Title.
Would have made all of Disney and Universal’s IP buy-ups over the last decade+ a lot more interesting.
Nah. I’d prefer a hard and fast 50 year limit.
Or even as a compromise, between 50 years and the current deadline standard, have it released to the creative commons non commercial.
Bigtech would hire hitmen to go after PhD students
It should return to the original design: 14 years from creation, and then 14 more years if requested and paid for.
Should be X years after publication, lifespan should not matter.
A person at age 200 (I mean in the future when they find anti-aging tech) should not be able to gatekeep the stuff they wrote when they were 25.
A person publishing a book at age 30 then dies next day in a car accident should not lose the right to pass on profits made from the book to his/her children.
Copyright should be fixed-length, fuck lifelong copyright, fuck “corporate personhood”.
Also this length should be at most 25 years and 10-15 years is better. These 75+ year copyrights are total BS.
They shouldn’t need to inherit anything wealth from their parents. We are playing wackamole instead of just building a better system than the current obviously flawed models that we all… Inherited. Ironic
Could be incentive to murder content creators.
You should separate the art from the artist.
I cannot do it when the artist is using the money to hurt people.
Just give me a moment
Breaking news, popular book series enter public domain as the author was Luigied last night.
Separate the art from the artist with extreme prejudice
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
Research by mathematician Rufus Pollock in 2009 pegged optimal copyright length at 15 years, regardless of time of authorial death. So if I copyrighted something at 30, I would lose the copyright automatically at 45, even if I lived to 90.
So glad to see another reference to this guy’s work in the wild.
As an amusing side note, the original term of copyright in the first law that established it (the British Copyright Act of 1710) was a flat 14 years, with a mechanism that allowed you to apply for only one extension of an additional 14 years. So most things would be 14 years, and whatever select things were particularly valuable or important could have 28 years. Under Pollock’s analysis this is just about the perfect possible system. So by sheer coincidence this is something that we got right the first time and ever since then we’ve been “correcting” it to be less and less optimal.
This estimate is also an overestimate according to the paper.
First, much creative endeavour builds upon the past and an extension of term may make it more difficult or costly do so. Were Shakespeare’s work still in copyright today it is likely that this would substantially restrict the widespread and beneficial adaptation and reuse that currently occurs. However we make no effort to incorporate this into our analysis despite its undoubted importance (it is simply too intractable from a theoretical and empirical perspective to be usefully addressed at present).
This means that the real number is significantly less than 15, maybe more like 12.
Whats the TL;DR on why?
I wish the abstract had information on what factor they’re optimizing for when deriving the optimal length.
Plot: a rival publisher hires a killer to murder a successful author over the copyright.
I was just thinking about that. If the copyright is tied to the author being alive, that’s essentially putting a huge target on your back. People have mysteriously died for much less than that.
Well, we need to figure out how to kill companies first. They own the copyright in the situations you would care about.
So, it kind of already works that way. If the company dies, no one is gonna come after you. Unless it was sold of to another company, that is.
It is always sold to another company. If a company is “destroyed” - eg, they must declare bankruptcy - then their assets will be sold off to pay back their debts. IP counts as an asset, so it would be sold to another company. It would not simply enter the public domain.
Meanwhile, you probably don’t want to kill all companies. Your friendly neighborhood taco truck is, after all, a company.
I’m all in favor of shortening copyright length, but it shouldn’t be tied to a creator’s lifespan. It’s too variable, and it doesn’t make sense for anything that more than one person worked on.
I think a reasonable compromise would be 20 years default, after which point you could apply for a 5 year extension twice. Extensions will only be granted if the work is still being made accessible, either new physical copies are being printed or digital distribution is available.
But I would also include a clause that if a work is no longer accessible, such as being pulled from streaming services, an online game being shut down, software not updated to be compatible with modern platforms, etc, copyright is considered to be in a weaker state where end users are permitted to pirate it for noncommercial purposes.
I would shorten the initial term to 15 years instead but keep everything else the same, if the author can’t be bothered to even file for an extension then they probably aren’t earning money from the thing anyway. See below for why 15.
That’s fine, the exact number isn’t really important. I kind of went for an intentional highball to pitch this as a closer compromise to how long copyright currently lasts.
I am in favour of that.
It should be held by government and every company that makes money out of copyrighted material should pay it in taxes and authors should get money from government as long as they live. It can be steam % so 70% author 30% government. When author dies government gets 50% children gets 50% after that grand children 30% and then back to 0%.
This way each country would benefit from their brightest minds now it’s just foreign corporations benefit from everything.
Honestly we need to make inheritance an obsolete custom. Keep personal items, but wealth should not be transferred
I don’t know what is your understanding of wealth but money is not wealth and never should be treated as one. Wealth are material things. Profit sharing is not wealth transfer it’s just paycheck.
Wealth are audio records, movie records, books. Those are now inherited and monetized by corporations. What is benefit for you by living in country that had many famous musicians ? If you live in country that have oil you benefit from it.
Are you having a stroke?
Hmm. Interesting idea.
It’s not idea, it’s how art worked since ancient times. Artists were always sponsored by kings and noble people and this art is now in museums, somehow along the way we put art in hands of corporations, and money in hands of idiots and leave countries with nothing. We have countries with ministry of culture that posses no culture. We pay taxes and get nothing back.
We pay taxes and get nothing back.
Tbf, this has been the rule, not the exception, for most of recorded history.
Limit copyright to 5 years.
Abolish patents entirely.
Greed and selfishness are unacceptable foundations for any society.
Rich bastards would still fuck it up.
