The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.
Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:
By inhibiting cheap reprints of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce a genteel impression that English literature itself had stopped about that date...
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders and users about how to go about uploading and downloading copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the geographical differences from region to region on copyright expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at their own risk)?
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
As do people. Which ends up weakening copyright even further as it becomes a law everyone ignores, on the level of speeding or jaywalking. The same knock-on effects as Prohibition, we become a nation of scofflaws.
People don't know copyright law. They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers from normal people will be less than the current "author's lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
My answer is "a generation". There's so many ideas and behaviors that don't persist between generations that it seems as natural of a division as you could have.
The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems about right.
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
Readit News
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
So many ideas better than the current regime.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
That doesn't mean it's always the right decision.
Remember, ultimately it is the consumer who pays the creator; thus the consumer has a vested interest in negotiating how long copyright should last.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
Would the original creator prefer to rest on his laurels and collect checks instead? yep.
Would all the hundreds of people out there wanting to innovate on that copyrighted idea also like to make a buck? yep.
It's all a balance of competing interests.
Well. It's supposed to be.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
> Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)
> Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
---
14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it.
Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.
Why?
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
(I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)
This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in January as well, details to come!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain
It feels like something that even in 1996 would have been a bit eye-raisingly overdue.
Dead Comment
70 years. After death.
The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
Want to see something cool?
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
Enjoy!
People don't know copyright law. They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
Objectively, why? It's in our lifetimes, I'd say it's just about right.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems about right.
https://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/08/do-bad-things-happen-when-w... (Do Bad things happen when works enter the public domain?)
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
I hope you’re happy.