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Comment by jsjohnst | Hacker News Reader

I very likely am biased as my primary income doesn't come from my written literary works, but as a published author, I simply don't get the PoV of the publishing/music/movie industry. Just because you published something doesn't mean you should be paid for every single possible usage of it for the rest of your life.

I know this isn't an Apples to Apples comparison, but imagine where tech would be today if you were paid a royalty every time something you produced was used in any form. Every time that header bar you wrote for Google back in 2006 is reused, adapted, extended, whatever, you got a >1% royalty on. It's simply not sustainable and I feel is why these "content" industries will ultimately fail.

I'm pretty vocally negative about many things Google does, but as a long as the continue their current course with this platform, I simply can't support the author's guild's "sky falling" hyperbole.

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The "sky falling" hyperbole would be believable with shorter copyright terms, but with life plus 70/90/120 years, enforced by DRM technologies meant to lock us into specific proprietary platforms, ripping us of any sense of ownership for the things we buy, the whole industry can go fuck themselves.

Don't forget about gaming history that could be/is lost. We have emulators up to PS2 and almost everything on PC without always online is cracked.

But with current decisions that game companies own your play-trough (they were able to shutdown streams on copyright grounds - it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting) - and with emulator servers moving more and more into the illegal - we could enter a digital history dark age. A lot of the cultural phenomenon that was WoW is lost and unexperiancable for the future generations.

> it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting

This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear where the issue lies.

A production company gets together a ton of money to build a film or game. Because of that they own the profits on most of the produced work.

What's really tough to understand is that they can choose to stop making profit from it, and in so doing, stop others from using it altogether.

All of these cloud-centric services suffer the same fate -- as soon as the remote part of the product disappears, the entire thing becomes unusable. If that WoW license, for example, didn't come with a "right" to run the game against an independent server, does the production company have to leave itself open to lawsuits, for example, originating through players of the game and weird things happening on even a "vanilla" independent server?

I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.

> I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.

Yes. But I paid $40 USD and I am entitled to the profits of the art I create with it is sensible stuff. MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create. But Bethesda can claim that video of my speed play trough of Doom II infringes their copyright (the case was with Nintendo and some of their games I think). Blizzard can claim that modifying a bits in my RAM memory infringes their copyright and so on.

> MS cannot prevent you from profiting from the word documents you create

Hypothetically, could Microsoft legally do that if it wanted to? I'm guessing something like that could be part of EULA.

The home/academic licenses for MS Office have not-for-profit terms, IIRC.

In different words, you recorded and broadcast your performance of the production company's game.

Which, for other forms (Music, stage plays/musicals, etc.) usually requires royalties paid to the creator of the thing being performed if you perform it for profit.

I think it wouldn't be difficult to argue that the different mediums -- character on a screen vs. character on a stage -- don't really change that aspect significantly. The legal evolution around the birth and maturation of machinima is kinda interesting to dig into.

I as well am perpetually concerned about video game preservation, but WoW is a poor example. Issues of copyright aside, MMOs in general just aren't the sort of games that can be capably experienced in a historical capacity. To use the obvious example, Nostalrius existed not out of historical curiosity, but out of nostalgic sentiment which is only going to continue waning. Even with access to the source, someone fifty years from now is going to have a hard time pulling together forty people (or eighty, if you want to do PVP) and convincing them to play a game together for months on end solely in order to experience a meagre facsimile of what WoW was like at its peak. (Though I'm amused at the prospect of a professional video game historian offering work-study jobs to history students that consist solely of playing a sixty year-old video game).

This sort of thing has implications for game design as well. If you care about your game being experienced half a century from now (which, to be fair, you probably don't), then you should attempt to provide an "offline mode"--even for games with online multiplayer--that makes a best-effort attempt to convey the spirit of the game. Dark Souls does an excellent job at this: even though much of the fun of the game is in playing online (seeing the hints that others have left on the ground, summoning allies for boss battles, fighting off invading players, seeing the ghosts of other players running around the level and the bloodstains they leave when they die), it also goes to great lengths to cater to offline players: there exists a spell that will cause developer-written messages to appear, there are summonable NPC allies and NPC invaders, all PVP reward items can technically (and laboriously) be farmed from enemy drops, etc.

An MMO server could be set up in 50 years with bots taking the place of most of the players to a mostly convincing degree, although I think the knowledge that those are just bots and not real players would be just as unsatisfying then as it is today. If AI advances well enough, the bot-players could provide the drama elements and story lines currently created by players, but then we're basically looking at a derivative work instead of preserving the original work.

