The longest I can theoretically think is justified is the death of the author. The idea to keep works out of the public domain so that heirs or estates or businesses can live off economic rents is pretty bizarre to me, seems straight up feudal.
If someone writes a best seller and kicks the bucket, it'd sort of suck that someone like Disney could swoop in and make a bunch of movies without paying a dime of royalties to the author's family. Or that a bunch of publishers can have a field day republishing the best seller diluting all the work of the original publisher.
But on the flip side, 90+ years is really WAY too long.
Cut it to 20 years. Long enough to capture the initial buzz, but not so long that we end up with shit staying under the mouse's thumb forever.
I have photographs that I took 20 years ago that I occasionally sell a print of. You are suggesting that that material now be part of the public domain?
For that matter, you're suggesting GCC version 3.0.3, Emacs 21.2 and all prior versions be public domain and not have any copyright or copyleft protection on it? And thus, I could take the source code for them, modify it, close source it release my own version.
Yes. You can still sell prints of uncopyrighted stuff.
Your software argument is even better evidence that 20 years is a good idea. If the software is maintained, the new, derivative versions continue to be copyright protected. At the same time, abandonware becomes available for use without worry.
Here's another thought experiment. Assume Spiderman was first created in 2002 with the launch of the movie. It would be expiring soon. They've already made massive profits and such old movies are found for bargain-basement prices all over, so there's not a ton of money left to be made.
What does Disney have to lose? Just the idea of Spiderman himself, but would you rather see Marvel's spiderman or Warner Bros making yet another failed superhero movie? The latest Spiderman movie would still be available under copyright for another 20 years too. The only way Disney loses is if Warner Bros actually manages to make better content than disney makes. If better content COULD be made, but is stopped by copyright, this runs counter to the copyright's purpose according to the US Constitution.
Summed up, long copyright only serves to lock-in big companies and protect them from people who could do a better job with the ideas than they could. Everyone is worse off except the company's stockholders.
Disney makes billions a year off of Winnie the Pooh. Every year. New movie or not. What they make on Spider-Man is peanuts to that. It’s Pooh and the Mouse they are nervous about.
And, an example of where we are actively harmed is the Hulk. Because Disney doesn't own the rights to the Hulk we've not ever seen a good integration of the Hulk into the MCU. All because while Marvel was floundering they sold off rights piecemeal to a bunch of companies.
Would you not have taken the photo or sold it had you known the timeframe for it's value would be limited to 20 years? I suspect that, yes, you'd still take that photo. So long as the timespan is long enough to benefit the creator (and thus, encourage creativity) but not so long as to forever lock up the creation, then I see no harm in a much shorter copyright timeframe.
Why should I care if a 20 year old compiler or text editor ends up having closed source versions? And, on the flip side, wouldn't it be neat if we had Windows XP source code in the public domain?
Now consider the fact that with a 20 year lifespan on copyright every streaming service would have access to everything published in 2001 and earlier. 1 service could give you a bonkers amount of content.
why limit it to books or other creative creations - if you buy a house, you get exclusive use for 20 years - after that, other people just get to move into the unused bedrooms - after all, your kids are probably grown by now and you don't need them anymore.
How is this different - why should I be entitled to get, for free, something someone else created and owns.
Because we are talking about the ability to copy or mimic things when talking about IP/patent laws. We are not talking about physical goods, but instead ideas.
It's a crime to steal someone's bible even though the bible texts are (largely) in public domain.
It is not the same to compare a thing to a concept. I can copy someone's bitcoin hash all day long, but I don't own that hash simply be copying it into a text document. Same principle.
Anyone should be able to write and sell a story about Superman or Mickey.
Oh no, you are now required to watch this damned cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 (A one minute ELI5 explanation about the difference between physical and intellectual property.)
With property it kind of works this way, via property tax. You can see property tax as the government taking a small percentage of your property every year, and you buying it back.
Honestly, I don't see the problem with a 20 year copyright term.
You made profits off the prints for 20 years, and the state enforced those rights. You didn't pay for them, at most you paid a token fee to register the copyrights.
