Only in the US; Pooh was published in the UK, and there, it doesn't enter the public domain for several more years yet, because the UK sentences copyrighted works to life plus 70 years. Christopher Robin died of old age 25 years ago, never ceasing to hate the books, and his daughter (A.A. Milne's last descendant) died nine years ago, but still you can go to jail if you share your copy of the Pooh books with a friend using a computer.
Huh, this really surprised me, because Winnie The Pooh shipped for free with Apple Books when that came out, and I thought it was precisely because it was so old. So Apple actually licensed it then?
Winnie-the-Pooh hasn't belonged to the Milne estate for a very long time. Most of the rights rest with Disney. The estate has been involved in a multi-decade legal battle to get the books back, so that they could be released to the public domain.
Actually getting jailed for copyright infringement is quite difficult, but getting sued is quite likely: the copyright is now owned by Disney. Like everything else.
> Actually getting jailed for copyright infringement is quite difficult...
May be actually getting in jail is difficult but a threat of jail in a criminal copyright infringement persecution can be devastating as the tragedy of Aaron Swartz [0] so vividly illustrates [1].
Hopefully it isn't actually quite likely that you will get sued for copyright infringement just for copying some files onto a USB stick. That would involve the use of something like Apple's dystopian surveillance system being used for copyright enforcement, which I think is still two or three years out.
You can't go to jail in the US or most countries for a civil case (a civil case is what happens if someone sues you), only a criminal case. Since the No Electronic Theft act, even copyright infringement without profit motives can be criminal copyright infringement, and so for example Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by state prosecutors even against the apparent will of the copyright holders.
I don't know who owns Milne's copyrights, but given how profitable they are, I am sure they are jealously guarded.
The Swartz case was more about an overzealous US Attorney looking for scalps than copyright.
It also highlights the ridiculously broad law at the Federal level that essentially allow US Attorneys to function like medieval inquisitors than prosecutors of a democratic state. Copyright happened to be the pretense.
I would be very surprised if the Disney company wouldn't be protective of their adaptations, at the very least. How would that interact with the book and its illustrations entering the public domain?
It's going to be interesting. Most of the copyright infringement going on is clearly of Disney's adaptations; so, for example, when a couple sold me a house in 01999 with a Pooh painting on the wall of the children's room, that was probably criminal copyright infringement of Disney's version, because the painting looked nothing like the illustrations in the books. (And I'm sure she didn't get a license from Disney to do her painting.)
This legal situation is appalling; it makes a mockery of justice and humanity.
> that was probably criminal copyright infringement
sounds more like "Fair Use", unless you imply the painting was made for the purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.
As in: they painted it right before selling and used the image to advertise the house to young couples.
Possibly. The thing about fair use is that you can never really tell. Commercial intent is only one of the four factors. The market-effect factor would also weigh in her favor. The other two factors — the nature of the work and the substantiality of the copying — plausibly weigh against her. Of course I don't think she'll be prosecuted, or I wouldn't think about posting this, but that's partly because she's not a well-known political dissident who the FBI has a pre-existing grudge against.
Copyright laws have outlived their useful laws. We give 72 years of public funded enforcement for leisure and entertainment but only 17 years for patents. This has overly incentivized leisure and created irrational wealth in exchange for very little work. We worship football players while biochemistry majors with a bachelor's degree struggle to find jobs.
There's a difference. If you invent a character or create some art and it gets popular, you deserve to be protected from people making money of off that work, to a reasonable extent (fair use etc).
The difference to patents is that they're routinely abused. Patent trolls file or buy up patents that are as general as possible to drag smaller companies through the courts, or charge exorbitant licensing fees, stifling innovation. Pharma companies build monopolies around life-saving drugs and engage in price gouging. The patent holders get rich, not the biochem majors. Extending the effective period for patents will make things worse, not better, as the real problems are elsewhere.
