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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The problem with copyright is that it is used as an excuse to deliver the good idea to protect the new authors who are still alive, in the same package with the bad idea to let unspecified number of loosely related and unrelated people feed off free money source created by long dead authors decades ago.

I think part of the idea is that whether the creators are dead or not, having copyright and "unrelated people feed off", still maintains an economy over the item and gives it monetary value. Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.

E.g. Disney only being able to create or allow the creation of Mickey Mouse stuff (t-shirts etc), leads to a large business for them, taxes for US etc. (Plus pays a lobby to ensure longer copyright). If Mickey Mouse was suddenly public domain, that would stop and its characters would be devalued very fast, with everybody competing with ever cheaper products with him on.

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And they would come up with some other creative character with a new copyright duration, thus enriching our public culture with their previous works and employing people to create new works for people to enjoy.

Twenty years ought to be enough to recoup your investment, but I'm open to compromise. In any case, (rougly) 150 years, as it currently is, is way, way, way, way, way, way way too long.

>And they would come up with some other creative character with a new copyright duration, thus enriching our public culture with their previous works and employing people to create new works for people to enjoy.

Isn't letting them keep their copyright for long, an even stronger inventive for OTHERS to come up with some new characters? (in order to compete with them).

Maybe. It also stifles other creative endeavors that could be done with those characters by other authors. Lots of cool stuff is done with things in public domain (think Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, plenty of others), and I don't buy an argument that people would stop creating new things if they could simply copy someone else's.

Way too long for why? I don't believe citizens are harmed by not being able to make money from something they didn't create.

Really? Copyright is siloing off culture in unprecedented ways. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is under copyright by his estate, and will be until the 2040s. It can't be used by anyone without paying (large) licensing fees to his estate, even though they had literally nothing to do with the creation of the speech.

Ever notice how restaurants and movies never use "the Happy Birthday song"? That's because Warner Bros claimed copyright on it for decades. Another part of our culture that can't be used thanks to copyright.

There are plenty of films, plays, and TV series based on works in the public domain. Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Sherlock Holmes to name just a few that come to mind. Should those creators be required to pay tribute to the descendants of the long-dead authors in order to use those parts of our shared culture?

A famous stained-glass window in a church in my home town was heavily censored (i.e. publishing photographs of it resulted in legal threats, fair use or not) because the estate of the late artist who created it vigorously enforced his copyright. High-resolution photographs were available for free of every stained-glass window on the church website, except for this one. At times there were even talks about covering it up physically because of claims about public display licensing issues. The artist in question likely didn't see any of this coming during his lifetime.

Being granted exclusive protections during your lifetime or for a reasonable period of time after the creation of a work is defensible. De facto perpetual protections afforded to the artist's grandchildren (or great^n-grandchildren), not so much.

Until you realize the source material that made Disney what it is today is mostly in the public domain (while even their oldest adaptations aren't and -- if Disney have their will -- never will be).

Could Disney have become this successful without free access to public domain works like Cinderella, Snow White, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and so on and so forth? Possibly. But insisting that their works should be protected far beyond the protections their source material ever had is hypocrisy at best, anti-competitive at worst.

Original US Constitution copyright length was 28 years. That's long enough IMHO.

> Original US Constitution copyright length was 28 years.

No, it wasn't.

The first copyright law adopted under the Constitution may have established that length, but that's a very different thing.

>Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.

I think you have the whole process upside down. Digital media already has no value, and it can already be copied freely.

The changes in the law that Disney and other copyright maximalists are doing is attempting to re-value digital media. So, the only option open to them is to push for ever more draconian laws simply to protect their broken and outdated business models.

That's not true. Mickey Mouse himself is protected by trademark, which never expires as long as it is vigorously defended by the rightsholder. Copyright expiration would only affect those old, old films starring Mickey.

Linux doesn't loose value because people can copy it.

Linux is under a permissible license. That's the point.

https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING

I think they mean monetary value... (vice educational, entertainment, etc value)

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