:
| I don't think copyright shouldn't exist at all, I think the
| general consensus in this topic has been that the length of
| copyright protection is longer than is considered
| reasonable.
|
| You don't have to sell the prints if you don't want to. But
| if someone else does fulfill that market demand by selling
| or giving away your photographs after those photographs
| have entered into public domain, that's a win for all those
| who wished to enjoy your art. Without having to visit that
| particular restaurant. The length of time to get to public
| domain is the issue at hand.
|
| I want you to make money on your photography. It's a good
| incentive to keep doing that scope of work and more art in
| the world is a win for humanity. But if you haven't been
| able to recuperate losses and make profit on a particular
| photo after 70 years, I don't think it's going to happen
| for ya.
| shagie wrote:
| If I understand this correctly, your assertion is that me
| selling you a print 14 years ago (or 28) would now give
| you (or anyone) permission to put that on T-shirts and
| sell them despite that I'm still making prints of that
| photograph and selling it?
|
| Aside on this is that it disincentivizes me to display
| anything that I don't want to sell and think I can make
| money on during the copyright protected period.
|
| I have hundreds of photographs... the idea that I'd need
| to pay some amount to re-register them (individually?)
| extend their copyright protection is likewise absurd.
| (Compare : do you pay to re-register the copyright on
| each file in an open source repository ... because each
| file has a different copyright on it ... or the entire
| collection? But what is a logical collection of
| photographs?)
|
| I have photographs that have made more money in the past
| 5 years than they have in the 30 years prior.
|
| Moving things to the public domain faster than the
| artists who created the material would likely make them
| less likely to produce, publish, or sell things that
| would enter the public domain before they could benefit
| from them would result in the material becoming a
| patronage based system or the material never being
| created at all.
|
| I do not want all artwork to be locked behind a patronage
| system. e.g. "Here's my patreon - all members at the $20
| level get a high quality digital image each week." That
| would be bad for art as a whole... you'd never see it at
| an art festival or in a gallery or a restaurant wall.
|
| I realize this is becoming more and more popular... but I
| don't think it is good. Shorter copyright terms would
| make this even more prevalent because of the difficulties
| being able to make money as an artist off the material.
| The long tail of a photographer's library is very much a
| thing and part of one's livelihood. Cutting off that tail
| prematurely doesn't put more material into the public
| domain - it results in less material being created.
| bustadjustme wrote:
| You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on
| the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as
| nonsensical.
|
| I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long
| is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared
| experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've
| become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The
| Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright
| in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of
| Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public
| domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday"
| song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I
| associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if
| you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for
| the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio,
| establishments, because somebody was thought to own the
| copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and
| experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos
| (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same
| thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a
| published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become
| pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their
| protection remains.
|
| Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm
| version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make
| derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been
| disallowed from making it because elements of the story were
| "so recent"?
|
| Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work,
| but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent
| argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances
| the interests of authors/creators.
| jandrese wrote:
| Imagine a little known work from 1920 written by an author that
| died in 1955 featuring a boy wizard in a magic school who's
| estate sues J. K. Rowling in 1998 for copyright infringement.
| We might never have gotten any further books.
|
| This probably seems unlikely, but it's the flipside of
| exceptionally long copyrights, especially ones held by
| corporate interests who hire lawyers specifically to enforce
| copyright. The growth of AI is only going to make this more of
| a problem in the future. Imagine a ContentID like system but on
| the concepts and themes of works.
| dhosek wrote:
| The article has a link to
|
| https://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/08/do-bad-things-happen-when-w...
| (Do Bad things happen when works enter the public domain?)
|
| There are answer is no, but they're ignoring the fact that when
| works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror
| movies "based" on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning
| sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we'll all have to
| watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" in
| 2026.
|
| I hope you're happy.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| I didn't realize we were forcing people to watch movies now,
| that is quite concerning.
| jandrese wrote:
| Certainly you have your Clockwork Orange movie theater setup
| in your house right?
| RaSoJo wrote:
| Wow. The first Nancy Drew came out the same year as the first
| Miss Marple. I always thought of Nancy Drew as a much later
| phenomenon.
| newer_vienna wrote:
| Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at
| all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or
| corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case.
| Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
| NoSalt wrote:
| I wonder if there is a less annoying list I can read.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Ridiculous that stuff from 1930 is what's coming out in the US.
|
| Just make it 50-ish years, absolute max.
|
| On a side note, that web page's presentation of the items is
| leaving much to be desired. I can't click on each individual item
| out-of-order on Safari.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Oh, it's a countdown/Advent calendar.
|
| I mean I admire the creativity but I don't care enough to visit
| the page each day. Just give me the list.
| retrac wrote:
| Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright
| extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years,
| nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
| emptybits wrote:
| There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming
| "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the
| impatient: 1 William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
| 2 Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons 3 Albert Einstein
| 4 Nan Shepherd - The Weatherhouse 5 Langston Hughes - Not
| Without Laughter 6 Wallace Stevens 7 Hermann Hesse
| - Narcissus and Goldmund 8 All Quiet on the Western Front
| (1930 film) 9 Barbara Hepworth 10 Evelyn Waugh -
| Vile Bodies 11 Geoffrey Dennis - The End of the World
| 12 Charlie Parker 13 Margaret Ayer Barnes - Years of Grace
| 14 Hellbound Train 15 Hannah Arendt 16 Robert Musil -
| The Man Without Qualities 17 T. S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday
| 18 Thomas Mann 19 Agatha Christie - The Murder at the
| Vicarage 20 Franz Kafka - The Castle (English translation)
| 21 Walker Evans 22 Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its
| Discontents 23 Stella Benson - The Far-Away Bride 24
| Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 25 E. H. Young - Miss Mole
| 26 P. G. Wodehouse 27 Vladimir Nabokov - The Defense
| 28 Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon 29 Roger Mais
| 30 Saadat Hasan Manto 31 Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz -
| Insatiability
| tsoukase wrote:
| Entering PD at death+70y usually means a 100+-20y duration. Does
| anyone respect this silly timescale? Does any fine been imposed
| for a forgotten old work?
|
| Compare that with a drug's IP: total of 20 years after the
| molecule patent, of which 8-10y in clinical trials and only
| 10-12y in profitable life. But everyone respects that until the
| last day and it brings billions back.
|
| A short IP time would favor the small/poor creators that could
| earn something during their lifetime when the work is fresh,
| while a long one favors companies like Disney which can protect
| the copyright with their group of lawyers.
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