Rice farmers have a monopoly on the rice they grow—if someone else takes it without permission and sells it they are considered thieves. But it doesn't really make sense to compare physical goods and creative goods like that. You can't "copy" rice in the same way you can copy a novel; rice doesn't need copyright.
The reason copyright was invented in the first place was to encourage creative work by allowing the creator to profit from it for a period. It aims to balance potential benefits—the one that accrues to the creator and the one that accrues to the general population once copyright expires. You might think that the creator does not deserve any benefit from their creation, but most creators would disagree with you.
Code is a possible exception. The benefits of open source development may greatly outweight the benefits that would accrue to an individual developer if the code couldn't be copied, but I'm not sure that the balance is the same for novels and movies. I suspect many valuable creative works would simply not be created if the creator had no way to benefit.
Perhaps we need a more nuanced discussion that considers the actual benefits/harms of copyright periods on particular artforms and creative endeavours.
Ironically in some jurisdictions, you can patent crops. Patent != copyright of course, but it is related as in this case it would partly be used to prevent sale of the same type of rice.
Farming is not like copying a book. I just wasted a fair bit of time commenting about how farming is not like copying a fucking book and the implications that arise from that. But apparently you didn't bother to read it, are too thick to understand it, or simply prefer to respond with cretinous sarcasm, so I won't waste my time any further.
Disney owning what amounts to a controlling share of mass culture is roughly comparable to patent trolls. The copyright clause that enables copyright law is about protecting creators from rogue publishers. It was never meant to control what individuals could do with copyright protected works, short of publishing for profit.
Are you implying then that copyright is not routinely abused? Big companies do this all the time (eg, Google v Oracle or the Unix lawsuits).
There's fan fiction of almost every character you can imagine. Can you name even ONE fan fiction you'd rather consume instead of the original author's work?
Trademark law is what protects your character after the copyright expires. Mickey Mouse is safe. It would allow other companies to sell Steamboat Willie (as is), but it wouldn't allow them to make a derivative work and sell it as "Mickey Mouse".
Not sure what football players have to do with copyright.
But I guess your point is life isn't fair. And people like literature activities. It are you suggesting we should all sit signs watching biochem scientists work?
Lifetime of the author plus some time seems fair to me for copyright. And for patents, that's an exchange, the public sees the details and provides protection for some years.
My major gripe is with software patents which are already covered by copyright.
No, it's anything but fair. Those heirs did nothing at all. Why should they benefit from these works? On the opposite, copyright should not be transferable.
It should last maybe several years, and that's it. Only then most people would have any semblance of respect for it. And then something entering the public domain would be actually an event people would be looking forward to. Right now everyone considers copyright to be an effectively eternal thing.
It's also really depressing that the entirety of our pop culture is copyrighted, mostly by large faceless corporations.
You are young aspiring author. You have a family. You publish a greatly successful novel/series which would bring you $10M annually for at least 30 years.
You and your SO die in a car crash. Your children, 3 and 5 y.o. now without a parents.. and without ANY part of that probable $300M. Good luck, children, you did nothing at all.
If I were to die, I wouldn't care the slightest about what happens next. As far as I'm concerned, the entire universe ceases to exist that very moment.
Do you not appreciate the world that was prepared for you? Safe, healthy, entertaining, etc. Much of this work was done with future generations in mind. You could throw evolution in there too. It's nice to not be limited to a single cell.
On top of that, many people enjoy giving back, either to their kids or community. Preparing nice things for people after your death can bring comfort in life. That may come in the form of money, open sourced code, etc.
Honestly, the existence of the universe is meaningless to me if my consciousness is to somehow irreversibly disappear from it in the future. I find this whole idea of eventual mandatory death extremely cruel, and those who romanticize it cringey. So many people hurry to live their lives because "life is short". So many people make so many irrational, bad decisions for the same reason. And so many people accept this as some kind of immutable fact.
