Hacker News Reader

> You would get the copyright for the first year for free. Then it would cost more each year to maintain the copyright for one more year.

I have a major problem with this. The problem is that if I purchase an item and it says 'Copyright (c) 1990' for instance, I would have no way of knowing when or if the copyright had expired. A fixed term would mean that I would know the date I could reproduce that work based on the work itself, which I held in my hand.

A fixed term seems to me the best of worlds. Probably something like 10 years would be enough.

My reasoning is that the vast majority of works would have exhausted their cashflow potential at that point. That a vanishing minority which had made lots of money would lose the opportunity to make vastly more is uninteresting to me. The work would still be fresh enough in the mind of society that a derivative work would be useful. If the work was successful then the creators name would still be fresh in the mind of society that they would have an inherent advantage when they created more. I personally don't see any reason why we should care that the grandchildren of a successful artist would not have a guaranteed income stream. My father is a civil engineer and has worked on infrastructure projects all over the world that will be used by millions for a hundred years or more and I will inherit what he leaves me in his will (yeah, he was paid for his time). I don't see any reason that the users of his bridge would be beholden to my descendants in 50 years time. My mother was a teacher and the thousands of children who passed through her classroom will grow up and live their lives and some will be successful and some will die in poverty and I don't have a single claim on any of their future income streams and thats the way it should be. I myself have created many works and I don't see that my claim on the future is in any way greater than my parents.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

I concur the fact that grandchildren or the wife's second husband, or corporate executives living off copyright long after a person died in old age is obscene. However 10 years is equally absurd in the opposite direction. A book can take 10 years to write, or 10 years to get published and more than 10 years to get popular. George R R Martin has been writing GoT books for 22 years and I'd hate to see him lose ownership of the characters and stories when he is still writing more in the series. That would be horrible. Asimov was writing Foundation novels for 50 years.

Transitioning a book to film or TV can easily take 10 years or more and I think is a reasonable source of income for an author. It would seem obscene to me that an author could write a book and then 10 years later see major motion pictures released for the same material earning studios hundreds of millions and they get nothing.

Most authors earn a small stipend from their work and rely on that income through retirement, so I think a term until death, or commensurate with a single lifetime to support immediate family such as a spouse is reasonable, but that's it.

So maybe the fixed term is 15 years, or 20. I don't see the benefit (to society) of having uncertain terms though.

That a book takes a number years to write is irrelevant. The copyright will be dated the year it is published, not when you thought of the idea. Guess what, if you publish a new edition? You can put a new date on that.. the fixed term copyright applies to the copy that you are reproducing, not anything else.

Anyway, GoT books started getting popular well before 10 years was up. George R R Martin got rich from the first few. If copyright on them had expired, well guess what.. he is still George R R Martin and he is still creating books which would be wildly popular and make him plenty of money he could invest for his retirement. That also means that he could have trademarked the characters and situations and retain exclusivity for the stories he created. He could licence those trademarks for huge amounts of money to film studios and get films made. George R R Martin would still be incredibly wealthy with a fixed-term copyright of 10 years.

J K Rowling would be incredibly wealthy as Harry Potter and all the sequels were incredibly popular pretty much as soon as they were written.

As you say though, most authors earn a small stipend from their work. I don't believe that they actually rely on that income through their retirement though. The vast majority of their small stipends dry up in short order. I used to work in the UK book publishing industry, 25 years ago. There were approx 30,000 publishers in the UK at that time, the vast majority of which had one or two titles to their name. That suggests to me that most of the books published were effectively self-published. The authors will have had to pay for the print run, and work another job anyway.

You can't build a copyright system covering tens or hundreds of thousands of authors based principally on the situation of the most successful two or three of them in a generation.

Society has an interest in appropriately rewarding and incentivising creators of content. It's fair that creators should have ownership rights over their creations, within socially acceptable limits. Society has little interest in enabling freeloaders to profit off the creativity of others, whether those freeloaders are distant descendants and relatives, or contemporaries eager to appropriate other people's work.

Originally copyright was for 14 years from publication, with an optional 14 year renewal. So variable terms aren't unheard-of — you just ask the copyright office if it's been renewed.

Coincidentally (or not) this term is very close to the estimated economically optimal copyright term.[1]

[1] https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

I agree that 10 years is a little short, but I wouldn't call it absurd, certainly not comparable with the absurdity of 95 years. When you speak of GRR Martin "losing ownership" of his characters, ownership wouldn't simply pass to HBO, it would pass to everyone. So HBO would have exclusive rights over their specific adaptation of the story, but they wouldn't have exclusive rights to Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen as characters. A lot of us think that there would be a real social benefit to popular characters belonging to everyone, not just their creators. In any case, a 10 year copyright term would fundamentally change the dynamic

I think 30 years would be a reasonable medium. A writer who publishes a novel at age 20 could profit until she's 50. And most writers are active at older ages anyway, so this should be plenty of time. And certainly no movie or TV studio executive is actually thinking of profits 30 years down the road when they begin a project today.

10 years is short enough that no one would ever purchase rights to anything copyrighted, they would just wait it out. With 95 year copyright that doesn’t happen and creators would be paid.

