alyaza [they/she]askBeehaw: should copyright even exist at all? and if it should, how long *should* the ideal term of copyright be?
BrikoXI’m fine with copyright, but it should end when the author dies instead of extending x years after the death. But patents should be limited to a few years after product release and the loopholes closed. Right now some patents can be extened infinitely.
52fightersI agree although I would continue it for a spouse or living children under age 18. Also only human persons should be legally able to hold copyrights.
influence1123I think that's how it originally was until Disney realized they were gonna lose Mickey Mouse after Walt Disney died and single handedly got copyright law rewritten in their favor.
Copyright Act of 1790
Term of 14 years
Renewal of 14 years
Copyright Act of 1831
Term extended to 28 years
Renewal of 14 years
Copyright Act of 1909
Term of 28 years
Renewal extended to 28 years
Copyright Act of 1976
Life of the author, plus 50 years (generally)
75 years from date of publication or 120 years from date of creation (anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and works made for hire)
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (1998)
Life of the author, plus 70 years (generally)
95 years from date of publication or 120 years from date of creation (anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and works made for hire)
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (1998) is what Disney was able to lobby for to extend the life of Mickey for another 20 years. It expires in 2024. But trademark will still be valid.
Sounds like they had a hand in the one in the 70s as well. https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/how-disney-routinely-exerted-influence-on-the-us-copyright-law-to-keep-its-greatest-asset-mickey-mouse-549141
UngodlyAudrey🏳️⚧️I've mentioned this before here, but my stance is 20 years flat for a work owned by a corporation, and life for works owned by an individual.
cnnrduncanYeah that seems pretty reasonable to me. Was pressed off when the government here sneakily extended copyright length from 60 to 80 years as part of a trade deal with the UK a year or two ago - even 60 years was far too long IMO!
That’s interesting. Where is here for you? Was that term something pushed by the UK?
Not sure if this person is in the same place but Aotearoa NZ recently extended copyright from 50 to 70 years after death due to a UK trade deal, so I wouldn't be surprised if the UK have pushed it. We've recently fast-tracked the change due to an EU trade deal, though, so it's not the UK alone.
Yep that's the one, turns out I misremembered the exact lengths, cheers for letting me know!
Otome-chanThen you just have companies transfer ownership of their IPs to some notable figure in the company and transfers away from them when they die/leave. leading to indefinite ownership of copyrights by a company. This is even longer copyright than what we have today.
So just make it nontransferable.
StorksforlegsThis sounds perfect
sludgewhy lifetime copyright ownership for individuals?
Mostly, I felt it was important to discourage IP ownership by corps by making the individual term much longer. I'm open to making it shorter, but still considerably longer than that of corporations. An individual isn't going to be able to harm infringers the way that, say, Nintendo can, and does.
I honestly really like this idea. I would've been a fan of the model where copyright just outright can't be transferred from actual creators to a company, but that creates massive problems for collaborative works that don't have a single one creator. This model of giving individual creators lifelong copyright nicely addresses that problem.
LosExisting beyond death seems too exploitative for my liking. But also, what do people think about trademarks and patents.
ffmikeAs a published author, I'm glad copyright existed. Without it, none of my publishers would have been in business and I would have had to find some other income source. But I think the default should be "public domain" rather than "copyright", and I'm skeptical of allowing corporations to own the copyright to individuals' works.
Do you think that those publishers would be significantly worse off if the copyright length was, say, 20-40 years rather than the 80 years used by most of the western world nowadays?
Well, most of my work was programming books, so honestly a 5 year copyright term would have been plenty. But the internet put most of those publishers out of business anyhow.
Outside of my own special case, I don't have really strong opinions on the term.
inmatarianHow about an annual renewal fee that increases exponentially over time? The mouse can afford it.
Payable to whom?
The US government?
Each country has it’s own copyright office. So you would need to pay in each of them where your work is distributed. They are just enforced almost globaly as majority of countries signed an agrement to recognize them.
Society. That is how taxes work.
Each jurisdiction in which it has protection
A flat 20 years for everything. Individuals, companies, patents, trademarks, everything.
The issue with patents being 20 years that it completly stops innovation because even if it’s reproduced and improved patent stops it from coming to the market and the patent holder has no incentive to improve anything since it can just rake in the money.
Trademarks purpose is to make brand recognizible and it should exist as long as the company pruduces anything under that brand. Caping it’s existance serves no purpose aparting from letting cheap copies to be sold which doesn’t benefit anyone.
P03 LockeNow take your first sentence and replace the word "patent" with "copyright".
While true, I don’t have a problem with entertainment being copyrighted for longer, it’s impact on quality of life and healthis non existent in comparison to patents.
I think trademarks should be for the life of the company/author. since that's literally their purpose. but copyrights and patents shouldn't last longer than 20 years at most.
ChemicalRascalHold up. What purpose, exactly, does having trademarks expire on the death of the author have? What do we gain from that?
