[HN Gopher] Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disag...
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Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
Author : Tomte
Score : 189 points
Date : 2026-02-27 15:28 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (copyrightlately.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (copyrightlately.com)
| theragra wrote:
| As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an
| enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to
| death of an author. Even current regime is ridiculous.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property
| for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for
| free - while a piece of land pays property taxes.
| ivell wrote:
| IPR is a form of incentive for creators in service of
| betterment of the society (it also could be detrimental like
| Mein Kempf though). On the other hand real estate does not
| need such extra incentives. Need or greed is enough.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| The book title is "Mein K_a_mpf".
|
| It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like
| most European languages, there are close relationships to
| the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this
| case not.
| simonh wrote:
| Creators pay tax on their income.
|
| We all get legal protections for our property.
| boomlinde wrote:
| Real property owners also pay tax on their income. Income
| is taxed. Real property is taxed. Intellectual property is
| not.
| brookst wrote:
| IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.
|
| It's pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or
| office building is worth based on comparables that sold
| recently. IP doesn't sell that much and comparisons are
| harder.
| closewith wrote:
| This is actually a solved problem. It is self-assessed
| valuation with compulsory sale at declared value, known
| as the Harberger Tax.
| ralferoo wrote:
| This is only a solution if you think it's fair to have a
| regular ownership tax on top of the tax paid when
| purchasing / selling something.
| closewith wrote:
| It's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to
| fairly value IP.
|
| This whole thread is about how many countries with land
| taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether
| you think it's fair or not is another question - the
| blocker isn't fair valuation.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the solution to how to fairly value IP was provided by
| the owner, capital gains tax happens on sale of IP
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210
|
| capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally.
| These two things are obviously taxed differently because
| it is to the value of the government to do so, and the
| value of the government is supposed in many countries to
| somehow translate into a value for society.
| closewith wrote:
| Profits from property sales are often tax as CGT. It's
| only a select few jurisdictions that don't tax property
| sales, often with both CGTs and stamp duties.
|
| The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly
| not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
| boomlinde wrote:
| The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property
| would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of
| intellectual property, from people who can't afford to
| pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are
| willing to pay.
|
| A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where
| any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from
| my property and what wealth I actually extract from it
| represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a
| transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience
| to the original owner. In reality, there are many other
| reasons than market value that I might hold onto
| intellectual property.
| wang_li wrote:
| That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact
| that a piece of property's value can change over time.
| You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to
| knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't
| independently wealthy already you will never be able to
| become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc.
| as you will have to declare their value quite low in
| order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the
| publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from
| you for the low value you had to put on it because you
| couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond
| what the author could afford and profits from the movies
| rights and etc.
| toast0 wrote:
| Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of
| payments it will generate; take the net present value
| using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.
|
| Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not.
| Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates
| change a lot.
|
| I'm not sure you _really_ need a proprerty tax on
| copyrights though. They generate taxable income until
| they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income
| rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases
| where the appraisal is too high or too low.
| simonh wrote:
| I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes
| here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital
| gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes
| on buildings such as council taxes on houses,
| specifically to pay for municipal services, but not
| generally on land.
|
| If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I
| earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
| closewith wrote:
| There are some analogues of a land tax in the UK. Council
| tax for residential property, rates for businesses, and
| the upcoming mansion tax.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital
| gains on sold real property (this "often" of course
| varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may
| pay some if the conditions are right), when selling
| intellectual property you often (same proviso as before,
| only inverted) pay capital gains.
| kube-system wrote:
| Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are
| partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are
| entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties,
| nor should it be.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Taxing copyright ownership is effectively impossible.
|
| Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill
| for the comment you have written.
|
| Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is
| subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to
| decide how a tweet should be taxed
| stevekemp wrote:
| > while a piece of land pays property taxes.
|
| In some countries taxes are annual.
|
| In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land.
| You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
| lanceflt wrote:
| Council taxes are property taxes and are monthly.
| dghf wrote:
| Well, technically they're annual, but you're allowed to
| pay them in arrears over 10 or 12 months.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Council taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I
| guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for
| rubbish collection & etc.
|
| However council taxes are paid by the residents of a
| property rather than the owner of a property. Granted
| these are often the same, but consider the case of a
| landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying
| those.
|
| In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as
| an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a
| slightly different thing..
|
| (And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy
| a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
| mvc wrote:
| They're not exactly proportional to the value of the
| property though are they? There's folks in London with
| multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in
| council tax than a family home in the suburbs.
| piaste wrote:
| The enforcement isn't the issue, it's the scarcity.