I'm looking forward to all that life extension/rejuvenation research that's gaining momentum right now. I don't want to die. Ever. I wish I could contribute to it, but my skill set isn't very fitting for this purpose. I doubt any one of the companies doing this kind of research needs a screaming fast android app or a java backend.
I think your absence due to death is irrelevant here. People feel good when they do nice things for others, and one of those things can be preparing an inheritance. That all happens before death.
Heirs benefit because intellectual property is inheritable in the same way as any other property, such as real estate. If I owned a valuable copyright, I'd certainly want my children to get it in the event of my death. (Though I still agree that copyrights endure longer than they should.)
How do you know they did nothing at all. The purpose of copyright, at least in the USA, is to encourage creators to create. I wouldn't be surprised if she people try to create that one last great American novel, so their children are taken care of. If the copyright can't be passed on, those creators might not create that last work of art.
Personally I think copyright should be 25 years. And not the life and then some. But that 25 years should extend past the life of the creator.
Plus I don't want to create any motives to do away with the creators
Before you are dead, you might want to be able to get a cash advance from a publisher even though you might die before they sell enough copies to recoup their investment.
A copyright holder will already have earned money on it during a fixed time period.
Your argument is a straw man. Why should author's have a different right to provide for their children more so than other professions?
There's something inherently unjust in protecting the works based on the death of the original author. A 25 year old will, on average, enjoy a significantly longer period of protection than a 75 year old.
So the 25yo with a wife and child finishes a book, signs with a publisher, and dies.
The book sells a million copies and the publisher refuses to pay the widow and child anything because the work is now in the public domain. Justice has been done?
I think a simple period of time, like 7 or 14 years, or even 50, makes more sense.
If money was already made, then it should go to descendants. However, I see no reason why further copies made after death should get taxed in favour of descendants for 70 years. What do they have to do with it anymore? What value do they provide to justify the compensation?
What value do they provide? Their existence is in all likelihood one of the reasons the author put pen to paper in the first place. It is rewarding the author and encouraging creative work to be able to pass on ownership of creative works just like other belongings.
I think I worded my original post poorly. I am completely in favour of having a fixed time for already created works regardless of the time of the authors death.
In regards to your example, the publisher has a contractual obligation with the author, which is obviously part of the estate.
My argument is that even if the author has a deal with a publisher for a particular book, that should not prevent others from being able to create new books, movies, games, etc based on that book.
As a counter example, imagine a 25 year old, with a wife, who would have been able to create the best game ever in 2010. Unfortunately he dies in 2015.
The game would have sold millions of copies if it was published, but unfortunately the character of Mickey Mouse is integral to it, so because of copyright the game cannot be made until 2024 - 58 years after Walt Disney's death and 96 years after the first appearance of the character.
The widow and child get a pension, just like all other widows of non-authors. Widows and children of other people don't get the right to receive wage from work perpetually so it's insane that we're supposed to pay wages to authors families for decades and decades.
What you are saying is that all of the benefit goes to the publishing company, not the public. Not really.
The reality of normal people is that a big part of the reason they work is in order to provide for the people they love. This is why copyright exists in the first place—to protect the motivation to produce creative work, knowing that the benefit won’t be stolen from you. Knowing that if you die, the benefit to your children is immediately forfeit actually reduces the willingness for people who aren’t misanthropes to take on that risk.
>Your argument is a straw man. Why should author's have a different right to provide for their children more so than other professions?
I'm pretty sure that people from other professions can leave their property to their children as well, and that property does not suddenly become a public good a set amount of time afterwards.
I'm sure Levi's wouldn't mind a small license fee every time you wore jeans, but fashion designers - and most other professions - actually don't get the same privileges.
so now that we're off the real estate analogy - you picked Levis - a clothing brand and fashion design? It seems a weird argument to make that authors shouldn't have copyright on their books while using as the counterpoint another industry that is also protected by copyright https://copyrightalliance.org/education/qa-headlines/copyrig...