> it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting

I think that video games are a different enough medium that normal intuition doesn't apply, and that this example is not applicable. I think most people would be unsurprised if a live-stream reading of a novel was found to infringe copyright, but how far would you have to change things to not? Would an interpretive dance adaptation of a novel infringe copyright? Almost certainly not. What about a real-time translation into Tolkien's Elvish? That probably wouldn't either, but translations are generally considered to fall under the same copyright, so maybe.

A sufficient portion of some video games is enough like a movie that I entirely understand the logic behind not allowing live streaming of play-throughs, while others (Minecraft) are clearly centered on user content enough that they would fall on the other side of that line.

I think it's unrealistic to try and describe the situation as clearly fair use or clearly infringement.

That said, I do feel that the extension of copyright length is doing damage to the growth of culture, not least in the area of video games that will be lost to time.

Eh... I don't think it's that black and white.

As I see it, there's a very compelling argument for restricting streaming of narrative heavy/gameplay light games. Walking sims and the like. I have no trouble believing that views of lets plays impact sales (although, not as much as that one blog post by the creator of That Dragon, Cancer claimed -- that seems more due to subject matter than anything else).

And FWIW most game publishers allow streaming. The right exists to limit it but few take advantage of it other than nintendo.

For context: I'm an ex-game programmer (admittedly, I mostly worked on strategy games, so this never really effected me or my employers) who watches a more streams and lets plays than I'd like to admit.

That's honestly why I've gravitated back towards physical media in many cases. Printed books and even DVDs these days. Sure I still use Netflix/Apple/Amazon/HBO to rent/stream things most of the time but if I want to buy something lock in is a problem. Most vans have DVD players instead of Blu Ray (for kids). The older I get, the more fun an RV sounds (especially as a programmer who can work remote) but the idea of streaming movies over my phone isn't really exciting to me.

If there was ever an example of why gatekeepers are a big deal it was this last stretch of confederate flag hysteria where Apple was going so far as to take down historically accurate civil war games. It probably won't happen often, but it made it painfully clear just exactly how much control a few companies have over the availability of things we want just by controlling the distribution platform. On the flip side though, I do have to admit that in the middle of that my curiosity and Amazon made it possible to find and order about a dozen books about the civil war to start my new hobby (crazy interesting stuff by the way).

If you don't mind me asking, what are some of the books? We share similar styles of 'buy lots of things about a particular topic'. The Civil War is one of those where I've investigated very little, so any recommendation can jumpstart a bigger, much more invested search.

Sure, I'll get you a list later tonight

In order to jumpstart a more invested search you'll probably want something that gets your attention. For me, all of the online discussions of the war and cause that were so conflicting last year was what really got my curiosity up so I wanted to better understand both sides.

To do that, I decided to start with a book that made the southern case since I had no understanding of it at all. Most of the books were by southern authors and seemed emotionally invested until I came across "When In the Course of Human Events: The Case for Southern Secession" by Charles Adams.

This is the book that kick started everything for me because he's not southern and he's a professor who is an expert on global tax history. The book is extremely well cited (about 250 cites in 180 pages) and the cites annotate the paragraphs themselves. This is a huge help because thanks to the online Library of Congress and Google's effort to digitize books, every time you come across a "there's no way that's real" moment...of which there will be many...you can look up the cite and say "holy crap...that happened"

The official tome of the civil war that's a longer read is Battlecry of Freedom by McPherson.

There's a ton of material out there and as things get your attention you'll find lots of rabbit holes to dive down. The real trick of it is once you understand you'll notice so much oversimplification in internet conversations around it, even semi-official looking videos.

A couple of things that will get your attention:

- Each state had different reasons for seceding - Haiti played a HUGE part in secession - The causes of secession and the cause of war are 2 different things - Nobody died at Fort Sumter, the fort just ran out of ammo and the soldiers were saluted as they were returned to their ship. - The part that the media played in the war is extreme

For a single link that can really put you in place of what was going on at that time, the Cherokee Declaration of Causes from 6 months into the war:

http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/History/Events/Cherok...

Once you get into it you'll find a lot more. The economic side of things really got my attention. There's a lot of interesting European history around it too. In depth on slavery is The Half That's Never Been Told (not an easy read). Most of the Southern accounts are very emotional in the writing style, which may or may not appeal to you. Even with citations that negatively impacts some of the credibility for me, but still interesting to see.

There are also many collections of letters from the time period out there.

The single biggest thing that I took away from is this: every action has an equal and opposite reaction applies to history as well. If you read about something that seems like an extreme response to something small, that's because there is a piece you haven't found out about yet.