A trademark is a name. The point is to remove ambiguity and confusion when multiple people are selling similar products. Ie to prevent name collision. Once the company or person is dead, there is no longer an issue. Having indefinite trademarks will mean we will eventually run out of names, as every name will eventually be taken over many years. By having them expire upon death, the trademark is freed up for reuse.
Perhaps not have it immediately upon death though. I wouldn't mind, say, a 200 year trademark, for instance. Trademarks aren't preventing culture, they're just clarifying names.
Imagine if one person ever in history could be named "Joe". Naturally during Joe's life it's useful to ensure no one else has his exact name. but after he's been dead for 200 years? Do we really need to make sure no one else ever is named Joe?
Look at the Atari situation. Atari is a company that is long gone and everyone knows it. However, companies are propping themselves up as atari because they own the Atari trademark. In the system of "someone holds their trademark even after death", these new atari companies can't call themselves atari. Is that good? bad? up for debate, but regardless no one is confusing them for the old classic atari (or maybe they are haha).
But atari (the old company) surely isn't being hurt by the confusion.
Having indefinite trademarks will mean we will eventually run out of names, as every name will eventually be taken over many years.
This, I think, is the core of the issue for you, correct?
That's not how trademarks work. There are plenty of authors out there with the same name as other authors (like, literal authors, not in the general sense of creators of works). There are plenty of companies that have the same name as other companies, be that essentially the same or actually the same.
This ticks off the Joe example. Atari is a brand, that brand is IP, so that's a separate issue. I'm not sure what you're even trying to say about Atari there, though I'm pretty sure if the Atari trademark disappeared immediately on Atari's collapse you'd just see another company start trading as Atari, which under your prescription would be legal, and the world would be functionally identical in relation to the Atari trademark.
Trademarks? Why...? All trademarks do is ensure consumers know who made a given product.
If I make cola, even if it's the same as Coca-Cola, shouldn't consumers be able to differentiate between my cola and Coca-Cola's cola?
Half of mean median life expectancy which is something like 40 years. Same for everyone. Makes no sense that one can write a book and then live off it forever. That does not encourage more books. Good gig though.
Someone losing copyright of their book doesn't necessarily mean they're going to write more. A vast majority of published writers cannot live off of a single book (a lot can't from multiples). It's actually incredibly hard to make a living off writing.
At most, 10 year copyright term.
No patents.
No patents.
Patents are incredibly important for R&D as without them, there is no protection of IP
staticSo many details, how trivial is a patent?
how long?
can you patent discoveries like genes?
how long?
can you patent discoveries like genes?
You can't patent things that aren't a process or a product, so no you can't patent genes.
Patents take quite a bit of effort to write up if you really want to protect your intellectual property, and their scope is pretty narrow. The patent holder can also license with interested parties if they want.
RivalarrivalYou can't patent things that aren't a process or a product, so no you can't patent genes.
Genes can be sliced and spliced with methods such as CRISPR. The genetic code that has been artificially transformed by such methods qualifies as a "product". Yes, genes can be patented.
Being first to take what is frequently the next logical step shouldn’t be protected from competition for long enough to make the innovation obsolete. 5 years is more than enough time to establish a brand name and recoup any R&D costs. We can raise entirely new people to adulthood in less time than current patent expirations. If it can easily be undercut by a cheaper alternative, then the “innovation” is unlikely to have been that novel or costly. A more complex innovation would be harder to create and productize which should in itself help limit competition. If you aren’t capable of productizing an innovation, you patented it early just to prevent competitors who were already working on the same innovation from being able to recoup their own costs.
People far too often buy into the “R&D is incredibly expensive” narrative that republicans and big pharma like to perpetuate. R&D isn’t generally as expensive as much as if you aren’t first, you automatically lose everything you invested. Beyond that, R&D is done with the assistance public funding, then snatched away by corporations to prevent competition.
If competition is healthy, and is the self-proclaimed hallmark of capitalism, why are corporations so anti-competitive? Competition IS healthy, but it means that wealth is spread across many rather than the few who control patents, and requires continual innovation if you want to maintain your status as #1 rather than just sitting on a large, frequently purchased, patent portfolio.
The current speed of innovation in AI has shown what things could have been like if less time and money was spent trying to stifle innovation in the name of protecting profits by suing over patents. Every patent is just one more ball and chain shackling society to slow progress for profit.
At least, that’s my opinion.
I really don't think you should have dibs for 20 years on an idea. That's absurd.
I'm willing to let copyright slide (for a much smaller amount of time than it is now.), but not patents.
I'm willing to let copyright slide (for a much smaller amount of time than it is now.), but not patents.
Agree to disagree I guess. I think protecting ideas is an important safeguard that encourages people to take the risk of investing in research.
HanhulaCopyright should exist or artists and writers can't avoid having their work stolen by much larger companies.
I think it's worth defining a hard limit for non-person entities to own copyright. That'd mean post a certain limit, game code, artwork, music etc would be free to use. Human-owned copyright should probably be life with a minimum period of average life expectancy, with maybe provisions to allow it to cover your children too? Prevents corporations from waiting until your mum dies in an accident and immediately taking her life's work and using it everywhere.
