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Comment by danite | Hacker News Reader

Revert copyright back to the original 28 years and Disney's increasing domination of the media market becomes less of a concern. Of course this probably won't happen because the US and other world governments exist to serve Disney and their shareholders, but it's the easiest way to fix this that doesn't involve a long and complicated antitrust case that the government might lose in the courts.

If you want to be even more daring and spend a little bit of public money, you could have a publicly financed streaming service with most major public domain works. You could make it available through the Library of Congress.

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Not that I necessarily disagree with the point but

    "the US and other world governments exist to serve Disney and their shareholders"

Is absurdly hyperbolic language, and makes me want to listen to your actual argument less. It sounds like a college freshman who's just learned how it all "really works".

How else did we get our current extreme copyright lengths? Were regular people advocating for this? Or was it for wealthy corporations and their shareholders? Did anyone responsible for the Great Recession face any legal consequences for destroying our economy and putting people out of their homes? Did people go to jail?

Call it hyperbole if you want, but it's the reality we're living in.

And is it a coincidence that copyrights have been extended to coincide with Disney’s major properties being scheduled to move into the public domain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Like a lot of things in politics, it is a question of enthusiasm and motivation. There might not be a single individual person in this country in which reducing copyright protection is their most important issue (and if there is, I think that person has crazy priorities), but strengthening copyright is probably the single most important issue for Disney and other long-established media companies. Having a large group of people who are mildly in favor of something is much less likely to yield political change compared to a small group of people who feel incredibly strongly about that issue. This is the whole reason behind niche lobbying groups ranging from the NRA to the EFF and why those groups are able to have such a large impact on politics relative to their size.

There has been one copyright extension that can reasonably blamed on Disney lobbying.

There was one other that also affected Disney's copyright terms, but I can't find any evidence that Disney did any lobbying for that one, and even if they did it wouldn't have made a difference because that one had near universal support anyway because it was part of a major rewrite of US copyright law that did the most of the heavy lifting to make it feasible for the US to join the Berne Convention.

Your dismissal seems more hyperbolic than that statement. I think that statement is very plainly worded and uncontroversial.

May I suggest Kanopy, an excellent selection of streaming media free with a library card in the US?

Also, what about separating the delivery network providers from the content providers? Net neutrality would balance a lot of issues and reinvigorate competition and market forces.

In the context of constant growth encoded in the corporate DNA, corporate leadership has no other choice but make existing services more expensive and lobby to monetize things that were free (copyright extension).

The only reasonable way to fight against this is to write laws protecting society from this continuous encroachment.

Your library pays for that, it's not free for any library card, just libraries that pay for the resource. Hoopla is a similar service (with a worse catalog) that your library also may or may not pay for.

Kanopy is not available for Linux.

I believe it plays in the browser?

The following operating systems do not support DRM content protection:

- All Linux distributions (OpenBSD, Fedora, or Ubuntu)

https://help.kanopy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004589593-DRM-p...

This is the central concern. No matter how many platforms there are, there will be no, by definition, competition. The monopoly isn't on the platform, it's on the program. No one wants to subscribe to HBO or Amazon, they want Game of Thrones or Man in the High Castle.

I don't see the public interest angle here. This is merely entertainment. If even entertainment is something the government should be butting into because of unspecified "public interest" considerations, then what is outside the government's role?

Goodfellas, Dances with Wolves, Edward Scissorhands, Total Recall, Ghost, the Hunt for Red October, Back to the Future III, Pretty Woman, and the Godfather Part III were all released in 1990, 29 years ago. These were all created by a group of individuals, and studios spent millions of dollars paying those people to make those movies. The government had nothing to do with creating any of those movies. Why should the government be able to take those movies and release them for free?

The government actually heavily subsidizes the entertainment industry through tax breaks. In Canada, a huge portion of the economy of Vancouver is in entertainment, which basically exists entirely on the back of tax incentives provided by the government of British Columbia in order to attract outsourcing work from Hollywood. If those tax breaks ended, then the industry would likely vanish overnight to offshoring. Similar situations apply on a lesser scale throughout the US, for example in Louisiana [1].

[1]: https://katc.com/news/2019/03/29/study-film-tax-break-costs-...

