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Comment by gmoore | Hacker News Reader

WTF is wrong with Apple TV - It's Charlie Brown for christ sakes....

American culture has been redefined as 'Intellectual Property' with the intent of controlling it in perpetuity.

I think it goes rather the other way, that intellectual property is distinctively morally defensible --- it wouldn't exist at all without its creators and investors, unlike the land we stole from indigenous people --- and the idea that you can declare something "American culture" and thereby expropriate it from its rightful owners is alarming.

> rightful owners

When it's the original author or within a reasonable time frame of their publication the concept of rightful owners makes sense.

The idea of an essentially immortal non-living entity or a 5th generation niece/nephew being a rightful owner to a work is not a view I agree with. Society is the background that allows works to be created, at some point control over those expressions is ceded back to society.

A company funds the creation of a piece of content, taking the risk that it will be worth enough to recoup both that content and all the rest of their portfolio of titles, most of which are worth approximately nothing. I see the moral claim they have on that, even 100 years later. I do not see what moral claim we have, at all.

Markets don't always work, but here's a place where they've worked exceptionally well. We are in a wonderland of available content. It has never been easier to find something great to watch or listen to. If Disney wants to charge me $100 to watch Steamboat Willie, what do I care? I'll just watch something better, and probably not pay anything for it.

> I do not see what moral claim we have, at all.

All art is based upon the past. Think of how many times the plays of Shakespeare have been remade and reinterpreted. His works represent a share heritage that generations of artists have freely borrowed from.

And Shakespeare did the same thing! Hamlet is based on a 13th century legend of Amleth. Should a high school production of Hamlet in 2022 be required to pay royalties to the 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus?

> Markets don't always work, but here's a place where they've worked exceptionally well.

I agree but I don't see why a reasonable fixed term, such as 25 years, wouldn't work as well and allow the cultural well to refill. Think of how liberating it would be to be able to, for example, freely sample music from 1993 or earlier. And every year we all get more!

Even the term we had in 1909, over a hundred years ago, long before Disney existed, the content we're talking about wouldn't be available today.

Under the 1909 act, works before 1963 with extension and works before 1991 without extension of their copyright term would now be coming under public domain. Could you elaborate your point? I fail to see how a difference of 3 years invalidates the previous posters point.

The Charlie Brown Halloween Special would not be public domain under the 1909 Copyright Act, the point being that copyright extensions are not the reason network TV isn't broadcasting it.

It would be in two years at which point any network could broadcast it, AppleTV has likely bought the rights for many years to come making copyright extension a cogent component of this discussion in my opinion.

In the counterfactual world where the US hadn't passed the Copyright Act of 1976, which is not the "Mickey Mouse extension" that people talk about when we talk about extensions. That's a world in which the United States has sharply lower copyright terms than Europe. And even in that world, Charlie Brown still isn't public domain this year.

It's just not a strong argument.

Don't forget: you were paying for Charlie Brown last year when it ran on network TV; you just weren't paying the same way you are now. This is really just a story about how broadcast TV is being obsoleted by streaming; it's not a copyright extension story.

I didn't mention Disney? You asked what moral claim they would have to that work and I'm arguing that copyright is a govt imposed restriction on the natural right of humans to create and share derivative works.

If we are citing legal trivia the original constitution of 1790 allowed for a copyright term of 14 years, with a single extension, for a total of 28 years. So the halloween special would have entered the public domain in 1994.

No, the Copyright Act of 1790 did that. A specific term for copyright appears nowhere in the Constitution, which simply delegates to Congress the authority to authorize monopolies to authors and inventors.

That brings us back around to the extermination of a phrase from the article "common cultural experiences".

Consider the cultural difference between the gen-x experience of "every gamer" knowing the first level map of FPS game "Doom" vs the experience of never meeting another human playing in a procedurally generated space game like Elite Dangerous or No Mans Sky.

We can all entertain ourselves alone and very cheaply, its just if none of us have anything in common there is no more "We" anymore.

The effect can also be seen in political divides and other areas of life.

In the linked article, they intentionally, for some reason, confound "Friends" and "The Office" as common cultural experiences. However, even that is false. Friends finale in 2004 had 53 million viewers, The Office finale (US version, 2013) had a mere 5 million viewers. Quite a rapid cultural implosion!

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