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| The state isn't enforcing your rights for free - you still
| have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself.
|
| The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are
| allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
|
| This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for
| free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this
| infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
| cestith wrote:
| Copyright infringement in the United States has both civil
| and criminal elements at law.
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| Touche.
|
| This will arouse the ire of the "copyright infringement
| isn't theft" people - but we also have the government
| enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
|
| I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP
| revenue or physical property will be born by the victim
| though.
| cestith wrote:
| Sometimes for physical property the police take it and
| the owner can get it back from them. That much is
| sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I
| wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it
| I would have had to get it from the thief.
|
| Often the property is never found and returned.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I
| fully support copyright enforcement being funded by
| intellectual property taxes:
|
| * You declare your property's worth.
|
| * You pay IP taxes on that worth.
|
| * You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth,
| total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for
| $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car
| from you, you can't collect its full worth each from
| multiple thieves.
|
| And if you have a $1B film, you can't sue for $1B if
| you're only paying taxes on $1M.
|
| Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the
| public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our
| property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire
| departments and police.
| tacticalturtle wrote:
| > Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that.
|
| But they don't?
|
| Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property
| taxes don't fund that. The income tax that we all pay,
| including the IP holders, do the funding.
|
| Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of
| Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income
| taxes fund that, not property taxes.
| kube-system wrote:
| Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not
| for copyright... or for any other type of loss.
|
| People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a
| civil case to recover for damages in a copyright
| infringement case... or any kind of case.
|
| The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case
| do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is
| between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The
| copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
| toast0 wrote:
| Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues
| generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those
| funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to
| copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some
| recovery from criminal proceedings.
| kube-system wrote:
| If a criminal case ever happens, it is a possibility that
| restitution can be awarded. But generally, if somebody's
| infringing your copyright and you want to seek damages,
| you need to bring a civil case yourself. Well over 99% of
| copyright cases are civil.
| SolarNet wrote:
| Land is scarce. Also, generally, property taxes are paid to
| the city/county that makes that land desirable to live in.
| kube-system wrote:
| > It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual
| property for very little
|
| It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for
| your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an
| inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all,
| under the 1886 Berne Convention.
|
| Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| In the US, you do not _need_ to register your copyright. It
| is entirely optional, and you can still enforce an
| unregistered copyright.
| kube-system wrote:
| Right, that's one of the terms of the Berne Convention
| that I am referencing.
| freejazz wrote:
| How often do you see the US enforcing copyrights?
| edent wrote:
| "Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to
| kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright.
| cubefox wrote:
| Maybe 100 years after birth instead.
| cestith wrote:
| That's a disincentive to authors in their later years if
| it's a straight rule.
|
| We'd need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to
| their 100th birthday or something.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding your
| only motivation to create or share anything is the
| opportunity to extract as much value from society as
| possible.
| kube-system wrote:
| Many people find motivation to give to their heirs in
| their last phase of life.
| freejazz wrote:
| I don't see anyone here judging you for going to work and
| wanting to be compensated for your efforts. But suddenly
| authors are "extract[ing] as much value from society as
| possible"? That's just rude. If we're being honest, it's
| much better for society that an author gets that money
| than someone working at Facebook.
| cestith wrote:
| Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding you
| have to work full time as a Walmart greeter because you
| can't support yourself as a working artist anymore due to
| ageist pricks being in charge of policy.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| This isn't a bad idea. It would prevent the constant
| recycling of copyrighted works and bias the creative
| economy towards newer works. It seems the bias is in the
| other direction at the moment.
| kibwen wrote:
| Taking the death date into account is literally already how
| prevailing copyright law works. You can just make it
| conditional on publish date.
| edent wrote:
| Sure, but Life + 70 means it is unlikely that anyone will
| benefit from the death _soon_.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| One provision of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act
| [0] (which expired 6 months after passage of the law)
| allowed next-of-kin to revoke (the sale of) copyrights
| _sold_ by the author without recourse (by the folks who
| paid for them). Allegedly, this was added by Disney in
| order to cut costs hundreds of millions of dollars in a
| dispute over licensing _Winnie The Pooh_ IP /rights [1].
|
| Expect something similar when the next big author dies;
| my prediction: JK Rowling.
|
| Notes:
|
| 0 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-
| bill/505
|
| 1- https://hughstephensblog.net/2023/12/18/winnie-the-
| poohs-cop...