> The way that design elements are cut and pieced together is not protected by copyright. The U.S. Supreme Court recently addressed this topic in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, stating that copyright affords “no right to prohibit any person from manufacturing [clothing] of identical shape, cut, and dimensions.”
Levi's in particular has distinct cuts that they are famous for. Should we start embedding RFID tags in jeans to collect licensing fees every time you wear them in public?
since you just quoted the part saying that is one of the things not covered by copyright I guess the answer would be no?
I'm sorry but are you under the impression that everything an author does is covered by copyright, that is to say there is nothing an author does that they will be unable to copyright?
but I guess in whatever wonderful country you live in there are no such things as landlords, or perhaps its a dystopian hellhole because there isn't any government enforced property rights so warlords just grab whatever real estate they want? Just trying to get my head around this analogy you were making.
on edit: I see you completely changed your comment from being an example with real estate to being something with Levi's.
Real estate works the same way. Why are you not paying builders a license fee every time you enjoy the fruits of their labor that protect you from rain and wind? Builders get only a microscopic fraction of the value that their commercial building or a factory produces over its lifetime. Is this fair or unfair?
I don't follow this argument. If a copyright holder can earn money for their work for a fixed period of time, they can use that income to acquire things like property
Unless copyright holders are somehow prohibited from obtaining property or passing it on to their relatives I don't think that's a meaningful comparison
>I don't follow this argument. If a copyright holder can earn money for their work for a fixed period of time, they can use that income to acquire things like property
it should be relatively clear, copyrighted works are a form of property that people have and pay taxes on, the same way that they pay taxes on stock they own, or the improvements they did to their land when they built a house on it, and so forth. It's all a form of property.
>they can use that income to acquire things like property
yes, if a master carpenter makes a table and never sells it they can pass it on to their children as a form of property. but they can also sell it and use the money to obtain other forms of property and pass that on to their children. Or just let them inherit the money. Not sure what the point here is, except that for a lot of people's arguments to work here it is beneficial to ignore that copyrighted works are also a form of property.
Now someone will make the point that written works don't work the same as a table made by a carpenter and therefore it is unfair, even though stocks and bonds do not work the same as a small family mom and pop store which does not work the same as a table made by a carpenter which does not work the same as a painting by a famous painter which does not work exactly the same as the insurance business, and so on and so forth.
The fact is that there are many forms of business and property and they do not all work exactly the same, although their local differences tend to get smoothed out by the effects of accounting.
Obviously part of the way that the writing business works is formed by the laws and regulations pertaining to it. You would like to change that, but it seems disingenuous to argue that it should be changed because copyrighted works are not property. They function like property now that the owners lose after a variable amount of time, and even if the changes you wanted would be put in place they would still function like property - but with much less time before being changed to a public good.
Because you deserve to be compensated for your work. And maybe there is value in allowing you to sell your work for continued publication and protection against copying. The idea is that copyright encourages quality content. I don't know what the exact duration should be, but lifetime of author as a basis plus some time seems fair to me.
Does it even have to be their lifetime? 50 years from creation should suffice and they can put some of the profits during this time into a personal pension plan like the rest of us have to.
50 years is too long. It is basically saying everything culturally relevant from someone’s youth should not enter the public domain until they are pretty much dead. At which point no one is going to car about the copyrighted material.
20 years seems like a sufficient term, I would even go for 10 or 15. Creators were still creating before copyright terms were extended to infinity.
The argument is actually that copyright encourages more public works without regard to quality.
Copyright should be for a fixed number of years so that everyone receives equal benefit and that time period should be closer to 10-20 years rather than a hundred.
It's indirectly funded. The state passes a law granting a monopoly, and the copyright holder can sue for a breach. However this relies on the state providing courts, police, jails etc. (for people who breach court orders).
After an initial period of a few years 7 or 14 sounded good to the US founding fathers), Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax.
If anyone wants to put the work in the public domain, they simply have to pay the value the company declared.
