Our current copyright is far far too long. 20 years would be far more reasonable. We can talk about side issues all we want, but at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit. 20 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit.
> at the end of the day, copyright is about protecting the ability to generate profit
That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators.
20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.
> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.
What are you referring to exactly, US copyright law or earlier laws from other countries? US Copyright law from the beginning (1790) was written in part to preserve the economic property rights of authors and publishers. Part of the point always has been protection of profit. [1] [2]. Initially it only applied to books, not to art. You can’t really separate the granting of a limited-time monopoly over a work from the promotion of new creative works, they go hand in hand, to say economic protection was never the point is not accurate.
‘In 1783 several authors' petitions persuaded the Continental Congress "that nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."’ [2]
The earlier British Statue of Anne says similarly:
“Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted” [3]
Note that both quotes reference economic protection as the first reason, and promotion of creativity second.
> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works
for profit, profit of money and profit of learning. The first copyright law in the world, the Statute of Anne[1] specifically mentions money in the preamble:
> Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books;
(As an aside, I'm so glad English moved away from German or we'd still be using capital letters everywhere!)
Authors of the time were arguing against censorship, monopolies formed by powerful printers, and to make money they felt they were owed. As Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, is quoted as saying in that article:
> One Man Studies Seven Year, to bring a finish'd Peice into the World, and a Pyrate Printer, Reprints his Copy immediately, and Sells it for a quarter of the Price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament
Let's not misrepresent history to fit our own dispositions today.
> That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Are there any studies showing that copyright actually does achieve its goal of promoting the creation of art? Can we show a causal link between copyright and art creation? Can we show a proportional effect where longer copyright terms lead to more/better art creation? I suppose it would be rather difficult. You'd have to find a control group that's otherwise just like the USA (or your comparable country) but without copyright.
Is copyright really the driving force, without which we wouldn't have creative output? I have my doubts. People were drawing on cave walls and parchments long before copyright. Would people simply not create art if copyright didn't exist? And if so, would we really miss that particular art?
> That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.
I wonder - if copyright expiration had been enshrined in something harder to extend like a US Constitution amendment, would we be better off? Or would the powerful media/entertainment forces try to convince the electorate that early expirations were problematic? Would we have a flourishing public domain or would HUAC have flipped on its head - looking instead for the enemies of the entertainment industry? Commies who don't want Mickey Mouse to make money.
- they force exclusive access to a technology for a while, promoting innovation and profit; but!
- they also force you to publish all the internals of how that technology works, promoting production of cheaper copies after the exclusive period has passed.
I'm not aware of copyright having any such function.
>20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
What about stuff that didn't land initially, but was discovered years/decades later and loved. Should they be denied the right to make a (belated) profit?
Is it possible that the extremely long copyright time still succeeds in promoting the creation of new works? For example, under copyright, you can't take Mickey Mouse, throw sunglasses on him, then re-release all of the existing work, because it's not protected by the fair use clause. However, if you were to create something demonstrably different to the point where it does qualify for fair use, then suddenly you've created new media that you have the copyright for and can do whatever you wish (including sell it; whether or not it's used for commercial purposes is only a factor in fair use determinations, it doesn't instantly disqualify it for fair use).
The only thing the public domain seems to benefit is the ability to redistribute the work without iterating upon it in a way that makes it take on a new meaning.
Its the Mickey Mouse problem. Disney doesn't want Mickey or related works to enter public domain, because it would be a huge knock to their current empire.
Still, this seems rather easily solvable to naïve little old me.
20 year copyright by default, with a 20 year review cycle process an individual/company can apply to to ask for extension, on the condition that they can prove harm to newly generated IP, if the copyright is not-renewed. Still using Mickey Mouse to generate new works of non-derivative IP, and copyright of Mickey Mouse isn't causing damage to any other competing agencies (the way holding IP to a new drug or invention would)? Fine, renew granted.
Why should Disney get an infinite copyright? I think copyright should be limited to natural persons. No one involved in the creation of Mickey Mouse is still alive. Imagine if the Brothers Grimm, Inc. had just kept infinitely renewing their copyright claim? Disney wouldn’t even exist. Disney is a company that was built upon works in the public domain and now is depriving the rest of the world from the very thing that allowed Disney to flourish in the first place.
Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point.
Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
Or, beyond 28 years, if the work is not released to the public domain, have an annual copyright tax based upon a "fair market" assessment of the property. To keep assessment real, perhaps let there be an auction starting at 2x the taxed value.
I'm actually surprised corporations aren't lobbying for this. Instead of coming up with original ideas, they can just take any works of art pre-2000 and just recycle them over and over.
Why spend billions buying Marvel when you can do it for free, why spend billions for parts of the LOTR series, why spend billions to buy Lucas Arts.
I mean Disney is built on taking public domain works and reworking them into their own classics. Imagine if they could do that with the biggest cultural uptake in human history of the 1900s instead of the relatively unknown 1800s stories.
Don't forget streaming services like Netflix who shell out billions to get Seinfeld and Friends. Lobbying for 20 years means they get ALL the 90s instead of shelling out billions.
Seeing as the USA's ultra affluent crust is grossly crowded with generational wealth, I don't think they'd like the idea of removing any of their profits, however long ago and however void of any of their own toil, regardless of the overall good it would do.
The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth - and power law distribution of wealth really matters.
That said, I agree there is a problem with intergenerational wealth, although possibly more through family political power and influence than their raw financial power.
If I write a best seller at age 25, I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45. I'd also argue that heirs should also have some period of exclusivity as well. Using the best seller at age 25 example, were I to die an untimely death at age 32 I would again hope that my very young daughter would still be able to receive benefit from my creative works. So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me.
In the case of a non-human copyright holder, 50 years seems reasonable can broadly comparable to that of the life of a human creator.
> I hope that I can still claim my royalties past age 45
Write more best sellers then.
> So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me.
Yeah, of course a life+20 year monopoly on bits is great. For you. Instead of sitting down and working on more books so humanity can benefit, you get to sit down and collect rent from your past successes until you die. And then your children get to collect that rent for 20 years. You only need to strike gold once to be set for life and provide for children too.
Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? It shouldn't. The social contract was "we'll pretend we can't easily copy this stuff so you can make money for a few years before it enters the public domain". This life time monopoly bullshit is a clear violation of this contract. A society whose public domain rights were robbed has zero incentive not to use libgen for everything.
Things entering the public domain should be considered in the context of lowering the cost of access more than the work being the basis of new dirivative works. It's far more important that millions of people can read or watch something without having to pay a fee to the publisher than it is for someone to use the work as source material for a new work.
Copyright should be much shorter so that everyone can access culturally relevant art and books even if they have very little money. Right now the only option for many is piracy because the works their peers are seeing work enter the public domain until decades after they die.
Copyright for X years since first publish makes sense. Lifetime copyright makes sense too.
But "Lifetime + X years" just rewards those for whatever reason has a longer life. There's no reason a work should be protected for a longer time because the author lived longer.
Who not a guaranteed minimum of 25 years after publication (for posthumous works and authors who kick the bucket shortly after publication) with the expectation of lifetime of the author should they live more than 25 years after publication? The heirs of the long-lived authors will have to take the personal responsibility to have their own creative ideas instead of trading on their father's legacy.
Honestly, everyone should be able to sustain themselves 20 years later if they can write a best seller once. If you can't well then you are either extremely unlucky, have health issues or are just plain lazy - we shouldn't base this particular law on this.
Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.
Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.
Without it big publishing companies would just publish stuff without paying royalties, because they could can just do that. With 75 years it will be also some inheritance for authors children - should we also let publishing companies just take that?
There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
Could always leave the timescales as-is, but have a break clause — if your work generates more than $xM in sales it's now out of copyright.