| benj111 wrote:
| TBF there's currently a massive perverse incentive in that we
| want to encourage creators to create, but then allow the
| successful ones to retire making money from past works.
| nullc wrote:
| The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author--
| or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized
| to do so by postmortem profits.
|
| Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it
| won't create a windfall for any particular party. The
| residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly
| when an author's preferences are capping the market for their
| work or when the publicity of their death will create
| newfound popularity.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The inheritors are in a better position to kill the
| author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are
| incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
|
| An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard;
| but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption
| amount means that few estates pay any tax.
|
| > Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse,
| it won't create a windfall for any particular party.
|
| A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a
| windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of
| an untimely death.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| The distinction between author and their estates is
| fascinating: the stereotype is estates mismanaging the art,
| but that usually happens because the estates want to be
| "artistic" themselves.
|
| Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things
| for no reason.
|
| JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed
| away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought
| tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey
| zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
| jandrese wrote:
| Imagine what a better world we would live in if the
| Tolkien estate was able to kill D&D in the cradle as they
| would have liked...
|
| /s
| Supermancho wrote:
| > The inheritors are in a better position to kill the
| author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are
| incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
|
| This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the
| author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it
| is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a
| negative signal.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| Almost all works make all their money in the first five years
| after creation.
|
| 5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit,
| that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not
| penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the
| first place, i.e. us.
|
| Fuck the copyright cartels.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Generative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of
| copyright to society.
|
| There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are
| tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights
| holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties,
| in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA
| could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise
| values of all record labels combined.
|
| Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join
| copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and
| effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar
| companies from training and serving generative AI models.
| Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or
| image generation would be illegal.
|
| These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of
| human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to
| assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual
| property rights does that individual deserve? How much
| intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their
| rights owners deserve?
|
| What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains
| of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as
| generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and
| real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative
| AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is
| really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
|
| Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of
| these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely
| ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for
| things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near
| term, 5 years sounds ok.
| freejazz wrote:
| A human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take
| posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are
| premised on complete misunderstanding.
| wang_li wrote:
| There is a legally protected right of publicity. You
| cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your
| advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their
| permission.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There is a legally protected right of publicity.
|
| There is not a general right of publicity in federal law
| in the US; in certain states there is with different
| parameters, including as to who is even protected.
|
| There _is_ a false endorsement provision in the Lanham
| Act, 15 USC SS 1125(a), that provides a very narrow
| protection around misleading commercial endorsement,
| though.
| freejazz wrote:
| In some states, yeah, but it is not a copyright and has
| nothing to do with copyright.
| freejazz wrote:
| If its the term that's the issue, it's the term, not copyright
| itself. Which do you think it is?
| observationist wrote:
| 0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total
| say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies.
| Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15%
| royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context,
| for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain.
|
| Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on
| media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5
| years after publishing.
|
| No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a
| creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life
| by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.
|
| Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and
| wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a
| continual basis. We don't have to live like this.
|
| Until it changes, pirate everything.
| goku12 wrote:
| Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future
| aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like
| what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the
| politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
| kube-system wrote:
| The first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and
| 21 years for works already in production.
|
| The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a
| renewable 14 years.
| observationist wrote:
| This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could
| see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10
| years, but more or less operate identically.
|
| Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions,
| grandfathered special interests, or variations for special
| industries.
|
| This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry,
| like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP
| hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture -
| gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it
| most.
|
| It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing
| - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage
| of a creator's fair-use content in the training data,
| whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided
| each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for
| inflation, etc.
|
| No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and
| giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI
| revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data
| legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier
| to entry.
|
| Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to
| understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates
| to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them
| engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat
| of legal peril.
|
| No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million
| dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.
|
| The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets
| nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of
| middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the
| apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal
| services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
| Angostura wrote:
| The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use
| of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently
| attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell
| us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly
| use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of
| course that original concept has been corrupted
| observationist wrote:
| Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse
| engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented,
| it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it,
| they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're
| paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc.
| We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give
| it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit
| schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild
| something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and
| clear laws around things. The current system is also
| designed around a court system and process that regularly
| drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid
| obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no
| legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest
| years of their lives and lots of money to fight big
| companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand
| just on principle, and so forth.
