We used to track various timings in some of our games to detect cheating. Cheaters find out and change their cheat engines to perform within plausible human reactions. Which is a benefit - now the cheating isn't obvious to everyone, but it still happens. I don't know if you could sprinkle data scientist dust on the problem and come up with a viable cross-game solution though.

Thats a win. Preventing cheaters gaining superhuman advantage significantly reduces their impact.

I don't know how you repeal citizens united. That decision basically fucked the US over for a very long time. I'll probably be dead before it's fixed.

The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.

Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.

I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.

I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?

So many ideas better than the current regime.

I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.

Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.

IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.

What's interesting is that this is true of all creators, not just artists.

Making money means running a business, and running a business requires more than just creating something. You also have to identify a good market for that creation, and find a way to distribute to them, and provide a viable model for them to pay for it, and (the hardest part) out-compete all the other businesses who are doing the same.

This is true for cooks. It's not good enough to create a meal. You have to also scope out the local market, find a good location, build a restaurant or a stand, attract customers, and sell your meals. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept cooking for free, or going to work for a restaurant who's going to do all those hard parts and take the bulk of the profits.

This is true for computer programmers. It's not good enough to write a program. You also have to build a business, find customers, attract them through ads or marketing or viral growth, collect credit carts, and sell your product. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept coding things that make no money, or go to work for corporation or startup who will pay you a salary while collecting bigger profits.

Etc.

For some reason artists are the only group that makes a big stink about this situation, and feels that they should get the benefits of running a business without doing the work or taking the risk of running a business.

Artists are not the only ones who make a stink about this; it's inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Everyone involved in a venture is risking something, but the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture. Other kinds of risk are solely rewarded with monetary wages at sub-profit margins. That's why labor unions exist, and why the nation's elites work tirelessly to stop them.

But with artists, there's a particular extra wrinkle, in that the law created a middle tier of reward specifically for the efforts of creative workers. Copyright was specifically intended to allow authors to have their own business ventures without necessarily having to share in the same risks that equity owners do. So, naturally, those equity owners all colluded with one another to steal this other form of equity and wear it as a second shell.

> the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture

I would argue that it's not solely the law rewarding that kind of risk, it's the market. There is no law that says that only equity owners can enjoy massive profits. Some employees get paid 7 figures, 8 figures, or more, even without equity.

Generally speaking, the rewards go to the hardest parts, the riskiest parts, the parts with the least supply and the most demand.

You are taking far more risk by being a business creator and blazing a new trail, than you are by studying a fixed set of knowledge and techniques to train to become a Front End Software Engineer or some other kind of well-defined high-demand pre-defined role. And the evidence for this is the fact that there are millions of people who've shaped themselves into that safer mould, and very few who have done the former.

And this doesn't just apply to owners vs employees, it applies within each group, too. There are far more restauranteurs than search engine founders, as the former is simply a less risk and less competitive endeavor. (Competing with your local market vs competing with the world.) And artists who create unique works tend to earn a lot more than copycats. Artists who master rare skills tend to earn a lot more than people generating stuff off Midjourney. Etc. Risk tends to go hand-in-hand with reward.

Of course there are exceptions, e.g. rent-seeking, sabotage, monopoly, collusion, etc. that can earn you a lot without you providing a lot of value or taking a lot of risk. And a huge role of the law is to make as much of this illegal as possible, to force people into more value-creating activities by process of elimination.

I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.

The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.

The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.

If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.

And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.

Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.

An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.

> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.

Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.

This still seems very reasonable to me.

Keep in mind that under such a system, corporations would have a financial incentive to wait just a bit longer to do an adaptation

> Keep in mind that under such a system, corporations would have a financial incentive to wait just a bit longer to do an adaptation

Meanwhile they are currently buying up IP and locking it up for decades in such a way that no one can build on it.

Sherlock Holmes, who was created in the 1800s, only became public domain (but not all of it) a few years ago:

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/sherlock-holme...

* https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/01/how-sherlo...

BigCorps could do a lot of things under a new regime, but they are already doing shitty things. I'd rather deal with the current problems and then see if/what kind of new issues crop up, and then course-correct then.

GRRM is already beating them at that game by publishing a new book in the series every couple decades. That might become a common tactic in such a copyright environment

I find it strange how people are so invested in spiting $BigCorpThatMightDoBadThing that they're willing to harm the public at large as well.

So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.

> Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985

It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.

Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.

A person who wants to coast off the success of a single creation for eternity and not feel compelled to make future creations is not an artist.

They are a capitalist.

Artists create, despite the destitution, because they want to create and feel strongly compelled to create. Art is about that compulsion.

An artist wants enough money to pay rent/mortgage, raise a family, have a hobby, not be in debt, etc. But when Daniel Hardcastle received 0 pounds from his book because the publisher was a scammy cunt, he doesn't stop writing because there's no money in it, he continues to write despite the lack of profit. Because that's what he feels compelled to do.