> I know this isn't an Apples to Apples comparison, but imagine where tech would be today if you were paid a royalty every time something you produced was used in any form. Every time that header bar you wrote for Google back in 2006 is reused, adapted, extended, whatever, you got a >1% royalty on.

Actually, if it was anything like today's movie/music publishing business, you wouldn't get a dime in royalties for that header bar. The benefits of copyright go to rights holders, not necessarily content creators. Maybe Google would have given you a $1000 "advance" for you to sign away your header bar. Meanwhile, they'd license the crap out of it to everyone and keep all the royalties for themselves.

A few authors have Google to thank, as I've bought many books due to the content showing up in search results.

On the other hand, I've also "consumed" some book content without purchasing it. In those cases, how is it different to me reading the book in a bookshop then putting it back on the shelf?

A long time ago, I had a shareware product. I'm sure plenty of people benefited without paying (the free version was enough). Sites even benefited from distributing it. I didn't lose sleep over it, because without people being able to try it first I would have had less sales.

I have to agree with this. I have, in the past, infringed on copyright (I no longer do this, as I reformed and whilst I am diametrically opposed to placing undue restrictions on creative work, I also think it's not something I want to break the law over). However, on many occasions I actually purchased the work that I infringed upon, and in many of those instances I don't think I would have paid any money at all to the author of the work because I didn't realise how valuable it was to me until I had (what's the word?) consumed it.

In fact, this is sort of like pirating music, movies and TV shows - in particular music. With these items, it was increasingly the case that you didn't know you enjoyed the work or liked the artist until you had actually experienced listening to or watching their work. Most people have a very finite supply of money, and so if they decided not to infringe copyright then they would just decide not to buy the works.

This is why the record companies were so incredibly stupid in not getting behind streaming services, instead attacking people with little resources for infringing copyright, such as suing mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset to the tune of $1.9 million.

Apple and Netflix have essentially eaten their lunch because they have basically freed up content for a reasonable subscription fee. Apple iTunes was great even before Apple Music launched because you were finally able to purchase individual tracks instead of having to buy the entire work - and at a price that pretty much anyone could afford.

Which is why I get so annoyed with rights holders dividing the globe into geographical regions. They do deals with big companies to maximise their profits, but this is perversely leading to increased copyright infringement and the bypassing of their geoblocking efforts.

In essence, these distribution companies add almost nothing to the work produced by the original creators and artists, yet take a cut anyway and inflate the price paid by the consumer of the work. Sometimes it's even more perverse - as an example, I tried to purchase the Dragon Book on compilers from Amazon in eBook format to read on my iPad 2. This was not in any way possible to purchase, so I ended up purchasing the physical book from the U.S., had it shipped to Australia and found an unencumbered PDF with the content so I could read it on my iPad.

In the printed world, this is currently the problem Elsevier and other companies are facing. They have restricted access to important research by in effect gouging the market, and so students from overseas countries (in particular in some Eastern-European nations) who could either never gain access to the material or couldn't afford it eventually just shared it and never paid for it. Then they got organised, and suddenly publishers discovered that they had a massive problem on their hands with no way of effectively countering it because those pirating the material are outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...

>In those cases, how is it different to me reading the book in a bookshop then putting it back on the shelf? //

There are alternatives but one way might be that the bookshop have an established financial relationship with the publisher [who has rights to distribute the work via copyright] whilst Google have taken a book known to be in copyright [in many cases] have created copies and distributed copies without having such a relationship.

This. My appreciation for classical music hockey sticked after things like Spotify became available. As a result I am now spending several hundreds of dollars to see artists perform live. Hopefully this helps also ensure a greater share of my money goes directly to the artists themselves.

Before widespread music streaming, my interest in the space was barely growing and rarely ever more than a passing interest. This is largely due to the fact that discovery was inconvenient - as a comparatively niche (and vast) musical genre, it was harder to download. Buying the music was out of the question, it is prohibitively expensive to develop an appreciation for the genre - if one album costs $15, then just all of Beethoven's Symphonies alone would be $135 and only for one interpretation of each.

My total lifetime expenditure towards Classical Music is probably approaching $1000, and the rate of spending is only accelerating. I can't help but think that if it weren't for things like Spotify and YouTube making it more accessible, I would not be spending even 1% of this on it.

I wish more people could see the bigger picture when it comes to things like this...

Perfect analogy! I as well was someone who used to spend hours in book stores consuming books. I'd usually only need a few paragraphs at most and it was better for me to write a few notes in a notebook than spend $30-50 on a book when I needed so little of the content from it.

