I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies but damn it’s 3 generations. Something my grand grand father may have seen, that’s insane.
25 year, a single generation would make sense. I’d argue that by then all the money would have been made and you would allow new generation to grow up with the greatest art from previous generation, it would be like a virtuous circle. Next generation would improve based on previous one And so on.
I'm going to designate this as the obligatory "copyright is far too long" subthread.
In my opinion, the ideal length (if we are to have copyright) is between 10 and 15 years, at least if a work is already monetarily successful. If a work has yet to be monetarily successful, then we can allow up to 25 years for it in particular.
European patents have an interesting fee structure that increases exponentially (IIRC doubling every ~3 years), with a 20 year limit. I think this (plus mandatory registration if you want to enforce) is a great solution to copyrights, too, even if you let it run unbounded. If the registration fee is $1000, a registration 30 years later is $1000000 and if you want 60 years you have to pay $1000000000 over the life of the copyright.
Any excess revenue could, theoretically, be redistribute as grants for the arts.
Assuming fee based renewal, proportionate to revenue is problematic for works that fall out of publishing.
There's lots of works from when I was young that nobody is interested in publishing, even though I would like to see them again. They make zero revenue now (and probably didn't make much before), so I suspect the rights holders would abandon them if they had to pay any fee, especially an escalating fee.
I'm personally less worried about works that remain in print.
Print them how? Am I supposed to type up all the pages of that falling apart book - book scanning helps but still requires extensive effort? What about the page that got ripped out and is missing, how do I recreate that?
While it is likely legal for me to go through all that effort for myself, it isn't legal for me to share the fruits of my effort with someone else who wants a copy so they need to do it themself. Even if they have a worn out copy themself it isn't clear that I can print them a new copy. If I want to share this work with someone else who might want it I'm stuck - I can only do the above for personal use.
Why complicate things and allow for even more creative accounting? Elevating flat fees give you a term that is inversely proportional to revenue. With flat exponential fees, term is logarithmic in revenue.
I completely disagree. The previous comment's idea is better: just charge fees. The government shouldn't be worried about exactly how profitable something is, because you can argue that too many ways (see Hollywood accounting). It's too easy for large corporations to invent "creative accounting" tricks, and just basing things on revenue penalizes any company that invests larger amounts of money in ventures that have lower profit margins (e.g. doing high-quality movie production with physical models, on-location shooting, etc. instead of just using some crappy AI to generate everything).
With exponentially increasing fees, the copyright holder can decide for themselves if it's economically worthwhile to pay the renewal fees or release it into the public domain. If the cost to extend copyright another 5 years after 50+ years is $1B, for instance, very few copyright holders will bother with that unless it's a highly profitable property.
The problem with "just charge fees" is that it wastes an excellent opportunity to make the copyright system more useful for individual authors and artists, and instead strengthens the status quo with even more incentives to consolidate copyright powers under mega-corporations. Long before the fees got high enough to incentivize a corporation to abandon a work's copyright to the public domain, they would force authors to sell out to a corporation in return for a share of future earnings, rather than accept an immediate loss of all royalties.
Assuming some nominal or zero starting fee. The author can choose to sell his rights at the beginning, or can choose to keep the rights.
If x years later, the renewal comes up and isn't worth it, then he doesn't have to pay it. the value to the author isn't worth the value to the public. If a mega corp comes along and buys it, they have taken on a risk that it will be worth more in the future, and the author has gained some extra income.
If the mega corp think its worth buying the rights, theres probably a good business case for the property, so the author should be able to get the money somehow. If not, the mega corp is giving the author a nice bonus.
Presumably you could set up "just charge fees" to have a grace period of 3-5 years to register your copyright (and pay any back fees) if you happen to want to enforce the copyright after that time.
It's also possible that you could set up a smaller fee for a news article, etc.
There are lots of implementation details that make "just charge fees" work.
Yes, exactly that model. In practice, you would treat that 4-year-old work as "under copyright" the same way everything written is under copyright today. This sort of thing gives you a chance to market your creative work with protection and avoid paying fees until you know that it is valuable. That would then allow the fees to be relatively high since only people with valuable IP would pay.
The alternative is that everyone's blog enters the public domain immediately upon writing unless they want to pay $XXX per article, which also seems wrong to me.
I think the first 5 years should be free; after that, fees apply, starting at probably $1000 for the next 5 years, and going up exponentially afterwards.
How would that apply in the case of, say, Peter Jackson's 2003, $281 million "The Lord of the Rings" film series?
Does Jackson own the IP? Do actors own part of the IP for every scene they're in? What does Jackson offer to investors, to get the backing he needs to hire loads of horse riders or whatever? Do we do it Star Citizen style, giving Jackson a few hundred million upfront with no obligation to deliver anything?
You make an excellent point. Companies could eg. have 25yrs to make a profit.
On the other hand: if an artist produces something that slumbers in anonymity for decades before it suddenly explodes into popularity and becomes part of the cultural canon, then I'd want the artist to reap whatever benefits possible. That is: if anyone is making big bucks off of that, it first and foremost should be the artist, for as long as they're alive.
On what basis would that form of explosion actually happen? In my understanding of the history of art, what often happens when something "slumbers in anonymity then explodes" it is quite popular in a subculture but then eventually gets mainstreamed when the mainstream culture comes around and people start to explore that subculture. In other words, it is a commercially successful product from day one.