He would not lose the rights to the characters. The characters in a series of literary works are eligible for trademark. He would just lose the right to prevent others from making exact copies of his older books. Derivative works with characters that are not important to the canon works would be allowed, but main characters would have to be licensed before publication, lest a C&D letter render the entire print run unsellable. A breakdown in license negotiations means running a search-and-replace on some character names.

Instead of writing about Jon Snow, you're writing about Dan Sleet, a suspiciously similar character.

In reality, this only matters for fan-fiction, multi-author universes like Star Wars or D&D Dragonlance, and cross-media adaptations. Most print-published authors have zero problems creating original characters. The problem is making them follow the plan for the plot.

I think the idea is any extension beyond the fixed term would require registration (as it does in existing copyright law). So you would always be able to determine if something is in copyright or not if you had the copyright date.

Part of the problem is derivative works. I don't think even Disney cares too much if people stream Steamboat Willy - but if MGM Studios wants to create a new Mickey Mouse film that could be a problem for them.

Still I have little sympathy - it's hard to argue that endless Twilight fan-fiction did the franchise any harm. And there's plenty of non-canon James Bond films that have no impact on the main franchise.

Also there are a lot of franchises where, arguably, fans do a much better job than heirs.

I am bitter that Zelazny's heirs killed Amber RPG, one of the best of the time.

A lot has to be said on Dune and LOTR heirs as well. And don't get me started on Tintin, currently managed by the surviving second husband of Hergé's wife...

Pretty sure that Disney will have trademarked Mickey Mouse and therefore a lack of copyright would be irrelevant anyway.

I can think of two: the Casino Royale with Woody Allen, and Never Say Never Again. Any others?

Those are properly licensed. They are not derivative works or "fan fiction" any more than the Broccoli produced installments.

That's only a problem for Disney. The rest of the world gets to benefit from an explosion of creativity, and more available content.

I definitely support a short copyright period (say 10-20 years). Beyond that, as the original creators of the characters, any further 'official' content/stories created by them are likely to be popular if they are any good (and would be subject to their own copyright period). But if someone else takes on those characters and manages to produce great stories with them. Well fantastic, let's allow them to, and reward them for it.

Hilariously 50 shades of Gray started as Twilight fan-fiction.

The concept of "canon" does not have anything to do with copyright.

The only counterpoint I can think of is that it seems unfair for copyright to lapse after a couple of years on a song and then have a movie studio pick it up and use it as a movie theme a few years later.

They could end up making a ton of money with it and not benefitting the artist at all.

If the hypothetical movie studio from your example could not have used the song because of copyright, they would not have used the song, leaving the artist just as bereft of benefits as before – there is no change for the artist either way. If the movie studio can pick the best song from all available non-copyrighted songs since there are a large number of them, the artist will still not benefit but the movie studio might make a better movie, benefiting them and thereby the economy and society as a whole, even if nothing changes for the artist.

But now we have movie studios who are (generally) paying for rights to use a song that was popular a few years ago, or they're paying for original soundtracks.

Reduce copyrights to just a few years and Hollywood, with all the parasites in it, would just lift songs like there's no tomorrow and further dodge paying a cent to the artists involved.

Perhaps, but we'd be free to use their content as we saw fit too. Overall, I think reduced copyright would benefit the smaller artists (who might not be able to afford to license prior art now).

Movies and TV use copyrighted music all the time - they just pay the copyright holder for licensing it.

I am OK with using this logic when it comes to individuals using media for non-profit purposes, but movie studios are out to make money. Saying "if it didn't exist they wouldn't have used it" is taking away from the final composed project that includes many artists and mediums.

So differentiate between copyright periods for personal use and commercial use.

Many countries used to have strong explicit exemptions for personal use, but even just making it shorter in time for personal use would make a huge difference.

Nonsense, they may well have paid a license fee. As frequently happens now.

I always questioned whether we should be paying artists for music at all. The fact is, song writers don’t make most of their money from recordings. It’s merchandise and concerts. This would solve most of the copy right issues because someone recorded it with a cell phone.

More than that, we’ve seen cases such as the Louis CK video release where he asked politely for people to pay and they did.

You don't have to pay artists for music if you don't listen to it.

Copyright law is not supposed to create fairness.

It is supposed to benefit society as a whole. If protection is too long, limited access to (and reuse of) existing work reduces the benefits of having a law. If protection is too short, some works may not get created due to the lack of incentives.

Someone attempted to calculate an optimal duration, and concluded it was about 15 years: https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf (Related article: https://medium.com/basic-income/the-zombification-of-intelle...)

I would recommend reading James Boyle's 'The Public Domain'. It's available free from his site on a creative commons license[1]. He makes a great argument about the development of IP laws, similar to the points you have made.

[1] http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf

15 years sounds fine.

I guess I was talking about just a couple.

No one goes to see a movie just because it features 1 song.

well, I did see the movie "bohemian rapsody" mainly to hear the music...

The use of licensed music is a critical component in many movies. Just consider Donnie Darko or Goodfellas.

It was a proposition of the pirate party that RMS supported: make copyright duration 5 years long. Grant longer copyright terms to people who choose to add freedoms to it: free to copy, free to modify, free for commercial use would each add 5 years.