Disney could declare Star Wars is worth $5b, as it’s 40 years old they’d have to pay say $150m a year tax to deny the rights to the public.
If they declared it to be worth $50m to save on that tax, then netflix could pay for it to go public domain.
Income tax generates tax revenue just as well, and the government’s incentive to protect copyrights domestically is the fact that it is the law. Internationally is a matter of politics, but I do not see a clear black and white answer for why copyright would need to be enforced internationally.
Income tax generates tax revenue. Whether it's "just as well" as other forms of taxing is debatable. In at least some countries, wealth is taxed less than labour, which increases a class distinction. Less income taxes in favour of other taxes may redress that balance.
Or it may not - economists and ouija boards can give you predictions.
Sure, but I do not see the purpose of creating a special tax scheme just for copyrighted works. If you want to hit everyone with a wealth tax, then do it the same way for all assets.
Every time the copyright law is discussed, little players and harm done to them is always brought in the conversation. In practice, however, the corporate media behemoths are the ones who benefit most from these laws.
It's 'think of the children!!' argument of the IP laws.
You’re missing the point if that’s you’re take away because I’m saying is overly complex rules are more likely to harm smaller players than they are the larger ones given larger organisations have the resources and motives to work exploit loopholes.
This isn’t a theoretical argument either. You see it all the time already (eg tax avoidance).
You seem to be a bit obsessed with points. Ok, I'll elaborate.
1. The original message wasn't missing a point about complex rules harming small players. It was just stating that ANY shit done to IP laws is done on the pretence of helping the small players, but instead benefitting the big ones. This was a typical strawman argument on your part.
2. The point you say I disagreed with in the subsequent message is literally the point I agreed with.
Total points score: 2-0 in my favour. Better luck next year, have a nice 2022. ;)
> The original message wasn't missing a point about complex rules harming small players. It was just stating that ANY shit done to IP laws is done on the pretence of helping the small players, but instead benefitting the big ones. This was a typical strawman argument on your part.
Again, you’re making the same argument as I was while claiming I wasn’t making it.
> The point you say I disagreed with in the subsequent message is literally the point I agreed with.
Your comments (this one included) don’t do a particularly good job of expressing what you do and don’t agree with. Half your comments read like a rebuttal despite being an effective reiteration of former comments posted by those you’re replying to. The other half aren’t clear which comments you’re actually replying to (such as this post - it’s so vague as to the sequence of events you’re referring to that your comment is basically meaningless).
> You seem to be a bit obsessed with points.
> Total points score: 2-0 in my favour. Better luck next year
Are you 5 years old? That’s a pathetic way to handle a conversation.
It might help to think about the idea that the "little" players here are the public who, in aggregate has the largest stake in the game but who simultaneously has the lowest financial stakes and the least monetary incentives to lobby for their real interests.
I say that as someone who has produced a whole lot of content at the least-monitizable end of the system.
Disney is the one who is winning right now, both in terms of me "as a content creator" and me "as a member of the public".
> It might help to think about the idea that the "little" players here are the public
That was exactly who I was thinking about when I made my statement.
> Disney is the one who is winning right now, both in terms of me "as a content creator" and me "as a member of the public".
I agree. However the proposal made by the OP would only worsen the control that companies the size of Disney have while making it harder for individuals like ourselves to defend our own creative content.
So if you’re a contend creator (as I am too) then you really should oppose the suggestion made by the OP.
What you need to remember is that while copyright reform is needed - so badly needed - it doesn’t automatically make every possible suggestion better. In fact some of the suggestions that have been floated on HN are a lot worse than the status quo (and that’s saying something given how bad it already is).
But then I shouldn’t be surprised that a forum built around VC has members who think copyright can be “solved” simply by asking creators to throw more money at the problem…
That’s nearly impossible to do though because the bigger the company the more resources they have to figure out loopholes and then to exploit them. And the more profitable exploiting those loopholes becomes thus the more tempting it is to act first then beg for forgiveness later.
