10 is a bit hard to bootstrap R&D and regain the invested money (especially when you build something over multiple years). But 20 years .. should work. Was not the original copyright for books something like 30 years.
My qualm is that it can take a lifetime of pushing around a script or a novel before it gets made. Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free… ideally it’d be 20 years after it got big but that’s not enforceable and vague.
That only works if every single publisher and studio are participating in an anticompetitive cabal who are all colluding to prevent the work from being bought, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about.
I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists, so assuming it would continue to follow anticompetitive practices is not a leap of any kind.
> I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists,
Of course, they're called _unions_, which prevent companies from hiring or contracting anyone who isn't part of their cabal -- I mean union.
Disney and Comcast and WB/Discovery are _competitors_ who would cut each other's throats for a nickel. Would they collude for profit? Sure, but they treat this as a zero-sum game, so they don't want to help their competition too much.
> Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free
If publishers and studios refuse to ever publish anything for 10 years artists will be free to publish things for themselves and you can bet that they will. I seriously doubt there'll never be a studio or publisher smart enough to pay for a script or book and bring it to the market first though.
Once a property is out there and has a fanbase they'd be total idiots to wait until every last person on earth can churn out media involving that property because for anything remotely popular the moment the 10 years are up the market will be saturated with new versions and remixes of it. They don't want that kind of competition, especially from people outside of the industry. Copyright has been corrupted into the restrictive vice on our culture that it is today in part because of that fear.
If you are a studio or publisher it'd be far better to pay the licensing fee and rake in the massive profits within the 10 year period before everyone is tired of seeing a billion versions of something on offer everywhere and avoid having to spend the kind of money and effort it would take to differentiate your work and pull attention from everything else springing up.
Now this is really sad. This is why we don't have nice things.
I believe the "natural" state of the society where we can build on each others work, but copyrights make that practically impossible.
It lowers the quality of art significantly (I do believe that most art pieces could be significantly improved, but we can't do that).
It lowers the quality of cars, electronics, and other products, also their reparability from 100% to 0% or so, as they constantly discontinue past products, and make them shittier, and they prohibit 3rd party to make replacement parts, and we can do nothing against it.
And it allows rent-seeking behaviour, for example we gave Intel a hundred of billions of dollars or so, because the prevented other companies to produce x86 compatible chips, and they could get away with ridiculous profits. This would be illegal if Intel was a 'monopoly', but the same rent-seeking and abusing the market is not illegal since Intel is not a monopoly. Or countless other examples.
The article states that we almost developed a sane society where we could build and sell whatever we wanted, and use whatever we found (even if it was made by an other person), but the exact opposite happened. The article does not mention the reasons.
Yes. The worst part is our current effectively-infinite copyright length is a very recent invention, but it's already taken root as the-way-things-are. Imagine a world where copyright lasts 28 years max. How different would our culture be? All of our early computing history would be 100% freely available, no questions asked. Windows XP would be nearing the end of its copyright term. This is the way things were for centuries, right up until 1978 when things started going off the rails.
