The problem was that various music copyrights were being dated from the 1970s for historical reasons despite the music itself being much older. Congress passed a law fixing a whole lot of that in one lump. Which is why music from the 1920s becomes public domain at the same time as movies from the early 1930s.
Alright, that's fine for now. The distance between this and modern pop music is actually razor thin. Update the instrumentation with synthesizers, give it percussions and you'd be done.
Interesting, the covers are further away from modern pop than this is
So, anyone that had a personal attachment to that music is dead.
The current goal of copyright is to let companies own the culture you grew with. All the movies, music, books and games that defined who you are will not enter the public domain until you are dead or very old.
Companies like Disney were founded on well known stories. They will not allow anybody else too accomplish the same.
Disney was founded on Mickey Mouse. Yes, they made major motion pictures out of old myths and legends, like Cinderella and Robin Hood, but those stories have always been public domain and you can write a book or movie about them with no problem.
Alice in Wonderland was based on a book that was 86 years old when Disney's film was released. It was public domain. But Disney fought hard to prevent Mickey Mouse from going into the public domain, and got Congress to extend the copyright term to 95 years. Under such a rule Disney couldn't have made Alice in Wonderland without permission from the heirs of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll).
> those stories have always been public domain and you can write a book or movie about them with no problem.
Those stories were retelling of stories which were retelling of stories which were... Disney made it law that no one is allowed to retell their stories but them. Approaching or alluding to their retelling can carry stiff penalties. It's antithetical to a universal human institution that has existed since before recorded history.
This is interesting to think about. The Disney retellings in some ways are evolutionary winners that are also dead ends. Outside of Disney they can’t evolve unlike pre-Disney. The Disney retellings are so popular that other retellings are almost extinct. When Disney goes away, does the story lineages disappear? Do copies of older retellings resurge? Do totally different story lineages take the place of the Disney stories?
It would be interesting to do a study on popular myths/fairy tales that have and have not been adapted by huge media companies.
For example, if I search "Beowulf" in Amazon, the first link is for 2007 movie, the second for the book, and the third for a TV show. If I search for "The Little Mermaid", the whole page is dominated by the Disney franchise or some off-brand adaptations. Hans Christian Andersen's book is nowhere to be seen.
Those stories are dead. Most people think Disney came up with all of their ideas and have no idea that most of them stem from ancient stories--some existed before writing as we know it.
They will probably dig up these stories from Sumeria (tablets in UK) or other yet un-studied texts some day and rehash them completely anew...starting the cycle again.
Heck, the bible has a lot of good stuff if you can shed the religious/Christian connotations.
> They will probably dig up these stories from Sumeria
Yes, a Snow Crash reference! Chapter 28:
"'Rife Bible College, which he founded , has the richest archaeology department in the world. They have been conducting a dig in Eridu, which was the cult center of a Sumerian god named Enki.'"
[...]
"'Sumer was a civilization of clay. They made their buildings of it and wrote on it, too. . . . So all the data of the Sumerians have survived. Egypt left a legacy of art and architecture; Sumer's legacy is its megabytes.'"
[...]
"'If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn't process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.'"
Not sure about their finances back then, but I have to guess that their feature films were the money makers and the shorts less so.
And I think the grandparent's point is that Mickey Mouse today is in some sense analogous to your Cinderellas and Robin Hoods in the 30s... only you can't make your own movie about him.
However, their next two movies (Pinocchio, Fantasia) cost them money because they were released during World War Two, when they couldn’t show them in large parts of the world.
> So, I guess it wasn’t till after World War Two that their feature films became profitable. They survived, so chances are the shorts brought in money.
According to Wikipedia [0], "The U.S. and Canadian governments commissioned the studio to produce training and propaganda films. By 1942, 90 percent of its 550 employees were working on war-related films." So, it seems they primarily survived by taking government contracts, not producing shorts. In fact, the next paragraph goes on to say, "With limited staff and little operating capital during and after the war, Disney's feature films during much of the 1940s were 'package films', or collections of shorts, [...] which performed poorly at the box office." So I wouldn't say their shorts were particular moneymakers during that time. After the war, they started releasing feature films again (Song of the South, etc).
Although it does seem that in the 20s and early 30s, prior to Snow White, animated shorts and comics (and potentially related merchandising?) were most of the company's revenue.
So, I think it's probably fair to say shorts financed the company through the release of Snow White, but not really any further.
Disney was actually founded on Alice in Wonderland, Mickey Mouse was created years later.
At the time, Alice in Wonderland would have still been copyrighted if it were under the copyright regime Disney etc. instituted since. The corporation pulled the ladder up after it.
Incidentally, Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of Universal's Oswald the Rabbit.
"Mickey Mouse was in many ways a ripoff of Universal's Oswald the Rabbit"
Considering that Walt Disney created Oswald the Rabbit for Universal, it is no surprise that some elements carried over to Mickey. When Universal took Oswald away from Disney's control, he responded by creating the mouse.
Apparently Mickey and Oswald were both created by Ub Iwerks. I don't know why it's still repeated that Disney created them personally.
"Disney asked Iwerks to design a character that became Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first cartoon Oswald starred in was animated entirely by Iwerks." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks
Incorrect: Mickey Mouse was created in the 20s, Disney's Alice in Wonderland was released in 1951. You're right that the book would still have been copyrighted.
Oswald the Rabbit was also created by Walt Disney, in 1927, and sold to Universal. He then created Mickey Mouse as a replacement character for his own movie.
They aren't referencing the 1951 movie, but instead the 1920s shorts series called Alice Comedies, the first of which is literally called Alice's Wonderland.
These weren't really retellings of the original stories, but it would nevertheless not be hard to imagine they would count as a derivative work under modern law and would thus have been illegal to produce without a licensing deal.
Sort of, you have to be careful to stick to the originals and not accidentally insert any Disney-derived elements, which just creates a lot of extra risk for those who want to make use of their cultural heritages.
Disney does not own the stories but it owns its films and all associated IP. If you sell a Cinderella T shirt that looks like their Cinderella, you will probably get something in writing from a lawyer before long.
>So, anyone that had a personal attachment to that music is dead.
1923 is right around the first few recordings of country blues, and I've got a few of them in my regular playlist. We're not dead, there are dozens of us !
Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?
To answer your question specifically, no. A derivative work needs to contain newly created/copyrightable material for the work itself to be copyrightable
For more general answers, see this pamphlet from the US copyright office
No, because the original is still in the public domain. Copyright law is pretty good about defining “derivative works”, and someone’s remaster is not going to hold up as a copyrightable contribution.
While this is mostly correct, the mention of derivative works is a red herring; derivative works are copyrightable, they're just also subject to the copyright of the original.
Derivative works are relevant because they’re subject to the original copyright, yes? Please note I didn’t say all derivative works are not copyrightable; I’m saying that a basic remaster won’t even qualify as a derivative work.
A simple copy of remaster won’t cut it in the US, but if you did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those.