|
| A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright
| laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity
| times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people
| want their legalized scams to continue.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse
| engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented,
| it can be copied
|
| That's true for products that are freely distributed,
| less so for inventions that are more closely held.
|
| If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics,
| aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets
| have always been pretty compelling by default, and
| patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.
|
| It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we
| don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced
| widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of
| patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to
| share the real cutting edge advancements.
|
| In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you
| need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public
| paper.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| Anyone looking to start pirating check out fmhy.net (free
| media heck yeah)
| jcranmer wrote:
| So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin
| should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made
| off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years
| after the first book was published.
| danaris wrote:
| First of all, your timeline is off: A Game of Thrones was
| published in 1996, and the Game of Thrones series premiered
| in 2011.
|
| Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only
| apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which
| were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with
| Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).
|
| So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright
| maximalist strawman?
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Even if the timeline in the question is off, do you agree
| with the premise? If Stephen King puts out a novel in
| 2026, when should I be able to sell photocopies of the
| novel without paying royalties. 2027?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| According to the regime this thread is discussing (in
| observationist's post upthread), 2037. This seems more
| than fair to me.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Maybe it would have encouraged him to write the last books
| and thus have an ending
| reedciccio wrote:
| Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT,
| not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he
| wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work
| on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright
| expired.
| specialist wrote:
| I'm totally fine with your proposal.
|
| I especially like no-permission-needed for commercial use
| with predetermined royalties. Throw in patents and I'll be
| your best friend for life.
|
| Another reform notion I heard (IIRC): Require formal renewal
| of copyrights. $10 fee per year to cover expenses. Allows
| Disney to keep their Tug Boat Willie and Mickey Mouse for as
| long as they like, without borking the rest of society.
|
| My own reform idea: Royalty also paid to the government. For
| all IP, for all time. To enjoy our govt's subsidies,
| protection (tort), and adjudication (contracts), you gotta
| pay.
|
| The aircraft carrier groups, diplomats, intelligence
| services, and lawyers needed to keep our markets open don't
| just pay for themselves.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't think Taylor Swift became a billionaire on copyrights
| of her songs - it was because she did very successful concerts
| performing them.
|
| CDs and streaming are just advertisements for the concerts.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I would argue that in a digital world, copyright should be
| inversely scalable to the size of the creator - that is,
| individual works by independent artists intended for exhibition
| rather than reproduction should receive more favorable terms
| than movies or games created by huge conglomerates intended for
| mass reproduction, licensing, and sale.
|
| Or more simply: if you're not selling it presently, you don't
| get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights
| are solved, and we can all move on.
| bobro wrote:
| Just to try to understand this, do you think anyone should be
| able to make, say, a Harry Potter movie right now paying
| nothing to the author?
| function_seven wrote:
| Yes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to
| be published, with the author of those works knowing that
| they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned
| quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been
| incentivized.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| What about the other 99.99999% of authors?
| Aerroon wrote:
| If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much
| it's not going to sell now either, no?
|
| But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse
| correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too
| short where an author writes something popular and a
| movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it
| rather than pay the author.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| > If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell
| much it's not going to sell now either, no?
|
| That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a
| little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that
| he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then
| a game development studio made a series of _wildly_
| successfully videogames based on his work, which
| definitely made _way_ more money than his books, to the
| point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I
| struggle to imagine how it could be just that the
| videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him
| nothing.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| He sold his rights to CDPro. Also the videogame made him
| famous- I for one read one of his books BECAUSE of the
| game and I'm sure that I am not the only one.
|
| There's a reason why writers want their books to become
| videogames and or movies. I would not be surprised if the
| Tolkien estate made more money after the Peter Jackson
| movie came out than in all the decades before...
|
| And most importantly artists are not children. If they
| don't have business sense enough to read a contract they
| should hire an agent.
| mindslight wrote:
| Why not?
|
| This is a fantastic example - the Harry Potter movies have
| already been wildly profitable, surely enough to have solidly
| incentivized their creation. And they are now firmly part of
| our collective cultural background, to the point that most of
| the value comes from the network effects of people who have
| watched them rather than the works themselves.
|
| The first book was written in 1997, and released as a movie
| in 2001. The last book was written in 2007, and released as a
| movie in 2011.