That's the bargain of copyright, I think. Yes, some folks lose control after a period, but everyone else is enriched.
Excuse me, I've got to go order a Miskatonic University sweatshirt.
> You made profits off the prints for 20 years, and the state enforced those rights. You didn't pay for them, at most you paid a token fee to register the copyrights.
That's a very idealized version. You most likely did pay taxes on any income made and you payed a lawyer to enforce your right, if necessary. The only thing the state did was to write those laws down once and offer a judge and jury, in case of a violation.
Also, you didn't pay for any of your other rights. I don't see why copyright should be special in that regard.
I'm fine with 20 years, but that argument in particular is rather weak.
> The only thing the state did was to write those laws down once and offer a judge and jury, in case of a violation.
Nope. The judge and jury are backed by the bailiff who forecloses on you if you don't pay the judgement, and by the police who jails you if you resist the taking of your assets, and by the prison system where you end up. This whole security apparatus is behind just "writing those laws", and it does not come cheap.
> I have photographs that I took 20 years ago that I occasionally sell a print of. You are suggesting that that material now be part of the public domain?
Have you been selling the prints for 20 years? Then sure, that's probably fine. If you didn't make enough money off those sales, encouragement to go take new photos is a good thing.
> For that matter, you're suggesting GCC version 3.0.3, Emacs 21.2 and all prior versions be public domain and not have any copyright or copyleft protection on it? And thus, I could take the source code for them, modify it, close source it release my own version.
But you also get to take any closed-source program from X years ago and it becomes public domain too. I'm comfortable with this tradeoff. Though I'd like to go further and force companies to register a copy of the source code when they register their copyright, to be released upon expiration. And we could always add specific open-source legislation...
If you really don't like 20 years we can do 30. But I think half an adult lifetime is long enough to profit off any particular work.
I think the software if anything would be the least harmed by a twenty year term. If you wanted to make a closed source compiler its going to need to be better than the latest open source ones for anyone to buy it, so it seems like starting with a twenty year old design and having to (cleanroom) fix all the various bugs that have since been found and modernize the codebase, plus add all the new features needed to be competitive, would be a nonstarter.
If you could fork the latest version and make it closed source, then it's easy, you just add a couple useful features and now yours is "better." But if you have to start with such an ancient version and decades of technical debt you didn't even create, it would be a total waste of time. The open source one would continue getting better while you were playing catchup to even release it.
Re software: While not necessarily fundamentally anti-copyright, the basic point of "copyleft" licensing like the GPL is to use the system of copyright against itself. I can't imagine the FSF/GNU project would be against a massive reduction of the extent of copyright limits. If there was no concept of copyright, copyleft would be somewhat moot.
I believe that's what the GP is saying. Perhaps I'm wrong, but your tone seems to indicate that you think doing doing so is completely preposterous. And while you're allowed to feel that way, instead of dismissing the GP entirely, I'd be more interested in hearing more about your position based on your totally valid personal experience.
Personally I think it should be 25 years
But yes. That is how copyright works. At the end of the term, the item falls into public domain. If that term is 20 years, then your photo should be public domain by then. That should incentivize you to take more photos
As a hobbyist photographer, no - it wouldn't incentivize me to take more photos... or rather, it would incentivize me to not publish my photos and share them with others online.
Simply said, if you wish to profit from or enjoy the creative works that I have done beyond what I've provided, I expect some compensation.
If that term was 20 years, my photographs would never have been displayed online in the first place.
Additionally, model releases and property releases become much more difficult when someone in the photograph loses their rights for how the photograph may be used.
I firmly believe that a reduction of the copyright duration that would make it expire during the lifetime of the artist or model would have a chilling effect on hobbyist art being accessible to the public.
> my photographs would never have been displayed online in the first place.
So the world would have to learn to somehow live with that loss. Given all the other works it would get access to in stead, I strongly suspect the world at large will find that a great bargain.
I've never (AFAIK) seen your photos even in this timeline where they are online (IIUC?), and I'm okay with that. But I'd sure love it if a bunch of stuff I know of from between 1923 and 1990 were in the public domain. So at least I would find that bargain great.