> The government shouldn't be worried about exactly how profitable something is, because you can argue that too many ways (see Hollywood accounting). It's too easy for large corporations to invent "creative accounting" tricks
This is also the core reason why tax systems should be simplified simplified simplified.
Has anyone done a study on when copyrighted works make their money? I'm guessing that the vast majority of the income is made in the first decade after creation. Timeless classics are by far the exception. And for those, does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels? The creation that copyright was supposed to incentivize already happened. At that point society benefits when works go into the public domain so derivatives can flourish.
> does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels?
In my opinion, it doesn't. In creative and entertainment industries, the idea of practically indefinite royalties has been normalized, but no other industries has this*. For example, it would be strange to continue paying a construction company after your home has been built.
*As far as I can remember. I'm open to correction here.
I don't understand the analogy. We don't continue to pay authors after we buy their book. We do pay construction companies again if we want a second house - even if the design is the same.
Probably floorplans would be a closer comparison - and I believe they are licensed IP?
Dépends. If the 2nd house location requires review by an architect because of ground issues or regulation. If contractual provisions require an architect fee. If small adjustments that may have structural impacts are needed. You won’t pay the same amount, but still something.
Imagine that you've paid the construction company after it finished building your house. You then go and live in it. One year later you get an invoice because you're living in the house they built.
That's what doesn't happen and what (I think) GP means with indefinite royalties: the person who owns the house has to keep paying the company which built the house.
The problem with that analogy is of course that royalties are based off profits, but there are ways to consider a home to have its own sense of profit (like the Belgian legal term 'cadastral income':
> Cadastral income is not an actual income. It is a notional value that we determine for an immovable property (building or land). This corresponds to the average annual net rental income you would receive in 1975 for your leased out property.
A rich author can retire, and not write any more books. From an encouraging creativity POV, copyright length should be set at about the amount of time it takes to create a followup.
But, as open source software, and most authors and musicians demonstrate. People will create without any financial incentive.
So ultimately copyright is there to allow an industry that can actually find and distribute these works.
For the record, I'm not suggesting that creators should be decently rewarded for their works.
To start, royalties have nothing to do with copyright. They are simply an agreement between an author and a publisher. I give you the exclusive right to publish my book, and I get a cut of every sale.
Royalties extend far beyond creative fields. Any deal where someone gets a percentage share of the sale of a product or service on an ongoing basis is a "royalty". E.g. in manufacturing or even software.
In the case of Adobe, you're paying for continuous updates and their added cloud services (or other functionality which requires their servers). Also Adobe's subscription pricing (per-month) is significantly less than the retail cost for a one-time purchase of their software without future updates.
Meanwhile one does not pay for continuous updates to a particular novel or a movie. Even if they do pay for new installments in a series, they do so separately.
> Also Adobe's subscription pricing (per-month) is significantly less than the retail cost for a one-time purchase of their software without future updates.
Adobe presumably also fixes bugs, so hopefully you are getting something better over time. I've in the past wore out a favorite book and since it was in print bought a new copy - and found the same typos that were in the previous copy.
Some people would say that the fortunate authors have already benefitted society, and that the potential of winning this lottery ticket was part of their incentive to do so. We could equally ask "does it benefit society to enrich tech founders with billion-dollar acquisitions?"
That said, I believe the security of UBI to be a stronger enabler for creativity than gambling you'll write the next great American novel in-between shifts at the fish cannery.
My guess is that authors have relatively long-term returns on their books, while movies are known to generally make almost all their money in the first year.
Generally yes, significant revenue (for books but also movies and music) may happen several years after the first release/publication. Because… reasons you don’t always control.
Ok, but the goal is not to make sure that artists can derive every possible revenue but only to make sure that they get enough to for the creation to be worth it.
Given the nature of the cultural market (authors/original creation often gets a very small share of what the end consumer pays, unless they are also their own editors, producers and distributors), it’s hard to make it worth it without extending in time (and part of the idea is that some of the value you didn’t get while you’re living will get to your legacy, which is a deep motivation too).
Streaming revenue has no public attribution of fees to specific content, as far as I can tell. It is very much possible that a large fraction of that revenue is driven by (and attributed to) new content, the same way DVD sales were.
Yes, that is the question to which neither of us has an answer. Streaming deals happen as bundles, and my understanding is the opposite of yours: the old stuff gets thrown in as a piece of the bundle to help make the catalog bigger, while new content actually sells subscriptions. In other words, the back catalog has some marginal value to the streaming service (and the studio), but it's the new releases that actually sell subscriptions.
Releases of "The Mandalorian" got people subscribing to Disney+, and new seasons of "Game of Thrones" had the same effect for HBO, for example.
In other words, a bundle of 100 movies for $10 million could be attributed as "$100k per movie," but that's almost certainly wrong. More likely, that bundle is a combination of something like $5 million for one movie, $1 million for a few others, $100k for a bigger set, and all the way down to $1000 or less for the remainder of the catalog.
I would bet it’s a bathtub curve for a lot of things. You make a chunk initially, then your cultural relevance / popularity wanes. Then roughly 20-30 years later you see a revival as all the younger generation that were fans of your work become old enough to both spend disposable income on more of it and have their nostalgia kick in. I there’s a number of older 80’s and early 90’s properties that are getting / have gotten renewed interest because the original fans are old enough to renew that interest. Think things like Cyberpunk (1980s TTRPG -> 2020s CRPG).