Would protect the non-Star Wars/Harry Potters, but also let us recognise that SW/HP/LotR _have_ become part of our shared culture and it does wider society little benefit to give one company a monopoly on them
So the business model "write once, get paid for the rest of your life" should get built into law? I'm trying to think of an analogous situation. Should Architects get commission on rent for the rest of their life?
> There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
There are many more non successful books, I agree. I doubt many of them are still available, much less making noteworthy money, after 20 years. This is based on my experience trying to buy obscure books, I tried to find actual numbers but was unsuccessful.
> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.
Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?
> Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.
I would argue the opposite: that for non-bestsellers, income after 20 years is completely negligible. NO one is buying 2nd rate fiction 20 years after it was first published, only bestsellers will still sell a significant fraction after that long.
I also don't see how potential income 20 years later could ever effectively motivate or enable a person...
I'd much rather solve the problem of starving people separately from copyright, maybe some form of Universal Basic Income. That way we can handle it for everyone who is in a rough situation without requiring them to get lucky enough with a moderately successful book.
> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings.
I'm sorry but there are certain lines of work that are simply not profitable. Maybe earning a living by being a not popular author is (should be) just not possible?
As much as I dislike big corporations abusing the system, like Disney, that’s a good point. In particular for novelists and artists, it can take decades for discovery and subsequent appreciation of their work.
All of this IP law was written well before the large-scale adoption of the internet which has greatly accelerated the proliferation of ideas and and largely commoditized ingenuity. It's insane we haven't lowered the current timeline. Some commenters are mentioning the current folks in power who stand to lose a lot pushing back on change. That's probably the most plausible reason I can think of but curious of any others.
OTOH, there's a huge amount of content out there that's formally and legally in the public domain already but not really findable/discoverable via detailed cataloging, or easily usable (and reusable) by 21st-c. standards. Zillions of random page scans up on Google Books, Hathitrust and the Internet Archive. If what you genuinely care about is expanding access to the legacy of our intellectual history, the low-hanging fruit really is very low.
Beyond clear cases like ensuring preservation of materials that are obviously at risk, it's kinda hard to argue and lobby for a shorter copyright term when we're collectively ignoring what's long been available for the taking.
I really don’t understand your justification here. A consequence of Sturgeon† is that most public domain material was unpopular in its day, and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022. Why does that imply copyright terms shouldn’t be shortened?
If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today.
I get the sentiment but writing the Great American Novel is no easy proposition. Everyone who is saying 20 years are plenty should first make sure their wealth doesn't come from a salary. Creators are taking the risk so deserve the reward. I'm fine with ending with the creators death. This does push the creator to keep creating to maximize earnings for their estate prior to death. Creation is hard and it shouldn't be like art where paintings are only valuable posthumously.
the problem is that very rarely creators own the copyright, most of the time it's transferred to corporations. in principle I agree with you, but corporations should have restrictive limits (i.e. 20 years after first copyright transfer from a natural person) - and just to be sure, make it so that royalty contracts are null and void if they cover a duration longer than 5 years, so that corporation cannot workaround the issue buying new property for pennies using forever exlusive royalties and preventing renegotiation once the property becomes famous (i.e. avoid the current musicians/labels contracts where unknowns get scouted early and chained forever)
Life expectancy is 2.5X what it was when these laws were first conceived and the majority of creative people have a relatively short peak creative period where most of their valuable output comes - eg. Typical recording artists last no more than 10 years & to be able to achieve their peak, they have to often give up on things that promise stable careers for people (advanced college degrees, internships and starter roles in the 20s) not in the creative industry. So why not let them enjoy the benefits of their creativity through royalty in their old age if someone streams their song decades later? There are a lot of senior artists who would be facing very significant hardship if not for their royalties. You can see this much more often in athletes who don't have a royalty stream.
Life expectancy was mostly shorter due to infant mortality. The average person who made it to 5 years old didn’t have an expectation to die at 35 at all.
What about a compromise where the original works (and republishing verbatim) are protected for the life of the creator, but derivative works (e.g. writing a new novel with the same characters/setting) are only prevented from being created for 10-20 years?
Copyright shouldn't last even one decade. Most of the profits of games and movies are made in the first few weeks. Give them like five years of protection in order to be exceptionally generous and allow for exactly 0 extensions.
That's it. That's how copyright should work in order to be tolerable. Anything else is pure rent seeking.
> Most of the profits of games and movies are made in the first few weeks.
This is mostly straw man, it only applies to big-budget AAA titles, it doesn’t apply to indie games & movies, it doesn’t apply to artists or musicians, especially most small-time artists. It doesn’t apply to books or to software or to journalism or to educational or corporate content. Your claim isn’t really even true for Marvel movies or whatever either, box office is complicated and movie profits are now based on global sales and streaming and ancillary rights and merchandising and all kind of things that don’t happen in the first few weeks.
Copyrights might be too long now, but these laws have been around for many centuries, and ala Chesterton’s fence, you seem to be failing to consider the reasons that copyrights appeared in the first place, and the ramifications of significantly reducing or abolishing copyrights. The problem that led to copyrights is IP theft, unscrupulous people publishing work as their own and rent-seeking all the profit they can. This will happen at a massive scale if we cut the period down to 1 decade or less. You might want to consider the possibility that if copyright were shortened to less than a decade or abolished today, it might not really hurt Disney and other big media corps at all, it might just kill independent artists because large corporations can control the internet and legally steal your independent creative work before you can make money from it.
A lot of great indie games wouldn't even have been finished when their copyright expired if it lasted only 5 years (Factorio, Minecraft, Terraria).
And Cave Story wouldn't have made any money. It was released for free in 2004 but few people knew about it at the time. It wasn't until 2010/2011 when it released on Nintendo and Steam (paid version) that it took off.
3-5 years AT MOST. 20 years is an eternity in today's world. Most of the revenue a creative work generates comes in the first few months after its release anyway. For movies, the revenue from outside of cinema screenings is not even considered for statistical purposes.
It would also make some sense to make copyright non-transferable.
I agree, but authors will scream blue murder and claim that you're depriving of their chances of any kind of security in retirement if you do so.
Do they have a point? There are undoubtedly some creators making money from their old works, but I'd bet the vast majority of creators who do make a living from their work at some point (a small fraction of those who write or compose) make the vast majority of the royalties from their work in the first 20 years of its existence. Even more so when you apply appropriate present values to future royalties.
But when I looked for actual evidence to support or refute this point the quality of evidence in the public domain is extremely weak - either anecdata from prominent authors, or very poor-quality aggregate data from economists supporting liberalizing copyright.
If I didn't need to earn a living would be fun and useful to do a PhD examining this question properly.
As it stands, all the myths of our culture are only allowed to be told by giant media conglomerates. Nobody but the House of Mouse, for instance, can tell the stories of Darth, Luke, Han, and Yoda.
50 sounds very reasonable. Not only is it plenty long to monetize a work but it may also incentivize aging legends to have a second golden age of creativity at the end of their career.
One of my favorite all time musicians is still touring (and sounding great!) but his entire set list is music he wrote in the 60s and 70s. I suspect he still has it in him to write amazing new music.
I'm not fully convinced 20 years is the right answer. Things made 20 years ago are still often in pop-culture (The Matrix Trilogy, the first 7 seasons of South Park, the first 5 Harry Potter books), and these entering the public domain would create significant pressure to avoid the names of these series becoming legally generic. Managing the rights of these also feels like it would create significant stress on platforms trying to stem off piracy - is that 5 min clip from the Simpsons from seasons 1-15 (legal), or 15-34 (illegal)?
Somewhere between the two feels more significant. Few series will run that long, and anything that does enter the public domain will be unambiguous due to its look, feel, and sound. Something like the original Star Wars (45 years old) is clearly older and is distinct from modern media in its look and feel. Something like The Lord of the Rings on the otherhand is hard to differentiate.