When youtube made it impossible for animators to make money on Youtube, Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) started paying people to make animations out of his content, including people who started out doing it entirely without their permission. When many channels make pure profit from creating clip shows or compilations of their content, instead of throwing lawyers or the Youtube machine at those people, he paid someone to make official versions.

Compare how those two jackwads acted (the fine brothers), trying to trademark the concept of a "reaction video", to all the different channels and groups that do "Power Hour" or variety content like Good Mythical Morning. They even joke about how they are all stealing from each other. They know that their audience is looking for their unique output, not a specific format, and that protecting such a format would be a waste for everyone.

Because a real artist does not say "How dare you make better product with my formula", a real artist says "Aww man they used my formula to make something great, I should figure out how to make something great and up my game".

The sin in artistry is someone taking your style or content and shamelessly stealing it because it's a profitable business, rather than riffing on it or iterating on it.

Weird Al generally gets permission to do his work despite the law being clear that he does not have to because artistry is about respect and effort and collaboration.

More importantly for copyright law, despite no legal protection for a "Power hour" format, many groups are able to profit off it simultaneously, because art is not some winner takes all market. Copyright is not about enabling you to profit off of a work indefinitely, copyright is about ensuring that Greedy McBusinessman cannot take your book and sell it for cheaper because he doesn't have to pay your rent and does that for a hundred other artists. It's about who owns the Rights to Copy a work.

If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.

Or you can't because 57 new sequels were published the week before.

Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have completely killed famous book series? Me neither.

No, but I think it might happen if copyright lapsed in 14 years.

Presumably people would consider a Song of Ice and Fire sequel by GRRM to be "official" and everything else "fanfiction", even if the fanfiction manages to appear in bookstores

But it would only lapse after 28, assuming the author is still interested in pursuing it. 28 years is plenty, IMO.

*28 years, unless you were not invested enough in your work to bother renewing it.

What fan fiction?

Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/ Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived.

So where can a mainstream consumer purchase or borrow a paperback edition of those stories?

I mean https://www.printingcenterusa.com/printing/book-printing

Someone who buys books at Barnes & Noble is not going to print online fan fiction on demand. If you think this is something a “mainstream consumer” would do, I think you’re very out of touch with the average person.

Isn’t reading stuff on the internet more mainstream than buying things at Barnes and Noble? Not necessarily those specific things, but the notion that something needs to be physically available at a bookstore to be relevant is at best dated.

If you spend a lot of time online, it would certainly seem that way.

I think you should also assume it's called "Archive of our own" because of the same sense that Woolf had in "A Room of one's own". This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed.

So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming that they can thrive in a shared space and then discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason, they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by employers despite having the same skills as successful male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to have a place of your own.

That's an interesting perspective, I hadn't considered that the name might be a reference to A Room of One's Own.

My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the community, which means everyone migrates to the next site which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3 run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of them

This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.

A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.

50 Shades is decidedly not a fanfic for the exact reason that it couldn't be sold as one.

Quoting Wikipedia:

“The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by [E. L.] James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’.”

Exactly so. It was not able to be published in its initial state as a Twilight fanfic due to copyright and had to be re-worked so as not to infringe.

exactly.

Because copyright lasts longer than 14 years.

as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.

How do the sequels affect this? I read this once more in the same discussion so I am curious.

Let's assume the 1st book goes public. I should be able to use those characters and their known relationship in any which way, no? What's wrong with that, copyright wise?

For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not from the original author.

I mean, that sounds like a win from the point of view of copyright.

The whole purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of new works after all. In GRRM's case, the more successful his works became, the less he wrote which is kind of the opposite of what copyright was intended to do.

>IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never the intent.

Similar to the Patriot act.

Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.

14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer than a patent lasts for.

Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?

(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)

> Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?

Well, independently coming up with the same solution to a given problem is a lot more likely than independently writing the same novel. Personally, the chilling of independent invention is the thing I find most obnoxious about patents.

I might independently invent a cartoon character of a black mouse with a tan face that wears white gloves and red bibs and wish to publish a comic book featuring that character on the cover, but I'll never be able to do that -- no matter how long I wait: We have trademark law in the way.

Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they never automatically time out as a mere function of the calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse, they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney Company.

The addition of copyright makes it all a double-whammy. Trademarks can already last as long as time itself; copyright doesn't also have to be that way at all.

14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose, if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well, and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.

(Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of those is timing out soon and I really should check on it.)

> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).

It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy

IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.

14+14 seems to cover these two scenarios? Lifetime+whatever is far too on the other end of this seesaw.

> The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.

The author’s book got popular based on the efforts of others based on the author’s book.

That's true of course, but the book series wouldn't have become a cultural phenomenon that makes billions.

Unlike, for probably the only example, Harry Potter, which was already a cultural phenomenon when the first film was announced.

Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and generates cash.

What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.

Nah it was popular among people who read books long before the tv show.

I read it too before the series came out, but it wasn't the same level of popularity.

> The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.

