Why does it always seem as if such proposals are written by clueless people?
Can't we, people of HN, draft proposals collaboratively, perhaps with some moderation system?
Can't we, people of HN, draft proposals collaboratively, perhaps with some moderation system?
I would like to see all copyright completely abolished, or at least reduced to max 2 years or so. I imagine a lot of people will disagree with me.
The first problem that immediately arises is that of providing a 1984-proof who-made-what oracle. No, the blockchain won't work. :D
(Alright, alright, in a perfect-to-the-nth-degree world the blockchain probably would work, but it's generally a good idea to try and invent one new thing at a time, not invent ten interdependent things that all require each other and which all independently have discrete adoption inertia.)
I would like to have copyright end once your earnings from a certain work exceed some multiple of the expenses that went into making it by a certain factor, but I can see that this is not realistic for various reasons.
One of the reasons is that it would have a chilling effect for speculative investment in creating works. What if I'm a movie producer getting an average of one hit for nine flops? I need the profit from the hit to subsidize the flops.
That's the dream of the Free Software movement, n'est-ce pas?
When you release something without restriction, it brings the whole civilization forward.
The problem is monetizing the creation of the work, which doesn't have to be done by the business-model of restricting its usage. Indeed the latter seems like a violation of individual freedoms that I'm not sure should be allowed by legal contract.
(Admittably, I have not thought the international problems that this might cause)
...or it gets bought by some more powerful entity - capable of paying the tax - shortly before this happens. Leading to concentration of copyrights in the hands of big corporations, to an extent even larger than under current system.
The "doubling after that each year" provision of the original comment neatly takes care of that. After a relatively small number of doublings the size of the tax for the single item would be larger than the current US national debt.
The 'math' term for this is "exponential growth".
Sounds great to me.
My suggestion is that if the copyright holder fails to pay the tax, it is automatically considered to be licensed under the latest version of the GPL.
Edit: In some ways this is actually an improvement over the status quo. It solves the problem where software can't be relicensed because no one can track down all the authors. You only have to track down the authors who have been active in the last two years.
> In some ways this is actually an improvement over the status quo. It solves the problem where software can't be relicensed because no one can track down all the authors.
I wouldn't really call that an improvement. There's no longer even a point in relicensing code, given that the license only matters for code less than two years old.
They're not. The copyleft portion of the GPL prevents improvements to open source code being locked up. In the case of source code, simply putting it in the public domain is of little use if the source code isn't public.
e.g., Disney won't stich together all their movies in a year-long pseudo unit of work, because, if it did so, a two-hour clip from that work would fall under fair use.
An initial cost of 1000 USD, doubled every year, for 20 years is:
1000 * (2^20) (where ^ means exponentiation).
Or 1,048,576,000 USD - a wee bit over 1 billion dollars for the 20th year.
Whenever you start to think that a complex thing was done by a clueless person, you should stop, and consider the possibility you might be lacking a clue yourself. That doesn't mean the other side wasn't missing a clue either, or isn't acting in bad faith, of course. But I find it rare that there's no actual good reason ideas happen.
In this case, it's definitely true that the "right" to refuse renumeration has been abused, on many levels — from free-of-charge press effectively displacing and forcing the rest to follow on the "big guy" scale, to unpaid internships on the "small guy" scale.
There are good reasons to reject the proposal — as outlined in the OP — but that doesn't mean the author was clueless. Whether incoherence comes from a difference in perspective or bad faith we don't know (though you can guess what I - a socialist - am guessing about the good faith of a CDU politician). But there _are_ reasons.
> Can't we, people of HN, draft proposals collaboratively, perhaps with some moderation system?
There aren't "we, people of HN", but if you want to collaboratively draft proposals, join your nearest political entity. My own even has a Discourse forum where you can get all meta about the policy process.
This is true, and it works both ways. For example, people who oppose GDPR are not all Facebook shills.