I wonder if you could have a system that captures that sort of thing. Something like 10 years exclusive + if you register the copyright you can get 10 more years of a standard royalty + limited right of refusal and another 10 years of just standard royalties. That way you could benefit from the nostalgia bump but also society can benefit from easier access to build on your IP.
What length of time does a film studio, or book publisher look at for payback?
If everyones calculating their return on the first 12 months, setting copyright to 12 months obviously isn't going to impact any industry investment decisions.
The only part that feels weird about a shorter duration like that is tv/movie adaptations of books. The game of thrones show came out 15 years after the first book, does that mean they would have been able to make it without licensing it from the author?
It does mean that, and I think that's just something that would have to be accepted. Disney's empire is built on adaptations of public domain stories, after all.
Disney is about to be faced with a landscape where anybody can make Pixar films from home. They're in for a world of hurt in the new regime where thought moves faster than IP.
Film studios only existed because (1) distribution used to be hard and (2) films were financially and logistically difficult to make. Netflix and YouTube slayed the first challenge, and now GenAI will fell the latter and give indie directors the same kind of platform that indie game and indie music folks currently have: true one person studios.
Agreed. Everyone raves about generative AI but I've yet to see a single generative AI video that is "enjoyable" to watch in a way beyond the way tech demos are enjoyable to watch.
That was also true of quite a lot of early CGI, but most people would say that things have improved. I think we're on the cusp of rapid improvement in AI video as well, in part spurred on by skilled people using the tools we currently have.
I came across the following recently. I think a casual viewer would assume it was just Bakshi-style rotoscoped animation without a major AI component.
My constructive criticism to this video is "90% of it is figures standing still while wind blows their outfit or the camera does a simple move." Sometimes moving their lips as though talking .. though I did like that bird turning it's head smoothly away like "forget this, I'mma preen! Peace out!" Haha
Very much no throughline of concepts from one shot to the next. You never see the same character twice. No foreground dynamic action.. not even simple walking except one far-away character directly away from the camera which means that their silhouette hardly changed.
This all comes from the current generation of video diffusion models that basically just generate an image like they always have except with a hint of temporal coherence they expand that into a short shot with no types of movement except those seen a million times in their training set.
Getting gen models to be able to reason better about motion and to build mental world models of the 3d scene they are managing a 2d window into is going to be a big challenge, and require some additional breakthroughs on a par with the original GPT and stable diffusion breakthroughs that currently act as a foundation to a majority of modern AI innovation.
> ... and require some additional breakthroughs on a par with the original GPT and stable diffusion breakthroughs ...
You say this like Stable Diffusion isn't a 2022 technology. And not early 2022, but quite late (August). ChatGPT is younger.
I mean sure we need more breakthroughs, but we've barely even seen a new hardware generation since those things came out and the researchers are really only getting started with the new capabilities of generative tech. If we don't get more breakthroughs in short order then that would be a stunning halt of progress, a breaking stop the likes of which we have almost never before seen. More breakthroughs are a given.
An interesting example. It may be because I consider myself a fan of animation (moreso than the average person), but the video has obvious garbage less than fifteen seconds in, with the spaceships (?) morphing and sludging around the pyramid.
Sure, that's why I said casual viewer and not careful viewer. But getting back to your original point, would you say it was foul and unpleasant? That's really what I'm claiming, that we're fairly quickly advancing beyond the old days of those nightmare Nekobuses and vomit-inducing clips of Will Smith devouring spaghetti, and into territory where at least some people can find the product genuinely enjoyable. Of course nothing will ever be perfect. AI aside, after all these years it's still often jarring when computer physics is shoehorned into cartoons/anime that's designed to look like traditional hand drawn animation.
If I were to watch 90+ minutes of that with dubbed voices on top of it, absolutely. There's practically zero cohesion between any of those shots. No real action, no real narrative. It's a collection of non-cohesive stills that were stretched, not any bit of a story at all.
Not sure why you're downvoted. This is one of the most objectively true things said here. CGI was pretty crappy for at least the first few decades of its existence. Even aspects of the animation in Toy Story really show that film's age. I remember realizing that in the early 2000's. Most people either forgot or didn't even experience the early days of CGI and would consider much of it to be nightmare fuel today.
AI is pretty clearly advancing orders of magnitude faster than CGI has. Just because it sucks now doesn't mean it's going to suck in another 5 years.
"Just because it sucks now doesn't mean it's going to suck in another 5 years."
We will see. Some flaws might be baked in, like LLM's halucinating. That won't go away, unless we invent a new tech.
So here with generating videos, will morphing objects for example ever go away? I am sceptical with the current approach.
To me the magic is in generating things that would have had too much right issues or would not have been economically viable.
A series that is a variant of the stories of “The Wire”, but taking place in the Harry Potter universe? Coming right up.
Obscure prog rock band from the 90s put out one album? Now its two.
I can understand people their apprehension, feeling like art is losing something essential without the human touch behind it, but I saw an article a few days ago where people thought generated Shakespeare was better than actual Shakespeare. Until it was revealed which was generated.
If AI can generate me another, better Illmatic, I’m all here for it.