ArugulaZTwenty years. After that, get a job. (Or create something new.) Copyright was never intended to be an heirloom, to be carried from generation to generation.
Who downvoted me? Walt Disney? Fuck off, you dead, frozen bastard!
PrincipleOfCharityI have recently been thinking that copyright and patents should be enforced until the creator made back their money plus a set profit; like 30%. The reason for this is that it makes it similar to physical products which are often sold at cost plus some profit; usually around 20-50% depending on competition.
Doing it this way has some interesting side effects.
- It puts creative production on par with physical production.
- It requires transparent accounting.
- It covers the hard work required to develop something while not giving windfall profits to minor discoveries that just piggyback off the work of others.
- The more that is charged for a protected product, the quicker it enters the public domain. If you needed to keep a copyright for a long time then you wouldn’t charge a lot for it which is still beneficial to the public.
There could be some nuances. I’d imagine that there would be some threshold amount that covers smaller items. Maybe everything is covered for the first $200,000 or so. If one was claiming more than that for R&D then they would have to produce accounting demonstrating that amount. That way smaller creators aren’t necessarily burdened like a large corporation that does R&D for a living would be.
Obviously numbers could be fudged, but with it could be set up so that is difficult. Accounting could be adjusted. Perhaps quarterly or yearly reports have to be made on which projects money was spent on. That way there would be a paper trail that would make it harder to pretend like more work was done on something than actually was.
Just a thought.
WiggletI actually really like this idea.
I feel like it should also have a time expiry of some sort but I overall I think it's a good balance of protections for smaller creators and a limit to excessive greed. If it's truly a revolutionary idea, it will make back the development costs quickly and the information will be available to other creators to build on.
The reason this doesn't work is because there is no agreed price for someone's time. If I research for a book for 20 years how much money should I make before relinquishing my copyright? If I paint a breathtaking picture in 5 minutes on a napkin I will abolish my copyrights after selling a copy for 3$?
I imagine there would be a blanket amount that covers small creators. Something like $200,000. Now if a movie studio claimed that a new movie costs $150 million to produce then they’d would have to show the accounting for that. If they could then they would be entitled to maybe $225 million ($150 million + 50%) before the movie goes into public domain.
ultrasquidThis is a great idea for patents, but probably doesn't work as well for copyright, as the cost of a creator's time and effort is subjective and hard to prove. Additionally, this gets a little wonky with free or open source products, which are unlikely to be making much (if any) money.
Big businesses already have figures about what a creator’s time and effort is. For small creators there would be some fixed amount, like $200,000 or something, that they’d be entitled do just by creating something. If they claim their expenses were higher than that then they would have to produce receipts or something.
I have to imagine that a number like $200,000 for writing a book or song is pretty good. Stephen King has written like 65 books. At $200k a pop that is $13 million just from book sales. That’s not including public appearances or speeches and stuff that could also earn money from the fame. That’s rich, but not stupid rich. Mr. King’s net worth now is like $500 million or something.
It's a good idea to know the history of US copyright before answering this question.
As far as my answer, maybe 10 years. Even then, all content is remixed and remastered, so I don't really see a point to copyrights at all. Anything that relies on copyright are a part of incredibly incredibly oversaturated industries, so people should just make what they are passionate about, and not worry about whether some dude decides to rip it off to create some other thing. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. Jazz musicians certainly don't give a shit, and people have been stealing the Amen Break for decades.
People are too damn concerned over trying to be rich and famous from whatever idea they foolishly think is unique. Every melody has essentially already been created, and if it hasn't, then AI and LLMs will take care of the rest. Create art because you like to create art.
The problem is the work-to-live death spiral. Install UBI and abolish copyright.
Copyright: Forever Less One Day
You might find this interesting, then: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw
Related TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU
Every Melody Has Been Copyrighted (and they're all on this hard drive)
Copyright should be abolished entirely. But a reasonable length if it needs to exist is maybe 20 years. Think about stuff from 20 years ago. Movies like the first matrix, or games like the original super mario bros. These are classics, no longer something the creators rely on for profit, yet shape our culture.
Copyright is used to harm culture for the sake of profit. An absurdly long copyright period can only harm society for the sake of shareholder profits. Ideally, things should enter the public domain at some point, and ideally at a time where the cultural impact can be felt. Anyone who disagrees with this should believe that disney is an illegitimate business, as almost all of their IPs are things originally in the public domain.
If copyright as it is today existed back when disney started, we wouldn't have beloved disney classics.
25 to 45 years seems like plenty for most of the profit of a work. Maybe 5 years with an option to renew it by the author using the copyright with maximum of 50 years or so. That way abandoned IP or works no longer being published can be used sooner but people who have a series or keeps selling a work can keep control of the IP.
The life of the author plus 70 years bs we have now is insane. It use to be 14 years originally then was 28 years for a good while.
FaceDeerThe original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total.
It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows.
There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.
In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.
HubertManneGoing back to this is where I would put it. If an artist cannot make new works after 28 years then maybe they just have to do other work. Most artists I know produce something about once a year or faster. Be it a song or a book or a painting.