LMAO the serie would not even exists if not of his books

I'm not saying it would. Sorry to spoil the laughter.

"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.

Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.

I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.

I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?

The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.

What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.

14 years is already too long.

Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid. Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.

IP is just the umbrella term for copyright/design/trademark/patent, isn't it?

It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.

My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to defend — even if you agree with copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella term as it muddies the waters.

Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.

Not really - you have IP lawyers who might do all of it.

It is good for those lawyers, sure.

You can also have people who do both plumbing and electrical work or electrical work and home Ethernet wiring...

> IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid.

Your opinion does not make that fact.

The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not talking about physical things. They're made up rules about made up things. It can all be different if we agree to make it so.

IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.

I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?

Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should say and do.

Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.

It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.

I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...

Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.

finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.

I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.

It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.

(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)

Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.

A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.

But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.

Who do you pay? How do you pay them?

>Who do you pay? How do you pay them?

Create a non-government copyright collective[0] that manage copyright unrelated to music (musicians already have their).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective

That's somewhat hilarious.

Last time I looked into trying to get pricing from ASCAP and BMI so I could legally stream some music for a small number of people, I found the following to be true:

1. There is no public pricing. (Why? Because fuck you, that's why!)

2. If I insisted, then the simplest way to get a price is to stream whatever I want and wait for a nasty letter from one or more lawyers that will most assuredly tell me how much I owe.

3. The only safe way to proceed is not to play the game at all.

That's gonna be a "no" on the cartels for me, boss. We might as well just throw all of the money and all of the copyrighted stuff into the memory hole for all the good they do.

See if the scheme that BMG / Columbia house still works. (Apparently they would send a check to the rightsholder, and if they cashed it, it was considered payment.)

(But don't quote me, I'm not an expert.)

That's a good question. IMO:

1: The formula dictates what you pay.

2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow account.

At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is forfeited.

(What happens to the money at that point? I think this is a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of us get the kind of copyright reform we need.)

(Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.)

Those are great answers.

I'd like to propose the following additions to help tie it all together:

Copyright must be registered. Registration requires sending a digital copy to some officious government body, such as the Library of Congress, for preservation. (It used to be ~about this way; it can be this way again. Disk is cheap. Git and email both exist. It can be figured out.)

This registration will be open and publicly-available to query (online, of course, but also by phone, and mail, and just by walking in the front door and asking), so the question of "Who to pay" is always easily answered.

All forfeited money from licensing goes to help pay for the preservation of the collected works, and for the ongoing expense of providing the registration database. It won't be nearly enough to cover those expenses, and that's fine: This means that the balance always has a place to land.

Copyright should not span generations. It should still time out completely, and do so after a period that is shorter than a normal human lifespan.

If a person saw a film when they were 5 that they really enjoyed, and if they manage to live long enough, then they should eventually be able to walk into the Library of Congress, give them some money, and walk out with a physical copy of it, and be able to freely upload that copy of it to YouCloud for their great, great grandchildren (and indeed, the world) to see, and be able to do all of this without becoming a criminal.

(How much money? Something in the realm of 15 Big Macs worth of dollars sounds about right.)

> Copyright must be registered.

https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm

    Members shall comply with Articles 1 through 21 of the Berne Convention (1971) and the Appendix thereto. However, Members shall not have rights or obligations under this Agreement in respect of the rights conferred under Article 6bis of that Convention or of the rights derived therefrom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

    Author's rights under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration.

This would require the country to back out of the Berne Convention and TRIPS (and by implication the WTO). Protection of copyright is automatic and does not require registration.

Just because I haven't sent the latest batch of photographs to the Library of Congress for registration (so I can collect punitive damages rather than just compensatory damages) doesn't mean that the images that I have created are not copyrighted and protected.

I'm aware of the Berne Convention. It can be vacated. Sweeping changes have sweeping effects.

I can't conceive of a way for any of this hypothetical copyright system to work (ie, to not fall completely apart) without requiring registration.

How would this impact open source? Would I be required to register every repository that I have on GitHub?

Would anyone be able to license that repository for $(legislated amount) and make it into a closed source product?

You know the UK and EU already operate such schemes for Orphan Works?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-over...

All without registration...

Which government? Who controls the account?

How do I claim it?

How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)

What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?

What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?

---

I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.

> I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments

Copyright only works if you have faith in your government to create and enforce laws.

Otherwise, if you don't have faith in your government, you have bigger problems than a poor system of copyright.

---

Anyway, all of your points are wonderful things to argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need. When we argue about details like this, we can assume that compulsory licensing is a good concept overall.

Which government do I need to have faith in for enforcing the copyright for a citizen of Wakanda who is infringing upon my work?

The floor of copyright reform is set by TRIPS and the WTO. That's 50 years. If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that. Setting an floor that expires sooner is likely a non-starter given concerns about things getting slurped up into AI models.

Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.

Much of the suggestions of copyright reform would involve the relevant country to leave the WTO and withdraw from the TRIPS agreement. That is unlikely to happen.