Even if the IP is continuing to be used by the original creators, they can set the "canon" while competition might force them to do a decent job of using the IP in future.
For example, the Matrix. It had definitively entered the cultural meme pool after 20 years. If other creators could make money telling stories from that universe - whether through images, music, video - then the populace at large wanted that content. And if film number 4,5,6 are any good they make money as well.
You're only looking at the commercial value of copyright - making sure an IP stays as profitable as possible for as long as possible. But cultural value is just as, if not more, important, as is the premise (lost in modern society) that culture should be driven by people rather than manufactured by corporations.
Copyright should end soon enough for public adoption of a work to still be culturally significant, even if that interferes with its market viability.
I want to see what would happen if we abolished all IP law except for trademarks. No patents, no copyrights. I personally doubt it would actually discourage anyone from producing art or innovating in science/technology, but it might have other unexpected negative effects.
One negative effect might be that you don't get to hear the music, read the book or view the art because you are not the wealthy patron or one of their friends. That's the way it used to work.
> 0 years is more than enough time to profit from creative works. Are we as a society really saying that 75+ years is how much time people ought to be profiting from creative works? An absurd proposition in almost any other industry or pursuit.
How is it any more absurd than a trademark? Why should someone be able to write and sell a book about Harry Potter but not sell their own Iphone?
The purposes of those concepts are totally different.
The purpose of trademarks is customer safety. If it wasn't illegal to infringe trademarks, it would be much easier to distribute fake products, and companies would have less incentive to build their brand on quality.
The motivation for copyright is similar in that it exists to incentivize beneficial behavior (creating valuable works). But it's different because it also limits the distribution of the works. If this "cost" is too high, there is no economical sense in having so long copyright.
Trademarks are not intrinsically valuable (to society). Limiting their use has no cost.
Artistic control is major aspect of copyright; as an artist you might not want to allow Disney to make hack adaptation of your story, or someone use your song in an ad, or gazillion other things. Of course such protection can be made into separate law, but I think just slashing copyright would be problematic.
I like the idea of an extension with a hefty tax. After an initial period of ~10 years, you have to declare the value of the IP each year and pay 10% of that p.a.
Anyone willing to provide your declared value to the public coffers can then have it placed in the public domain.
I agree about how excessively long the current copyright laws can be, but there's a few things I wonder about that has to be done before that can realistically happen, along with several other related questions I got. Regardless of what happens in the end, any amount of copyright term reduction, even if that's only like 10 or 20 years, is better than nothing.
* How will the Berne Convention from the early 1900s be dealt with? Since multiple countries signed onto that, how can that be overridden or be repelled so that at least some countries can start to reduce copyright terms? I know there's a few countries that didn't sign onto this convention, but they don't enough power to cause major reforms to occur.
* I wish I could do it all myself, but I don't have enough money to convince most politicians to support such reforms. There's got to be some way I can easily gather like people who support such reforms. It's even harder if this has to happen outside of the United States for any meaningful reform to start. Where could I possibly get started on gathering like people for this purpose?
* I know about fanworks (such as fanart, fanfiction, and fangames) and the like, but unfortunately, such things aren't tolerated when they're mixed with open-source software or anything with similar licensing. How come many of those can stay up while being legally dubious (by way of using characters and/or settings from pre-existing mass media without explicit permission from the original rightsholder(s)), but open-source software doesn't get that same pass, even if only for non-commercial purposes? Even if many rightsholders would ignore such things for not being worth their time to take down, it still doesn't feel totally right if the law was strictly followed.
* If a (non-open source like) work gets delisted or removed from online stores or websites to the point where it can't be legally obtained anywhere (and hence can only be acquired via piracy), would that count as a publisher or author saying that they effectively revoked rights to such a work? Then if that work cannot be legally obtained anymore, would that also mean that that work can never enter the public domain unless it becomes available again in the future?
I ask these questions in order to reduce the likelihood that I end up with a DMCA notice sent against any of my fanworks, that could potentially hurt my chances for getting future jobs. Then that could have a domino effect of making my life very hard if this gets bad enough because of not being able to find a source of income because people got scared of me infringing their copyrights. I may be exaggerating these worries, but that's what could happen if I strictly followed the law.
At least for the Berne convention, is Americans can start by unseating incumbents and electing senators who do not care what treaties their predecessors have ratified.
A lot of famous writers today lived in poverty and obscurity and sold very few books until their old age. Seems like it would be unfair for them to not profit from their life’s work just because it’s more than 20 years old.
Yet copyright persists a constant number of years after the author's death. Is there anyone seriously arguing that a person should profit from their life's work even after they're dead?
To grandfather in the existing copyrights, any new ones will have one year shortened every year until the 20 year mark reached. Then all copyright work have 20 years. That's it.
Interesting effect of this is that it would release a truly massive amount of previously copyrighted work in a short timespan. Assuming this takes effect next year, some time in 2073, all copyrighted material created between this year and 2053 will be in the public domain.
As was posited in another comment, if we're encouraging innovation here, that would help the point. Encourage creators to have to create again.
As an aside - I'd imagine for most works, the vast majority of earnings would come from the first 20 years. I mean, people aren't flocking to the theatre to see Titanic anymore, yeah? I'm sure there's some streaming deals and licenses to show and whatnot, but nothing like theatre earnings.
This does not sound convincing to me; I can not imagine ANY realistic scenario where artistic activity is only viable because of profits earned more than 20 years later: Not for individual authors/creators and especially not for companies.
I think this point of view only appears reasonable because of how ridiculously extensive copyright terms are right now...
Imagine companies paying bonuses for work that was done >20 years earlier: That sounds to me neither reasonable nor helpful in any way.
As an artist by trade, you're damn right I want my kids & grandkids to profit from my IP (though I'm no Walt Disney), whether 20 or 100 years later. Art is different my friend. I'm not piecing together code from StackOverflow. Why should my heirlooms be sold to the highest bidder outside of my family due to copyright legal loopholes?
Well I assume you are happy with a portion of you and your work's income for the next 100 years going to your teachers ( art and other subjects ) without who you could not have created the work.
Also any medical people who treated you or your parents.
Teaching and Medicine are skilled jobs that took years to learn. It is hardly fair that you and your heirs get to profit from some teacher's or Doctor's work without them getting a share.
Family heirlooms? Your art is not a heirloom. It's just information, transferred from your mind into your medium of preference. Information is just bits, nothing but a unique number whose discovery you feel entitled to.
You think yourself superior to people who "piece together code from StackOverflow"? You're not. They will prove it to you with machine learning AI.
> Jan 1, 2023 will also be a fine day for film in the public domain, with Metropolis, The Jazz Singer, and Laurel and Hardy's Battle of the Century entering the commons. Also notable: Wings, winner of the first-ever best picture Academy Award; The Lodger, Hitchcock's first thriller; and FW "Nosferatu" Mirnau's Sunrise.
Metropolis is so influential that I'd call it a must-watch for... well, basically any fan of popular media of any kind. Film, literature, graphic arts, video games, music(!). Its influence is everywhere.
Sunrise is one hell of a roller-coaster of a movie. As with anything in the silent era (especially the non-comedy films) it's a bit of an acquired taste but it's among the earliest films that I didn't just find interesting or funny, but that really got me on the edge of my seat, several times. It's got some real "yell at the screen" moments :-) I enjoyed it way more than the director's more-iconic Nosferatu. Though, for my money, it's no M or The Passion of Joan of Arc, as silent film dramas go. Still, really good, and I think a lot of critics hold it in far higher regard than I do.
Haven't seen the rest.
> On the literary front, we have Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, AA Milne's Now We Are Six, Hemingway's Men Without Women, Faulkner's Mosquitoes, Christie's The Big Four, Wharton's Twilight Sleep, Hesse's Steppenwolf (in German), Kafka's Amerika (in German), and Proust's Le Temps retrouvé (in French).