> Every time that header bar you wrote for Google back in 2006 is reused, adapted, extended, whatever, you got a >1% royalty on. It's simply not sustainable and I feel is why these "content" industries will ultimately fail.

True. But management and payment overhead were huge limitations. I've worked as a freelance, and part of the game is getting royalties in every market. But it was never easy, even with good contracts. Getting paid was a pain.

Now, however, with tons of usage data, and low-overhead blockchain payment systems, perpetual royalties are doable. They could be relatively small, context dependent, and declining over time.

This would be a huge game-changer for freelance creatives.

Which is why it won't happen. It would kill all the industries that act as content farms, including traditional and electronic publishing, music streaming, and so on.

It's simply not part of the corporate world's DNA to allow, never mind encourage, true peer-to-peer disintermediated sales.

It would be completely practical now to build a unified global not-for-profit distribution and micropayment system. But corporate systems rely on introducing market friction so they can pretend to offer something useful as distributors and sponsors.

Taking that away and making it trivially easy for artists and creators to sell directly to audiences and users, and to self-organise into project-specific teams that would continue to be paid for work after shipping would be an unacceptable political shift.

That is actually being built bit by bit by individuals.

See OpenBazaar for one. Bitcoin with changetip and payment channels. P2P search engines. Attempts at P2P forums / social networks.

It won't be quick, but eventually they're going to be bypassed entirely (I hope).

> Just because you published something doesn't mean you should be paid for every single possible usage of it for the rest of your life.

If you created something, why shouldn't you get paid every time anyone uses it? Why should anybody have any rights to a specific thing you created, other than the ones you give them?

For a start, buying something should grant certain rights over the thing bought.

beyond that though, even to evaluate if something is worth purchasing you need to be able to look at it and at least some of it's contents. People need to be able to talk about it. Reviewers need to be able to summarise it.

Fair use is a pre-requisite to having any kind of fair market for and social culture around books, or any media.

That's the difference between creating and publishing. To publish is to contribute your ideas to the public domain, where they may be picked up and used by others. You're under no obligation to publish your creation. But if you do, you have to understand that your creation becomes part of the same ecosystem of ideas that educated and inspired you in the first place. As a culture, we consider this a valuable process, so we incentivize it with limited and temporary immunity from the perils of free market competition in distribution so that you have the opportunity to recoup your investment and build a name for yourself.

For the same reason that you (correctly) use to justify high taxes on high earners. No one works alone. Much of the work that people produce is actually the work of the society that surrounds and enables them.

But all this realistically does is concentrate wealth further.

Now Google reaps all the rewards of the content produced.

How is this fair?

All the users of Google Books (millions of people) also reap rewards.

And anyone else is free to do the same thing Google is doing.

Am I free to go into university libraries and copy every book they own?

Yes.

Well, no. No, I am not.

Try it. See how it goes.

1) Go to library 2) Check out a stack of books 3) Go home 4) Make copies of them 5) Return books to library 6) Repeat many times

You'll be just fine.

The cheap way to scan books is destructive scanning, though.

That's a fair point, but I'm not a big fan of taxing specific things versus a general tax. If I make a bunch of money by selling books, fine, tax me on it. But it doesn't give you rights to my books, or to cut across my lawn...

While it takes money to run a society it also takes ideas. So it makes sense, at some level, to collect tax payments in the currency of ideas.

In an ideal world, maybe. But in the real world copyright just prevents people from using the work at all, rather than using the work and compensating the creator for it.

So the electricians that installed your lights should be paid every time you turn on your lights? The carpenter who made your chairs should get paid every time you sit down?

At some point, there must be an end to the rights, because otherwise they'd make life impossible for everybody else.

You can't reasonably have arbitary contracts follow the entire life of an entire class of things and ALL of their uses.

Otherwise you shouldn't be allowed to pretend you're selling anything - you're only renting it out.

Why should you? Human culture seems to work better if you don't, for one, moreover property rights over something infinitely reproducible in principle, are a lot more tenuous than property rights based on physical possession. For the former you need consensus and consent at a societal level, and a legal system, to enforce the right. For the latter you just have to hold on to the thing.

So, let us know how you're going to justify the infinite-copyright meme you like to trot out at every opportunity, both morally and pragmatically. Explain how such a regime is fairer to everyone involved, and results in better cultural outcomes.

Because, you do cheerlead for longer copyright terms a lot. Which is fine (though obv I really disagree). But I've never seen you actually back it up.

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