|
| Putting a 20-year limit on the copyright would mean that one
| could use the characters/story (from the book) starting in
| 2017 - either riffing on them or perhaps even a complete
| remake. And this would still be 6 years after the final movie
| was released. The movies themselves would of course each have
| their own 20 year periods of monetization. You could legally
| watch the whole series of movies on a personal computer
| starting in 2031, which is still 5 years away. This all seems
| eminently reasonable to me.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Copyright for nearly everything but software, is primarily a
| question of "can I reproduce this other person's creative
| work?". Fair use doctrine is so broad that I think it most
| everything else falls under most people's accepted "artists
| deserve to be compensated for their work" gut instinct.
|
| If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original
| idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the
| public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it
| seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of
| that action.
| cedilla wrote:
| Fair use is much more narrow than most people think, it's
| just that most rights-holders are not very belligerent. For
| example, streaming video games does not fall under fair
| right, most video essays critiquing films or series use way
| too much material commentated for fair right, remixing as a
| whole is not fair use, and most fan works are definitely not
| fair use. Legal protections don't help here, but the shit-
| storms companies like Nintendo of America had to endure when
| they tried to tighten the screws.
|
| And that's in the US, other countries have similar exceptions
| but they are also usually quite limited.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| It's always funny seeing these threads, when it's about AI
| these people defend copyright to the death. Then when it's
| about a private IP owner holding onto their IP, it's "death to
| copyright"
| wredcoll wrote:
| AI involves a large corporation profiting from violating
| current copyeight standards in a way that enriches a small
| minority while appearing to harm to large majority, as well
| as being hypocritical.
|
| Random people arguing for expanded public domain is not the
| same thing.
| ottah wrote:
| Or maybe we have never needed an exclusive economic monopoly on
| a creative work to encourage the creation of art? Maybe we
| would all be in a better world were art and culture lived in
| the collective commons, free for anyone in the zeitgeist to
| adapt and proliferate? Can we really say commercial production
| of culture has been truly the best for society?
| bonzini wrote:
| I read "The duration of the U.S. protection for all other
| works... was for 70 years from the artist's date of death" and
| thought wow, did Mondrian really live into the 1960s or so?
|
| Next paragraph: "Mondrian died in 1944. Any of his works subject
| to a life-plus-70 regime would have entered the public domain" 10
| years ago. Who even thought of including that in a legal
| argument??
| Someone wrote:
| based on your comment (the site is unresponsive, so I cannot
| check what exactly it says) I think the article is incorrect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
| :
|
| _"For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum
| copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if
| copyright was renewed during the 28th year following
| publication. Copyright renewal has been automatic since the
| Copyright Renewal Act of 1992.
|
| For works created before 1978, but not published or registered
| before 1978, the standard SS302 copyright duration of 70 years
| from the author's death also applies. Prior to 1978, works had
| to be published or registered to receive copyright protection.
| Upon the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act (which was
| January 1, 1978) this requirement was removed and these
| unpublished, unregistered works received protection. However,
| Congress intended to provide an incentive for these authors to
| publish their unpublished works. To provide that incentive,
| these works, if published before 2003, would not have their
| protection expire before 2048."_
| masfuerte wrote:
| You quote a section about unpublished work. The painting was
| published nearly a hundred years ago so the quote isn't
| relevant. If you think the article is wrong please state how.
| Someone wrote:
| I don't see that. _"For works published or registered
| before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years
| from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed
| during the 28th year following publication"_ may not apply
| here, but if so, it isn't because the work was published.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Is this a guessing game? Which specific claim in the
| article do you think is wrong? What do you think is the
| true situation?
| input_sh wrote:
| Life + 70 has always been an oversimplification, we still
| haven't even reached 70 years since the introduction of these
| rules (1973 in the US, in other countries depends on when the
| US strogarmed them into adopting similar rules).
|
| There's all sorts of quirks for anything published before that
| rule got standardised more-or-less worldwide, but in general
| 1930-1945 is still like a legal grey area that can be
| challenged in court and you should be good to go for anything
| published before that. And don't get me even started on
| posthumous publications, that's a whole different can of worms
| where a family member might claim some contribution (like for
| example Anne Frank's father), pushing the copyright further to
| the life of the author + life of that family member + 70.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Do you really think that the whole world is waiting for
| whatever the US say to make their laws? Spain copyright law
| is dated 1879:
| https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-1879-40001 , based
| on the French _droit d'auteur_ laws of 1700's. About the
| matter being discused here, read Articulo 6: dead date + 80.
| input_sh wrote:
| No I do not think it's an original concept of the US, more
| that it was the US that conditioned many _other_ countries
| to adopt similar laws as a condition for trade deals /
| investments.