Damn, what a powerhouse year in literature. And look at that, my favorite novel (To the Lighthouse) is about to be public domain!
The Holmes news is awesome, too. Bunch of copyright troll dicks have been making doing anything with Holmes risky for years. Great that everyone can more-easily ignore them.
This is the craziest thing about copyright law. Maybe it's fair that an author and his family should receive compensation for their work even after their deaths.
But Sunrise was released 95 years ago - the odds are that there is nobody alive who worked on this movie, nobody alive that even saw it in theaters. Why is it not publicly available? I doubt anyone is earning significant money off of an extremely old movie that caters to a niche audience - if the media is so old that it is both literally and aesthetically irrelevant in society, it's astounding that it wouldn't have been in the public domain already. It's a massive shame that Disney's corporate plots have been a detriment to other media that isn't generating huge profits. I only wish that "Steamboat Willie" going into the public domain will bring about some sort of copyright reform.
I very much doubt that anyone involved in Sunrise is pushing for the “copyright extensions”.
Steamboat Willie on the other hand... Even when he finally goes, Disney will be arguing for every single version of Mickey Mouse as a separately-copyrightable entity and therefore keep hold of him for even longer.
Getting to see 'Metropolis' in a restored movie palace with a live organist playing the entire time was quite the nice experience. Not sure I want to watch it at home and taint that experience. Still nice for others to have the option and for free.
I disliked Metropolis quite a lot. Maybe it was influential and was probably a gamechanger at a time. But is it good in any way from today's point of view? I'm not talking about effects or scenography which could not technically be better at that era. I'm talking about acting and script which look abysmal to me. I would probably not have this kind of opinion but it's often on some kind of top list and my expectations were high. Maybe I'm missing something? Or is it just touted for historical significance?
It's not that I have a problem with old movies. Casablanca came out only 15 years after Metropolis and is perfect in every way I care about.
Acting in silent movies is entirely different from what came later. That's why most silent stars didn't make it into the "talkie" era.
Just like aliens in 60s movies speak English and are obviously people in disguise, you just have to adhere to the conventions of the time.
Similarly, the ways to make the script go forward are usually quite different from what came later, because of the constant interruption required by text inserts.
Last, the musical score is important. A bad one can make of break a silent film (versions from archive.org and similar sites often have random music instead of a true score).
So you may need to learn the way of the silent movies before really appreciating them (out of slapstick comedy such as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton).
A lot of people feel the same way about Casablanca.
My advice is: you don’t have to like it.
If you are lucky you’ll stumble across an article or YouTube video that goes into details about how metropolis inspired movies _you_ love and on the back of that you can rewatch it as a sort of “behind the scenes” experience.
The thing that you're missing is the reappearance in other places of Metropolis's visual style. It's probably easier to see if you're a fan of Art Deco. It might also be easier to see if you watch Tron, which also was influential via visual style (in a different direction and lesser degree than Metropolis).
Silent-era sensibilities are very different from even WWII-era talkies. The field developed whole bunch, very fast. A lot of those films are difficult to appreciate without active effort to acclimatize oneself to them, much the same way lots of people bounce off classical music or jazz (or hip-hop, or heavy metal, or most musical genres, really) until they've had a bit more exposure and learned how to enjoy them. Plus, a lot of them were leaning really hard into one movement or another, and Metropolis is one of those (many) cases, so what it's aiming to do well isn't necessarily the same set of things most modern films would aim to do well (and indeed, off the beaten path you can find plenty of modern films that similarly target some particular effect or art movement, which can also take a bit of adjustment to one's expectations to enjoy)
Acting in particular has gone through some serious changes as fashions come and go, and most any style one encounters aside from what's now in-vogue tends to come off as corny. Even Casablanca, which is ahead of its time in many ways (for an American movie, anyway—the US lagged in some film technique developments at the time, compared with other markets) features acting that's less-naturalistic than what's popular now. Also, changes in editing have really made a difference in how performances come across, which is part of why watching a scene being filmed from a behind-the-scenes camera can make the acting seem off or bad—because it's not being filtered through modern shot-framing and editing.
IMO the comedies suffer the least and remain fairly accessible (no matter when you were born, if you can't laugh at Chaplin and Keaton, there's something wrong with you) but, for most people, approaching the rest of the silent era is more a project than something you can just dip into here and there and expect to have a good time. The field was immature, the whole "silent" part of it takes some getting used to, and there was a whole lot of art-movement-influenced experimentation going on.
There is, however, a lot of variety in styles in the silent film era, especially in foreign film. If you don't like 20s German expressionist films, try films of the 30s (IMO the silent era got a lot better toward the end), try American films, try French, try Spanish, Russian, stuff like that. Weird absurdist Spanish films that evoke the atmosphere of Monty Python, shocking short films, heart-rending dramas, cheap action schlock, about-the-town documentary or semi-fictional films, heavy-handed allegory—lots of stuff to explore. Plus the comedies, of which many are excellent and most are fairly accessible to a modern audience.
[EDIT] If you want something a bit easier to chew on, from the same director as Metropolis, M, which I mentioned in my first post, is much closer to a modern film, in terms of its storytelling and its plot structure.
>Metropolis is so influential that I'd call it a must-watch for... well, basically any fan of popular media of any kind. Film, literature, graphic arts, video games, music(!). Its influence is everywhere.
And notice that it managed to be extremely influential WITHOUT being in public domain.
It actually could be kind of interesting to have AI fill in the missing segments. I believe there are only 2 remaining, and we roughly know what is supposed to be there, but not able to restore it because of how few original copies remain. So you should be able to do a supervised learning to interpolate the remaining scenes and be fairly confident that it matches the version that was premiered in 1927.
I wonder how the efforts to reassemble and restore Metropolis from the various archives factor into its legal status. Does that count as a derivative work with its own copyright?
At 75 years past the death of the creator it’s possible you cannot use anything that came out throughout your entire life. Nothing you grew up with, nothing that inspired you, nothing that speaks to the life you lived.
It’s even possible that your children and your grandchildren will not be able to use anything you knew. Definitely not anything they knew.
We’re in real danger of cultural death with these rules restricting our expression.
Thankfully current artists have the option of open licenses for their works.
If I could, I would flip a switch right now where I am only exposed to things with open licenses for the rest of my life.
I’m happy to forget about everything Disney ever made. They can go put it in the vault forever and protect it with all the lawyers and guards in the world. I will never ask them to release it and they can feel safe that no one will be able to “steal” it.
> it’s possible you cannot use anything that came out throughout your entire life. Nothing you grew up with, nothing that inspired you, nothing that speaks to the life you live.
What do you mean by “use”? You can’t sell someone else’s creation just because you like it, that’s true. You can’t copy it and send it to others or post it online. But why should you be able to do those things? Why are you implying that legal restrictions on stealing them for your own profit, or redistributing things for free alike, is akin to not being able to enjoy culture?
You are allowed to view/watch/listen/consume legally obtained copies, and be inspired by them. You & teachers/schools are allowed to made educational copies for school. You are allowed to pay homage to things you grew up with, artistically, and share snippets and some kinds of remix under Fair Use. You can copy styles legally without copying content, if you want. You are allowed to have and hold any culture you want. You are allowed to create new work and give it to anyone you want.
This seems like FUD. Copyrights have been longer than the average lifespan for more than 100 years and we still have plenty of culture - spread of culture has even been accelerating in many ways. Strong arguments do exist for reducing and/or weakening copyrights, but pretending that copyrights prevent the spread of arts and culture isn’t accurate. (And might be willfully blind to the intended and actual ways that copyrights successfully promote cultural development and incentivize new creative works.)