> You are suggesting that that material now be part of the public domain?
Yes. I could be wrong, but I feel comfortable guessing that you were sufficiently incentivized to take those photographs 20 years ago. Also, you could still sell prints!
I am replying to a post that looks to make the term of copyrights the same as the term of patents. Patents aren't tied to the lifespan of their inventor.
Life + 20y is is quite reasonable. 20y from publication is on the very short side for content that has a lifespan that can easily outlast its creator.
Some of the posts are suggesting that things that were published in 1990 or 2000 should be in the public domain now.
This is exactly what Disney did do though; Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio; to become a massive corp. And now that they are a massive Corp that just can buy the rights to any copyrighted material locking out competitors. Imagine if others had the chance to compete.
Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story. Carlo Collodi was dead by 1890 so Disney definitely didn't "swoop in" and benefit at his or his descendent's expense.
I believe the other stories you mention are even older.
>Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. You are free to make your own movie with book version of the the characters and the story.
This is very much an "in principle" thing. In practice, many of these traditional stories have (sadly) become synonymous with the Disney version, so Disney's work is basically the canonical version. This gives Disney a very good sword of Damocles to hang over the heads of anyone else trying to adapt these folk stories: to my understanding if you include a single copyrightable adaptation or embellishment of the original that was written by Disney without "prior art", you're liable to be steamrollered by the lawyer army and be ruined.
Pinocchio was just fine in the Shrek movies, and I imagine Eisner wasn't happy that Universal of all people used him (as, only a few years prior, Universal poached a bunch of imagineers and made The Lost Continent, which copied a lot of elements of 'Beastly Kingdom', the original name for Animal Kingdom), so it must have took a lot of lawyers saying "this is a bad idea" when Eisner surely suggested they sue over using Pinocchio.
> Disney doesn't own the rights to Pinocchio. [...] Carlo Collodi was dead by 1890 so Disney definitely didn't "swoop in" and benefit at his or his descendent's expense.
This illustrates (IMO, the evils of over-long) current copyright terms rather perfectly: Disney didn't swoop in and benefit at Collodi's or his descendent's expense under the copyright rules of the time. Had current -- heavily Disney-influenced, so presumably supported and wished-for by Disney -- terms been in force then, this would have been a case of Disney swooping in and benefitting at Collodi's or his descendent's expense. Dunno what exactly this means... Besides Disney possibly being quite hypocritical.
And yes, most of Disney's older great hits about princesses and princes (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella...) are based on German folk tales collected by the brothers Grimm and first published in 1812.
They did that via public domain usage; the OP is making the point that extending it just to "death of author" will allow Disney to continue to do this. Nowadays, they surely can just buy the rights to stuff they want, but that's a completely separate issue and not one that copyright law is meant to address.
Way too long for who? I don't own any copyrights - probably never will - but why am I supposedly owed the right to use something for free that someone else created after some arbitrary amount of time?
You might be able to make a case that it is in the public's interest to only patent life-saving medicine for X number of years, but who is really harmed when the author of a book retains the rights in perpetuity?
Please pay your forefathers for each word you use, each thought you have and even each invention you make for their share of what you reused.
As a first line argument: It's not that you are owed anything (as tshaddox says, it only applies to things already shared/published), it's that you do not owe a due to others.
As a second line, I would say that yes, if you are making money off of things you share, then society deserves the right to freely use and share it (say after 20y), even if you put DRM on it (shouldn't be a thing) and even if you didn't originally publish the source code or manuals and tools. Though compulsory requirements should probably be limited as a fraction of sales.
> who is really harmed when the author of a book retains the rights in perpetuity?
Anyone that wants to make (or accidentally makes) derivative works based on that work. This is especially apparent in the music industry.
Write a story about a prince waking a princess with a kiss an you run the very real risk of getting sued into oblivion by Disney.
We, the public, lose out on creative works because creative folk have to be VERY careful with how they approach art to try and minimize their exposure to lawsuits.
Very similar to the harm done by software patents.