It’s not even as if anti-competition laws have much effect these days. There’s a real culture in the US of acting dishonourably and then asking for forgiveness later. And more often than not, the punishment for breaking the law is significantly less than the profit earned from those unlawful acts. So they’re incentivised to be unlawful.
This is why you need clear rules that equivalent regardless of income so everyone is clear where the line is drawn; but penalties that are weighted so that rule breaking cannot be gamified.
I've had this (admittedly naive) idea for a while now: what if there were a way to declare fines for corporate offenses based on a percentage of the money earned from committing such an offense? This percentage could be greater than 100% to ensure it is never incentivized to break the law. The main issue is determining how much money a corporation made based on a decision. This would require statistics and analysts and the minimum possible fine should be the minimum possible fine currently imposed by law.
The whole shell corporation, off shore tax haven bullshit would probably make this infeasible but is there actually anything that can stop that? I don't have any good ideas, but I know corporations should not make money off breaking the law.
How would you value the product of a startup, or some open source software that doesn't make any money but the creator wants to use a copyleft license for? Also, how would this work internationally? Would you have to pay a proportion of the value to the US government even if the US is a small market for you?
My guess would be that after the initial period of no taxes if the company wasn’t able to turn a profit on the patent then they would have to either sell the patent to avoid taxes or list it as a value that they would manage to be able to pay taxes and start raising money, might help with patent/copyright squatting
I don’t want to have to declare some “value” on my code and then actually pay some real money on the off-chance it might become valuable later on.
I appreciate that copyright is often abused - milked - for all it’s worth. But I think your proposal goes too far. As bad as it is copyright has some uses. With copyright I can apply a GPL license and attempt to conjole others to contribute to the greater good.
You're suggesting that Copyleft licenses should be _public domained_ after a short period of time, or the copyright owner should pay a tax?
So, let's take say the Software Freedom Foundation. They should declare a value on the GNU Tools - and if say Microsoft is prepared to pay that value then all GNU tools should be public domain - meaning they can be used in say Windows (as closed compiled binaries?)
Alternatively the FSF needs to come up with some % of value to prevent MS from using their work under a closed license?
I mean, copyright works both ways right? It's equally protecting those that want to commercially profit from their work, and also those that don't want it to be used in a "non freedom" way. So, assuming most GPL authors aren't swimming in cash, this would make more-or-less all GPL'd works lose their freedoms?
You obviously disagree but it seems very reasonable to me that 20 year old FSF code should fall into the public domain including for Microsoft or MomAndPopSoftwareCo or whoever to use.
Note that they still couldn't just take the current grep or vim or whatever code and use it; copyright on later revisions isn't based on the first published moment of the same project.
Instead the code has tons of changes made within the past 20 years and all of those deltas will still be covered by copyright. Microsoft could only be able to take the code of grep as it was as of 2001. I actually kind of doubt they would, but if that much time has passed and something is still useful it should belong to everyone and not just one person.
This would probably work better for the big conglomerates than the status quo. The tax would be less than the royalties they'd no longer have to pay to the actual creators, because emerging artists aren't able to afford to pay tax up front in the hope someone will eventually offer them a big advance.
Ideally, in a perfect world this makes sense but will not work in reality. This just gives a way for any larger player to easily get something in the public domain from a smaller player with less resources. The tax concept is a good concept, maybe like how we have large banks under more scrutiny over a certain level - but this may lead to small IP companies that just hold ip in order to get below the threshold. Star Wars LLC licensing to disney to be under whatever threshold is designed. Copyright in reality should protect the smaller players from the bigger players, a 30 year time frame for an author to profit before the public domain, so a company can not horde IP makes more sense.
I've long advocated something generally like this, for patents and other IP as well. I would propose a longer initial term (~30-50 years) since the nature and value of IP has changed significantly since the 1700s. I would also put an upper limit on it, since the most valuable IP is now held by immortal corporations.