Talk to the people who have created games based on existing characters: they made their own original work because they loved it, put in hundreds of hours, released it for free, and had their work taken off the internet with a cease and desist.
We see examples like that all the time. When was the last time someone was able to make their own popular movie from existing characters without facing some type of legal action? And I’m not talking about the “30% different loophole” where creators have to figure out the balance between recognizable and alienating.
>We’re in real danger of cultural death with these rules restricting our expression.<
Isn't it sort of the opposite? Without these rules we'd be stuck drowning in an even larger and blander sea of retellings and reimaginings. The only time I see this considered noble or akin to staving off death is when the culture being preserved is already stagnating anyway.
> Without these rules we'd be stuck drowning in an even larger and blander sea of retellings and reimaginings
This experiment has been run in the form of open source software. The point of the GPL license, and other open source licenses, is to remove the restrictions of copyright from a work, and encourage people to reuse it, copy it, share it, modify it, etc.
Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software? Was the Xi Editor (RIP https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...) a bland remix of ed? Even moreso than proprietary editors like sublime text?
Has there been no progress in Haskell, an open source language, due to the lack of copyright's limitations? Is all non-bland (spicy?) innovation in software done under copyright, and licensed out to other developers so they may enjoy some type system or language?
Open source software to me seems like a very clear counter example to your fear.
Right in this very moment there are hundreds if not thousands of musicians making music absolutely terrified that they will accidentally use prior works they can’t get permission for (or can’t afford).
Some are terrified they’ll use “the wrong sample” (is there a list of wrong samples? no), some are even terrified they’ll accidentally “create” a chord progression that someone else already has the rights to.
In these cases, that artist can end up getting a little popularity and maybe even a little income, then end up in debt with the song pulled from the internet, never to be played by them again.
It is not always legal to do so; in some countries it is impossible to forego your copyrights. CC0 is a tool that allows to get as close as possible to a public domain dedication.
Question about how public domain works in the US, specifically with regards to this comment in the original post:
> Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. 2 They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.
Is the “20 year pause button” permanent, i.e. copyright term for all works moving forward will be 95 years? Or will that eventually expire and the term will revert to 75 years?
Permanent. The term is 95 years now, unless Congress changes the law. And reducing it would be very difficult legally, with copyright holders suing for their theoretical losses if Congress "deprives" them of 20 years of protection that they now consider their property.
I don't know if those suits would succeed. If Congress gives someone a benefit and then gets rid of it, then you can't sue the government to force them to keep giving it to you.
...that is, unless Disney can force another extension to Copyright law in the next couple days. I wouldn't be surprised if they did (or tried, at least)
Steamboat Willie doesn't go public domain until 2024, so there's technically another year.
Disney is unlikely to attempt to push through another copyright term extension (see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i... for fuller details). The two main reasons are that there is a much more forceful caucus in politics against copyright extension than there was 25 years ago, and the arguments for doing so are weaker (the copyright extension 25 years ago was partially driven by raising copyright term in the US from "life + 50" to "life + 70", in line with European standards).
If one pays careful attention however, one would note that Disney has, over the past few years, started using a clip from Steamboat Willie more aggressively in its films, which has led many to wonder if they're planning on taking down anyone who distributes Steamboat Willie on the basis of trademark violations instead.
I've noticed them putting steam boat willie in all of the credits, at the same time things were going into the public domain, I had always assumed that was the game plan.
Make steamboat willie trademark not copyright, and the laws become a lot more flexible around that.
They stopped doing that a while ago. They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it.
> They realized it didn't matter and was more beneficial for them so they can scoop up more public domain and make more movies out of it.
I don't have anything concrete to back this up, but it seems more likely to me
that they just don't see much potential revenue in content from the 1920's, so
they see little to be gained from further spending on copyright-extension
lobbying.
Put another way, they've already succeeded. Copyright terms aren't actually
unending, but in profit terms (or practical terms more broadly) the difference
is minimal.
Tbh it would have been better if we just allowed corporations to continue paying to extend their own copyrights forever and everything that's no longer commercially viable or doesn't have an entity owning it just gets freed quickly.
I strongly disagree. And not just because copyright in perpetuity is unconstitutional. The value in a rich public domain is vastly under-appreciated. The default position is that IP is not protectable by law, because the free exchange of ideas is extremely important to modern society.
Certainly we have carved out exceptions to that default position, but only for very clear and distinct policy reasons. 1. consumer protection (trademark) and 2. incentivizing innovation and expression (patent and copyright).
The idea that my great-great-grandchildren might want to benefit from my having written a book really does not factor into whether I might write a book. If I'm not incentivized by life of the author + 70 years, I would probably not otherwise be incentivized.
Also, corporations don't pay to extend their copyrights. Other than the money Disney pays their lobbyists.
Yes, they should be able to pay a fee to extend beyond a fair time (~50 years?) based on a declared value of the work. To ensure the declared value is realistic, they then must sell the work to anyone that offers more than the declared value.
Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point.
Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
No extension in the next couple days, but there will be another 20+ year extension purchased within the next 11 years. Why? To make sure 1938 doesn't go PD.
I will leave it up to the reader as an exercise to determine what is special about 1938.
When Itchy & Scratchy teamed up for the war effort [0]? Documents on Prescott Bush, grandfather of Bush Jr, who happily sold steel to the Nazis and created the current Bush family pile [1]?
Disney is over lobbying for copyright and instead went for the legal gymnastics gold of extending Trademark protections (which never expire) to things that should fall under copyright law.
Please note that this list is for the U.S.A.. If you live in another part of the world, these books might still be copyrighted. For example, in the Netherlands (like most of the EU), it is +70 years, meaning we still have to wait 5 more years.
And in other countries, it's really unlikely you'll end up in prison or sued for using something that is both 75 years old and already public domain elsewhere in the world.
I came to the conviction that digital artworks, any form of digital property, really, needs a public clearinghouse.
You simply shouldn't be allowed to sell any digital license for a product you didn't register at that clearinghouse before. The task of that clearinghouse would be to provide the customer with the bought content in case of dispute or any other problems. So if, e.g, Amazon goes out of business, all my books would be available for me to download from said clearinghouse because I own the license. Same for steam games or Disney videos.
Many (but not all) of the problems with DRM or copyrighted works would vanish if we established this legal requirement.
Nowadays digital stores sell you the privilege to get access to said content, you own shit.
Making virtually unlimited profit on a limited initial amount of time, labour, costs is what's evil here. "X number of years" argument will never solve it (the shorter the worst the hype push will get).
Should be capped by a function of said time, labour invested plus costs and allowed profit adjusted for inflation.
I don't care how much one thinks he deserves to milk such work/invention. Look at what Nikola Tesla gave us and what he got in return.
Readit News
That's what is has turned into, but it was never the point. The point was to promote the creation of new creative works. That's it. The way to do that was making sure that creators had a limited time where they could exclusively profit from their efforts, but the creation or protection of profit was never what copyright was all about.
Today, creating/protecting profit is what it's been abused to accomplish though, often hurting the creation of new works, and most often not even for the benefit of the actual creators.
20 years was more than enough time for people to profit from their works when worldwide distribution was basically impossible, advertising was a joke compared to what we have today, and it was a massive investment to publish at all. Now you can publish for close to nothing and advertise and distribute worldwide in seconds. 20 years is at least 2x too long. 10 years seems far more reasonable to me.
If we're reworking the system we also need to make sure that DRM doesn't prevent works from being useful after they've been returned to the public domain. That's a consideration they didn't have to worry about when copyright protections were being drafted, but it's increasingly going to lock us out of our own culture.
I'm pretty sure it prevents new works more than it creates them these days.