The conclusion to draw there is that Shakespeare honestly doesn't make for very good reading today unless you are also delving into the historical context or considering the major impact of his works on humanity's culture from the arts to language. LLM generated output has none of that.
'Ah ha! LLMs are better than Shakespeare!' is a meaningless statement.
Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure; there is no need to generate more. ;)
I bet you could get a random person off the street to fairly-consistently pick (curated) AI works over an amalgamated top-5 of great jazz recordings selected by jazz super-fans.
> Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure
Exactly (kind of). Lots of rewarding works take effort to learn to appreciate, for a bunch of reasons that may include (as in Shakespeare's case) that they're old and their context and vernacular is not ours. Lots of people (I'd say a large majority, in my experience) dismiss entire genres and forms of art that they weren't heavily exposed to as children, often going so far as to judge them bad, simply because it would take some time and effort to learn how to enjoy them and to be able to discern what's good or remarkable about a given work.
What proportion of the population has ever in their lives enjoyed the experience of reading a Shakespeare play? Even once? It's gotta be tiny. Of course you can get them to choose AI junk over Shakespeare, it's not a kind of thing they understood or enjoyed to begin with, in most cases.
> I know the work I'm doing is valuable and that this field is the future. I'm sure it'll click for more folks soon.
Maybe because not everyone shares your opinion? Having an LLM generate art isn't necessarily a net benefit for society. Computers were supposed to improve our lives but instead of robots to perform dangerous menial work it's taking the creativity out of humanity.
Hey guys you no longer have to do fun things, tech bros have that covered. Now get back down the mine.
The thing is GenAI will be just like CGI. When it is bad it will look bad and has 'that look'. But when it is good enough you will not even know.
The creativity has already gone sideways for most of this. I can with a few simple sentences create an acceptable picture (in some cases a short film). With a AI pipeline I can make some pretty cool scenes. Instead of having to know how to properly draw an s curve with a nice gradient bit of layered colors over it and 14 meticulously created layers. I tell the program to do it for me. It does an acceptable job in a fraction of the time. People can complain all they want but the rest of us are already using these tools and will continue to do so until something better comes along.
Most of the people who seem to be fans of AI-generated art are fans of AI, not of art.
Maybe it'll get to the point where it's good enough to have on as background television - not everything needs to be great, after all - but what's the point of that? We already have far more high-quality television shows and movies than most people can ever watch.
So far, it's really bad at actually replacing human labor in pro-social ways while being a supercharger for various antisocial jobs, like scam artist or astroturfer. The main "beneficial" use for it today is replacing wasteful labor that probably didn't need to be done in the first place—which is why an AI version is fine, because it didn't matter to begin with.
My wife and I both work in the field, I on the tech side, her on the creative side, and she's been in it since the earliest days of industry trying to adapt these tools. There's a lot (like, holy shit, so much) of effort and money going into it, but so far it's only marginally helpful for non-evil jobs.
I was speaking in response to most of the general "pervasive negative attitudes" mentioned, not you specifically. Although I'm curious where you viewed generative AI content repeatedly 5 years ago; it was effectively non-existent outside research circles then.
If I recall correctly, that was about the time that Google started demoing its generative AI "deepmind" - a particular demo of a frog comes to mind. The commonality of AI content has certainly increased since then, I didn't mean to imply it was commonplace back then.
People might care for culture. I’m very much in favor of a reformed copyright that strengthens indie artists, conservationists, and remixers and weakens Disney et al.
It’s also a matter of fact that we have the copyright we have that’s prohibitive to people and favors corporations. It’s upsetting to see how a bunch of Silicon Valley companies stomps right across those lines with impunity, while people like Aaron Swartz are persecuted and threatened with decade long prison sentences for crimes that in my mind ought to be much less upsetting.
If copyright was fair, training of AI intended for non-personal use ought to be a sufficient commercial activity to require a license. That would stiffle the development of AI, which is what I’d argue happens to human creators under our current system.
If we had a 25 year copyright, we could easily make useful AI trained on the sum of human creation until 1999, _and_ have badass human made remixes of 80s and 90s songs — we wouldn’t have to do legal gymnastics to allow the development of useful AI, as it’d have access to quite substantial training material from the 1900s, and unlock relatively modern training material year-by-year.
So yes, I dislike AI for infringing on copyright and I dislike copyright (in its current state).
Disagree. I've seen things done with generative AI which I've wanted to see visualized for decades, but which were too difficult and time-consuming to do traditionally. I've also seen beautiful things that were either impossible to produce or impossible to even conceive of through traditional workflows.
Those make up an infinitesimally small portion of the total output, which is largely a deluge of crap, certainly. But, generally, rarity makes something more valuable and beautiful by comparison.
It is not inherently, but people are very effective at using it to produce foul, unpleasant output, which is a temporary problem. Like almost all things, people will not actually care how they're made if the final product is good.
Hm, also at 10 years out how likely is the author to be able to convince someone to do a TV adaptation, knowing that by the time they're done someone else will be able to release their own versions (sans royalty even)?
Apparently the TV series Game of Thrones cost just under $600m to produce[1], and George R. R. Martin earnt something like $100m from royalties as its original author[2]. Although access to the author for advice and publicity must be valuable, that is nonetheless a very large proportion of the profits that I'm sure many studios would rather not have to share!