There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and rights payments.
As far as I know, restoration is insufficient to claim a derivative copyright in a public domain work because it lacks sufficient originality. To the extent you do a good job, your additions to the underlying public domain work are not your creative authorship. They are a restoration of the original author's authorship.
I believe that is why Peter Kuran (Trinity and Beyond) patented a photochemical restoration process for revitalizing the color in films. Because his other restoration work is not protectable.
Doesn't it have to be changed in some way? Changing the storage format doesn't change the actual work. I assume you're talking about the Fair Use clause where something has to be different enough from the original to be re-claimed as new?
Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records.
It became fairly dubious in the age of photocopiers and tape recorders, but fortunately was little enforced, except in the USSR. A photocopier was useless without typeset or handwritten text to copy, and a tape recorder was no substitute for a recording studio, and the copies degraded every generation, so publishing houses were still needed.
Now every computer is a book-copying and music-copying machine more powerful than the entire publishing industry a few decades ago: it can transmit a gigabit per second, and for a one-megabyte book, that's 125 copies a second, 10 million copies a day, 3 billion copies a year, so copyright is a constant danger to everyone. Fanfic sites are full of people sharing stories they wrote with no expectation of making money. Soundcloud is full of indie band recordings edited in Audacity. The age of the rich celebrity authors like Isaac Asimov or Ernest Hemingway ended decades ago, not due to xeroxes but due to TV. (We still have celebrity musicians, but it's not clear that helping the Rolling Stones buy cocaine is an important public policy objective.) The best software is free software, as copyright makes proprietary software untrustworthy, creating incentives to stuff it with malware. And, even if Elsevier were paying researchers instead of vice versa, the idea that copyright on research papers could fund research is as ludicrous as the idea that people would stop singing songs and telling stories without monopoly profits.
Apps, videos, and websites constantly disappear due to (often groundless) accusations of copyright violations. Police evade accountability by playing copyrighted music, rendering any recordings of their abuses copyright violations. A friend of mine committed suicide after being prosecuted for copyright violations that might have been fair use; we'll never know.
So, I would set the copyright term at zero years. Legal monopolies on preserving and sharing knowledge are not only useless in today's world, they are harmful, a monstrous menace to the integrity of the historical record and to private communication.
To add to your point, the futility of copyright enforcement in the digital age created a new industry in the form of DRM and YouTube auto-takedown algorithms.
There is still an up front cost associated with the creation of software or works that get distributed in a digital format. Even in the best case scenario where the hardware was free, the OS was free, and the software tools were free, the creator still has to spend his or her time on making the copyrighted work. They deserve to have options that allow them to be compensated for that labor. I reject the false dichotomy that states copyright law should continue to be abused or be done away with entirely.
The example you provided regarding the printing press resonates with me as an author. I have not included any form of DRM with the digital copies of my book and I won't go after individuals who pirate it. But, I will enforce my copyright on the work if a large company like Amazon tries to start selling it without my permission. When you say there should be no copyright, you're saying a giant corporation I want nothing to do with is entitled to profit off of three years of my labor, for free, without my consent.
There needs to be a more nuanced approach where laws are written and interpreted in a way that benefits regular everyday people. Abolishing copyright would do the opposite.
Creators are free to choose to spend their time doing creative work, or not, as we please. I'm going to keep writing for the public, and so are lots of other people, and we don't care if you do or not. Amazon or anyone else can redistribute our work; that way it reaches more people. They won't have much luck selling it when you can just download it for free.
If you think the world owes you something in return for spending your time writing, you should take your ball and go home. We have a civilization to preserve here that copyright is threatening — children to educate, medical treatments to deliver, historical films to copy onto non-rotting stock, private communications it's intolerable to scan for forbidden information on which the government has granted you a monopoly — and any one of these is more important than what you think you deserve.
> The New York Times reports that in some countries where "1984" is in the public domain opportunists are printing cheap versions of the novel and listing them on Amazon, avoiding paying royalties owed to Orwell's estate in the US.
> The New York Times found 11 of the 12 fake Orwell books it ordered were dispatched from an Amazon warehouse and were labelled "new." The books cost as little as $3.
This seems like an obvious net-negative for society.
Seems like a net positive: more people can read 1984. If your concern is that someone might publish a modified version of the text, why, public-domain status makes that easy to detect and analyze, because anyone can share the original version, which copyright makes illegal.
In an ideal world, copyright should last for maybe two or three years. It would still mostly fulfill its purpose to allow the creator to earn money, but would severely curtail the abuse potential. In an even more ideal world, copyright shouldn't be transferable.
Three years is too short. The people who need these protections the most are not marketing powerhouses that can achieve instant successes.
I feel like a two or three year copyright could be even worse that current state — large publishers would probably just wait out artists and steal their work.
“Nice album kid, bet it’ll sell great 3 years from now”
Sure, but a big company can absolutely find some little-known creator's work, spin off their own products with it, and use their size to absolutely dominate search results, marketing, and distribution.
While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them. In creative fields it often takes many years to build up a portfolio and a following, if you've not been picked up by a major promoter.
Wouldn't have been a problem for Charles M. Schultz. One month of copyright would have been enough to keep him well fed. Same for Nassim Taleb.
In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.
Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.
Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain.
In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where copyrights on Linux have expired, we'll may very well see contributions drop dramatically as the largest contributions start to closed-source their branches of Linux.
> Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.
Right, that's why we're trying to find ways to limit the damage it does to everybody else.
The GPL-vs.-BSD flamewar you're trying to start is only mildly relevant. The various BSD and Apache contributors aren't campaigning against the use of their code by Apple and Microsoft, either. The point is that there's nothing wrong with going out and making derivative works of other people's creative work; it's how all creative work is done.
I am clearly using the word in a functional, moral, non-legal sense. The entire premise of my point indicates that I understand what public domain means.
I'd be happy with it being short enough that middle-aged creatives could build on material from their childhood, and old ones, from their middle-age. Say, 20 years. People should, at least, have full ownership of a good portion of their contemporary culture.
Friend that's an IP lawyer had a rant that copyright law is applied for things it has no business being applied to. The law is built around single author books and sheet music. Where the authors lifetime output is small. And commercially valuable work smaller still. Not appropriate for things like ad copy, manuals, and software.
It needs an overhaul. But the current system heavily favors entrenched interests so won't happen.
2-3 years is no time at all. Someone could hand a movie studio a script in hopes of it being made a movie, the movie studio could wait 4 years, and then make the movie, with no harm to them whatsoever.
Huh. A movie studio. Yes, my proposal also has a nice side effect of filtering out those who are in it for the money, not self-expression. The world would become a better place if there were no "entertainment industry".
No entertainment industry? So... nobody could sit and create a movie studio or a record label?
What a weird thing to rail against. I'm certainly unconvinced the world would be magically better without people organizing to produce content.