It needs a rewrite:
- you only get copyright protection if publish an address to send payments to
- enforcement of copyright means compelling payment to that address, not removing the infringing work
What are you referring to exactly, US copyright law or earlier laws from other countries? US Copyright law from the beginning (1790) was written in part to preserve the economic property rights of authors and publishers. Part of the point always has been protection of profit. [1] [2]. Initially it only applied to books, not to art. You can’t really separate the granting of a limited-time monopoly over a work from the promotion of new creative works, they go hand in hand, to say economic protection was never the point is not accurate.
‘In 1783 several authors' petitions persuaded the Continental Congress "that nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."’ [2]
The earlier British Statue of Anne says similarly: “Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted” [3]
Note that both quotes reference economic protection as the first reason, and promotion of creativity second.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/timeline_18th_century.htm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Text
for profit, profit of money and profit of learning. The first copyright law in the world, the Statute of Anne[1] specifically mentions money in the preamble:
> Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books;
(As an aside, I'm so glad English moved away from German or we'd still be using capital letters everywhere!)
Authors of the time were arguing against censorship, monopolies formed by powerful printers, and to make money they felt they were owed. As Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, is quoted as saying in that article:
> One Man Studies Seven Year, to bring a finish'd Peice into the World, and a Pyrate Printer, Reprints his Copy immediately, and Sells it for a quarter of the Price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament
Let's not misrepresent history to fit our own dispositions today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Are there any studies showing that copyright actually does achieve its goal of promoting the creation of art? Can we show a causal link between copyright and art creation? Can we show a proportional effect where longer copyright terms lead to more/better art creation? I suppose it would be rather difficult. You'd have to find a control group that's otherwise just like the USA (or your comparable country) but without copyright.
Is copyright really the driving force, without which we wouldn't have creative output? I have my doubts. People were drawing on cave walls and parchments long before copyright. Would people simply not create art if copyright didn't exist? And if so, would we really miss that particular art?
I wonder - if copyright expiration had been enshrined in something harder to extend like a US Constitution amendment, would we be better off? Or would the powerful media/entertainment forces try to convince the electorate that early expirations were problematic? Would we have a flourishing public domain or would HUAC have flipped on its head - looking instead for the enemies of the entertainment industry? Commies who don't want Mickey Mouse to make money.
Patents have a dual purpose:
- they force exclusive access to a technology for a while, promoting innovation and profit; but!
- they also force you to publish all the internals of how that technology works, promoting production of cheaper copies after the exclusive period has passed.
I'm not aware of copyright having any such function.
What about stuff that didn't land initially, but was discovered years/decades later and loved. Should they be denied the right to make a (belated) profit?
I thought the point was to ensure streamers and video creators couldn't film the real world where songs get performed all the time.
The only thing the public domain seems to benefit is the ability to redistribute the work without iterating upon it in a way that makes it take on a new meaning.
Still, this seems rather easily solvable to naïve little old me.
20 year copyright by default, with a 20 year review cycle process an individual/company can apply to to ask for extension, on the condition that they can prove harm to newly generated IP, if the copyright is not-renewed. Still using Mickey Mouse to generate new works of non-derivative IP, and copyright of Mickey Mouse isn't causing damage to any other competing agencies (the way holding IP to a new drug or invention would)? Fine, renew granted.
Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
10 years is more than enough in the current landscape of the Internet and the creator-driven economy/
Why spend billions buying Marvel when you can do it for free, why spend billions for parts of the LOTR series, why spend billions to buy Lucas Arts.
I mean Disney is built on taking public domain works and reworking them into their own classics. Imagine if they could do that with the biggest cultural uptake in human history of the 1900s instead of the relatively unknown 1800s stories.
Don't forget streaming services like Netflix who shell out billions to get Seinfeld and Friends. Lobbying for 20 years means they get ALL the 90s instead of shelling out billions.
The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth - and power law distribution of wealth really matters.
That said, I agree there is a problem with intergenerational wealth, although possibly more through family political power and influence than their raw financial power.
In the case of a non-human copyright holder, 50 years seems reasonable can broadly comparable to that of the life of a human creator.
Write more best sellers then.
> So author life + 20 years to the first heir (exclusively) would work for me.
Yeah, of course a life+20 year monopoly on bits is great. For you. Instead of sitting down and working on more books so humanity can benefit, you get to sit down and collect rent from your past successes until you die. And then your children get to collect that rent for 20 years. You only need to strike gold once to be set for life and provide for children too.
Why should society subsidize this absurd rent seeking? It shouldn't. The social contract was "we'll pretend we can't easily copy this stuff so you can make money for a few years before it enters the public domain". This life time monopoly bullshit is a clear violation of this contract. A society whose public domain rights were robbed has zero incentive not to use libgen for everything.
Copyright should be much shorter so that everyone can access culturally relevant art and books even if they have very little money. Right now the only option for many is piracy because the works their peers are seeing work enter the public domain until decades after they die.
But "Lifetime + X years" just rewards those for whatever reason has a longer life. There's no reason a work should be protected for a longer time because the author lived longer.
Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.
Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.
Without it big publishing companies would just publish stuff without paying royalties, because they could can just do that. With 75 years it will be also some inheritance for authors children - should we also let publishing companies just take that?
There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
Would protect the non-Star Wars/Harry Potters, but also let us recognise that SW/HP/LotR _have_ become part of our shared culture and it does wider society little benefit to give one company a monopoly on them
> There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".
There are many more non successful books, I agree. I doubt many of them are still available, much less making noteworthy money, after 20 years. This is based on my experience trying to buy obscure books, I tried to find actual numbers but was unsuccessful.
Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?
I would argue the opposite: that for non-bestsellers, income after 20 years is completely negligible. NO one is buying 2nd rate fiction 20 years after it was first published, only bestsellers will still sell a significant fraction after that long.
I also don't see how potential income 20 years later could ever effectively motivate or enable a person...
I'm sorry but there are certain lines of work that are simply not profitable. Maybe earning a living by being a not popular author is (should be) just not possible?
Beyond clear cases like ensuring preservation of materials that are obviously at risk, it's kinda hard to argue and lobby for a shorter copyright term when we're collectively ignoring what's long been available for the taking.
If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today.
† Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
That's it. That's how copyright should work in order to be tolerable. Anything else is pure rent seeking.
This is mostly straw man, it only applies to big-budget AAA titles, it doesn’t apply to indie games & movies, it doesn’t apply to artists or musicians, especially most small-time artists. It doesn’t apply to books or to software or to journalism or to educational or corporate content. Your claim isn’t really even true for Marvel movies or whatever either, box office is complicated and movie profits are now based on global sales and streaming and ancillary rights and merchandising and all kind of things that don’t happen in the first few weeks.
Copyrights might be too long now, but these laws have been around for many centuries, and ala Chesterton’s fence, you seem to be failing to consider the reasons that copyrights appeared in the first place, and the ramifications of significantly reducing or abolishing copyrights. The problem that led to copyrights is IP theft, unscrupulous people publishing work as their own and rent-seeking all the profit they can. This will happen at a massive scale if we cut the period down to 1 decade or less. You might want to consider the possibility that if copyright were shortened to less than a decade or abolished today, it might not really hurt Disney and other big media corps at all, it might just kill independent artists because large corporations can control the internet and legally steal your independent creative work before you can make money from it.
And Cave Story wouldn't have made any money. It was released for free in 2004 but few people knew about it at the time. It wasn't until 2010/2011 when it released on Nintendo and Steam (paid version) that it took off.
It would also make some sense to make copyright non-transferable.
Do they have a point? There are undoubtedly some creators making money from their old works, but I'd bet the vast majority of creators who do make a living from their work at some point (a small fraction of those who write or compose) make the vast majority of the royalties from their work in the first 20 years of its existence. Even more so when you apply appropriate present values to future royalties.
But when I looked for actual evidence to support or refute this point the quality of evidence in the public domain is extremely weak - either anecdata from prominent authors, or very poor-quality aggregate data from economists supporting liberalizing copyright.