The hard part for copyright is tracking what has been renewed and what has not, without some kind of registration system, which I don't think we want to add. Without this, it would make it very difficult to know if the work you intend to use/copy/distribute is protected or not.
That is a very interesting idea. But I think you would want at least a 14 year grace period with no property tax.
Another possibility is a use-it-or-lose-it scheme like that used in Trademarks. If you built a game that is now abandonware, it should be fair game for someone else to remaster it, etc.
Taxes (and tax deductions) are generally one of the best ways to align incentives. If it's a binary condition then you have tons of derelict content that should really be public domain, but because of the big ticket well-maintained Disney content the laws are written to be "reasonable" for that content and it ends up unnecessary locking up all of the other content from the 1970s
>Having 50 years to earn off your creation seems fair to everyone.
Everyone? Hold on there a moment, Jack.
I'm a copyright minimalist. Seven years with one renewal for a total of fourteen years seems much more fair to me considering all the years we've already had of continually delayed releases into the public domain. We the people have paid to enforce those years of copyright without the corresponding payoff at the end of the term release to the public. There's nothing fair about that situation and it needs to be addressed.
Copyright only exists because the government uses its monopoly on violence to protect it. Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so?
The average property tax is about 1%, so why should copyright be treated as something special? Especially, if the rent is collected by a third party that purchased the rights, their relationship to the creation of the underlying asset is no different to a landlord.
I'd dispense with this self-valuation business though and just charge a 1% tax on net present value of the asset.
If the copyright holder releases their claim early, then they'll get a tax refund for previous payments at the recalculated net present value.
"Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so?"
well i guess it depends on if you view the government as a profit seeking entity trying to maximally price its IP protection product, or if you view it as societal infrastructure.
Society works when people feel better off within than without, when that's not true, then people stop respecting laws and generally act asocial.
Copyright holders get an excellent deal by living in a society that allows them to collect rents that can add up into the millions of even billions.
But how about the work-a-day folks? What's in it for them? An abstract idea that allowing the descendants of creators to collect economic rents for generations after their death, might result in a greater throughput in creative works... somehow. No, for society to work, then rent seeking must be reigned in.
A copyright wealth tax would still allow rights holders to become fabulously wealthy, but they'd have to give something back in return. Something more than normal income tax, because of the rent seeking nature of their enterprise.
I'm not sure if I would call profiting off of an intangible invention or creation "rent". Is profiting by selling other property rent? Such as your labor? Or your used car?
It's a lot easier to steal your music or your blueprints than it is to steal physical property, but that doesn't change the fact that it's all still property, at least in my mind. And society seems to work best when theft is at a minimum.
If I build a bridge across a river and setup a toll booth, then yes, I should expect a return that reflects the capital, time, and risk I took in constructing the bridge. However, when I abuse my monopoly over the bridge to extract a return in excess of that, then I'm seeking economic rent.
Renting out a property is (by definition) a form of rent seeking, but it only becomes a problem when rent seekers have monopolistic market power as the rents they seek cannot be restrained by normal market forces. One only needs to look at the consolidation of the movie industry to see such power in action.
I'm not defending intellectual property theft, I'm (quite modestly) suggesting that rights holders should pay a surcharge (similar to real property taxes) in return for the state allowing for them to extract monopolistic profits from their copyright holdings.
> What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know?
Consider all those works that are in the public domain and that can be shared freely. Iconic pictures like the Mona Lisa are available to the benefit of everyone. No one owns the exclusive rights and everyone has access to this shared cultural history.
There's also collateral damage with the current copyright system. A lot of lesser known works have little commercial/brand value. But they remain illegal to share. These works are at risk of becoming lost culture. And in many cases the original authors don't own the rights to release the works into the public domain at an earlier time, because they have contracts with publishers.
To add to this, many works are simply unavailable. Works from before copyright became effectively perpetual are easily found. Works from the most recent decade or two are easily found. Anything in-between is frequently lost, with only the outliers remaining.