|
| As a concept it existed in one way or the other pretty much
| ever since the printing press.
| otherme123 wrote:
| It is not difficult to find that the "US conditioning
| other countries in the 1970's" actually started in 1886
| at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
| when 10 european countries agreed on legal principles to
| protect original works. Among these 10, France, Germany,
| Italy, France and UK, so in practice the whole Western
| Europe. US didn't join until 1989.
|
| The original treaty, if I am not misunderstanding here: h
| ttps://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/berne/summary_bern
| e includes a "dead + 50 recomended" protection since the
| 1908 revision, before that it was up to each country
| laws, and in 1948 it changed to "dead + 50 minimum
| mandatory". In 1993 it was raised to "dead + 70" in the
| UE, to be followed by the US with the same extension in
| 1988 in Sonny Bono Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy
| right_Term_Extension_Act.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The Mondrian estate... don't get me started on that one.
| benj111 wrote:
| Surely the issue is estates (in this sense) in general. Did
| anyone in the estate actually know the guy whose legacy they're
| supposed to be protecting?
|
| How does paying money to Mondrian's great great great great
| grandchildren enhance society?
| jacquesm wrote:
| See also: Ravel.
| elric wrote:
| Magritte is another such case, with a litigious Magritte
| Foundation. I guess he would have been somewhat amused at
| the absurdity of it all.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Please do get started! You can't just leave hints like that and
| not give us the full scoop!
| jacquesm wrote:
| :)
|
| Let's just say that one day I found myself in the Tate
| Gallery with a Mondrian that needed some work... tech
| consultancy takes you into the most interesting places.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Copyright doing what it does best. Killing new works that
| resemble a bit too much anything under its protection and
| allowing rentseekers to live off others.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| That's because you're ignoring the primary purpose of
| copyright, which works perfectly and is invisible because
| violating it so obviously stupid (because the rules exist): I,
| an author, go to a print shop and say "I'd like 500 copies of
| my book, please", and then print shop sells me my 500 copies,
| then prints 1000 more and sells them themselves.
|
| Copyright is primarily concerned with one-to-one recreations of
| existing works. That is the _primary_ reason for copyright 's
| existence. All the other stuff is built out of trying to close
| stupid loopholes that people would try exploit.
| jlv2 wrote:
| Archive link: https://archive.ph/GxEPr
| donohoe wrote:
| Sadly archive[dot]ph uses its site to perform a DDoS against a
| blogger they don't like, and are manipulating pages. They've
| been dropped by Wikipedia.
|
| There is also this version:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260301183248/https://copyright...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Also Internet Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20260123152
| 234/https://copyright...>
|
| (Origin site is presently down.)
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| We GIVE creators copyright to serve us by encouraging CREATION.
|
| Mondrian died decades ago. He is not creating any more. Copyright
| of his works is not serving us any more.
|
| Copyright should have ended when the balance between encouraging
| his creation and encouraging others to create based on his works
| was reached. i.e. About 5 years after he made the piece.
|
| Fuck the copyright parasites whining about this.
| zugi wrote:
| The US Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyrights
| with limited scope:
|
| > _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_
|
| One could argue that a colored box promotes neither science nor
| useful arts, and therefore applying any copyright protection at
| all to this non-useful art is unconstitutional.
| dboreham wrote:
| Reminds me of when in my youth I thought it would be a good idea
| to re-tile my bathroom in the style of a Mondrian. This because
| I'd found that white, red, green and yellow tiles were available
| at low cost. Good to know that bathroom is not in breach of
| copyright now.
| romeinaday wrote:
| If I were to sell an app on the App Store called Mondrianify
| which made Mondrian-style pictures, would the Mondrian Trust
| demand the app be removed?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Germany didn't have patent laws in the 1800s. Their economy
| rapidly industrialized and boomed.
|
| I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net
| improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things
| better if they couldn't patent it?
|
| Note that Tesla open sources its patents.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The benefit of patents is that you have to make your patent
| public. After the patent runs out anybody can reproduce what
| you patented exactly like your did.
|
| The problem, of course, is that many companies see patents as a
| way to rent-seek. Establish enough patents in your niche and
| now nobody can compete with you. This is particularly a problem
| in the modern world where technological advancements have
| accelerated so much that a 20 year long patent is an eternity.
| An entire industry can just die off in that time.
| legulere wrote:
| That's the idea behind it. The reality is that patents are
| written in a way to reveal as few as possible while blocking
| other companies as much as possible.
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