I feel like a two or three year copyright could be even worse that current state — large publishers would probably just wait out artists and steal their work.
“Nice album kid, bet it’ll sell great 3 years from now”
But it's public domain. You can't exactly "steal" something that already belongs to everyone, including you.
While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them. In creative fields it often takes many years to build up a portfolio and a following, if you've not been picked up by a major promoter.
In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.
Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain.
In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where copyrights on Linux have expired, we'll may very well see contributions drop dramatically as the largest contributions start to closed-source their branches of Linux.
It affects everyone. Most only negatively.
Right, that's why we're trying to find ways to limit the damage it does to everybody else.
The GPL-vs.-BSD flamewar you're trying to start is only mildly relevant. The various BSD and Apache contributors aren't campaigning against the use of their code by Apple and Microsoft, either. The point is that there's nothing wrong with going out and making derivative works of other people's creative work; it's how all creative work is done.
I would be really pissed if i got a "custom fork" of a novel and didn't also get the original, or at least a diff of changes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...
It needs an overhaul. But the current system heavily favors entrenched interests so won't happen.
What a weird thing to rail against. I'm certainly unconvinced the world would be magically better without people organizing to produce content.
Maybe there's some issues with copyrights, but as far as I can tell, almost any organization would attempt to preserve profits. We, as a people, then go through and create legislation which curbs rampant abuses whether that's environmental pollution, or unsafe kids' toys, or overly lengthy copyright claims.
But the idea people can't get together and make movies, that's a new one.
Often at the expense of everything else, including common sense. Despite their current revenues already covering their expenses, many times over.
> But the idea people can't get together and make movies, that's a new one.
They can, but they will own shares in them, either split equally or proportionally to their contribution.
My idea here is that you would have the option of either paying right now, or waiting when the copyright expires and getting it legally for free. In our current system people don't even consider that copyrights have an expiry date, they operate as if they're effectively indefinite. And the current system doesn't work anyway — the majority of the society just isn't having it. Everyone has pirated something at some point.
Covid has been nearly 2 years, and for many of us it feels both like yesterday and also like forever ago, for example.
And then you'll have people that want to watch the movie of something, so they're willing to pay the video company for instant access, but the movie is based off a script someone wrote, or a book someone wrote, and that book is at least 2 years old.
RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example.
> RR Martin would make zero dollars from Game of Thrones, for example.
whats the long tail look like for popular books?
my impression was, most books that make any money are hugely popular for a short time, then basically fall off a "sales cliff"... i wonder if anyones done any comprehensive stories about this subject.
The minute you want to express yourself to others, you're no longer in it for self-expression.
And regardless of your opinion on what should and should not exist, people should be fairly compensated for their endeavors, even if those endeavors are to create leisure activities for others.
Copyright is an attempt to enable creators to get compensation for their work. This is one thing the people who rail about the ease of reproduction miss. It was never about the difficulty of reproduction, it was always about the difficulty of creation.
How do we reward that when we are allowed to freely copy their efforts without the need to consider their contribution? It's one of the few things I like about a subscription or Patreon model. We're paying directly for the effort of creation.
> That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work?
afaik i didn't sign any copyright assignment in my work contract...
i wonder what the legal basis is for that?
> And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends.
sounds super cool if it could work... all the stuff i made, when reused somewhere by a company, i get a residual... the more valuable, the more used, and the more i get... that could be pretty awesome (hypothetically)
But now, it is dead simple to propagate someone's work once they've finished the act of creation.
And this isn't a discussion if others are getting their fair due. Even if they are not, it does not mean we should shaft everyone. Everyone should be fairly compensated for their work. But not enforcing some level of protection for the creation of art is pretty much ensuring no one is compensated for their work. Fairly or not.
I don't think the system would function without transferable copyrights. A movie might have 10,000 people who've contributed to it. Managing the copyrights without some kind of legal agreement would be a nightmare. I get the spirit of the comment (to prevent generations of people from owning and profiting from the works of people they never knew), but eliminating copyright transfership probably doesn't solve that.
Perhaps this would affect less known artists. I would be willing to keep the copyright until the first 100,000 or 1,000,0000 worth of product is sold.
Most movies are fixed in a tangeble medium months before week one. Sometimes years. Component parts (principle filming, scripts, original music, if any) are routinely finished at least a year before release. A rush to get everything out to enjoy the full 3 years of income potential would further push out the couple of films a year made where people actually cared to do things right.
20-30 years might be right, though. Or one of the escalating fees for renewal after a reasonable period, preferably with a required deposit of the work so when it becomes public domain it can be easily distributed.
1. You're only considering works published by huge multinational publishers with the gigantic marketing budgets required to get immediate traction
2. You assume that works are published on a large scale for their initial publishing
Small time artists can spend years trying to get a work picked up by large publisher. Those who don't choose to use large publishers may be finding new audiences over longer periods.
Assuming that copyright should be designed around the use-cases of Comcast or Disney is the reason we're in the position we're in now.
Sure, under the current system.
The question is how many people that would have bought the media would just wait out the copyright. Once you're into these short lengths of time, it's a lot.
When you're talking about timelines as short as weeks, you're going to get a ton of people waiting. They might still go to a theater, even, but one with much cheaper tickets.
How many at 3 years specifically? I'm not sure, but it's a risk to be considered.
It needs to be something like 12 + 12 or 20 + 20, or even 20 + infinitely continuable for a gradually increasing cost. It still has the potential issue of waiting out that 24 to 40 years; but companies are less likely to do that, when a few years is basically nothing.
It's been 2 years since covid started, for example.
The more effective approach would be to simply remove the economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no one's able to profit off it in the first place and spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer penalized.
The purpose of copyright protection, which was a controversial issue at the time the US Constitution was drafted, is written in the Copyright Clause: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Anything beyond that stated purpose is hindering "the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
That copyright terms are limited is essential, and should optimize the purpose, not the profit of publishers who go unmentioned.