> What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know?
It effectively locks away cultural heritage for more than a hundred years with no tangible benefit to the society.
Disney became Disney because it used works in public domains (Brothers Grimm tales) and expired copyrights (Alice in Wonderland). Current copyright laws effectively blocks anyone from using 20th century works (and some late 19th century works) for ... well, anything, really.
Additionally, great swaths of culture are simply lost because of:
- the fear of potential copyright violations. This affects a great number of orphan works
- copyright holders doing nothing with their properties and others not being able to do anything with them. Can't find it now, but at one point Amazon carried more new books with works from the 19th century, than books with works from the 20th just because of that
But even that isn't the main problem. Copyright was intended to protect the author and incentivize them to create other works. I'm eagerly awaiting Tolkien's new works in 2047 (the copyright on The Fellowship of the Ring expires in 2050).
If there are no gains, the option is to release it or value it as nil and let someone else do it. So it's up to the owner of the copyright and I see no real unrealized gains tax.
Say you own the copyright on an old film you made, but are doing nothing with it (and making practically nothing) but plan to in the future (you have a plan to in say 10 years time). You are projecting that the value of the IP is something based on what you plan to do with it.
So it is 100% a tax on unrealised gains.
I complexly understand why some people will not be sympathetic to this.
> Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax.
I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate.
Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.
> copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP]
Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.
A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.
It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.
It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.
- author explicitly uses public domain as a license,
- 120 after publication,
- 120 after registration,
- 95 years after publication if it is corporate work or
- 75 years after the death of the author; whatever comes first.
Most significant arguments I hear defending current copyright status are:
- author have the right to make money from what they create,
- their children must still get some of it in the case their parents are authors and die early.
I still think the time for content to become public is too long. There are old music recordings from the 50's and 60's which nobody is making any significant money out of it and you simply can't copy to anybody. The same applies to a lot of games from the 90's and the 80's.
I think that it would be much more fair if copyright holders had to prove they are still making money out of a published work. If very little money is being made, this means nobody is paying for it or the copyright holder can't sell it well. In this case, the content should be declared abandoned and free to be copied unless the copyright holder demonstrates that money can be made with the content.
Reason: abandonware sites are on the fringe of legality, GOG was able to contact a few producers but that is not an easy or even possible task for everything. There are also music from early 1930's to 1960's for which it is not easy to even know who are the copyright holders and you fall on the fringe of legality if you distribute sheet music of it.
Also, there are other kinds of works: books, films, cartoons...
Copyright was intended to provide a means of support for individual artists, not as a means of guaranteeing profits to super-conglomerate shareholders for a period that nears on a century.
No. Copyright was intended to allow people to create. This might mean support for individual artists. Our it might mean profits for a super conglomerate. In fact, without that super conglomerate some things would never be created.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution specifies "authors and inventors," suggesting that natural persons were what the drafters had in mind. Those rights granted to individuals have been inferred to also be the rights of immortal companies over time.
Today i learned, that there is a latin translation of Winnie the Pooh. https://www.amazon.com/Winnie-Ille-Pu-Latin-Milne/dp/0140153... It even became a bestseller, and appeared on the list of New York Times bestsellers. Is it known, if translations of the work need to pay for copyright too?
Fascinating detail. My father used the book to teach me some English as a second language, the book is written in a clear and simple language. I wonder if these qualities have been preserved in the translation.
The spine on my Latin translation is far too tattered for me to crack open and scan an example page, but, yes. It's very, very simple and easy to read.
One of the peculiarities of the translation, that makes it so simple to read, is that it opts to use genderless words where possible. Using words like "illi" instead of "eae" for example.
For anyone interested in a Christian theologian's ruminations on whether copyright laws are just or actually prevent people from loving their neighbor, see "Copyrights and Copying: Why The Laws Should Be Changed" by Vern Poythress (Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia), https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-l....