If I didn't need to earn a living would be fun and useful to do a PhD examining this question properly.
We need a lobby pushing to cut it back to 50, which is the international standard.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
One of my favorite all time musicians is still touring (and sounding great!) but his entire set list is music he wrote in the 60s and 70s. I suspect he still has it in him to write amazing new music.
Somewhere between the two feels more significant. Few series will run that long, and anything that does enter the public domain will be unambiguous due to its look, feel, and sound. Something like the original Star Wars (45 years old) is clearly older and is distinct from modern media in its look and feel. Something like The Lord of the Rings on the otherhand is hard to differentiate.
Even if the IP is continuing to be used by the original creators, they can set the "canon" while competition might force them to do a decent job of using the IP in future.
For example, the Matrix. It had definitively entered the cultural meme pool after 20 years. If other creators could make money telling stories from that universe - whether through images, music, video - then the populace at large wanted that content. And if film number 4,5,6 are any good they make money as well.
Copyright should end soon enough for public adoption of a work to still be culturally significant, even if that interferes with its market viability.
Books - the sales fall off a cliff after a year.
How is it any more absurd than a trademark? Why should someone be able to write and sell a book about Harry Potter but not sell their own Iphone?
The purpose of trademarks is customer safety. If it wasn't illegal to infringe trademarks, it would be much easier to distribute fake products, and companies would have less incentive to build their brand on quality.
The motivation for copyright is similar in that it exists to incentivize beneficial behavior (creating valuable works). But it's different because it also limits the distribution of the works. If this "cost" is too high, there is no economical sense in having so long copyright.
Trademarks are not intrinsically valuable (to society). Limiting their use has no cost.
Anyone willing to provide your declared value to the public coffers can then have it placed in the public domain.
* How will the Berne Convention from the early 1900s be dealt with? Since multiple countries signed onto that, how can that be overridden or be repelled so that at least some countries can start to reduce copyright terms? I know there's a few countries that didn't sign onto this convention, but they don't enough power to cause major reforms to occur.
* I wish I could do it all myself, but I don't have enough money to convince most politicians to support such reforms. There's got to be some way I can easily gather like people who support such reforms. It's even harder if this has to happen outside of the United States for any meaningful reform to start. Where could I possibly get started on gathering like people for this purpose?
* I know about fanworks (such as fanart, fanfiction, and fangames) and the like, but unfortunately, such things aren't tolerated when they're mixed with open-source software or anything with similar licensing. How come many of those can stay up while being legally dubious (by way of using characters and/or settings from pre-existing mass media without explicit permission from the original rightsholder(s)), but open-source software doesn't get that same pass, even if only for non-commercial purposes? Even if many rightsholders would ignore such things for not being worth their time to take down, it still doesn't feel totally right if the law was strictly followed.
* If a (non-open source like) work gets delisted or removed from online stores or websites to the point where it can't be legally obtained anywhere (and hence can only be acquired via piracy), would that count as a publisher or author saying that they effectively revoked rights to such a work? Then if that work cannot be legally obtained anymore, would that also mean that that work can never enter the public domain unless it becomes available again in the future?
I ask these questions in order to reduce the likelihood that I end up with a DMCA notice sent against any of my fanworks, that could potentially hurt my chances for getting future jobs. Then that could have a domino effect of making my life very hard if this gets bad enough because of not being able to find a source of income because people got scared of me infringing their copyrights. I may be exaggerating these worries, but that's what could happen if I strictly followed the law.
To grandfather in the existing copyrights, any new ones will have one year shortened every year until the 20 year mark reached. Then all copyright work have 20 years. That's it.
As an aside - I'd imagine for most works, the vast majority of earnings would come from the first 20 years. I mean, people aren't flocking to the theatre to see Titanic anymore, yeah? I'm sure there's some streaming deals and licenses to show and whatnot, but nothing like theatre earnings.
I think this point of view only appears reasonable because of how ridiculously extensive copyright terms are right now...
Imagine companies paying bonuses for work that was done >20 years earlier: That sounds to me neither reasonable nor helpful in any way.
Make a second thing in the 20 years you have ahead of you or find other work.
What about the Coca Cola Brand and Logo? It's also more than 100 years old. Can I start a 1:1 copycat, including logo and name?
It should probably be related to ACTIVE USAGE, not first mention.
Dead Comment
Also any medical people who treated you or your parents.
Teaching and Medicine are skilled jobs that took years to learn. It is hardly fair that you and your heirs get to profit from some teacher's or Doctor's work without them getting a share.
You think yourself superior to people who "piece together code from StackOverflow"? You're not. They will prove it to you with machine learning AI.
Plus on average you're so far removed from about... the 3rd generation of descendants that it doesn't really matter.
Nobody should leave their descendants that much wealth that:
1. they don't need to be productive themselves
2. that the initial wealth has a higher than 1% chance to pass to grandkids
Each generation needs to earn their bread.
Baby boomers kind of didn't and look at what people are saying now.
Metropolis is so influential that I'd call it a must-watch for... well, basically any fan of popular media of any kind. Film, literature, graphic arts, video games, music(!). Its influence is everywhere.
Sunrise is one hell of a roller-coaster of a movie. As with anything in the silent era (especially the non-comedy films) it's a bit of an acquired taste but it's among the earliest films that I didn't just find interesting or funny, but that really got me on the edge of my seat, several times. It's got some real "yell at the screen" moments :-) I enjoyed it way more than the director's more-iconic Nosferatu. Though, for my money, it's no M or The Passion of Joan of Arc, as silent film dramas go. Still, really good, and I think a lot of critics hold it in far higher regard than I do.
Haven't seen the rest.
> On the literary front, we have Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, AA Milne's Now We Are Six, Hemingway's Men Without Women, Faulkner's Mosquitoes, Christie's The Big Four, Wharton's Twilight Sleep, Hesse's Steppenwolf (in German), Kafka's Amerika (in German), and Proust's Le Temps retrouvé (in French).
Damn, what a powerhouse year in literature. And look at that, my favorite novel (To the Lighthouse) is about to be public domain!
The Holmes news is awesome, too. Bunch of copyright troll dicks have been making doing anything with Holmes risky for years. Great that everyone can more-easily ignore them.
But Sunrise was released 95 years ago - the odds are that there is nobody alive who worked on this movie, nobody alive that even saw it in theaters. Why is it not publicly available? I doubt anyone is earning significant money off of an extremely old movie that caters to a niche audience - if the media is so old that it is both literally and aesthetically irrelevant in society, it's astounding that it wouldn't have been in the public domain already. It's a massive shame that Disney's corporate plots have been a detriment to other media that isn't generating huge profits. I only wish that "Steamboat Willie" going into the public domain will bring about some sort of copyright reform.
Steamboat Willie on the other hand... Even when he finally goes, Disney will be arguing for every single version of Mickey Mouse as a separately-copyrightable entity and therefore keep hold of him for even longer.
Jeeves & Wooster 'Puttin' on the Ritz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LObPaCloY8E
It's not that I have a problem with old movies. Casablanca came out only 15 years after Metropolis and is perfect in every way I care about.
Just like aliens in 60s movies speak English and are obviously people in disguise, you just have to adhere to the conventions of the time.
Similarly, the ways to make the script go forward are usually quite different from what came later, because of the constant interruption required by text inserts.
Last, the musical score is important. A bad one can make of break a silent film (versions from archive.org and similar sites often have random music instead of a true score).
So you may need to learn the way of the silent movies before really appreciating them (out of slapstick comedy such as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton).
My advice is: you don’t have to like it.
If you are lucky you’ll stumble across an article or YouTube video that goes into details about how metropolis inspired movies _you_ love and on the back of that you can rewatch it as a sort of “behind the scenes” experience.
