Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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

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