Who is harmed? Creators. Consumers. Anyone who ever pined for access to something out of print, or in a vault, or otherwise squatted on for no productive reason. Anyone who ever had to guess what they could sample or what they could not; what would be legally considered derivative of some decades-old musical expression (many of which resemble each other superficially) and what would not.
> I don't own any copyrights - probably never will
Actually, you do own lots of copyrights. For example, you own the copyright on almost every blog post that you made. (The exceptions are things like lists of facts.) You own the copyright on every picture that you've taken or drawn.
> why am I supposedly owed the right to use something for free that someone else created after some arbitrary amount of time
That's the natural default. If two people don't interfere with each other's happiness, then there is no copyright. You don't need a right to copy, the owner needs a right to stop you from copying.
Why are they owed the right to a government-enforced monopoly?
Well, xyz there are good reasons but also those reasons make more sense with a time limit.
It's antithetical to the very idea of culture. Humans have been modifying and retelling stories since before the dawn of civilization. Imo, it's profoundly immoral for the state to restrict ownership of culture to its creator for such a long period of time. Some degree of copyright is necessary to create a financial incentive for new works, but the currently length goes far beyond that.
This doesn't even make conceptual sense. An author chooses to divert their working time to producing a piece of content (say, about a honey-guzzling bear) with the expectation that they'll be rewarded by the market for doing so, which is why they don't instead divert all their efforts into writing ad copy for PepsiCo.
The amount of reward the market provides is based on the value that can be extracted from that property. If value can only be extracted while the author draws breath, the market provides much less reward --- for the author, in this lifetime.
Bear in mind that intellectual property is in some ways even more defensible than real property. The rights to real property are fundamentally secured through conquest and forcible appropriation. IPR is generated de novo, from the creators themselves.
So, to me, the opposite argument seems to apply. There's no obvious moral reason that copyright should be in any way tied to the lifespan of the author. A cultural work is no less valuable because its author happens to get hit by a bus the week after they publish; why on earth should the market for those works be asked to consider that possibility?
(This is potentially an argument against creators, in the sense that an unusually long-lived author is no more entitled to excess rewards than an unlucky bus-strike victim is entitled to fewer rewards.)
> There's no obvious moral reason that copyright should be in any way tied to the lifespan of the author.
A dead author can't create new works. Their copyright persisting beyond their death prevents derivative works from being created. Copyright after death forestalls the creation of new derivative works.
Is that "worth" eliminating the "copyright-after-death" bargain? I don't know. I tend to think opening up a world of potential derivative works after the death of an author is a good gamble if the desired outcome is more works.
Curtailing copyright after death would have to be handled in a nuanced process because some people certainly have "banked on" that business model.
I'm not sure you're following. The limited monopoly on new works incentivizes authorship by providing a market for that content based on the transfer of that monopoly. It doesn't just incentivize the next work; it's the foundation of incentives for all of the work, including the first. Anything you do to make the transfer of those rights less valuable (for instance: terminating them when the original author dies) reduces the incentive for every work of authorship, from the first to the last.
I don't think fewer works would be created under a less restrictive copyright regime. Some classes of works wouldn't be profitable anymore, but that's not a tragedy to me. (Taking away some of the profit motive sounds like a good move to me culturally but that reflects my preference in more "indie" media and less "mass market" media.)
Morally I find the idea copyright flat wrong on the basis that it restricts human expression and culture. Pragmatically I can see a use for it. We're better off with it, even if it (and the class of "workers" who benefit repeatedly from only doing work once) is morally repugnant.
The social contract around copyright, as it sits now, has been "negotiated" significantly in favor of the owners of copyrights to the detriment of the good of society (terms that are too long, works becoming orphaned because mandatory registration was eliminated, infringement without profit motive treated the same as "piracy"). I'd like to see it brought back to a more fair arrangement.
> Your first two sentences literally contradict each other
No they don't. They only do if you think the number of works that wouldn't be produced because creators are dissuaded from producing them by the knowledge that they wouldn't be able to profit from them after they're dead is necessarily greater than the number of new works that would now be created (and otherwise couldn't), using the newly liberated work of these creators as input.
