Posted by Cider9986 3 hours ago
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.
I think most people are in support of some financial incentives via protection, but 70 years is just insane.
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
[1] https://www.swissmedic.ch/swissmedic/de/home/humanarzneimitt...
See insulin prices difference in europe vs US
I think this is an inversion of cause and effect.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
I seem to remember a guy living in a cabin, writing manifestos, and mailing bombs to tech people and academics.
I'd love to see it brought back down to that again.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
Anything below 5-10 years and you have literal starving authors. Anything less than 5 and you may as well abolish it altogether.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
In what way is the system as it exists currently failing to encourage the creation of new works?
I wouldn't say we have more "traditional" art that an author spends time creating with the vision of selling copies for years to come, than we did when copyright terms were shorter.
Is there a lot of fan art, yes, there's also massive amounts of original works as well. There is no lack of either.
My point is that it doesn't need to do that. Copyright could still encourage creation of new works with a much shorter duration, without the downside of locking our culture up in monopolies for life + 70.
You could equally solve the issue by providing provisions for archival. Or a provision that requires a work to be freely available for sale.
The creator having a monopoly on the work seems to me to encourage the creation and sharing of work as intended.
Which includes giving creators royalty rights that can be passed on to their heirs, so the elder author can finish their manuscript on their deathbed as a gift to their family.
NEVER have I argued for life+70 and I never will.
I know a few great works were published posthumously, but most of these were because somebody thought it was really important to share, not because it was a golden goose they wanted to start... milking.
And again, to be clear, since apparently people think I’m defending life+70. I am abso-fucking-lutely not.
I want 14+14 or raw 28 back.
Edit: oh apparently I do, thanks Kagi Assistant.
Otis Redding Died in a plane crash literally 3 days after recording a famous track and his family earned a LOT after his passing.
"We" is doing a lot of work here. I realize that it's basically impossible for an entire population to have coherent motivations, but I support copyright because I think artists have the right to control what happens with their work and to sell it if they can. I believe that this right extends, like all rights, until the end of the author's life. I don't really care one bit about encouraging the production of new works.
which is too long, and also too short - what about authors who wrote finished their book on their deathbed? Then their rights are shorter than someone young - an unfair discrimination.
That's why age should be irrelevant. Copyright is useful, and should be granted. However, current copyright grants last far too long - age plus some years beyond. Not to mention corporations lobbying to increase the length right as some copyrights for some works are about to enter public domain.
Therefore, copyright should be granted for a single period and end - like patents. 20 years seems to be a good middle ground, but i could hear arguments for slightly longer or shorter.
I suggest to rather look at it under the angle whether estates should be able to inherit author’s identity (or some of it), to continue the will.
Abolishing the copyright or not is not that important if nothing is done in front of that to guarantee that every single human are granted unconditional access to decent life conditions.
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
inheritance has nothing to do with copyright. Financial assets are not monopolies. Copyright is only a valuable asset because of the granted monopoly on copying/distribution.
Therefore, to reduce the value copyright has (as it currently does seem to have too much), reducing the granted terms should be sufficient. Like patents, a good 20 years seems like a sufficiently long time to recover cost of production, while letting people who are currently alive to produce derivatives of it afterwards.
If I spend $20m on building a house or creating a computer game, why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not? I would have a monopoly on this specific building and on this specific creative work, but anyone is free to build/create anything else.
If J. Rowling created Harry Potter universe, why her family can't own it indefinitely? We somehow accept this notion for other assets, but treat copyright differently.
p.s. creative work is more valuable as it has something that money can't buy (authenticity, taste, sincerity, etc)
The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.
Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright.
If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.
Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.
They do, some build to rent indefinitely or sell to other who rent out the property.
But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore?
For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.
We're there already, considering the cost of actually enforcing your rights, but it would be bizarre to codify that into law.
That's an americocentric view. Copyrights are shorter around the world. In fact, iirc, US has some of the longest ones.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.
Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.
Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.
Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game.
While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts.
While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents.
Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour?
I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
Maybe a while ago it was. It no longer accepts new papers since 2020 and there are much better alternatives available are this point (STC Nexus)
I want dozens of them. And then I can play the one with the best reviews.
Of course, without copyright meaning that people have to pay for the games, the chances of those games being made is pretty slim.
Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.
See for example this article [1]
> unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.
> it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
>Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
What small scale author receives license payments for anything they have authored from bug tech?
To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument.
The correct response to that is to fix the asymmetry, not blow the rights up entirely.
Quoth the OP:
> It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies.
Post Citizens United, you could say the same thing about free speech. Does the OP want to abolish that, too?
The fact that the wealthy (corporations and individuals), with massive teams of lawyers and propagandists, can often better take advantage of the rights I also enjoy is not a compelling reason for abolishing my rights.
That said let's cut copyright back to 28 years.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
The AI companies are the ones that want copyright gone.
Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us.
They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you.
At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
Also it's big tech (MS, Amazon) that is against this more than anyone.
What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
That's an argument for no laws at all.
There are murders so why make it illegal.....
The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space for a workable business model by limiting piracy.
I take your point there are other models - such as subscription - however not everyone is Charles Dickens and can turn out chapter by chapter on demand, and it those don't work for every genre.
> is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
Is is? Does it really matter I can't copy Disney films or books? Are we so lacking in creativity that it's not possible to create novel stories or characters?
I think too often IP and copyright are confused. If somebody had the rights to the wheel in perpetuity that's bad for innovation, but somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse isn't in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
What's stopping people from doing that now? The moment you sell something of any interest, you can be sure to find a copy of it free on the internet somewhere.
That's the key difference.
The fact that it's illegal limits large scale commercial exploitation, leaving enough room for legitimate distribution that pays the author.
With no copyright whatsoever, there would be a well-organized company with a better marketing department selling their version of your work, taking all the profit, and making it impossible to actually sell it yourself.
On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations.
Did copyright helped against AI? Nope.
If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience.
Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
It's not their responsibility. For that part of the law, you need to get your lawyer involved. And your lawyer will probably tell you not to waste your money, because the way the DMCA was written makes it practically impossible to find enough proof to actually win.
I don't think the "internet is a series of pipes" politicians could've foreseen Youtube or TikTok, but had I believed that the authors of early internet legislation had that foresight, I would've accused the law of being intentionally written to lead to these implementations.
The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind.
What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
Just because you choose copyleft (even weak copyleft like MPLv2) doesn't mean your project will succeed or be more popular. A lot of people (and especially a lot of companies) do prefer permissive over copyleft, and that's because they can built something proprietary on top, without being forced to give back. That's why they're ultra billionaire rich, and in comparison you're poor.
Software often wins because it's better. Copyleft favours the collective good, permissive favours the individual greed. In any case, all of these things require copyright law.
I like how you so easily dismiss my opinion by saying "it's probably because you suck" :-).
For my library, people explicitly complained about copyleft, saying "it comes with strings attached". They were pushing for permissive because it meant they could fork it for their proprietary startups.
For the other example that you conveniently ignored (Ardupilot vs PX4), it's also very clear that many companies choose PX4 because of the licence. I have heard a lot of "if you go for Ardupilot it's risky because GPLv3", and believe it or not, it has an impact on people's decision long before they can say whether PX4 or Ardupilot is better (spoiler: they are roughly equivalent).
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
Any downsides?
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the ML government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
s/ancap/marxist leninist/
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
>AnCap govenment
what?
On the other hand, Disney's success is largely owed to public domain adaptations, and for a century, it did its best to shrink the public domain and expand copyright.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-histor...
They may have ignored patents too, but they build their work on copyright infringement.
Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.
Was it is a good thing and it was created by ignoring copyrights and therefore we shouldn't protect copyrights as an absolute because other good things can be created out of it, or is it a bad thing and is using that copyright to restrict others.
You can't have it both ways. My point was just that defense of Hollywood is a terrible example.