Resetting copyright to the floor dictated by TRIPS would be a possibility that a country could entertain.

> Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.

You just made the argument for mandatory licensing.

Why?

Piracy is about to become a lot harder to prosecute. (See the news coverage of the Cox case in the Supreme Court.) All those usages of your work that you object to (which many people consider fair use), are about to become much harder to prosecute.

Thus, shortening the period of exclusive control and introducing a period of mandatory licensing allows you to get paid in situations where it is extremely hard to prosecute for copyright infringement.

Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?

Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?

Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?

Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?

Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?

Because once you make information available to the general public, you have no way to control what the general public does with that information. (This is the reason why DRM failed.)

(In general, my proposal is more in context with things like movies, TV shows, music; situations where in the past anyone could make a DVD/CD player that could play any DVD/CD, anyone could sell any DVD/CD by buying into the patent pool. No one could sell a DVD/CD that could only play in a specific model, and a CD/DVD player maker didn't have to negotiate with every studio. So my licensing model isn't quite the same situation that you're talking about.)

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In this case, the problem is that fair use is eroded. The questions are:

> Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?

1: Once you make information available to the general public, how long do you retain exclusive control of that information? At what point is the general public's fair use eroded?

> Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?

2: That's really the formula. It's a wonderful thing to argue about. Again, though, it's about making sure that fair use is preserved.

> Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?

3: (Please also see answer 1) Why do people still flock to the Lourve (sp?) to see the Mona Lisa? That being said, copyright isn't intended to support artificial scarcity, and I think breaking down artificial scarcity makes popular items more valuable. (IE, the knockoff prints, that you collect royalties from, make the limited "artist made prints" more valuable.)

> Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?

Fair use. (Sorry, running out of time, see my example about the DC/DVD market. Also, radio stations used to be able to play any song and follow a formula to pay the right holder. The artists couldn't refuse a station from playing their song.)

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> Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?

This isn't a copyright / fair use issue

The same copyright laws apply to all things that are copyrightable regardless of medium. Anything that can be put into a fixed medium, be it print, digital recording, film.

Such a proposal needs to take into consideration everything that is copyrightable rather than just literature or film productions... but also software and photographs.

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50 years after publication date. If you want to license it before then for some other purpose, that's something that depends on your use of it and what I'm willing to accept.

If you have a formula, put it on the table. How much should it cost for me to commercially license some open source software?

How much should it cost you to license my photographs for fine art replicas? for placemats?

My contention is that any price that is legislated is wrong for the majority of the use cases. Any attempt to make it right gets into absurd nuance.

It is the same copyright laws that frustrate people for getting literature or movies into the public domain that also protects open source.

The alternative to copyright isn't "everything is free" but rather "everything is locked up."

The GPL was created because Stallman wanted to be able to modify printers. Getting rid of copyright (or making it very short duration) wouldn't have changed his experience with printers. What it would have changed would have been that that the GPL would lose all its teeth to compel people make their software licensed the same (under copyright law!).

People are upset about content they created two decades ago being incorporated into an AI model ( https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moonrise-over-San-Fran... )... without copyright I would have no right to complain about this.

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However, all of this is pretty much moot and performative. If you want to change it to something shorter than 50 years - get the WTO to renegotiate TRIPS.

That ain't happening.

Spending effort to say "this is how it should be..." go write a story and release it to the public domain about that utopia of copyright freedom.

Speaking for myself, if I lost the rights provided by copyright to my photographs after a decade and half or so - I would not have posted them.

I do not want art locked up behind patronage and restricted to those few... though if that was the only alternative to being able to make some money off my photographs, then that's what I would have done.

Let me oversimplify

Current system: exclusive control for a period of time, then public domain.

My proposal: exclusive control for a period of time, then compulsory licensing (for fair use), then public domain.

Makes sense?

The point of compulsory licensing is to preserve fair use.

You're getting far too defensive, and are missing the point that I'm making about fair use.

Then perhaps let me explain what I mean by fair use:

For example, I'd like to write an ebook reader that can give me an AI summary of the last chapter that I read, or give me a quick AI based summary of who a character is on the page that I'm reading.

Fair use means that I don't need to negotiate with every publisher and every author, or negotiate with Kindle to be able to access their content.

This is why we need compulsory licensing; it makes a middle ground between the exclusive control that you have when you create something, and the eventual entry into public domain.

> If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that.

This is less of a tough sell than you think. In pretty much every IP-related trade negotiation, you can divide the world into two categories:

* Ultra-rich countries that want to push through every insane IP idea they have (life+50, DMCA 1201, etc) onto as many other countries as possible

* Everyone else

Notably, the ultra rich are all "dealmaker countries". They're the ones dictating the terms of international trade to everyone else and whatever terms they insist upon will be accepted without question. So yeah, if, say, South Africa or India want shorter terms, they still have to respect America's terms, at least up to life+50. But if the US wants shorter terms out of India, they will get shorter terms out of India, come hell or high water.