A less restrictive copyright regime (shorter terms) would enable a larger number of derivative works to be created sooner (likely when these derivative works are more culturally relevant, too).
Would fewer "primary" works be created-- maybe? (I tend to believe that almost all human expression is derivative by nature, though. There are few new ideas under the sun.)
Would more derivative works be created? Almost assuredly. There are always more "other people" to build on an earlier work that the lone creator of the work upon which derivative works are based.
I'd bet less restrictive copyright terms result in a net larger number of works.
Fewer works that require fantastic financial investment would be created under a weakened copyright regime. I still believe more works, overall, would be created.
So we agree: reducing incentives on the creation of new primary works will reduce the number of primary works created, because people respond to incentives.
You hope to offset that by enabling the commercialization of fan fiction. I am less hopeful about that proposal, but at least it's a coherent proposal.
I firmly believe, like I said, that nearly all human expression is derivative. It's almost all "fan fiction" when it comes down to it. There aren't very many "primary" works that can't have their influences traced back to prior works. The current copyright regime just gets to choose who is allowed to make the "fan fiction" and when.
No, sorry, that doesn't work: you're saying that by reducing incentives for primary work authorship, we'll gain more works because people will be able to work on derivative works based on existing ones. The only plausible way that could work is by allowing people to derive works from popular properties; literally: you're talking about fan fiction qua fan fiction. Star Wars. Twilight. Spider Man. Enabling people to derive new works from obscure primary works wouldn't move the needle, and wouldn't support your original argument.
I'm saying: I don't think you'll get enough commercial Spider Man fan fiction to offset the damage. But you can at least connect the dots on that argument.
You are free to borrow from those same works, have your superhero bit by a radioactive arthropod, or invent a coven of space witches with energy swords, and you'll be just fine.
It depends on which kind of "works" we're talking about.
I seriously doubt that passionate authors would refrain themselves from writing because they've been denied a few extra bucks after their death. Many would probably be happier to know that their legacy goes on through the now possible derivative work.
Could such a restriction on copyright impact purely commercial works? I don't care. Work made just for profit has no soul anyway.
It's not after their death. This is the crazymaking part of the argument. The cash flows from art received after the death of the author is factored in to the compensation the artist obtains during their life. This is basic economics.
If you don't care about a work made for profit because it's soulless, then what grounds do you have to set terms for its release? It's work you by definition think is unimportant.
This is a pretty common argument in fact, that places which lack copyright protections often have as much or more art. It's a very competitive endeavor no matter how low the stakes get.
Also the new business models adopted by those adapting to a lack of copyright may well involve more creative production. For example holding concerts instead of just selling reproductions.
This argument would be more persuasive with examples. Also: touring music is notoriously non-remunerative; people think about U2's fleet of luxury busses, but the majority of acts, even ones that lots of people have heard of, barely cover gas money and the returns they'd get as the manager of a convenience store from touring --- which is work that is tremendously disruptive to actually building a life, which is why we pay long haul truck drivers so much money to do it.
I get a lot more value from recorded music than I do from live music; the idea that we should make it essentially impossible to make a living from music you only play in a studio doesn't sit well, since I like a lot of that music too.
My bigger problem here is a moral one, though. It's simple: a musician takes the time to compose and record a piece of music. I had nothing whatsoever to do with that work. What right do I have to set the terms that musician can use for their work? It's their work, not mine. If they want to charge $5,000 for a copy, that's their right; I can just listen to something else. If musicians writ large want to maximize the number of copies that are made of their work, they can do what Radiohead does and release on "pay what you want" terms. That almost nobody does this in practice is telling.
The internet itself is one commonly-used example of a "wild west" without protection and with prolific art nonetheless.
The incentive to continue wasting your life doing unprofitable concerts is not removed in a world where you can only profit via concerts. It simply changes to hoping for a future of profitable concerts, rather than hoping for a future of profitable record sales.
And while you may cling to one system becasue you like certain facets of it which might change, you also don't know what you are missing in a system without copyright. Policies always have a hidden cost.