Many things are only popular for a relatively short period of time. If someone wants to wait until the copyright period is over to do an adaptation, the source material may no longer be that popular, and the adaptation, even without having paid a single royalty, will be unprofitable.
Ok but you’re gonna have a hard time convincing me that (morally) HBO should have been able to make game of thrones without cutting a check to the guy who created it
What about the lord of the rings movies? Tolkien didn't get paid from that, his heirs did.
What about Shakespeare.
What about the Brothers Grimm. Should Disnay have to pay for those fairy tales?
In the end every creative work stands on the shoulders of giants. We should reward creators for contributing to our culture but this notion that they should be able to own their creations way past when they become popular is absurd.
I'm not saying it'd be good for HBO to do that, only that they could. Regardless of whether or not they should, edge cases like GoT's success should not control the outcome for everyone and everything else.
You may have a point with a cult band like Neutral Milk Hotel, but songs like Take On Me and Running Up That Hill were incredibly popular when they were new -- it's just that both got a second wave of popularity decades later when they were used on soundtracks of films/shows.
> does that mean they would have been able to make it without licensing it from the author?
yes and it's possible someone could have done it even better, had they not been required to convince investors to purchase copyright. GoT was a masterpiece, don't get me wrong, but it's a fallacy to think it couldn't have been better, or that other book adaptations could have been as good or better, without copyright being in the way.
It's a minor issue in the grand scheme, but my pet peeve is with "synch licenses" (not sure if that's even the right term), but where sitcoms can't go to home video because of stupid disputes about shitty songs that happened to be included. Did anyone watch "Married With Children" because of Frank Sinatra's song "Love and Marriage" in the intro? It's a catchy song, and I'm sure it lured people in who might have otherwise changed the channel, so yes it has value. But it should only be a tiny fraction of the royalties for a full performance of the song. doubly so for home video releases. Would anyone buy even 1 season of MWC just to hear the Sinatra song? I say no. And therefore should not be required to pay any royalties.
I am watching "Murphy Brown" reruns from pirateflix because apparently it never went to home video because of license disputes about the 60's soul songs in the intro. They add character to the show, for sure. But they're not why I watch the show. I watch it for the story and the acting. In this case, actors (who worked extremely hard over 10 seasons of that show!) are being wrongfully deprived of royalties because record execs can't be reasonable about how much 10 seconds of a 60 -year-old song is worth.
Yeah, thats a big problem with shows that work really well with the music, like Scrubs. I'm glad we have piracy to be able to keep the original works with the intended tracks intact.
That can be fixed by limiting copyright to a certain duration per medium. You write a book - you have copyright on paper based books for 15 years. You publish it as Ebooks for desktop and mobile devices - get 15 years on that medium. Convert to visuals on Television &/or Films - 15 years on that medium. Virtual reality - another 15 years and so on ...
No. I am suggesting that short copyright terms should be tied to the medium of delivery.
If someone writes a book, copyright will begin when they publish the book and the 10-15 years copyright expiration would only be applicable for paper book medium. After the copyright for the paper book medium expires, anybody can republish it. But, only the original copyright owner can "recreate" the work again in another medium - like Games, TV/ Films, Virtual reality etc. Even if that happens after the expiration of copyright on the first medium it originally appeared on.
With the Game of Thrones example, with short copyrights, Martin would lose the copyright on the books (the first original medium it was published on) in 10-15 years. But he would retain the copyright on his work for other medium. So if 20 years down the lane, HBO wanted to recreate his work for TV, they would still have to get his permissions to do so. Once Martin's gives HBO the rights to his work for TV, HBO would own it only for the 10-15 years, and after that, anybody could use it freely too, but only for paper book and TV medium. This means if Meta or Apple want to recreate Game of Thrones as a virtual reality show, they would again have to approach Martin to get his permission. If they do, then they own the copyright to his work, on virtual reality medium, till it expires in 10-15 years.
In this kind of system, the original author would continue to retain the future rights for any new future medium of delivery too.
What would happen then if someone wants to make a movie about a book published a few centuries earlier? Would they have to do deep archaeology to find the heirs of the author, the heirs of the heirs, the heirs of the heirs of the heirs,... and then get permission of the hundred-odd heir^Nths?
The law would obviously need to address such scenarios. One idea could be to also make everything public domain, for all mediums, when the author dies or a certain period has passed (like 70-80 years).
Surely the point of copyright is to allow a person to have sole rights to commercialise a thing before it goes to the public domain.
If so, if they havent done that in the first 10/15 years, why should they get an extra 10/15 years?
Further, another issue of very long copyrights is preserving things you don't really have a right to preserve.
that successful videogame may still be around in 25 years. the one that wasn't so popular has much less chance of surviving.
And then you have the added complication of what was successful? a fixed term means you know when something is in the public domain.
personally, I think there should be registration and fees attached. if you want copyright protection for the first 5 years, pay a nominal fee. if you want more than that, pay exponentially more for each year.
If companies want to pay that tax, they can. if it isn't worth it, then it can go in the public domain.
Either way, at least you have a register of what is in, and out of copyright.
Is 10 Cloverfield Lane a sequel to Cloverfield? They decided to throw the Cloverfield name onto it shortly before release for marketing reasons, the actual movie has nothing to do with the events and story of the original Cloverfield.