Maybe there's some issues with copyrights, but as far as I can tell, almost any organization would attempt to preserve profits. We, as a people, then go through and create legislation which curbs rampant abuses whether that's environmental pollution, or unsafe kids' toys, or overly lengthy copyright claims.
But the idea people can't get together and make movies, that's a new one.
There is copyright, but it's non-transferable and only lasts for 2-3 years. After that time, yes, anyone can copy and distribute it.
My idea here is that you would have the option of either paying right now, or waiting when the copyright expires and getting it legally for free. In our current system people don't even consider that copyrights have an expiry date, they operate as if they're effectively indefinite. And the current system doesn't work anyway — the majority of the society just isn't having it. Everyone has pirated something at some point.
I think the big problem here is that 2-3 years is almost no time at all. With 2-3 years, basically everyone will wait for the next book in the Game of Thrones series to come out of costing money.
Covid has been nearly 2 years, and for many of us it feels both like yesterday and also like forever ago, for example.
And then you'll have people that want to watch the movie of something, so they're willing to pay the video company for instant access, but the movie is based off a script someone wrote, or a book someone wrote, and that book is at least 2 years old.
RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example.
> RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example.
idk... how many people are still watching game of thrones?
whats the long tail look like for popular books?
my impression was, most books that make any money are hugely popular for a short time, then basically fall off a "sales cliff"... i wonder if anyones done any comprehensive stories about this subject.
My point was that RR Martin wrote books, and then *movies* were made off the books. If the copyright period is 2-3 years, then a movie company would just need to wait a couple years and RR Martin would get zero dollars for his work (except the small number of people that buy his book) but more people watch movies and shows, so they would be willing to pay the premium for the movies based off his content just a couple years later.
Most video games already quickly become cheaper much less than 2-3 years after release. Some are even given away at some point. Yet most sales still happen close to release. The expectation that the average consumer has the patience to wait for 2-3 years if they can get something now for a reasonable price is odd.
They usually start self-expressing just for themselves, so they still have a job. Most video bloggers started this exact way — first a hobby, then they quit their job and turned their vlogging into a Serious Business™ with obnoxious sponsorships, a studio, a ton of ridiculously expensive equipment, and optionally a crew.
If you are in it for self-expression, you're entirely free to self-express to your heart's content. Copyright doesn't matter, publishers don't matter, studios don't matter.
The minute you want to express yourself to others, you're no longer in it for self-expression.
And regardless of your opinion on what should and should not exist, people should be fairly compensated for their endeavors, even if those endeavors are to create leisure activities for others.
Copyright is an attempt to enable creators to get compensation for their work. This is one thing the people who rail about the ease of reproduction miss. It was never about the difficulty of reproduction, it was always about the difficulty of creation.
How do we reward that when we are allowed to freely copy their efforts without the need to consider their contribution? It's one of the few things I like about a subscription or Patreon model. We're paying directly for the effort of creation.
How were artists living before copyrights? We’ve had quite a few of them delivering masterpieces. So we can reward efforts the same ways as before, art will not die just be less profitable maybe. If reproduction is easy what do we as a society earn by making it harder artificially? I don’t believe any other worker is having these benefits. You do your job, paid for your effort by someone willing to do so, and then go on with your life. That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work?
Through patronage and performance. And since reproduction was difficult, you had to have these people around. You couldn't pick and choose among a thousand SoundCloud composers to find a song you liked. You needed a Mozart or Bach. You needed orchestras because recordings don't exist.
But now, it is dead simple to propagate someone's work once they've finished the act of creation.
And this isn't a discussion if others are getting their fair due. Even if they are not, it does not mean we should shaft everyone. Everyone should be fairly compensated for their work. But not enforcing some level of protection for the creation of art is pretty much ensuring no one is compensated for their work. Fairly or not.
You most probably did. At least I know I did. And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends. You will have trouble using your creative outputs when moving between companies. Unless you start all over again and from that perspective it is a weird motivator for creativity, albeit one oriented to getting you where you started from rather than one step further.
> And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends.
on that note, there are some proposals (superdistribution - brad cox, xanadu - ted nelson, etc) that would allow any works to be licensed from/to anyone via micro transactions.... but i've never heard of anyone actually trying to do such a thing at scale.
sounds super cool if it could work... all the stuff i made, when reused somewhere by a company, i get a residual... the more valuable, the more used, and the more i get... that could be pretty awesome (hypothetically)
Three years is probably too short, but certainly something less than 30 years. That gives people plenty of time to enjoy the profits from their work (basically their entire adult lives) while allowing it into the public domain while it is still somewhat useful.
I don't think the system would function without transferable copyrights. A movie might have 10,000 people who've contributed to it. Managing the copyrights without some kind of legal agreement would be a nightmare. I get the spirit of the comment (to prevent generations of people from owning and profiting from the works of people they never knew), but eliminating copyright transfership probably doesn't solve that.
Most movies are fixed in a tangeble medium months before week one. Sometimes years. Component parts (principle filming, scripts, original music, if any) are routinely finished at least a year before release. A rush to get everything out to enjoy the full 3 years of income potential would further push out the couple of films a year made where people actually cared to do things right.
20-30 years might be right, though. Or one of the escalating fees for renewal after a reasonable period, preferably with a required deposit of the work so when it becomes public domain it can be easily distributed.
Copyright on a movie doesn't start until it's registered. The component parts are copyrighted upon creation but the entire work is a separate copyright. For example the Star Wars re-release is copyright 1997, even thought the bulk of it was created in 1975-76.
1. You're only considering works published by huge multinational publishers with the gigantic marketing budgets required to get immediate traction
2. You assume that works are published on a large scale for their initial publishing
Small time artists can spend years trying to get a work picked up by large publisher. Those who don't choose to use large publishers may be finding new audiences over longer periods.
Assuming that copyright should be designed around the use-cases of Comcast or Disney is the reason we're in the position we're in now.
The question is how many people that would have bought the media would just wait out the copyright. Once you're into these short lengths of time, it's a lot.
When you're talking about timelines as short as weeks, you're going to get a ton of people waiting. They might still go to a theater, even, but one with much cheaper tickets.
How many at 3 years specifically? I'm not sure, but it's a risk to be considered.
It is complicated. For very popular artists yes, their music is commercially short-lived and most of the returns will come in the first six months. But for the more obscure composers and performers the reality is completely different.
It wouldn't. If a music studio needs to wait 4 years to not have to pay any royalties at all, then the song would be recorded (copyright created) and the music groups would just wait 4 years and then start playing it on radio stations.
It needs to be something like 12 + 12 or 20 + 20, or even 20 + infinitely continuable for a gradually increasing cost. It still has the potential issue of waiting out that 24 to 40 years; but companies are less likely to do that, when a few years is basically nothing.
It's been 2 years since covid started, for example.
Companies will go bankrupt. Their business models will break down. Yes. That's intended. There's no need for these middlemen in the age of the internet.