Are the most enduring and popular works of fiction, of film, or of music produced primarily on the Internet, or are they released commercially with IPR protections?
I don't doubt the Internet's ability to produce cartoons and memes, but I wouldn't trade all of them together for Blood Meridian or Nevermind.
I agree that tying copyrights to lifetimes doesn’t make sense, because it’s logical for copyrights to be inherited and the law shouldn’t benefit long‐lived authors over short‐lived authors. I’m not fond of the reasoning in your comment though—by my reading there’s nothing stopping it from being used to extend copyright to “forever less one day.”
US copyright law at its inception was intended to provide a balance, incentivizing authors to create new works without infringing too far on people’s inherent right to copy and share ideas they haven’t necessarily created. See Madison (who wrote the original Copyright Clause):
“But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good.”
I'm not sure what "inheritance" has to do with it. Assume an author destined to die alone. That author might be more highly compensated for a successful work in a system where copyright isn't tied to lifetime, since the work itself has more market value. That value accrues to the author in their own lifetime; immediately, in fact.
Deeply disagree with you. Imaginary property is a coercive and violent fantasy.
It is infinitely reproducible once created, unlike physical items which can only do one thing in one space at time. The imagination of a fellow human does not deserve men with guns to protect it. Say what you like about the imaginary world of cryptocurrency; at least it’s opt-in (you are free to ignore the coin or the NFT, but those that don’t ignore it can freely transact). The only property rights I can get behind are opt-in and enforced by the universe of mathematics.
Imaginary or not it takes real effort and time to create works of fiction. And there are occupational hazards to using ones hands so much. Having done some modeling and animation I have an appreciation for those who do it professionally.
Those kind of people are free to believe whatever they like, as long as they don’t push it on those that don’t believe. :-) That is the fundamental difference. Wanting the State to shoot people in the face for daring to challenge their ongoing intellectual rent extraction is mean spirited to say the least. Math needs no gun, and it’s defenses are as much energy can be thrown at the problem.
I’m not really here to argue my point, I don’t think I could challenge you T or change your mind. But I wanted to splash some counter idea on this hard and growing harder IP dystopian world we find ourselves in.
>. If value can only be extracted while the author draws breath, the market provides much less reward --- for the author, in this lifetime.
This is true for any kind of property tax is taxed or IP that expires, be it patents or land lease policies or whatever else. The less you can milk it the lower is its value. However given that we don't want to live in a necrocracy where the interests of the dead outweigh the interests of the living we've always balanced this, or we'd grant 1000 year patents.
Also as a sidenote if you look at most of humanities greatest works of art, if anything most of them obtained market value long after the creators were dead in the first place. If anything we're drowning in mediocre fiction precisely because we've commodified art.
Again: it's not the interests of the dead. Those posthumous interests are priced into fees the authors collect in life. The proceeds of those interests don't just pay the original authors; they also subsidize future bets on other authors.
> An author chooses to divert their working time to producing a piece of content (say, about a honey-guzzling bear) with the expectation that they'll be rewarded by the market for doing so, which is why they don't instead divert all their efforts into writing ad copy for PepsiCo.
Seems like a good fit - a honey-guzzling bear and ad copy for PepsiCo aren't all that far apart...
The people who wrote the clause of the US constitution that enables the government to grant a temporary monopoly to authors and inventors argued over whether to do so. It was not like ownership of land, structures, etc. The phrase "intellectual property" dates to the 19th c. and was not initially widely used.
What we call "copyright" is, as it is referred to in the constitution, a monopoly granted by the government. All your other rights are assumed to exist because it would be outlandish to say a mere government could "grant" them. They are protected by the government, or so it was intended.
Unlike real rights, Congress could pass a law setting the term of such a monopoly to zero and there would be no civil rights argument against doing so. Patents and copyright are nothing like your actual rights.
This applies to the way copyright law is authorized constitutionally in the US. YMMV.