Conversely, Mexico has life+100 terms, but nobody is trying to use them to ratchet up terms elsewhere. They're a deal taker.

The real question is if another ultra-rich country will stop one that tries to lower the Berne minimum. Keep in mind that the ultra-rich subdivide into groups that, in order of relative IP insanity, are: Europe, Japan, and then the US in the crazy slot. If the US were to, say, repeal DMCA 1201; Europe would cheer and Japan would grumble.

Actually, the Berne convention happened during a time when Europe was the copyright basketcase and America was in the "everyone else" category[0]. The US had 28+14 terms up until 1976, and we didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988 - almost a hundred years late[1]! So if the US were to drop the Berne floor, you could totally imagine the EU going insane and trying to trade war the US out of it. But at the same time, the EU isn't very good at fighting trade wars with other ultra-rich blocs. Or at the very least, they fold very easily.

[0] For exactly the same reason why China is today. China is in the same position America was a century ago, where it had a huge manufacturing base and basically no cares about copyright.

[1] In particular, the US really, really hated automatic registration. While it is true that you don't have to register copyright and users of creative works have to treat everything as copyrighted; creators still have to register anyway if they want to actually enforce their rights. And if they don't do it right away they don't get statutory damages, which are almost always the only damages that matter. So you get all the problems of automatic registration with all the problems of copyright formalities.

The US couldn't drop to the Berne floor... because it is a member of the WTO and restricted by TRIPS which has a floor of 50 years.

Going to anything less than 50 years would entail leaving the WTO and backing out of TRIPS. That in turn would be disastrous to the companies that work with information (music, movies, microcode (software), and ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶y̶).

Want to do away with registration for punitive damages? Absolutely. On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.

A reasonable copyright term makes abandonware not a thing

If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.

Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.

>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.

This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.

Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.

> This is the entire point of copyright.

That was never the point.

Copyright was invented with the printing press. What was happening was that authors couldn't get compensated, because everyone with a printing press was re-printing their works. It never gave the author control over where their books were ultimately sold; just who could copy it.

Related: This is why the Bible became so popular and well-known. Printers could re-print the Bible because it wasn't protected by copyright.

I was about to respond to your comment yesterday about closed protocols but this is a better article!

> A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work. > This is the entire point of copyright.

Not only is the entire point, it is the thing that matters most when discussing "piracy" productively. Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media. "Consuming" intellectual property can never be piracy by definition because you are not providing anything.

If Netflix screws up their licensing agreements and provides too many seasons of a show and people watch it no one would be considered "pirates". Netflix is simply in violation of a licensing agreement. If they had no agreement whatsoever then they are directly infringing on the "IP holders exclusive right to control the distribution and sale".

>Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media.

I don't know if I go that far, since copyright is literally about the right of exclusive control over copies, and piracy is making a copy without authorization.

However, the advent of computers limited the "literalness" of that interpretation, and my understanding is that even without such consideration, many countries do not consider copying for personal use to be a breach of law. I am not in violation of copyright when copying a program from my hard drive to ram, and I think that would be true even if the proper owner of the copyright insisted otherwise.

Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.

It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.

But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).

And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.

I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.

Right; so according to your own assessment, for the "14+14 no extensions" thing , you're always going to have have "a minority of opinionated geeks" on one side, and "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests willing to fight tooth and nail for a gold mine" on the other side. You're never going to win that one.

Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one.

IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"

Can you write down your actual analysis of the disposition of political capital, factions, interest groups, etc.?

People aren’t just going to take your word that A outweighs B modulo C, or that B outweighs A modulo C. There needs to be some credible substance.

Sorry, did I accidentally wander into a political action group working meeting, and you're mistaking me for the chairperson or something? If you have actual money and people working on this, don't take your cues form some rando on the internet!

I thought this was a site where we talk about ideas and see what people's perspectives are. @basilikum asked why on earth @mchusma would advocate "pay to extend" instead of "14+14 no extensions". I gave my own personal take. I'd be totally happy to be wrong about the political viability of "14+14 no extensions". If you have actual data, or even just a different take on the situation, I'm all ears.

So then "You're never going to win that one.” was just a random guess?

Why pretend if there’s no substance at all backing it up?

Again, you seem to misunderstand what this kind of forum is about. I gave my layperson's judgement and my reasons. If you don't agree with them, the thing to do is to point out where you think things are wrong, or add in your own take. That's what will lead to an interesting discussion where we learn from each other.

And this opinion is also based on your… random guesses?

You can probably see the problem then. How do I know if your random guesses have any meaning at all, couldn’t they just be gibberish?

> So many ideas better than the current regime.

Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.

The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.

Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?

Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.

Why No ip is created in a vacuum. It’s built on the ideas and concepts that came before it. It’s built on the shared open culture that we all own.

Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.

Nobody who uses the word “copywritten” can be taken seriously.

Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act

>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer

The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.

That's the point.

The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.

Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.

Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.

Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.

A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.

I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.

The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.

Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.

So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.

Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.

The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?

Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings.

The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.

> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.

I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.

As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.

An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.

> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.

If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.

Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.

> If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.

Because an accountant’s work is timely and transactional. Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.

As a contrasting example: pretty much all other income generating assets can be passed down.

Copyright is a compromise between society and authors, and I think that’s the right way to frame things.

(Also some countries have this same compromise for assets such as land, where land “ownership” is subject to time limits)

> Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.

Which is why the artist may deserve royalties over a number of years: they did the work (a possible multi-year investment of time/effort can deserve a multi-year payback period). It does not explain why their (grand)children, who may not have even been born when the work was done, deserve royalties.

The Hobbit was published in 1937, and the final volume of LotR in 1955: does Simon Tolkien (b. 1959) deserve royalties?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Tolkien

I didn't say anyone deserved anything -- I'm just saying that as a society we do have other (potentially) income generating assets that do pass down to heirs who didn't "do anything to deserve them".

e.g. Some cultures think it is normal that someone can own thousands of acres of wilderness land that they've never even seen just because a distant relative hundreds of years ago had a piece of paper that says they own it. Other cultures believe the earth is a collective resource that is merely used by humans for their lifetime.

> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.

Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.

> their interests are not absolute

The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all.

That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.

Isn't the question whether it's reasonable for people to be rentiers? Clearly lots of the population are, but wouldn't it be better if they carried on creating rather than sitting back and doing nothing for the remainder of their place on earth?

I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S. Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently, but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

> The question of interests is a cultural debate

Not at all, that question has quite real and far reaching economic and political consequences, it's not about endless debating, it's about proper and timely deciding, precisely in the framework of economics and politics within the Constitution.

Which constitution would that be, again?

When asked "do you want more or less income?", most people, including me, will answer "more".

That doesn't mean it's always the right decision.

Of course they do, their bias is to keep all the cards in their favor. Our (the consumer's) bias is to shorten copyright.

Remember, ultimately it is the consumer who pays the creator; thus the consumer has a vested interest in negotiating how long copyright should last.

Which is absurd, because most creators would benefit hugely from an expanded public domain.

I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.

And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.

> Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.

I would suggest that artists who say they're producing fully original works are just poorly educated in art history. Making something that has no prior influences would be extraordinary in the modern world.

Also, the entities most capable of exploiting long copyright terms are corporations. Individuals simply don't have the resources to keep something relevant decade after decade save for a very small handful of exceptions like J.R.R. Tolkien.

I'm not even really advocating for or against the copyright position.

I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause you study lots of works and create an original creation which borrows influences isn't the same thing as requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.

It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have no influences cause I classified works without any copyrighted material as original.

My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted work becomes available does not necessarily imply creators and artists lives will be substantially different or better off.

maybe 'creator' in the youtuber sense

But most creative people I know aren't really that interested in trying to co-opt someone else's work

Oh really? You don't think all the creators who do things like make video essays on 20 year old movies would benefit from not getting the rug pulled out from under them? You don't think they would prefer being legally in the right making money from analysis of media that was a generation ago?

You don't think the Techmoans and Technology connections would prefer having better demonstration material than whatever recordings from 1912 exist, so that they could actually show you what they are trying to demonstrate without having their livelihood threatened by a capricious and byzantine system hell bent on pleasing a few megacorps?

You don't think the creatives who made "The Katering show" for example would prefer that more people watch their artistic output than have it locked behind some business leaving it languishing in a random digital storefront rather than letting more people buy it because they just cannot be assed? Oh, you don't actually have to guess, because they uploaded a youtube video where they encourage people to pirate their work so they can see it.

Creatives and artists tend to enjoy their work being consumed and riffed on (not plagiarized) and well adjusted artists recognize that there's "nothing new under the sun" and that remixing and riffing are essential parts of the creative and artistic process.

Hell, the music industry even understands this, which is why letting songs get licensed out for remixes and future use is common.

What "Creative" people do you know?

However, ultimately, few people really are holding any cards. Most will have to compromise a great deal, to be able to generate income and benefit from existing publishing infrastructure.

Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.

Mmmm..

I don’t know man?

I actually don’t mind 14+14 for corps. Because corps could conceivably never “die”. (In fact, I wouldn’t even be too opposed to getting rid of the +14 part).

But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs. And I’m a guy who’s not a creative.

I just think if you come up with a painting, or story, or video game, why should a big corporate be able to swoop in and just copy it while you’re alive without paying you?

The copyright should lapse after a reasonable amount of time following your death. But while you’re alive, what you made should be yours.

> But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs.

But it is theirs... well, until they sell it. We aren't talking about the things they make but about copies of them. I can't believe there are people who still don't understand the difference.

The copies aren't theirs to begin with, copyright isn't natural property and it's not a natural right, that much is set in stone. Don't be confused by the ridiculous name "Intellectual Property".

I'm not saying the legal right called copyright should not exist but it should be paired back to the terms it was originally limited to, there are good reasons for those limits.

