Comment by bcrosby95

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.

I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.

The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.

The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.

If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.

And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.

Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.

An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright 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.

Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.

This still seems very reasonable to me.

So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.

> Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985

It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.

Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.

If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.

Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.

14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer than a patent lasts for.

Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?

(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)

> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).

It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.

14+14 seems to cover these two scenarios? Lifetime+whatever is far too on the other end of this seesaw.

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy

IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.

> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity

Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.

>IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never the intent.

Similar to the Patriot act.

"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.

Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.

I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.

I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?

The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.

What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.

14 years is already too long.

Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid. Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.

Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.

A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.

But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.

Who do you pay? How do you pay them?

A reasonable copyright term makes abandonware not a thing

If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.

Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.

>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.

This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.

Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.

It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.

But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).

And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.

Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.

The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?

[dead]

> If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.

Because an accountant’s work is timely and transactional. Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.

As a contrasting example: pretty much all other income generating assets can be passed down.

Copyright is a compromise between society and authors, and I think that’s the right way to frame things.

(Also some countries have this same compromise for assets such as land, where land “ownership” is subject to time limits)

> their interests are not absolute

The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all.

That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.

However, ultimately, few people really are holding any cards. Most will have to compromise a great deal, to be able to generate income and benefit from existing publishing infrastructure.

Which is absurd, because most creators would benefit hugely from an expanded public domain.

Maybe, but their economic role might be more like an angel investor or VC— fund a hundred failed efforts and hang on for dear life to the few runaway successes.

The sweet spot would have been an initial term of 14years or something like that, and generous duration thereafter, limited to works that are registered and re-registered on a regular basis.

Mmmm..

I don’t know man?

I actually don’t mind 14+14 for corps. Because corps could conceivably never “die”. (In fact, I wouldn’t even be too opposed to getting rid of the +14 part).

But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs. And I’m a guy who’s not a creative.

I just think if you come up with a painting, or story, or video game, why should a big corporate be able to swoop in and just copy it while you’re alive without paying you?

The copyright should lapse after a reasonable amount of time following your death. But while you’re alive, what you made should be yours.

Yeah, this sounds very similar to people who vote as if they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires. "There's a minuscule chance my work will become super lucrative for decades, so I want a super long copyright" when they don't realize that a much shorter copyright can help them creatively in the near term.

Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting creative works, which are, by their nature, much much easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to copy, that I can sell exceptions to.

Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.

IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your rights to, including the production of derivative works and the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or something significantly different). For the next 2 decades after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-all.

I don’t blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he ever become public domain?

At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).

I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.

> 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.

And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.

>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter

There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.

Success isn't real. All things are internal, but we make/pretend they are external. I dont care at all of your accolades or accomplishments. Exactly like you dont care of mine. If we ever do care about others' success, its not bc of the other people. We are just playing games with ourselves and calling it stuff like expectations, admiration, respect, and responsibility - its all bullshit.

UBI allows a different life. You can only fail so much, only fall so far - rather than people being lazy, it will be a huge boon for creativity. The 9-5 for 45 is creative death.