Outside of portable material property, the idea of property rights as natural rights is pretty fanciful. Land ownership is a good example of a property right that was understood to be government-originated even in the system of English Common Law relied upon by the authors of the Constitution. At the time that the United States split from Great Britain it was understood that land ownership rested with the monarch, that land could at the discretion of the monarch be held in "freehold" by entities other than the monarch, but that the monarch retained certain rights on account of its fundamental ownership of all land, such as the power of eminent domain, or the fact that any property for which a freeholder could not be identifier would revert to the control of the crown. The authors of the Constitution understood that going forward such rights were held by the new federal government, or by the governments of the several States.
Moving away from land ownership, you get forms of property rights that are even harder to reconcile with the idea of natural rights. Mineral rights, shipping rights, air rights, spectrum rights, toll rights, salvage rights, etc. None of these things are meaningful absent the concept of a legal system enforced by a government.
I do not think law should be calculated (it sounds too much like hiding your political values behind science) but it's worth trying - just to see what assumptions you need to make.
I spend years writing a novel. My wife contributes to this novel by keeping me fed, clothed, and sheltered while I write it. The day it's published, I die.
Your proposal leaves my family nothing.
Life + a decade is reasonable, IMO. Alternatively, 25yrs or life, whichever is longer.
Dead creators can't create new works. The primary purpose of copyright, to my mind, is to incent the creation of new works for the ultimate benefit of humanity.
I'd like to see "life plus" sunset over a period of years, allowing those who "banked" on that business model to still benefit while decreasing the copyright term after death until it's eventually eliminated.
Removing copyright-after-death gradually discourages the business model you describe. It makes sense, to me, to ease into that gradually.
Does the end of copyright-after-death mean some works won't be created? Maybe. Some people might not create new works if their estate can't profit after their death.
Eliminating copyright-after-death opens the door for new derivative works sooner. I think there's potential for more new works to be created with copyright ending at death. More creators can build upon the old work versus a single creator toiling at the end of their life.
I am of the camp, ultimately, that wants to see the U.S. Constitution's original copyright terms restored (and the requirement for registration and renewal). I think it will need to be a gradual process if only to allow those who have (unfairly, in my mind) lobbied for effectively infinite copyright terms to die.
> You probably mean that you want to restore the terms of the US’s first copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790 (fourteen plus fourteen years, etc.).
You're quite correct. Sorry for being sloppy when I banged-out that comment.
> Dead creators can't create new works. The primary purpose of copyright, to my mind, is to incent the creation of new works for the ultimate benefit of humanity.
But in the example GP posted, if the person knew they were near death, they very well might stop working on it since their family won't benefit.
So I've always leaned toward the "ends at death" model (if not sooner; I actually have tended to lean toward no IP protections) but I think you've raised a good argument and might have changed my mind.
However, can't you somehow create some legal mechanism for transferring rights on death to handle the sort of scenario you describe? This is, after all, the arguments about divorce settlements (Person A is supremely financially successful, but was supported by their spouse, so their spouse is heavily rewarded by the court). So couldn't you somehow smooth that process?
I tend to think copyright lengths are arbitrary except these kinds of arguments:
1. Death of the creator(s) -- or those supporting them, or designated by the creator(s) as you've outlined. People dream up all sorts of murder plots, but it seems like those kinds of incentives could be worked out.
2. Some decline in profits or failure to make available a product. That is, once the profit declines to a certain point, or if someone takes a product out of print, it enters the public domain.
You could also specify something based on averages. Like, the median product ceases to maintain X% of profit after Y years, so that becomes your copyright length.
One real‐world example of this is Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography[1], which he wrote while dying of throat cancer, specifically to provide for his wife. He died five days after finishing the final manuscript.
It’s a great read and I’m glad it was written. I’m also glad that the copyright has expired and as a result there exist free, high‐quality community‐maintained ebook editions.
I would be okay with a fixed term allowing a short time for estates to profit, in the event someone created a work shortly before their death. I think the primary purpose should be to provide for the author, not their heirs, but I can understand how an author would feel like their effort were wasted if they died shortly after. Maybe something like a minimum term of ten years, with the ability to renew it during your life up to fifty years or so.