Corporations can't create copyrighted works, only people can. The date of copyright expires is based on when the actual humans authors die.

Yeah, this sounds very similar to people who vote as if they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires. "There's a minuscule chance my work will become super lucrative for decades, so I want a super long copyright" when they don't realize that a much shorter copyright can help them creatively in the near term.

Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.

Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.

> they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years

    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something 
     when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
    ~Upton Sinclair

Copyright is meant to reward innovators while it's still an innovation, and reward society once it has been fully inculcated.

Would the original creator prefer to rest on his laurels and collect checks instead? yep.

Would all the hundreds of people out there wanting to innovate on that copyrighted idea also like to make a buck? yep.

It's all a balance of competing interests.

Well. It's supposed to be.

Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting creative works, which are, by their nature, much much easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to copy, that I can sell exceptions to.

Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.

IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your rights to, including the production of derivative works and the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or something significantly different). For the next 2 decades after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-all.

You're right on the innovation speech, mea culpa.

You surprise me with a proposal for shorter copyright terms. Interesting!

For fun, here's an interesting discussion countering my own earlier statements - Once a work is in the public domain, it seems there's very little to do with an idea except drag it through the mud. Audacity is what drives commerce i suppose. For example as soon as Mickey Mouse entered public domain all the news could talk about was horror films and "adult" films capitalizing on the "what're you gonna do about it" of the moment.

Similarly when Peter Pan entered the public domain there was a short glut of "now he's a nightmare / villain" representations before becoming irrelevant again.

Imagine creating something like Sesame Street or Mr Roger Neighborhood then a mere 30 years later everyone has more fun making "Mr Grouch Goes On A Murder Rampage" bloodbath and "Mr Rogers + Freddie Kruger Teamup" art / film / trite youtube videos.

It'd be pretty soul crushing.

"Tragedy of the commons", as it were.

With this in mind, perhaps... your idea could deal with that via tiered pricing of "official / approved / canon" works are charged the standard fee whilst "unofficial / unapproved" works tithe a larger proportion of the proceeds to the original author...

The biggest annoyance here is the discussion always focuses on protecting individual creators whilst the laws and benefits seem to go to large corporations. e.g. Disney would have no problem using Peter Pan without consequence, while the rest of us wouldn't dare use Steamboat Willie.

Of course they are happy with that, they are not the ones affected by the problem and even benefit financially from it.

Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.

... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.

(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).

Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.

It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.

I don’t blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he ever become public domain?

Well his origin "Steam Boat Willie" became public domain last year.

The film is in the public domain and the original versions of Mickey and Minnie are public domain. But that does NOT apply to the later versions of Mickey that you'd find Disney pushing today (e.g., at parks, on apparel, etc.). Further, Disney has been trying to continue to assert copyright even over the original version of the character. See here for more info: https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-publi...

The irony of sticking your finger in the dyke with a racial slur long forgotten.

This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement

> Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)

> Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)

---

14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it.

Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.

Perhaps Trumpian madness will do something good for once.

Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.

Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.

I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.

Give 14 years free.

Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.

Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.

Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.

Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption

And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.

This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.

We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.

Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.

Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially increasing fee.

Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.

We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.

Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.

It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.

When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.

At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).

While your end goal is admirable, it’s more fun to share new experiences with others.

Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.

I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.

"I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand."

Maybe you should have enjoyed more xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/606/

My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club

In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:

  By inhibiting cheap reprints of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce a genteel impression that English literature itself had stopped about that date...

Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.

Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:

- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.

With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:

- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.

- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.

So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.

Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.

> even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.

And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.

With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of English.

Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.

And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.

>Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.

Why?

True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?

Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more fans who deserve to own their childhood.

"Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can afford it for long.

> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.

Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?

(I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)

> Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?

This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!

Shorter copyrights would lead to less beatings of dead tauntauns or thestrals.

It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.

What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?

The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.

Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.

The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...

If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.

I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.

In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...

>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter

There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.

>captured from the non-rich.

What do you mean by this? The economy is not zero sum, it is possible for everyone to get "wealthier", even if the spread increases.

This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.

Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).

Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).

It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.

You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.

The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with regulation and limits on building rights than with income inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and other constraints keep supply artificially low, which pushes developers toward higher-end units because the fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more building by right, supply would go up and prices would come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is primarily an inequality problem.

RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn’t a meaningful way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a software distribution business just reflects scale. Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a big market, not because Valve is “extracting” in some zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the distribution market would become less efficient, not more equal, and consumers or developers wouldn’t actually be better off.

There are no prizes for effort. People reward you if you please them, not if you spin on a hamster wheel.

People that can be taxed at several order of magnitude of wealth compared to a median income obviously didn’t work several degree of magnitude harder/longer/smarter. They more "efficiently" capture the benefits, certainly, but that’s it. And even there, mainly through network effect and pre-existing social forces.

If instead distribution of wealth was flatter in an equally wealthy society, a tax could still capture just as much.

When vladms speaks about high taxes on the rich, it already assumes the continuation of social structure which exaggerates the uneven distribution of wealth.