Local governments give tax breaks to entice movies to be filmed in certain places instead of in other places. Presumably they get their money's worth in terms of local economic activity and tourism. That doesn't give them any claim to the resulting movies. (Governments also use tax breaks to entice major employers like Amazon to locate in one jurisdiction versus the other. Nobody would equate those tax breaks with the government somehow helping Amazon run its service.)

> Presumably they get their money's worth in terms of local economic activity and tourism.

No, they don't. The fact that Vancouver is Hollywood North is industry inside baseball. The public doesn't know or care that the work is all outsourced (which is in fact how Hollywood wants it). The subsidies exist to bring jobs to the region--especially to keep artists employed, which is seen as socially desirable.

> Nobody would equate those tax breaks with the government somehow helping Amazon run its service.

But they do. That's why the entire controversy in NYC existed regarding the tax breaks for "Amazon HQ2", for instance. People were not happy with the government effectively subsidizing such a rich company.

I don't necessarily endorse the grandparent post's proposal--it seems extreme--though I do believe copyright terms are presently too long. However, I do think that the fact that the public subsidizes the entertainment industry is a valid argument in favor of concessions of some kind, for the simple reason that the public deserves its money's worth.

It's worth pointing out that Virginia offered among the most miserly tax breaks in the Amazon HQ2 "competition" (about $500 million when most cities were offering $2-4 billion), and yet Arlington was still one of the locations chosen. The HQ2 "competition" was almost certainly a ruse to get the target jurisdictions, chosen before it ever started, to shell out as much cash as possible, so it's not surprising that there was a massive controversy over the tax breaks.

> The government had nothing to do with creating any of those movies. Why should the government be able to take those movies and release them for free?

The government wouldn't be "releasing" any of these movies; it'd instead be telling the movies' creators: "You chose to make these movies available to the public in a form that makes them vulnerable to being copied. 'To promote the progress of science and useful arts' [0], we the people are willing to intervene on your behalf — but only for a limited time — to stop others from doing such copying. As to those particular movies, your time is now up; if you want us to intervene again on your behalf, it'll have to be for something new you've created, not for the same old stuff."

[EDIT:] That said, of course, the specific duration that copyrights should have is certainly a valid subject of discussion and debate.

[0] U.S. Const. art. 1 sec. 8 cl. 8. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/law/us-constitution/

I think the separation between public and private interest may be more blurred thank you think. In an indirect ways, studios were able to spend money paying people to make those movies because the government provides a safe geographical space for that to happen. There's a reason you typically don't see many movies (certainly not entertainment movies) produced in countries ridden by war, for example. So a strong armed forces, internal police, a predictable legal system, etc., all of that is typically provided by a government and allows business, including movie studios, to run.

On a more direct way, I remember watching VHS movies as a kid in the 80s and there was an FBI piracy warning near the start of all tapes, so the studios do leverage the government to protect their business (and I don't have a problem with that in principle, if perhaps I disagree a bit with the extent of the protections).

By that reasoning, there is no reason for the government not to intervene in literally everything.

Maybe that’s true? Government is just a bunch of dudes, just like any corporation.

Should there be any areas of life where legislation doesn't apply?

Almost all creative works make the majority of their money in the first few years from their release, if not the first year itself. Movies, TV, etc. will still be extremely profitable businesses under a shorter copyright. Shorter copyrights also serve to help encourage creators and artists to continue to produce new works for the public to enjoy.

By this logic there should no copyright protection in the first place for entertainment. Why should the government use law enforcement resources to track down people and take away their freedoms because they copied a movie?

Only because the government is already involved, protecting their interests, is there even anything to "take" in the first place.

The government shouldn’t use law enforcement resources to enforce copyright. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to file a civil suit for infringement. That doesn’t cost the government anything other than the general cost of having courts.

There seems to be an assumption in this viewpoint that copyright is the state of nature for creative works, and removing copyright protections violates this natural order. This is the opposite of reality, though — copyright is an artificial restriction on expression and dissemination of knowledge, which would otherwise be free and unrestricted.

In other words, if you want to preserve or strengthen copyright, you're arguing for the government to butt in, not against it.

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