Is the video game Nier a sequel to Drakengard? Technically yes, but the connection is vague and distant. And there's also Drakengard 2 which is the sequel to a different ending for the original game.
How would you count Fear the Walking Dead, the spin-off series of The Walking Dead, itself and adaptation of a comic book series. Do the shows continue to get copyright protection so long as the comics are still being published? Or vice versa?
It should definitely be short enough for creatives to engage directly with their influences from childhood and adolescence in middle age, and to take on and use the earlier works of their contemporaries in their later years.
So, probably not more than twenty years. Fifteen would be better.
All the TRIPS agreement requires is 50 years. That can be from first publication, regardless of when the author dies.
The US should go with 50 years from first publication. It doesn't have significant financial effect for rights holders. Revenue on content over 50 years old is tiny. Maybe if you're still alive, the sole author, and own the rights yourself, you could apply for an extension for the rest of your life. But no more than that.
Someone with Trumpworld connections could push this, as a way of getting back at Hollywood.
> All the TRIPS agreement requires is 50 years. That can be from first publication, regardless of when the author dies.
TRIPS requires fifty years for features, but not for various bits of copyright that go into making a feature, where it requires life + 50. There are vanishingly small amounts of films that would be genuinely clear under the TRIPS terms, they'd basically just be performing arts pieces with no script or planning or music.
The point of copyright is to promote the creation of new works. It has nothing to do with the popularity of the work under copyright or after entering the public domain. Mickey Mouse was still relevant at the time of entering the public domain, ninety-five lobbied years later.
To add it's only Steamboat Willie Mickey that is public domain. The actual character as we think of him isn't. The creator has been dead for nearly 80 years. It's absolutely insane that any of those creations are still privately owned.
Yep. But if it still commands economic value for its creator and you cut that off, then it is reducing that incentive to create and cultivate in the first place.
You are assuming that incentive to create keeps increasing with more monetary reward. Incentive doesn't start out at zero without rewards (see history before copyright) and is never infinite (what good is infinite money if you never get to use it).
Brand is valuable for consumers and protecting that brand only makes sense if you continue to have ownership and control over it.
For a non infinite money glitch version of this, see “Calvin and Hobbes”. Would the world be better if those characters could be printed on random merchandise?
I mean if everyone agree but a few big companies, how is it possible that it has not yet been changed by politicians.
I’m not saying specifically USA but also Europe, I can’t see common people fighting over the right of author to hold intellectual properties for 70 years.
Haven’t been trials to shorten it somewhere, either USA or any other developed countries where it’s actually enforced ?
There are a few reasons why copyright terms aren't shortened:
* International treaties make it difficult without buy-in from everyone, or at least the most important countries. The USA is probably the only country that could afford to unilaterally make such a change.
* Politicians are largely beholden to big companies now.
* The average person is distracted with other societal woes, and politicians and companies work hard to keep it that way.
* Some people have been convinced that excessive copyright is a moral good through propaganda.
I’m not sure where I stand on this, but is it possible that some people have been convinced that copyright is a moral evil by propaganda? I pause when I hear this line of argument, “I’m a free thinker and I have objective truth. Others are weak minded victims of propaganda.”
Of course. There's all kinds of propaganda (and depending on where you stand, some propaganda is good and other propaganda is bad), and not one person is immune. But for the sake of this discussion, there are some extra factors to consider:
* Those promoting copyright expansion or the status quo have significant amounts of money; those criticizing it mostly do not (counting groups with real principles, anyway)
* It is suspicious for people who have no personal interest in extended copyright to excessively favor it.
The benefits of a shorter term are diffuse. The benefits of a longer term are concentrated. This is a case where representative democracy often breaks down - policy A would be better for almost everyone, but not by enough for them to switch their vote on, whereas policy B is better by enough for a few people to make them single-issue voters. So we get policy B.
The length should be no more than would be required to maximize the creation of works and not a moment longer.
Long terms prevent the creation of derivative works which at an extreme could be reducing the number of works created as well as disincentivizing creators from creating new works if they've been especially successful early in their careers and decided to coast.
Derivative works aren't really the primary problem copyright law was created to address. In the early days of novel publishing, it wasn't uncommon for a popular book an author had sold to a publisher on a royalty basis to just be reprinted by other publishers who kept all the money for themselves. It wasn't unheard of for the majority of an author's books to be published by people who weren't giving any money to them until the law stepped in.
I think people have a tendency to focus on corporations and super-successful individual creators as the primary beneficiaries of copyright, and I get it, but George R.R. Martin should not be your yardstick: the long tail applies here. A lot of authors have books that might keep bringing in a thousand dollars or less a year in royalties over a couple decades; if those authors are able to put out a book a year, that "back catalogue" might end up being most of their writing income. And the rise of ebooks has probably created more authors in that boat, not less.
The original US copyright act in 1790 set the term at 14 years, with a near-automatic extension of another 14 years granted upon request. I'd be happy enough going back to that, but I don't think I'd want to see less, honestly.
There's also absolutely zero sense that if there's any term based on the lifetime of the authors, that it should extend a single day after their death.
I'd definitely prefer a 20-30 year fixed term, but if it was going to be based on lifetime then it should only be until the death of the author.