This is great in theory, but not practice and not practiced anywhere. You could site some EU countries with a very homogeneous population and a GDP < half of the states, but it's not convincing.

I don't think we currently have the most efficient tax vs productivity situation now, but I don't agree with equality being the goal.

It is about the practicality of convincing people to do something. Many people I know are inert and would say no to change. Even those that want change have a favorite topic.

So, personally, when discussing economic topics I discuss the taxes part, which is so clearly unjust when explained (most countries tax less capital gains than work, which results in rich people able to accumulate things faster).

Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work - humans are complex. So while I hope that it is possible to have "A society can also thrive without high income disparities.", proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.

> Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work

Sure. It doesn't mean anyone else know better from some absolute perspective that we should blindly trust.

>proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.

Not proposing any change, letting the same egocentric people with selfish intentions always have the last word on what should change or not, also proved to be a sure source of great human catastrophic outcomes.

Success isn't real. All things are internal, but we make/pretend they are external. I dont care at all of your accolades or accomplishments. Exactly like you dont care of mine. If we ever do care about others' success, its not bc of the other people. We are just playing games with ourselves and calling it stuff like expectations, admiration, respect, and responsibility - its all bullshit.

UBI allows a different life. You can only fail so much, only fall so far - rather than people being lazy, it will be a huge boon for creativity. The 9-5 for 45 is creative death.

Rent control absolutely causes a reduction in supply: there's a reason rent controlled buildings have apartments in poor condition that owners do not renovate (so a reduction in quality supplied) and many are held off market or converted to owner occupancy through condos and TICs (so a reduction in quantity supplied). Not to mention the units underused by long term tenants who maintain them as secondary residences.

>> If this - "High-income job losses are cooling housing demand" is true, doesn't this mean UBI would never work?

I've even see a rent controlled apartment in manhattan being used as a storage unit !!!

Central to the challenge of UBI and housing costs is the law of rent. UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners. There are ways to make that possible.

Rent controlled apartments being held by tenants no longer using them as primary residences is pretty common. A famous case of this was Cleve Jones in San Francisco who tried to make it a huge political deal when his landlord raised his rent to market because he was 1. living in Guerneville full time and 2. subletting the apartment. The media environment is one where it's ok for a master tenant to be a de facto landlord and make money on real estate, as long as it's not the landowner themselves!

>> UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners.

Doesnt this happen now because we're all so tethered to HCOL cities? With UBI presumably people would be geographically free, and there is a lot of inexpensive land and housing around the country. Doesnt the capture problem only happen due to scarcity in HCOL cities and thus not an issue?

Yes but it builds into my argument - it does not counter it. Reduced supply... increases rent. I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build". And the person I'm replying to said rent control makes people not want to build.

> I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build"

This is false. People will want to build more on the margin, but that doesn't mean they want to build. If the profitability requirement (hurdle rate for getting investment from institutions) is greater than the the market rent, people will not build even if market rent is high. Indeed, that's what's happened in the last 5 years as costs have increased much faster than rents.

Rent control also switches the class politics, as people who are paying far below market rate for housing become like landlords and homeowners: getting free imputed rent.

People have been knocking down doors to build in SF for decades, but do not because regulatory capture by homeowners, landlords, and those with below-market rents are happy to keep out new people.

Where and when housing gets built in the US is not merely a market driven decision: you also need to get local permission to build.

Responding with "skill issue" in a discussion is itself a skill issue. Maybe invest in some conversational skills and learn to be constructive rather than parroting a useless meme.

All systems eventually turn bad. The idea that you can gold plate something so it won't is naive. It isn't about getting it right from the start, its about having the will to change it once your system or uses evolve into something that turns it wrong.

A good system, i. e. one that got it right from the start, is one that is cost-effective to change. (“Will” has little to do with it.)

Change in which ways? A system designed to be cost effective to change in any way isn't going to be cost effective to change in a small set of ways.

Answering that question well is what makes the system good!

If you think spam is bad now imagine if trillion dollar corporations could do it. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it doesn't help.

Yeah, people aren't cartoon super heroes or super villains. People are messy. People are nuanced. You can't summarize them in a 1,000 word article much less a 10 word title.

Yes, and the reasons why they do so has little to do with why this law exists.

A law whose purpose is protectionism is bad. It invites stagnation, pointless inefficiency, and retaliation.

A law whose side effect is a bit of protectionism has none of these problems.

I've never connected with how most people do holiday shopping. "Ill just spend $50 on something you want, and you just spend $50 on something I want, and we'll be done!"

Even more degenerate is "You tell me something I should buy, and I'll tell you something you should buy!" At that point the holidays have evolved into a justification of consumerism.

At that point I just stop gift exchanges. To me the point of holiday shopping is to find something they would enjoy that they never would have thought of getting themself. I know its hard, but isn't that the point? It's supposed to be a time of thoughtfulness not "let me just spend $100 and get it over with".