The guy who invented insulin made it free for all rather then patenting it because it’s literally a life saving medication.
How’s that going in the US?
Those insulin are still available at $25 a vial, no prescription, no insursnce. But those are not the newer fast-acting ones and (I’m not an expert on this) are supposedly less effective than the more modern insulin.
Why the difference? Why should an artist who creates a popular character get 5 years of monopoly to profit off of their creativity, while an inventor who creates a better mousetrap not reap these benefits?
That is the BARE MINIMUM of reason.
There’s no reason IN THE WORLD for any kind of idea of “intellectual property” to exist once the creator is dead.
NONE.
It doesn’t benefit the creator in any way to have such a system where people can claim ownership of another’s work after death. All that does is deny the living things that could help them in favor of some ridiculous notion that you’re helping the dead; it’s asinine.
Minor children of artists benefitting from their parents work is one possible reason. Like if an author had a five year old why shouldn’t the kid get royalties if their parents is in an accident?
It should be short enough that the child of an artist shouldn’t be benefitting for decades, but there are cases where an untimely death would screw over the artist’s family and allow the publisher to make all the money themselves.
The current setup is awful, but there should be at least a period of time after their death for rights to be inherited that is no longer or possibly shorter, than a reasonable time frame like a decade or two.
This highlights that we are fucked in the head how we take care of ourselves, kids shouldn’t be made to struggle becsause of the economics of parents. Neither should adults. Neither should retirees.
Neither should adults, but economics based survival is what we have until we all decide why the fuck don’t we just cover the basics of a decent life, no strings at all, waste your life doing what you want or be the best version of yourself, getting us from financial from would just solve so many problems.
Like needing copyright to secure financial gain/benefit.
Especially for creative/cultural works that only have value because other humans went to to share an experience
“Nope, the kid is fucked. We need public free access to his father’s work ASAP.”
I’m just being silly and taking the counter view to the extreme
This happens all the time to people who don’t receive royalties. Parents die, kids get nothing. End of.
You might expand that to “society continuing to allow children to suffer because their parents are unable to care for them is a larger issue than the question of copyright.”
If we addressed the core issues of people having what they need to live then copyright would no longer have a reason for existing.
Generally they earn a somewhat stable income over time as an employee. Most artists do the vast majority of their work unpaid at the time and then try to make money off of all that work afterwards.
Plus companies wouldn’t be negatively affected by this change, so it is just punishment for individuals.
Like if an author had a five year old why shouldn’t the kid get royalties if their parents is in an accident?
Like I said, all it does is prioritize the desires of the dead over the needs of the living. It’s not justified.
In this example, the child is living, and has needs.
In the perfect world, the kids should have UBI regardless on if their parents are authors. But yes the kids should be inheriting the remainder of the fixed-term copyright.
So you would rather the publisher make the money instead of giving it to the family of the artist for a short period of time.
What terrible priorities.
I do think they said a publisher was involved.
But what about when they are not?
If the duration of copyright is short enough, why reduce it further based on heartbeat?
Hmm, I think there may have been some confusion on my part here. I’m fine with copyright directly serving individual authors and their families.
I’m not into how that is expanded and abused by corporations.
But I’m also not into the idea that my creative work could be taken and used in ways I don’t want it to be to undercut me and destroy my ability to subsist off of my labor. I so I think copyright has a place in society.
I think they mean it would become public domain and nobody would make money off of it. Books could be downloaded or used for free without a publisher.
A publisher currently publishing a book when an artist dies would have one less expense as they continued to rake in the money.
People make money off of the public domain all the time. Printing bibles is a booming business and copyright on the text expired ages ago. They do get to claim copyright on all of the stuff surrounding the text, like any illustrations, introductions, covers, etc. Most early Disney movies were based on works in the public domain.
Sure, it would allow instant access to copyrighted works which is neat and all but getting it earlier because the person died earlier is a silly reason based on all artists being hermits who have no families. It also ignores all the copyrights that aren’t owned by individuals, and companies don’t get into car accidents. Why should someone who keeps their copyright be more at risk of their family losing income than a company?
Why should the benefits of my labor not pass on to my children just because it’s a creative work?
Because the benefits of labour don’t pass on to your children, period?
Maybe there’s something out there I’m unaware of, but I don’t understand the implication in your question.
Inheritance
That’s not «the benefits of labour» being passed on to your children, is it? That’s what you own being passed on to your children… And it’s taxed! Maybe it would be a good idea to have taxes on inherited IP, though. Then again, if the taxes are at or above 50% then wouldn’t that mean that the state would inherit control over the IP, hence making it public domain? Meh. That would be an estate tax rather than an inheritance tax, technically, I think. How would you pay taxes on inheriting an IP?
You own copyright the same way you own a piece of paper that says you own a house. Someone who made a lot of money in a short time from their labor can pass on the rest to their children. Copyright spreads out the income over time by allowing exclusive income on ideas for a limited period of time. It is what allows a musician to make money from their songs without needing someone to directly pay them for writing fhe song at the time it was made.
Copyright as a concept is not horrible when applied to exclusive distribution for a short period of time, and that time period shouldn’t arbitrary end on death any more than someone should lose the house their family lives in because the person whose name is ok the deed died in an accident.
It just needs to be far shorter and companies should be changed so that the way people and companies use it. Otherwise every person would create a company, give it the Copyright, and then fhe company could be i herited.
Headline from the past: Sadly, our beloved Walt Disney died yesterday after apparent suicide by 20 knife stabs to the back.
Ahhhh, that sure does explain why it exists, lol.