I don't have particularly strong feelings on this particular issue, but I do take issue with worrying about edge cases. By definition, edge cases are infrequent and unlikely occurrences. Trying to account for every possibility is a way of making sure nothing ever changes. It's a form of perfect being the enemy of good.
For this particular scenario, I would tell publishers and authors to take out a life or accidental death insurance policy.
Publisher takes risk every time they publish book, sometimes they loose money sometimes they earn a lot. This wouldn't deter them from publishing young author, maybe even the opposite because statistically they would have more chance to live long.
If I'm alive and I work, I provide for my family. If I'm dead then im not providing for my family anymore. why should it be different for authors ?
Where are you getting 70 years from? In the UK etc it's lifetime plus 70 years. These will be works whose authors died before my retired father was born.
It says authored 1929 for the US which seems to indicate 95 years? I've lost track of how long these ridiculous lengths are now.
For works produced by a company's employees and owned by the (immortal) company, its 95 years. For works produced by a mortal human it's that author's life + 70 years.
I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980. Frodo Lives!(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Lives!) notwithstanding.
I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone.
>Just for argument, if we set the limit at 25 years. The Fellowship of the Ring, published 29 July 1954, would have been out of copyright by 1981. I would say that the bulk of the (for lack of a better term) fandom, occurred after the 1980.
So? Tolkien after all died in 1973. The fandom would exist even without copyright past 1981.
>I would also argue that corporations would have no qualms of waiting 25 years to capitalize and format shift a work of art, where as the 50 year term limit makes it more difficult for them to play off of nostalgia alone.
What would waiting for 25 years achieve? And what is "format shift" this context? "The book is copyright free, but the movie coming out after the book's 25 years is not"? Wouldn't that be an improvement over today which neither is?
When something is available for every channel to rerun, it would be even less of a differentiator than a channel getting the rights to Friends or Seinfield today.
So Channels wanting to attract people would need to come out with new material still - as Seinfeld and Friends would be able to be played by any other channel.
I think that's too short. Lifetime of the author or a min. 50 years would make sense to me. Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable.
The crazy long Disney thing, though, is what it is because of lobbying muscle.
> Mark Twain, for example, was worried about providing for surviving daughters. I think that's reasonable.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to continue to make money after you are dead. Earn enough during your lifetime to provide for your surviving daughters, sure, but I don't like the idea of someone being able to posthumously put a gag on people's ability to express themselves just so that their kids can get a nice inheritance.
Perhaps not, but the point of copyright is to provide incentive for creating work. Since earning beyond the grave is an incentive, there’s an argument to protect it (within limit).
Another example is Grant’s autobiography, which he wrote as he was dying of throat cancer. No way he would have done that without copyright.
> No way he would have done that without copyright.
Why not?
For centuries people wrote books so that they would have a legacy and be remembered. They wrote because they felt it was the right thing to do, or because they wanted to control the narrative around their lives. Do you have any specific reason to believe that Grant wrote his autobiography to provide for his successors, rather than just to have written it?
I understand the theory about incentivizing people to create, but honestly I'm not convinced that what we get from that deal is worth it. Too often it feels like extended copyright creates a similar set of incentives to advertising—sure, we get more works, but the best works would have been written even with a much shorter copyright because the author had something they wanted to say. The works that are being incentivized by long copyrights are the ones that we could do without.
Grant wrote his autobiography pretty much entirely out of desperation to provide for his family after his death. He had lost everything he had in a Ponzi scheme and was heavily in debt as he was dying from cancer, and the autobiography was his last chance to make money for his family.
That said, at the time of Grant's writing copyright in the US was 28 years (with an optional extension for another 14 if the author lived long enough), which means that OP's proposal of 25 years would likely have been sufficient to motivate Grant.
The problem that I see is not the Mark Twains but the vast majority of other authors.
Their works go out of print but they're still copyrighted so people can't legally reproduce them (for profit or otherwise).
My grandfather was a published author with some success but he's dead and his stuff is no longer in print.
No one in my family is going to see revenue from his work.
No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now.
Most books written in the 20th century are basically gone from public availability.[1][2]
I agree, with the caveat that a literary work can be seen as an asset that has value which pays out over time. It takes a large investment upfront and then pays out slowly.
So having a limited ability to pass on that asset if you die prematurely seems only fair—you'd have the same option if you were building something physical—but we shouldn't use inheritance as an argument for longer copyright. The question of how long someone should be allowed to earn money from a work should be orthogonal from the question of whether that right to earn money should be inheritable.
This is the flaw in life plus 70—it assumes that copyright should last indefinitely during one's lifetime and then provide for successors. I'd rather see a flat rate for how long we're comfortable locking up a work in copyright, successors or otherwise.
> It takes a large investment upfront and then pays out slowly
Does it really? Sure, timeless classics pay out over a long period of time but they are by far the exception. I'll wager that the vast majority of copyrighted works make the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? (Essentially perpetual because almost none of the works created in my lifetime will ever pass out of copyright before I die)
> the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright?
I agree. I think OP's proposal of a fixed term of 25 years is more than reasonable. All I'm saying is that it should be inheritable and not based on when the author dies.
We have property rights for physical objects because physical objects are scarce. Only a limited number of people can use any given object and we need some way of deciding who gets to use it.
On the other hand copies of writing are not scarce. We can give copies to everyone who wants one for practically free. Property rights for copies of writing are therefore artificial. Creating artificial scarcity where none exists has real costs that in many cases outweigh the benefits.
