Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

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    > I'm not advocating 14 years; I think 28-56 is fair.

As I said I don't agree with the current state of copyright and think it should probably be much shorter, but it's interesting that discussions on this matter are rarely backed up with data. Why do you prefer 28-56 over 14, or 28-56 over 18-46?

Before you mentioned that "every artist on this list is dead" as if it were patently absurd for copyright to survive the author. Maybe it is, but to use my previous example why would a talented author is his 80s with young children write another novel if that were the case instead of going into the real estate business?

    > Yes, a Starship Troopers movie would have been released with
    > shorter copyright terms. It is cheaper to make a movie if you do
    > not have to pay for the IP.

You have to factor in movie studios being reluctant to base their works on public domain work because it makes it harder to create a franchise out of it. With a big hit like Starship Troopers being in the public domain nothing's stopping some other studio from releasing Starship Troopers 2, or selling action figures with that name etc.

It's sometimes advantageous that a work you want to use is copyrighted, because that means you can secure exclusive rights to publish a derived work based on it.

> why would a talented author is his 80s with young children write another novel

I know this is HN and money is the name of the game, but... some people like creating things and if they want to do it in their 80s, they will. (Also it's extremely unlikely you'll have young children in your 80s) I doubt anyone publishes their first book with high expectation of success and huge income. So why would it be the case for the last one?

srsly Tolkien was a chump

Sarcasm you chumps

Jesus the guy wrote Silmarillion in his seventies, a book that had no chance of being a bestseller and he barely lived to finish. Tolkien didn't write because he thought it was a "sweet gig", he wrote because he was a writer.

There is this mindset that refuses to believe that any motivation other than money is suspect, the nerd community used to be blessedly free from it.

I don't know what the right length should be. And what data do you need to back up a particular date range? The only thing I've found (and I can't find the article now) was a discussion of books on Amazon, and there was a steep drop off of copyrighted books older than 25 years (I think it was they weren't even offered for sale, not that they weren't being purchased)

> You have to factor in movie studios being reluctant to base their works on public domain work because it makes it harder to create a franchise out of it.

Didn't stop the very successful 2009 and 2011 Sherlock movie franchise, or the ongoing very successful BBC Sherlock movie series...

It's also important to remember that an author dying does not prevent him or her from capturing the value. If the copyright survives them, they can sell the rights to someone for a higher price before they die.

I prefer 28-56 because that was the law between 1909 and 1978 and it worked well. That era was extremely productive for artists and profitable for capital. Hollywood and record labels thrived in those years, so we know we can roll back to 28-56 years without harming those industries.

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