IMO if you want to end the commercialization of content, targeting copyright is not the most effective route. Big players will still be able to use their power to ensure that they have control over distribution, and will continue to profit off of content. Small players, such as the people coming up with new content, will find it harder and harder to make any money, to the benefit of the big players who no longer need to share profits with them.
The more effective approach would be to simply remove the economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no one's able to profit off it in the first place and spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer penalized.
Abuse implies a right. What kind of right does anyone have to see IP become public domain? The only reason that it should sunset at all is to release society from the burden of enforcing old IP at some point.
The term "intellectual property" is a relative legal novelty, and applying "IP" law to individuals, as opposed to rogue publishers printing works without a contract with the author and profiting from sales of that work, is an even more dubious novelty.
The purpose of copyright protection, which was a controversial issue at the time the US Constitution was drafted, is written in the Copyright Clause: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Anything beyond that stated purpose is hindering "the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
That copyright terms are limited is essential, and should optimize the purpose, not the profit of publishers who go unmentioned.
This is a fabulous resource! I especially like that, unlike most guides, it also lists the dates going forward. Great way to show just how complex the system we've cobbled together is.
I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost, perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over it.
Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the rights holders are for a particular work.
A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.
This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.
Yep, I really liked the copyright change to make copyright protection automatic, instead of requiring a filing.
But it should require active regular renewal, to create the record of continued ownership.
You should get a (reasonable) protected period of time automatically, to give you time to figure out which works are worth the effort to continue protecting. But it should require (minimal) active ongoing effort to maintain that protection.
For me, this is especially relevant when it comes to abandoned digital content (like video games and other applications). It'll be *so* much harder to archive and preserve content that's 140 years old, than it will be content that's 14-28 years old.
I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that.
That being said, what in reality would happen if you release that sheet music? If it's abandoned, there wouldn't be anyone to come after you for it. You could just put it up online for free and then honor DMCA takedowns from people who can prove they are the rights holder.
> I realize it creates a legal quagmire to have abandoned works and I think registration should be required to solve that.
I really like the model of every work automatically receiving protection. I think creations should automatically receive a relatively short-term automatic copy-right protection (say 14 years). After that, I think extensions should require manual renewals by the current rights holder (including contact information for the rights holder)
This would just mean that rich companies/people will get to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this whole situation where things don't enter the public domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.
On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n × number of works) every year.
Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big company and you want to own your stuff forever. But behind the laws protecting those companies there's a ton of stuff that the owner doesn't care, nobody even knows who the owner is, etc. etc. (There's a lot of stuff that is de facto in the public domain because nobody owns it anymore in any practical sense, but there's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly steep fee for the benefit.
Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything produced ever.
This would definitely be better than the current system of basically forever minus one day, but still leaves the problem that a few giant corporations own giant chunks of our hearts, minds, and childhoods.
The zeitgeist of our time should belong to us, at least after a decade or two.
This is just extending the rent seeking. If the work is so valuable the owner can continue to extend their copyright, the public should receive that value after the 14 years (by which point, the owner has been made whole through collecting rents for those 14 years) versus the owner ratcheting up the cost to pay to maintain the copyright monopoly on the work in question.
Eh, if the price rises enough year over year, and you dump that funding into the National Institute for the Arts, or other programs to provide grants and funding to low-income artists, I could see it being a potentially useful tool to spread the wealth around from very commercially successful works.
I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some positive outcomes from the approaches.
Life expectancy of adults hasn’t changed much (ie your life expectancy when you’re in your 20s). The life expectancy number you’re most familiar with is largely driven by infancy because it’s the mean and high infant/child mortality skews that. We’re really good at saving the lives of children now but I don’t see why that matters for copyright.
More hypothetically, let’s say human life spans got up to 500 years. Copyright is intended to promote the creation of art for the public good, not to fund the artist for their lifetime.
If you created a popular piece of art of music in your 20s, why is it useful to society to help fund the next 480 years of life in any way?
This is mostly an urban legend. Yes, some amount of the increase in life expectancy is due to reduced infant mortality. But it’s nowhere near the bulk of it.
In 1920 at birth a males life expectancy was ~54, at 40 a man could be expected to live to ~70. Current estimates are almost unchanged between birth and 40 at 76.23 vs 78.75. That’s a 25% increase in life expectancy at 40, but that a long way from the 41% increase from birth.
I chose 40 because it wasn’t medicine that made the biggest difference for 20 to 40 year olds but war. And actuarial tables can’t predict wars only account for past wars which make current estimates misleading. Aka we don’t have a lifetime of data for people born after 1920 only estimates.
Yes, your original post was indeed correct by hedging a bit, speaking of "adult life expectancy" vs. "infant/child mortality".
People read that and it registers as infants dying within days after birth. But life expectancy for 10-year-olds has doubled: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy. I doubt that your comment makes people think of dead teenagers, even though your post doesn't contradict that interpretation.
Even for the 40-year-olds, life expectancy increasing from 68 to 82 years means a >50% increase in "time remaining" which isn't something to sneeze (cough?) at, although I have to reluctantly acknowledge that I remembered it being even larger than that.
I think you’re confusing me with someone else, this is my second post in this thread. Anyway, the data doesn’t support doubling life expectancy for 10 year olds unless you go really far back.
Look at the England a whales data in your link, in 1841 10 year olds could expect to see 57.6, or another 47.6 years. In 2013 that bumped to 82.2 or another 72.2 years. By 20, they could likely hit 60 or another 40 years worth of life, and by 40 they where up into ~67.4.
However again the difference is largely one of lack of war and famine rather than medicine. The chart is bouncing around because of events that killed large numbers of people, but it smooths out as you approach today.
How are you defining urban legend? Here's from Wikipedia [1]
> Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality
> Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years.
> ... even in preindustrial times as is demonstrated by the Roman Life Expectancy table, which estimates life expectancy to be 25 years at birth, but 53 years upon reaching age 25
Here are actuarial tables for people in the US today [2]. The life expectancy if you reach 25 is.... 52 or 57 depending on if you're a man or woman.
We're certainly better at reducing all cause mortality even in adults but it's not as stark of a difference as you might imagine, particularly its effect on the mean.
Your second link shows years of additional life expectancy. For example, at age 80 it shows 8.43 years of life expectancy, meaning that the average 80-year-old lives to age 88.43.
So the average 25-year-old in the US has 52–57 years of life remaining, and will live to age 77 or 82, according to your link.
This is a very big increase over the pre-twentieth-century adult life expectancy of ~55 years of age! You claim that "life expectancy of adults hasn’t changed much" but your own links show that it increased about 50% in very recent history.
Thanks for the correction. So we're at a 45% increase. Typically life expectancy is reported as the "from birth number". That's gone from ~20 to 80.
The claim was that the bulk of the life expectancy number being driven by the mortality rate prior to adult hood was an "urban myth". Life expectancy in adult hood is a ~1.4x increase. Life expectancy from birth is a 4x increase. I'd say the bulk is driven by saving the lives of children and is not an urban myth.