Acting in particular has gone through some serious changes as fashions come and go, and most any style one encounters aside from what's now in-vogue tends to come off as corny. Even Casablanca, which is ahead of its time in many ways (for an American movie, anyway—the US lagged in some film technique developments at the time, compared with other markets) features acting that's less-naturalistic than what's popular now. Also, changes in editing have really made a difference in how performances come across, which is part of why watching a scene being filmed from a behind-the-scenes camera can make the acting seem off or bad—because it's not being filtered through modern shot-framing and editing.
IMO the comedies suffer the least and remain fairly accessible (no matter when you were born, if you can't laugh at Chaplin and Keaton, there's something wrong with you) but, for most people, approaching the rest of the silent era is more a project than something you can just dip into here and there and expect to have a good time. The field was immature, the whole "silent" part of it takes some getting used to, and there was a whole lot of art-movement-influenced experimentation going on.
There is, however, a lot of variety in styles in the silent film era, especially in foreign film. If you don't like 20s German expressionist films, try films of the 30s (IMO the silent era got a lot better toward the end), try American films, try French, try Spanish, Russian, stuff like that. Weird absurdist Spanish films that evoke the atmosphere of Monty Python, shocking short films, heart-rending dramas, cheap action schlock, about-the-town documentary or semi-fictional films, heavy-handed allegory—lots of stuff to explore. Plus the comedies, of which many are excellent and most are fairly accessible to a modern audience.
[EDIT] If you want something a bit easier to chew on, from the same director as Metropolis, M, which I mentioned in my first post, is much closer to a modern film, in terms of its storytelling and its plot structure.
And notice that it managed to be extremely influential WITHOUT being in public domain.
(something something blackface)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jazz_Singer_(1980_film)
At 75 years past the death of the creator it’s possible you cannot use anything that came out throughout your entire life. Nothing you grew up with, nothing that inspired you, nothing that speaks to the life you lived.
It’s even possible that your children and your grandchildren will not be able to use anything you knew. Definitely not anything they knew.
We’re in real danger of cultural death with these rules restricting our expression.
Thankfully current artists have the option of open licenses for their works.
If I could, I would flip a switch right now where I am only exposed to things with open licenses for the rest of my life.
I’m happy to forget about everything Disney ever made. They can go put it in the vault forever and protect it with all the lawyers and guards in the world. I will never ask them to release it and they can feel safe that no one will be able to “steal” it.
What do you mean by “use”? You can’t sell someone else’s creation just because you like it, that’s true. You can’t copy it and send it to others or post it online. But why should you be able to do those things? Why are you implying that legal restrictions on stealing them for your own profit, or redistributing things for free alike, is akin to not being able to enjoy culture?
You are allowed to view/watch/listen/consume legally obtained copies, and be inspired by them. You & teachers/schools are allowed to made educational copies for school. You are allowed to pay homage to things you grew up with, artistically, and share snippets and some kinds of remix under Fair Use. You can copy styles legally without copying content, if you want. You are allowed to have and hold any culture you want. You are allowed to create new work and give it to anyone you want.
This seems like FUD. Copyrights have been longer than the average lifespan for more than 100 years and we still have plenty of culture - spread of culture has even been accelerating in many ways. Strong arguments do exist for reducing and/or weakening copyrights, but pretending that copyrights prevent the spread of arts and culture isn’t accurate. (And might be willfully blind to the intended and actual ways that copyrights successfully promote cultural development and incentivize new creative works.)
We see examples like that all the time. When was the last time someone was able to make their own popular movie from existing characters without facing some type of legal action? And I’m not talking about the “30% different loophole” where creators have to figure out the balance between recognizable and alienating.
https://www.techdirt.com/2012/09/19/what-public-domain-why-l...
Originally authored in 1755, set to expire in 2052, a mere 297 years after it was originally written!
Isn't it sort of the opposite? Without these rules we'd be stuck drowning in an even larger and blander sea of retellings and reimaginings. The only time I see this considered noble or akin to staving off death is when the culture being preserved is already stagnating anyway.
This experiment has been run in the form of open source software. The point of the GPL license, and other open source licenses, is to remove the restrictions of copyright from a work, and encourage people to reuse it, copy it, share it, modify it, etc.
Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software? Was the Xi Editor (RIP https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...) a bland remix of ed? Even moreso than proprietary editors like sublime text?
Has there been no progress in Haskell, an open source language, due to the lack of copyright's limitations? Is all non-bland (spicy?) innovation in software done under copyright, and licensed out to other developers so they may enjoy some type system or language?
Open source software to me seems like a very clear counter example to your fear.
Some are terrified they’ll use “the wrong sample” (is there a list of wrong samples? no), some are even terrified they’ll accidentally “create” a chord progression that someone else already has the rights to.
In these cases, that artist can end up getting a little popularity and maybe even a little income, then end up in debt with the song pulled from the internet, never to be played by them again.
Imagine saying that statement unironically in a world where the MCU and Disney's Starwars exists.
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– If you published something and die today, it will not enter public domain until January 1, 2093.
– If a company hires you to publish something today, it will not enter public domain until January 1, 2118.
[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html
See https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc...
> Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. 2 They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years.
Is the “20 year pause button” permanent, i.e. copyright term for all works moving forward will be 95 years? Or will that eventually expire and the term will revert to 75 years?
Not going to happen of course, regardless. But laws change all the time, and grandfather clauses generally make it a solved problem.
Deleted Comment
Disney is unlikely to attempt to push through another copyright term extension (see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i... for fuller details). The two main reasons are that there is a much more forceful caucus in politics against copyright extension than there was 25 years ago, and the arguments for doing so are weaker (the copyright extension 25 years ago was partially driven by raising copyright term in the US from "life + 50" to "life + 70", in line with European standards).
If one pays careful attention however, one would note that Disney has, over the past few years, started using a clip from Steamboat Willie more aggressively in its films, which has led many to wonder if they're planning on taking down anyone who distributes Steamboat Willie on the basis of trademark violations instead.
Make steamboat willie trademark not copyright, and the laws become a lot more flexible around that.
I don't have anything concrete to back this up, but it seems more likely to me that they just don't see much potential revenue in content from the 1920's, so they see little to be gained from further spending on copyright-extension lobbying.
Put another way, they've already succeeded. Copyright terms aren't actually unending, but in profit terms (or practical terms more broadly) the difference is minimal.
Certainly we have carved out exceptions to that default position, but only for very clear and distinct policy reasons. 1. consumer protection (trademark) and 2. incentivizing innovation and expression (patent and copyright).
The idea that my great-great-grandchildren might want to benefit from my having written a book really does not factor into whether I might write a book. If I'm not incentivized by life of the author + 70 years, I would probably not otherwise be incentivized.
Also, corporations don't pay to extend their copyrights. Other than the money Disney pays their lobbyists.
Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.
Thats an interest way of interacting in society. I want that power.
I will leave it up to the reader as an exercise to determine what is special about 1938.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vhL6QsPGac
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_in_public_domain
You simply shouldn't be allowed to sell any digital license for a product you didn't register at that clearinghouse before. The task of that clearinghouse would be to provide the customer with the bought content in case of dispute or any other problems. So if, e.g, Amazon goes out of business, all my books would be available for me to download from said clearinghouse because I own the license. Same for steam games or Disney videos.
Many (but not all) of the problems with DRM or copyrighted works would vanish if we established this legal requirement.
Making virtually unlimited profit on a limited initial amount of time, labour, costs is what's evil here. "X number of years" argument will never solve it (the shorter the worst the hype push will get).
Should be capped by a function of said time, labour invested plus costs and allowed profit adjusted for inflation.
I don't care how much one thinks he deserves to milk such work/invention. Look at what Nikola Tesla gave us and what he got in return.