All of us working in development of any kind create value well into the future with our work. The only question is whether you monetize immediately with wages or with ownership
Drug parents are only 10 - 20 years, and it works great. The creator gets to make enough money to finance their next drug, and the public gets cheaper generics after a decade or two.
I think that's still too long when copyright was originally supposed to be a compromise between society and the author, not a indefinite guarantee for an author. I understand the concern of providing for family, but keep in mind that the average person works continuously to provide for their family and has to be responsible enough to save money. It is not society's responsibility to ensure that; and alternatively if it is to be society's responsibility, there are better mechanisms than copyright.
We're not talking about inheritance of real property or money, we're talking about "IP rights" or "royalties". The two are not the same. Why should someone's kid get money from their parent's book decades after it's been published? No other profession has this perk.
And, sure, why not. Let's have a 100% inheritance tax beyond a maybe a couple million in protected assets. If we want to pretend to have a meritocratic system, then we can't have that joke of a loophole creating dynastic wealth.
Either we have a system where people earn wealth on merit, or we have a feudal aristocracy with extra steps. It can't be both.
Why should someone's kid get the house from their parents decades after it's been built? The issue of inheritance is the same for physical and immaterial assets
Agreed. I think lifetime of the author, or moderate fixed term in the case of untimely death or corporate copyright, is perfectly reasonable. 10-20 years is way too short, it does not give enough consideration to the author's rights.
Reasoning about it from the perspective of something physical, one could argue that intellectual property doesn't exist at all, and we should only consider the books, movie media etc. to be property.
If we were to take the contents of a book or a movie for example, and copy it, you still have the physical source, and nothing is lost, your property is still yours. It's just that there is more of it due to the additional copy. That copy isn't yours, and from the moment it was created it still isn't yours. So in that line of thinking, the property that was created is not the same as the property it was copied from, which means two different properties exist.
We can make this even trickier, because if we were to reason about the physical property and the intellectual property separately, the story in a book, and the physical book itself would be two different properties. So when you create a copy, that book that started out blank was definitely not part of the property of someone else. So does the act of adding intellectual property now suddenly transfer the physical property to the source of the intellectual property?
In the current laws and practises around the world we have made all sorts of rules about this, but just reasoning about it before falling back on established practice already shows that it doesn't always turn out to be as easy as it seems.
"Hey, I like that table, I'm going to commission somebody to build one for myself!"
Totally legal. No loss to first individual. The fact is that intellectual property IS treated differently, and was justified as being required to incentivize invention and creation NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon. Now that it arguably gets in the way of innovation and creation, what justification is there for these ADDITIONAL legal restrictions.
>NOT because there was any natural right to the product of one's thoughts to not be copied or expanded upon
grandma not sharing her best recipes, and children calling each other "copycat!" is an argument for a natural right. It is innately how humans feel, and there is a supporting argument that we don't want grandma's secret innovations dying with her, to incent sharing.
> While I agree with you, I'm struggling to find a good argument why intellectual property should be treated differently from physical property
1) First reason, it is not physical property.
2) Second, many of the creators who lobbied for longer copyright terms benefited from a rich public domain when they did not have anything. In the case of Walt Disney, he made a film series based on Alice in Wonderland, which never had copyright protection in the US, and it's copyright expired in the UK in 1907.
Disney also used "Le Sacre du printemps" in "Fantasia" after meeting Stravinsky, who was offended by the idea. However, Disney informed him that he would use it anyway since it was not protected in the US. Stravinsky was paid pennies.
The most important factor should be that if something isn't commercially available (not used, new), it should fall to Public Domain faster.
If you're not selling your game published in 2005, it should be free for everyone to grab - you clearly don't care about it anymore. If you did, you'd let people pay money for it.
I disagree entirely in that I believe government shouldn’t determine this but rather the market. The rights to an intellectual property should be transferable/sold in perpetuity and at some point the work will become less and less valuable as newer works outcompete for attention. This will differ depending on how great the work was as judged by the market but it’s still the commanding force.
Any particular time for transfer from market control to public domain is arbitrary. If it’s worth anything it should be traceable not stolen. Everything will eventually have too little demand to be defensible and control will be let go and at that point it becomes public domain because it became public domain.
The government exists to protect the property of its citizens. You can’t have a reliable market without the threat of violence (prison, fines, etc) and judiciary from an authority and government is suitable for that purpose. It’s their main purpose in fact.
The government exists to protect all basic human rights of its citizens, including their right to free speech and self expression. Copyright is a severe violation of those rights that is only allowed for a very specific purpose of encouraging more creation.
So no copyright then? How would "the market" prevent publishers freeloading the works of authors? Suggest you look up why copyright was invented (and all the other thousands of ways simplistic markets don't work the way we'd like them to).
I’m saying copyright in perpetuity enforced by the government with the threat of fines or prison for stealing a copyright holders property. From there the market can take over as it’s now free to operate without fears of piracy etc.
I get it’s important to protect the right of authors and companies but damn it’s 3 generations. Something my grand grand father may have seen, that’s insane.
25 year, a single generation would make sense. I’d argue that by then all the money would have been made and you would allow new generation to grow up with the greatest art from previous generation, it would be like a virtuous circle. Next generation would improve based on previous one And so on.