You're still not doing apples-to-apples comparisons. The source that you cited says 12th–19th-century life expectancy at birth was 25–40 years when infant/child mortality is included, and 55 years when it is excluded. There has not been any “4x increase” in this time period. (Even if you start in the bronze age, life expectancy at birth has not increased four-fold.)
Since the time period you chose, life expectancy at birth has increased by about 40 to 55 years. Near-elimination of infant mortality accounts for 15–30 years of increase, while increases in adult life expectancy account for an additional 25 years.
North America has a life expectancy of ~80 years. I eyeballed it so closer to 3.2x the 25 year life expectancy in the 12-19th century. What am I missing?
Yes, if you start from a base of 25 years (which is the extreme low end of the range from your source), then we have 30 years of increase from reduced infant/child mortality and 25 years of increase from reduced adult mortality.
Can you really look those numbers and say that one of them is highly significant while the other "has not changed much"?
Translating this into percentages or "fold" increases is misleading because you are using a different denominator for the two increases. E.g. you are claiming that reduced infant mortality is a 2.2-fold increase (55/25) while reduced adult mortality is "only" a 1.45-fold increase (80/55), even though the number of years gained is almost the same.
And if you use the other end of the 25–40 year range, then reduced infant mortality is "only" a 1.38-fold increase (55/40).
I'm fine with that, if you use the life expectancy for an adult. Infant mortality has contributed the largest component of life expectancy gain since 1790, and we weren't incentivizing the creation of toddler art with the life expectancy gains.
So, if you scaled it from the life expectancy of an 18-year old in 1790, to the life expectancy of a 18-year old in 2021 then I'd agree with that.
50%+1 of a standard living persons actionable career. Do assuming 18 to 70. That makes 52/2 = 26 and +1 = 27. For sake of even numbers, you can fight over 25 or 30. I don't mind either way, both are far better than the current status.
I was going to go with 10 years. I mean, nobody cared about Madonna's "Ray Of Light" beyond 1999.
On the other hand, artists - like Dolly Parton - have made long careers out of songwriting that have carried them into their senior years, so it's a balance.
Clearly 99 years is absurd. Maybe 20 years is the balance to strike. Dolly would still be doing just fine with that term.
As the patron saint of my state, I'd also point out that she has used the money from her music to invest in other things. She is quite a shrewd business woman and I think even with 10 years she would have been fine.
The previous justification was to incentivize creators by protecting their financial interests and the interests of their offspring. It’s very clear to see that those interests are no longer being met when you sell your blockbuster song to a record company for $500.
IMHO make copyright non-transferable and make corporate copyright 14 years with an application to double. That way it works for the little guy without big guys abusing it (e.g. Disney).
Most people expect to inherit money and property from their parents but not to be paid for work their parents did years ago. I don't see why children of authors should have different expectations.
And also to not die, since they earn money for their children. It's the reverse of the usual inheritance situation, where the state and the kids both want the person to die.
Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup? Sometimes it takes longer than that to break even…
All law moves slowly. The law is supposed to move slowly, that’s (mostly) a feature, not a bug. You don’t want the existing laws to change every year, driving would be more of a nightmare than it already is.
Copyright was originally about protecting a creator’s ability to make some money from their works. Despite the fact it was extended in part to help Disney make money forever, we should still have some protection for artists and small businesses, right? We don’t want to shorten the copyright term just because NPM has a lot of churn, do we? That doesn’t seem like a good reason.
It took 7 months for the Sonny Bono Act (of Sonny and Cher and at the time congressman) to extends the copyright from 50 to 70 years. I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last "infrastructure" law (remember 2017's infrastructure week?).
By the way, that law was sponsored by Mary Bono, Sonny Bono's widow (Sonny Bono died during that year) and also congresswoman.
All this is a neat little circle of people voting laws for their own benefits. This has nothing to do with artists or small businesses.
I think it is fair to say that once the original author of the work is dead, the copyright should go with it. And if a corporation buy the copyright, then they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today.
> they they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today.
It’s neither fair nor accurate to point at the speed distribution as an indicator of the speed of building a viable business. It’s a fact that it’s common for a business to need a decade to build it’s business pipeline before the business is viable and fully supporting its employees. Don’t forget this system needs to support small businesses and not just megacorps.
From the perspective of law, and of copyright specifically, it’s also a mistake to assume that all business can move at the pace of electronically distributed software. Physical hardware goods frequently take more than a year to design, manufacture, and stock prior to distribution. Today we can add in an extra year of COVID related delays for the ordering and distributing pipeline … how many things are on insane back order delay as we speak? Copyright needs to be long enough that things like today’s situation don’t prevent a business from even starting to recoup, right?
> I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last “infrastructure law”
The point I was making is that law moves slower than tech. You would agree that infrastructure funding happens on a glacial pace compared to what’s hot on GitHub or what new ideas are being incorporated into neural network training, right? It’s fine to think of a few years being “fast”, but that’s a subjective opinion that isn’t relative to something specific. I was trying to make a comparison between law and the things presumably parent was calling “breakneck speed”, which is clearly referring to things that move faster than law.
I also mentioned “existing” laws for a specific reason - new laws can and sometimes do come up quickly. But laws we need to know in order to comply with need to be mostly stable. And by and large, most of our law doesn’t change every year, we have small nips and tucks mostly in places that don’t affect the majority of the population.
> From the perspective and of copyright specifically, it’s also a mistake to assume that all business can move at the pace of electronically distributed software
I think you are confusing copyrights with patents or trademarks. Copyright do not protect physical hardware or goods.
As far as I know, almost all copyrightable works can be transferred electronically. After all, we are talking about the right to copy (and distribute) a work (make more of them to sell it). Goods that cannot be copied are not copyrightable.
> Copyright do not protect physical hardware or goods. […] almost all copyrightable works can be transferred electronically
Don’t conflate “can be” with “are”. Copyrights absolutely protect books and posters and phonograph records; physical goods is how the law originated, and physical copies is a big part of what the law’s language still protects to this day. There are big problems with copyright law because it hasn’t yet been adequately adapted to the invention of the internet.
There is plenty of overlap when it comes to the business of physical goods. Copyrights do protect parts of the designs of many physical goods, and the sources and driver software of computer hardware, for example. Copyrights also protect marketing and advertising material and many other parts of a fledgling business.
What are we discussing at this point? I agree with you that copyright should probably end with the author (though I would say there should be a minimum term, to account for the many reasonable possible scenarios like being part of a business, accidental death, old age, etc., etc.). I don’t think 10 years is enough, and I don’t think that tech moving quickly is a valid reason to shorten copyright. There are valid reasons to shorten copyright, so we should discuss those instead.
But think of all the businesses that might be built on the work of the original business that never took off. What we are trying to maximize is overall benefit to society, so we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work.
Ten years may or may not be too short. How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?