I surely can't be the only one who finds it really weird that copyright lengths depend on the author's lifespan? Copyrights act as a sort of financial instrument that can be bought and sold. Imagine suggesting an office space lease that lasted for X years following the death of some specific named person. Everyone would think you are insane! But if it is the rights to a book, now everyone acts like an author's life expectancy should reasonably be a factor the term that any subsequent owner can hold the rights for their book
Reminds me of a precursor to life insurance, if only I could remember what it was called... Kind of a lottery / pool, all participants paid into it and the last survivor inherited the lot. IIRC.
Come to think of it, reminds me of life insurance: that's also a financial instrument the value of which depends on the lifespan of a specific named person.
You aren’t entitled to simply reprint or republish someone else’s work for profit but copyright is blocking derivative and reinterpreted works from entering the public domain.
Take Cinderella. Place her in the Wild West. Make her lose a cowboy boot at a village fete. But retain the names from the original so this heroine Cinderella. Clearly derivative, right? Also violative of Disney’s rights to Cinderella’s name and likeness.
What copyright blocks (in this instance) is our ability to start from a common source of understanding - naif with evil stepmom rescued by hot prince - to extend the story in random directions.
This block should not last in perpetuity is what many of us are saying.
In software, this would be akin to preventing forking.
> Also violative of Disney’s rights to Cinderella’s name and likeness.
How the fuck can they have any rights to her name?!? I'm fairly sure that's been the name used in English for the heroine of that story from the first English translation of the folk-tale collection of the brothers Grimm. (Or does this particular story predate even that; maybe Perrault or La Fontaine?)
You are indeed entitled to simply reprint or republish someone else’s work for profit if it is in the public domain. Copyright blocks most derivative work (with a few exceptionns like parodies), but also blocks verbatim unauthorized copies.
> Copyright blocks most derivative work (with a few exceptionns like parodies), but also blocks verbatim unauthorized copies.
Maybe verbatim unauthorized copies is all it should block? Hey, it's right there in the name, isn't it -- Copyright? It's not called "parodyright" or "derivativeright"...
Translations, revised editions (to fix typos, add examples or change the bookcover) and adaptations to other media formats are examples of derivative works, so copyright law would be pretty useless without that kind of protection.
Why? Why didn't a creator try to provide for their lives ones? Sure it shouldn't last forever. But just because a best selling author dies, shouldn't mean the kids and spouse end up homeless
That's effectively how land ownership works in many Asian countries. Every holder of land is effectively leasing it from the public for a set number of years (100 years or whatever). Land sales for indeterminate times (in "fee simple") place an unfair burden on future generations, by denying to them the public benefits of increasing land values. It's effectively a hidden form of debt to a bunch of private rent seekers.
Intellectual property and physical property are entirely different. Intellectual property can be shared/multiplied/given away indefinitely while still being retained by the originator while physical property cannot.
After copyright expiration, the original author of intellectual property can create derivative works even after their copyright expires (in the same universe, etc.) or even updated revisions, which restart their copyright for the revision. Even if other could do so, I suspect the market for their derivative works will still have a preference for their works vs. others who create derivative works of the original, depending on the quality of the derivatives.
It is really hard to own land (or any other physical thing) after you've sold it but the same is not true of a novel.
Alright, how's this for an intermediate compromise: instead of 70 + life, make it 70 - remainder of life. That way, people who die the second their book is submitted are still able to leave something for their children but people who live a very long amount of time for whatever reason aren't unjustly rewarded solely for living a long time.
How naive. This encourages killing off an author with a hitman so you can swoop in and steal extremely valuable intellectual property.
What, are you going to make an exception for authors killed in grisly murders of mysterious circumstances? Imagine if instead of paying George Lucas billions for the rights to Star Wars Disney just had him killed off for a fraction of the price.
> This encourages killing off an author with a hitman so you can swoop in and steal extremely valuable intellectual property.
No, because the property rights ceasing to exist means that there is nothing to steal. You can use what would have been exclusive under them, but so can anyone else. Property rights aren't the right to use but the right to exclude; without the right to exclude, there is no property.
(I do think taking the author’s life into account is a dumb idea, just not for that reason.)
