Only in the US; Pooh was published in the UK, and there, it doesn't enter the public domain for several more years yet, because the UK sentences copyrighted works to life plus 70 years. Christopher Robin died of old age 25 years ago, never ceasing to hate the books, and his daughter (A.A. Milne's last descendant) died nine years ago, but still you can go to jail if you share your copy of the Pooh books with a friend using a computer.
Huh, this really surprised me, because Winnie The Pooh shipped for free with Apple Books when that came out, and I thought it was precisely because it was so old. So Apple actually licensed it then?
Winnie-the-Pooh hasn't belonged to the Milne estate for a very long time. Most of the rights rest with Disney. The estate has been involved in a multi-decade legal battle to get the books back, so that they could be released to the public domain.
Actually getting jailed for copyright infringement is quite difficult, but getting sued is quite likely: the copyright is now owned by Disney. Like everything else.
You can't go to jail in the US or most countries for a civil case (a civil case is what happens if someone sues you), only a criminal case. Since the No Electronic Theft act, even copyright infringement without profit motives can be criminal copyright infringement, and so for example Aaron Swartz was hounded to suicide by state prosecutors even against the apparent will of the copyright holders.
I don't know who owns Milne's copyrights, but given how profitable they are, I am sure they are jealously guarded.
Copyright laws have outlived their useful laws. We give 72 years of public funded enforcement for leisure and entertainment but only 17 years for patents. This has overly incentivized leisure and created irrational wealth in exchange for very little work. We worship football players while biochemistry majors with a bachelor's degree struggle to find jobs.
There's a difference. If you invent a character or create some art and it gets popular, you deserve to be protected from people making money of off that work, to a reasonable extent (fair use etc).
The difference to patents is that they're routinely abused. Patent trolls file or buy up patents that are as general as possible to drag smaller companies through the courts, or charge exorbitant licensing fees, stifling innovation. Pharma companies build monopolies around life-saving drugs and engage in price gouging. The patent holders get rich, not the biochem majors. Extending the effective period for patents will make things worse, not better, as the real problems are elsewhere.
Disney owning what amounts to a controlling share of mass culture is roughly comparable to patent trolls. The copyright clause that enables copyright law is about protecting creators from rogue publishers. It was never meant to control what individuals could do with copyright protected works, short of publishing for profit.
Are you implying then that copyright is not routinely abused? Big companies do this all the time (eg, Google v Oracle or the Unix lawsuits).
There's fan fiction of almost every character you can imagine. Can you name even ONE fan fiction you'd rather consume instead of the original author's work?
Trademark law is what protects your character after the copyright expires. Mickey Mouse is safe. It would allow other companies to sell Steamboat Willie (as is), but it wouldn't allow them to make a derivative work and sell it as "Mickey Mouse".
Not sure what football players have to do with copyright.
But I guess your point is life isn't fair. And people like literature activities. It are you suggesting we should all sit signs watching biochem scientists work?
Lifetime of the author plus some time seems fair to me for copyright. And for patents, that's an exchange, the public sees the details and provides protection for some years.
My major gripe is with software patents which are already covered by copyright.
No, it's anything but fair. Those heirs did nothing at all. Why should they benefit from these works? On the opposite, copyright should not be transferable.
It should last maybe several years, and that's it. Only then most people would have any semblance of respect for it. And then something entering the public domain would be actually an event people would be looking forward to. Right now everyone considers copyright to be an effectively eternal thing.
It's also really depressing that the entirety of our pop culture is copyrighted, mostly by large faceless corporations.
It's indirectly funded. The state passes a law granting a monopoly, and the copyright holder can sue for a breach. However this relies on the state providing courts, police, jails etc. (for people who breach court orders).
After an initial period of a few years 7 or 14 sounded good to the US founding fathers), Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax.
If anyone wants to put the work in the public domain, they simply have to pay the value the company declared.
Disney could declare Star Wars is worth $5b, as it’s 40 years old they’d have to pay say $150m a year tax to deny the rights to the public.
If they declared it to be worth $50m to save on that tax, then netflix could pay for it to go public domain.
Every time the copyright law is discussed, little players and harm done to them is always brought in the conversation. In practice, however, the corporate media behemoths are the ones who benefit most from these laws.
It's 'think of the children!!' argument of the IP laws.