> we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work
That’s a nice goal, but not entirely accurate. Copyright is intended to protect individual works of authorship, and allow the author to leverage their work, even when they only produce a single work.
> How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?
It happens all the time in software companies! The early software foundation of a company is often integral to where it is when it starts making money. It’s common for the core ideas and algorithms to sit around for many years while the company is building marketing and payment and integrations and customer support and waiting for business to catch on. Sometimes companies wait on their patents to be granted before even starting to try to monetize some software, and it can take a couple of years just to get the patent.
From a copyright perspective, it’s important to understand and recognize that business, like law, often moves very slowly. While I’m firmly in agreement that 99 years is too long, I also think 10 years is too short. And to reiterate: the term length shouldn’t be set because tech moves fast, it should be set by considering what’s long enough to recoup an investment and when it’s fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it for their own financial gains.
> it should be set by considering what’s long enough to recoup an investment and when it’s fair for the copiers to come take your work and use it for their own financial gains
I don't think we disagree really. I said the goal was to maximize overall benefit to society and I think you did too. Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied.
> Nobody will know if 10 years is too short until the issue is studied.
I disagree. Plenty of people already know 10 years is too short, and it doesn’t take a study to show it. Lots of businesses take longer than that to get established, even the very fastest-moving fastest-distributing businesses like software startups.
It might be bad for you if code you wrote ten years ago is no longer protected by copyright, but what about society in general? Maybe five new start ups can take that old software and build something better than you were able to. Would that disincentivize creators? Maybe. Would the copyright expiration make a thousand flowers bloom? That's what would need to be studied. What the net benefit or harm is, isn't obvious.
True, this is a valid point. I’m under the impression that it has been studied, though I don’t have a source off the top of my head. It’s definitely been debated vigorously and often.
Anyway, keep in mind that this net benefit needs to incentivize people to get over the static friction of starting in the first place. We don’t want to make a point of handing content and ideas over to incremental producers because that will disincentivize people from trying in the first place.
Also important is that part of the net benefit to society is a trickle-down argument that we need to reward the authors first in order for society to reap the net benefit. The point is not to encourage business at the fastest possible speed be letting people borrow the ideas and inventions and content of others, the point is to protect the people who do the actual original work for a reasonable period of time, and to allow for the fact that they might be less good at business than someone who’s only reselling content.
Might be worth stating that study the economics of social net benefits is incredibly difficult, and can take a very, very long time, longer than you and I have left. The environment is a great example of how we’ve made disastrous business choices that were rationalized by “social benefit”, but turned out to be wrong.
> Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup?
How many startups today make their money by sharing actual source code and not cloud services? Unless its AGPL then you need not know the source for most services anyways.
The option to extend it being priced by the royalties collected and requiring substantial accounting of such.
Patents, for example, have maintenance fees that are quite high. So even that 20 year length is not really automatic and guaranteed, while already seen as problematically long to many.
But does having a work enter public domain automatically mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams via legitimate services like Spotify?
Honestly I think we should just work at doing away with the concept. The idea of it was to encourage the creation of works by providing a limited term of artificial scarcity so said works could participate in the market. But in the information age, where copying information is as close to free as makes no odds, I think that makes a lot less sense than it used to. That's without even considering that giant corporations have subverted this system and exploited many producers of works while profiting well past the deaths of the creators.
It is my opinion that we need an alternative mechanism for funding the creation of information-works that doesn't rely on artificial scarcity.
You have said it was originally to help out the market, and you have said copying information is now nearly free, but you forgot to say how or why the first part is incongruous with the second. Why does it make less sense than it used to? Which of our new capabilities could be leveraged by a new system?
You still didn't answer the question. Copyright was introduced because it was amazingly cheap to copy as opposed to create. If it's gotten even cheaper, that means it's more relevant, not less. So, again, how does the first part connect to the second? Explain fully why the current system isn't relevant, because there's clearly something obvious to you that isn't obvious to me.
What I'm saying is, the motivation to print pirated copies of books was to sell them to people for profit because as cheap as it was to copy books compared to writing them, it was still quite a bit above 0.
However, copying cost today is effectively 0. No one would pay money for a pirated copy of an ebook. One could (somewhat pedantically) say that this means the creator's 'exclusive right to profit' from their work is not violated because no one profits in this way from piracy[0], but that's not the point. the point is that the concept barely even made sense the first time around, but allowed a creator who didn't own a giant expensive distribution mechanism the leverage to negotiate compensation. Now the distribution is about as free as it is ever likely to get.
[0] or at least they wouldn't if it weren't for laws creating barriers that allow people to profit by providing mechanisms around said barriers.
Yes. And why not? That I can do that so easily today even with copyright just goes to show how post-scarcity information is.
The problem, of course, is that the creators of the work still need to participate in a scarcity economy to live. There are examples of efforts being made to fund creators outside the traditional scarcity-based mechanism, such as patreon funding, github sponsorship, and the like, although I admit they appear to only currently be useful for those who would be unable to leverage the traditional system effectively anyway.
While I may not have the answer to funding creators, I firmly believe that we'd be going backwards to insist on forcing scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
How do you ensure the copy you buy isn't adulterated and modified? One benefit of copyright is that the author can ensure the "real" one is shared... which you may care about when viewing content.
Trivially solved with hashing or signing. Copyright as a legal mechanism is unnecessary to ensure 'legitimacy'.
Copyright is useful for preventing others from using characters you created, but frankly I don't see the value in that. Moreover, it isn't even effective as fan fiction is incredibly common anyway. We can see how this would work with the proliferation of open source and the commonness of forks. It really isn't a big deal.
Copyrights are not only unnecessary for ensuring that the work you receive matches the original as copyright holders are free to make modifications. Worse, with the current copyright system the copyright holders can prevent the original from being distributed at all.
I don't think that follows. If we listen to car manufacturers we should replace our cars every year. Creators who make a lot of money with the current system are incentivized to perpetuate it, and some of those who don't make much imagine that they someday might.
Honestly, I don't mind the idea that you the creator, personally, holds the copyright for life. If I write a song in my 20s that sets the world on fire and I can still live a good life at 80 off the back of it, great.
The minute I sell that copyright to someone else (or it's inherited), a time limit begins to apply. Perhaps here you move into the '20 years' or something category.
For popular works, tracking the life of the creator is doable. For less popular works, figuring out who the creator is can be rather difficult. And then figuring out if they're alive isn't always easy either.
The screen actors guild has somewhat of a highlander policy, but if I release something Copyright My Name, there's hundreds or thousands of people it could be, including a Pulitzer Prize winning author who will likely predecease me.
One of the rights that copyright protects is the right to make derivative works--such as sequels and film adaptations. If you consider that someone like Terry Pratchett can productively write a literary universe for decades, it feels to me like the best answer is around 30-50 years.
Copyright should be taxed every year based on the cumulative earnings for the first 10 years.
This allows the rights holders to milk the bulk of the profit and yet quickly pass the orphaned works to the public domain - both benefitting the development of arts and sciences as stipulated by the US constitution.
Heck, even taxing works for $1 a piece per year would free up a huge number of orphans.
Not OP, but I think it makes very little difference whatever number you pick between “none” and “forever”.
Earlier this year a few authors whose work I enjoy tweeted furiously about this topic. Similar arguments may apply to audio and visual copyright.
If, for example, copyright lasted 14 years, then The Atrocity Archives (Stross) would already be public domain, which reduces incentive to create more in the series (not sure why, I would have expected new novels have new copyright, but I trust an author to know what their own motivations are, and I refuse to second-guess).
Now, these various authors on Twitter argued that being an author is poorly paid (it is), and that they would like to offer someone an inheritance comparable to a widow/er pension.
I can sympathise with that.
But, sales in most things decline over time. Sequels more, apparently (I wouldn’t know, one of the authors tweeted that). If income falls off exponentially with time, half the income for some specific work will be in the first x-months, 75% in 2x months, 99.9% in 10x months — I’m saying months rather than years because of how fast best-seller lists change, I don’t have real data.
Conversely, the reason for such a decline is that almost all the people who care will have bought the work soon after it is published. Making copyright last 100(average of all x) fails to harm society by preventing the work from becoming public domain, but only by the same[2] as it fails to help creative people commercialise their creativity, and for exactly the same reason: almost nobody cares any more. This remains true even if the income curve isn’t exponential, as the benefit to society is simply not having to pay for it[3].
Certainly I’m not rushing out to download some copy of inter-war music, radio broadcasts of whatever category, or newspapers; and I don’t even know if that’s for lack of money because I don’t care. I suspect I’m not alone in not caring.
Indeed, I only oppose zero/infinite duration because of the edge cases.
The point of copyright is to give creators an incentive at all besides the default of creative people being patronised or commissioned. This is already a thing — furry art by commission; stories[0] and YouTubers supported on Patreon. As this is not the status quo, if we switched to “no copyright” I expect this will break stuff and bankrupt people who have come to rely on it (this also means I oppose sudden changes in general).
If copyright was infinite, all works world eventually become lost in a legal quagmire of e.g. mergers and acquisitions where the actual owner ceases to be known.
> Making copyright last 100(average of all x) fails to harm society by preventing the work from becoming public domain
That does not follow. Even if literally everyone who was interested in the work already has a copy, copyright prevents others from building on top of it. That is the harm.
Yes, sure, it would be a copyright violation to write today a novel set on a giant space artefact containing a flattened full-scale map of Earth, where a motley crew (including a bald human on anti-aging drugs) crash-lands and investigates, finding the machinery of the world breaking down, where those things are “the Ringworld”, Luis Wu, superconducting wire destroyed by a synthetic microbe, and Boosterspice; but that didn’t stop Pratchett writing Strata with “the flat world”, Kin Arad, general entropy, and Days.
i think this is fair and we will likely see it extended further.
the media works of today cost way more than they did before. some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the longevity of media has increased over time.
we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even longer since the production value is so high
i think we will see this in video games the most. they will continue to be revenue sources in digital formats and companies will be defensive over losing them
I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of copyright is to shift money made from selling copies back into the production of new works; and anything else is just blatant rent-seeking at the expense of the larger economy.
High-budget songs, movies, and video games will either make back their budgets immediately, or they will be written off as a loss. There are very few cases where a work's financial success is predicated on money made five or ten years out. Hell, for video games, ten years out and you need to port your game to a new platform, which costs money, since the industry's investment into emulation technology[0] is piss-poor.
Furthermore, the production values of a work don't have much to do with it's longevity; you can't spend twice as much to get a work with twice the relevance decades down the line. In fact, most of the works from the past that still are relevant today were made on budgets that would be considered shoe-string today. If anything, I'd argue that longer terms make cheap cash-ins a safer bet than riskier experimental projects, even though the latter is more likely to be relevant. Do you really think that, say, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to last longer than the original Ghostbusters?
[0] Counterexamples: PC gaming, Steam Proton, and Xbox Series/PS5 backwards compatibility. All of these rely upon having built their games on technologies with long-term compatibility support built-in (Windows, x86), or upon community re-implementation efforts (WINE). The game industry cannot ever seem to afford to write their own one-off emulators.
this is totally false. world of warcraft was released 15 years ago and is still generating real profit. because video games receive updates and have continued micro transactions they do not necessarily make the most of their revenue immediately upon release
production value has a huge impact. why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain after 10 years? it’s still the cash machine that runs the business today and it’s 8 years old
If world of warcraft hadn't added any content in 15 years it wouldn't be making much money.
> why would rockstar spend billions developing gta 5 if it was public domain after 10 years?
Because that's still a ton of money. Also every time they update the game with more content, that's something you can only get if you buy or wait even longer. And it's easy for them to require payment to use GTA Online.
> it’s still the cash machine that runs the business today and it’s 8 years old
I don't think it would be a tragedy if they had to put out a new game at some point in the next few years to keep making as much money.
Also the game was already completely free for a week in 2020.
WoW and GTA5 both made back their costs shortly after launch. The fact that there is more profit to be made afterwards isn't an argument for or against longer copyright terms. The point of copyright is not to enable the author or publisher to capture 100% of the profit - otherwise, we'd just issue perpetual copyright title and call it a day. The point is to encourage the production of new works by giving people who create them a "bite at the apple", so to speak. So the length of copyright title needs to be calibrated to allow creators the chance to make a profit, but to not gate further creativity or re-use behind a paywall.
This is, of course, very poorly bargained-for in present law.
Okay, but for all modern media at those price tags, the overwhelming majority of the revenue is seen within the first year, often within the first month or even first few days (consider pre-orders on video games— RDR2 reportedly made $725M in its first weekend).
Why should this content be locked up for decades past the point where it has already made 90% of the money it's ever going to make? So the Disney company can have a century's worth of exclusive material ready to go when they launch D+, creating an absolutely impenetrable barrier to entry for an upstart?
Nobody is investing millions in a song that they think could take 95 years to earn enough to justify the investment.
Copyright is there to incentivize creating new works. If the copyright was shortened to max(life of the artist, 50 years), how many artists do you think would stop creating?
Frankly, there's an argument to be made that shortening the length of copyright to 25 years would encourage more new works simply because you can rest an your laurels.
> we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s.
When you take the time value of money into account, an expectation of big amounts of revenue multiple decades out is worth very little at the time of production. And on top of that, those old movies tend to be licensed at very cheap rates, so now it's a small amount of revenue getting exponentially discounted.
Cutting copyright after a couple decades won't have a big impact on profits.
> some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars
Seems like the cultural ROI isn't there. The extra money may bring extra revenue but it doesn't improve the quality at all. Why not force a market correction?