It might help to think about the idea that the "little" players here are the public who, in aggregate has the largest stake in the game but who simultaneously has the lowest financial stakes and the least monetary incentives to lobby for their real interests.
I say that as someone who has produced a whole lot of content at the least-monitizable end of the system.
Disney is the one who is winning right now, both in terms of me "as a content creator" and me "as a member of the public".
How would you value the product of a startup, or some open source software that doesn't make any money but the creator wants to use a copyleft license for? Also, how would this work internationally? Would you have to pay a proportion of the value to the US government even if the US is a small market for you?
My guess would be that after the initial period of no taxes if the company wasn’t able to turn a profit on the patent then they would have to either sell the patent to avoid taxes or list it as a value that they would manage to be able to pay taxes and start raising money, might help with patent/copyright squatting
I don’t want to have to declare some “value” on my code and then actually pay some real money on the off-chance it might become valuable later on.
I appreciate that copyright is often abused - milked - for all it’s worth. But I think your proposal goes too far. As bad as it is copyright has some uses. With copyright I can apply a GPL license and attempt to conjole others to contribute to the greater good.
This would probably work better for the big conglomerates than the status quo. The tax would be less than the royalties they'd no longer have to pay to the actual creators, because emerging artists aren't able to afford to pay tax up front in the hope someone will eventually offer them a big advance.
Ideally, in a perfect world this makes sense but will not work in reality. This just gives a way for any larger player to easily get something in the public domain from a smaller player with less resources. The tax concept is a good concept, maybe like how we have large banks under more scrutiny over a certain level - but this may lead to small IP companies that just hold ip in order to get below the threshold. Star Wars LLC licensing to disney to be under whatever threshold is designed. Copyright in reality should protect the smaller players from the bigger players, a 30 year time frame for an author to profit before the public domain, so a company can not horde IP makes more sense.
I've long advocated something generally like this, for patents and other IP as well. I would propose a longer initial term (~30-50 years) since the nature and value of IP has changed significantly since the 1700s. I would also put an upper limit on it, since the most valuable IP is now held by immortal corporations.
The hard part for copyright is tracking what has been renewed and what has not, without some kind of registration system, which I don't think we want to add. Without this, it would make it very difficult to know if the work you intend to use/copy/distribute is protected or not.
That is a very interesting idea. But I think you would want at least a 14 year grace period with no property tax.
Another possibility is a use-it-or-lose-it scheme like that used in Trademarks. If you built a game that is now abandonware, it should be fair game for someone else to remaster it, etc.
Taxes (and tax deductions) are generally one of the best ways to align incentives. If it's a binary condition then you have tons of derelict content that should really be public domain, but because of the big ticket well-maintained Disney content the laws are written to be "reasonable" for that content and it ends up unnecessary locking up all of the other content from the 1970s
>Having 50 years to earn off your creation seems fair to everyone.
Everyone? Hold on there a moment, Jack.
I'm a copyright minimalist. Seven years with one renewal for a total of fourteen years seems much more fair to me considering all the years we've already had of continually delayed releases into the public domain. We the people have paid to enforce those years of copyright without the corresponding payoff at the end of the term release to the public. There's nothing fair about that situation and it needs to be addressed.
Copyright only exists because the government uses its monopoly on violence to protect it. Why should it not get a decent cut of the pie after a decade or so?
The average property tax is about 1%, so why should copyright be treated as something special? Especially, if the rent is collected by a third party that purchased the rights, their relationship to the creation of the underlying asset is no different to a landlord.
I'd dispense with this self-valuation business though and just charge a 1% tax on net present value of the asset.
If the copyright holder releases their claim early, then they'll get a tax refund for previous payments at the recalculated net present value.
> What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know?
Consider all those works that are in the public domain and that can be shared freely. Iconic pictures like the Mona Lisa are available to the benefit of everyone. No one owns the exclusive rights and everyone has access to this shared cultural history.
There's also collateral damage with the current copyright system. A lot of lesser known works have little commercial/brand value. But they remain illegal to share. These works are at risk of becoming lost culture. And in many cases the original authors don't own the rights to release the works into the public domain at an earlier time, because they have contracts with publishers.
> What is fundamentally wrong with the current system, I honestly want to know?
It effectively locks away cultural heritage for more than a hundred years with no tangible benefit to the society.