I think if we're going to time limit ownership rights to intellectual property we should time limit ownership rights to everything - including land, buildings, shares and stocks, bonds, art collections, all of it. Except maybe trivial items like home furnishings and portable tools.
I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing between these asset classes.
If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is all property. If it isn't, it isn't. Any argument you can make about the benefits of putting intellectual work in the public domain, you can also make - more convincingly - about land and any other productive resource.
2 or more people wanting to use a given plot of land contend with each other to do so. My use impairs yours and vice versa.
2 or more people wanting to use given a sound recording do not as copying has a marginal cost approaching zero. My use can be entirely separate from yours and we may not even know of the existence of the other. Land, for example, cannot be copied with a very small marginal cost, or indeed, at all.
These things are very different and those differences need to be taken into account in any regulation surrounding their property rights. I express no opinion here of what correct regulation for property rights for these two vastly different asset classes should be. Make your case for opposing property rights by all means.
> I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing between these asset classes.
Owning a physical thing and "owning" information is fundamentally different. Information can be copied, spread, redistributed without taking it away from someone.
If you take land from someone they can no longer use it, if you copy information from someone they still have it themselves. You cannot build two houses onto the same place in the same property.
Ownership is designed so that we can say who is allowed to use things with naturally exclusive use.
Copyright is designed to make the use of naturally unlimited and reusable information exclusive.
This is also why we have the word "infringement" and why we should not be using the word "theft" in these contexts.
To put this idea another way:
Say Jane has an iObject. She uses it everyday.
Bob takes the iObject. Jane now does not have her iObject, and cannot use it everyday.
The iObject has value, and it's expensive to obtain another one. Jane must spend to obtain another iObject, assuming one is available for purchase.
This is theft, and the key legal concept here is someone being deprived of their property.
Joe has made a song. Joe has granted distribution rights to Larry, who collects money for people obtaining copies of the song. Joe makes money from Larry, who also makes money doing all these things.
Ann gets a copy of Joe's song from her friend Jose. Larry and Joe did not get any revenue from Ann.
This is infringement.
Notably, Joe still has his song. Larry still has his right of distribution he obtained from Joe. They are not denied their property.
Essentially Anne and Jose did, or experienced something they were not supposed to.
Also of note, Larry and Joe could still sell Ann a copy of the song! Ann could further promote Joe's song to others in various ways, legally.
There are some additional considerations.
Part of the value in Joe's work is context. People who know Joe, understand his work, identify with Joe in ways that make using Joe's work important to them all represent value. Larry helps add value to Joe's work by doing the other work associated with distribution, and that's advertising, and other efforts that generally promote the work and add context.
Unlike theft, there can actually be value created as a result of infringement!
In the case of theft, the value of the iObject to Jane is associated with owning and using the iObject, and said use could be just looking at the thing, or it could be the iObject enables Jane to do things she would not normally be able to do, whatever. When theft happens, Jane no longer has that value and or whatever was possible when she did have her iObject.
Infringement is weird.
Ann gets a copy of Joe's work from Jose. Prior to that, Ann has no clue about Joe, his work, that it's available. There is some chance Ann would have stumbled on all that due to Larry being good at what he does, but there is also a great chance Joe remains undiscovered by Ann, who would never spend any money that Joe and Larry would receive.
However, Jose promoting the work to Ann changes all of that!
Now Ann knows who Joe is, has context (Jose) and now could spend money for any number of reasons.
Joe and Larry received value from Jose's act of infringement (copy, distribute), and Ann added to that by her other act of infringement. (use)
And that's it, just really want to underscore the difference.
I've long held the view we won't really get workable laws on all this, until we discuss it using the proper words. The nuances are subtle, but they matter! As does the law and its impact on our lives and opportunities.
Personal ownership is already limited by the owner’s lifetime and automatically transfers when they die. Copyrights, on the other hand, outlive the creator.
Generational wealth is a significant problem as winner take all dynamics tend to concentrate wealth within families until they get so powerful that they form aristocracies. The US is new enough that it’s aristocracy is just getting started. Several European countries lack them because war or revolution hit the reset button, but if you look at a country like the UK, you will see it alive and well.
On the other hand, generational wealth below obscene amounts is a vital stabilizing force in a society. A middle to upper middle class family passing on a boost to each subsequent generation is a good thing. Grandparents help pay for their grandkids' schooling, kids have some sense of stability and a safety net, etc.
We need many layers of safety nets and stabilizing forces, because every layer is prone to different types of failure. There is a natural and desirable support structure of individial -> family -> community -> state -> humanity that allows society and individuals to survive and thrive through changing circumstances. Too much reliance on any one layer, especially the state, is a recipe for fragility or tyranny.
When every individual has an emergency fund, every family has a nest egg, every community pulls together in time of need, and every state provides a safety net of last resort, we can weather any storm.
>Personal ownership is already limited by the owner’s lifetime and automatically transfers when they die. Copyrights, on the other hand, outlive the creator.
well personal ownership generally gets passed to your kids when you die and then to their kids etc. so as long as your descendants do not sell it, that lasts forever.
Copyrights might last past you to your kids but probably not to your kids' kids and further.
well that's true, but are you under the impression that the value of copyrights are not ever taken into account in determining the value of an artist's estate and are thus not taxed at the time of death?
Copyright ant patents are monopolies on “infinite” resources to incentivize the creation of such resources. Property is a restriction on other people’s utilization of a finite resource that belongs to someone
What distinguishes land from all the other things you have mentioned is that there is a finite limit to its amount. You can issue new shares, make more goods, build new buildings, and write new songs, but the amount of land available is actually shrinking.
We need a land value tax. The wealthy shouldn't be able to extort rent from the rest of society for having bought up a finite resource that gets its value from that same society. Land speculation is a scourge that drives people into poverty and homelessness while good land goes sits idle.
Thought experiment: If I could duplicate any physical item you own exactly, would you have a problem with it? Other than the time taken to do the scanning process, you wouldn't lose any access to your property. If so, why?
IP and physical property are not fungible, so I find this argument slightly disingenuous. They operate under different physical laws.
IP is not about physical goods, it's inevitably a creation of the mind. If I take your home or land, you lose it and can't access it anymore. If I "take" your intellectual property, you still have "it".
While I don't totally disagree, physical items add some practical issues due to their individual scarcity that digital ones don't have.
What actually happens when my car goes back into public domain? Is it just fair game for everyone? Does someone from the govmt come to pick it up? Would there be some kind of library-esque system for all public domain'd property?
How have I not heard this idea before? I find it a brilliant balance between capitalism and socialism. It reminds me of 99-year land leases. It’s enough ownership to pass on wealth for 1-2 generations, then it goes back into the public trust.
Copyright should expire 20 years after the work is created. Shorter and the author will not be able to monetize, longer and society is held hostage by rent seekers.
Patents should just be abolished altogether. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
Steamboat Willie was in 1928 though, I wonder if anyone is sitting around thinking aw, when that comes out my evil plan can finally be put into motion.