Disney became Disney because it used works in public domains (Brothers Grimm tales) and expired copyrights (Alice in Wonderland). Current copyright laws effectively blocks anyone from using 20th century works (and some late 19th century works) for ... well, anything, really.
Additionally, great swaths of culture are simply lost because of:
- the fear of potential copyright violations. This affects a great number of orphan works
- copyright holders doing nothing with their properties and others not being able to do anything with them. Can't find it now, but at one point Amazon carried more new books with works from the 19th century, than books with works from the 20th just because of that
But even that isn't the main problem. Copyright was intended to protect the author and incentivize them to create other works. I'm eagerly awaiting Tolkien's new works in 2047 (the copyright on The Fellowship of the Ring expires in 2050).
If there are no gains, the option is to release it or value it as nil and let someone else do it. So it's up to the owner of the copyright and I see no real unrealized gains tax.
> Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax.
I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate.
Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.
> copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP]
Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.
A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.
It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.
It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.
- author explicitly uses public domain as a license,
- 120 after publication,
- 120 after registration,
- 95 years after publication if it is corporate work or
- 75 years after the death of the author; whatever comes first.
Most significant arguments I hear defending current copyright status are:
- author have the right to make money from what they create,
- their children must still get some of it in the case their parents are authors and die early.
I still think the time for content to become public is too long. There are old music recordings from the 50's and 60's which nobody is making any significant money out of it and you simply can't copy to anybody. The same applies to a lot of games from the 90's and the 80's.
I think that it would be much more fair if copyright holders had to prove they are still making money out of a published work. If very little money is being made, this means nobody is paying for it or the copyright holder can't sell it well. In this case, the content should be declared abandoned and free to be copied unless the copyright holder demonstrates that money can be made with the content.
Reason: abandonware sites are on the fringe of legality, GOG was able to contact a few producers but that is not an easy or even possible task for everything. There are also music from early 1930's to 1960's for which it is not easy to even know who are the copyright holders and you fall on the fringe of legality if you distribute sheet music of it.
Also, there are other kinds of works: books, films, cartoons...
Copyright was intended to provide a means of support for individual artists, not as a means of guaranteeing profits to super-conglomerate shareholders for a period that nears on a century.
No. Copyright was intended to allow people to create. This might mean support for individual artists. Our it might mean profits for a super conglomerate. In fact, without that super conglomerate some things would never be created.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution specifies "authors and inventors," suggesting that natural persons were what the drafters had in mind. Those rights granted to individuals have been inferred to also be the rights of immortal companies over time.
Today i learned, that there is a latin translation of Winnie the Pooh. https://www.amazon.com/Winnie-Ille-Pu-Latin-Milne/dp/0140153... It even became a bestseller, and appeared on the list of New York Times bestsellers. Is it known, if translations of the work need to pay for copyright too?
Fascinating detail. My father used the book to teach me some English as a second language, the book is written in a clear and simple language. I wonder if these qualities have been preserved in the translation.
Readit News
Source - I'm a Milne.
(Weirdly, the UK has a special law granting permanent copyright in Peter Pan, with the royalties going to Great Ormond Street children's hospital. https://www.gosh.org/about-us/peter-pan/copyright/ )
I don't know who owns Milne's copyrights, but given how profitable they are, I am sure they are jealously guarded.
The difference to patents is that they're routinely abused. Patent trolls file or buy up patents that are as general as possible to drag smaller companies through the courts, or charge exorbitant licensing fees, stifling innovation. Pharma companies build monopolies around life-saving drugs and engage in price gouging. The patent holders get rich, not the biochem majors. Extending the effective period for patents will make things worse, not better, as the real problems are elsewhere.
There's fan fiction of almost every character you can imagine. Can you name even ONE fan fiction you'd rather consume instead of the original author's work?
you think people idolize sports figures because of copyright?
My major gripe is with software patents which are already covered by copyright.
It should last maybe several years, and that's it. Only then most people would have any semblance of respect for it. And then something entering the public domain would be actually an event people would be looking forward to. Right now everyone considers copyright to be an effectively eternal thing.
It's also really depressing that the entirety of our pop culture is copyrighted, mostly by large faceless corporations.
Software patents cover the invention. Software copyright (presumably) cannot cover software that has not been created yet.
If anyone wants to put the work in the public domain, they simply have to pay the value the company declared.
Disney could declare Star Wars is worth $5b, as it’s 40 years old they’d have to pay say $150m a year tax to deny the rights to the public.
If they declared it to be worth $50m to save on that tax, then netflix could pay for it to go public domain.
Dead Comment
Any law has to treat everyone equally otherwise it’s always going to be the Disney’s et al who win.
It's 'think of the children!!' argument of the IP laws.
I say that as someone who has produced a whole lot of content at the least-monitizable end of the system.
Disney is the one who is winning right now, both in terms of me "as a content creator" and me "as a member of the public".
That would be older than Google for example.
I appreciate that copyright is often abused - milked - for all it’s worth. But I think your proposal goes too far. As bad as it is copyright has some uses. With copyright I can apply a GPL license and attempt to conjole others to contribute to the greater good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Harberger
The hard part for copyright is tracking what has been renewed and what has not, without some kind of registration system, which I don't think we want to add. Without this, it would make it very difficult to know if the work you intend to use/copy/distribute is protected or not.
Another possibility is a use-it-or-lose-it scheme like that used in Trademarks. If you built a game that is now abandonware, it should be fair game for someone else to remaster it, etc.
The government isn’t some beast we have to appease. It’s us! If we want to reform copyright, we don’t need to bribe ourselves with a new tax.
Everyone? Hold on there a moment, Jack.
I'm a copyright minimalist. Seven years with one renewal for a total of fourteen years seems much more fair to me considering all the years we've already had of continually delayed releases into the public domain. We the people have paid to enforce those years of copyright without the corresponding payoff at the end of the term release to the public. There's nothing fair about that situation and it needs to be addressed.
The average property tax is about 1%, so why should copyright be treated as something special? Especially, if the rent is collected by a third party that purchased the rights, their relationship to the creation of the underlying asset is no different to a landlord.
I'd dispense with this self-valuation business though and just charge a 1% tax on net present value of the asset.
If the copyright holder releases their claim early, then they'll get a tax refund for previous payments at the recalculated net present value.
Also, this is a tax on unrealised gains is it not?
Consider all those works that are in the public domain and that can be shared freely. Iconic pictures like the Mona Lisa are available to the benefit of everyone. No one owns the exclusive rights and everyone has access to this shared cultural history.
There's also collateral damage with the current copyright system. A lot of lesser known works have little commercial/brand value. But they remain illegal to share. These works are at risk of becoming lost culture. And in many cases the original authors don't own the rights to release the works into the public domain at an earlier time, because they have contracts with publishers.
It effectively locks away cultural heritage for more than a hundred years with no tangible benefit to the society.
Disney became Disney because it used works in public domains (Brothers Grimm tales) and expired copyrights (Alice in Wonderland). Current copyright laws effectively blocks anyone from using 20th century works (and some late 19th century works) for ... well, anything, really.
Additionally, great swaths of culture are simply lost because of:
- the fear of potential copyright violations. This affects a great number of orphan works
- copyright holders doing nothing with their properties and others not being able to do anything with them. Can't find it now, but at one point Amazon carried more new books with works from the 19th century, than books with works from the 20th just because of that
But even that isn't the main problem. Copyright was intended to protect the author and incentivize them to create other works. I'm eagerly awaiting Tolkien's new works in 2047 (the copyright on The Fellowship of the Ring expires in 2050).
Where is the incentive to do something new or to allow new players an ability to use works in a new way?
I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate.
Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.
Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.
A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.
Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf
It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.
It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyout_clause
I think that it would be much more fair if copyright holders had to prove they are still making money out of a published work. If very little money is being made, this means nobody is paying for it or the copyright holder can't sell it well. In this case, the content should be declared abandoned and free to be copied unless the copyright holder demonstrates that money can be made with the content.
Reason: abandonware sites are on the fringe of legality, GOG was able to contact a few producers but that is not an easy or even possible task for everything. There are also music from early 1930's to 1960's for which it is not easy to even know who are the copyright holders and you fall on the fringe of legality if you distribute sheet music of it.
Also, there are other kinds of works: books, films, cartoons...
I enjoyed them as a child. As an adult, I discovered the sly humor in them, which I like very much.
The first season of Spongebob had a lot of sly adult humor mixed in, which I enjoy a lot, too. Later Spongebob seasons seem to have lost it.
Also - did anyone else read the title think "Winne-the-Pooh, Ernest Hemingway Classic?!"