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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Quite right, but the solution to this isn't physical discs, or owning the "movie file", it's legislative. We need more restrictive legislation around storing then data mining user activity, and how that information is used. This applies to everything we do on our devices, but also interaction in the real world too.

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With all due respect, and even considering that I am generally a fan of the "no technical solutions to legal problems", but this concrete example is where I draw the line: there is a clear benefit of a 3rd party _not being able_ to trace you _at all_ ; compared to whichever legal restrictions you want to put on it which may not even be physically nor technologically enforceable (at the end of the day they have the addresses and "bytes of the movie requested" for every user they served it to, no matter what the law says).

Not to mention the public (as usual) doesn't even seem to mind about their user activity being mined; at this point, even "western democracies" do it with various coatings of paint. Such democracies enforcing companies not to mine user activity, appetizing and trivial as this mining is, is just wishful thinking both today as well as at any point of history.

I would never exchange a broadcast medium where it is _impossible_ for the broadcaster to track me with one where tracking me is practically a side effect of its normal operation, even if I had the personal written guarantee of the current President of the Republic that the broadcasters would not be able to actually use any of the data they mine from it.

Owning a physical disc also comes with additional legal protections. Once you own the copy, many agreements become non-enforceable. This applies to a lesser degree to software (since the installation step involves making a copy), but even then there are protections.

Which is why media companies hate physical discs.

They view the second hand market as lost revenue and libraries as legal thievery.

Owning a copy doesn't just protect you, but the content itself as well. It means that Disney can't edit or censor the work post-release. It means they can't stop it from being accessed entirely.

...or just drastically shorten the copyright terms to a few years, and watch it wherever and however after it's in public domain.

That's a pipe dream, it's just not going to happen. Pushing for copyright change is a distraction for making actual change.

We need change now.

And this will end up only hurting smaller creators. Disney can afford to churn out a ton of content every few years, whereas a novel/movie/art/etc. may be an individual's life's work.

So is the code I wrote 5 years ago and I don't have the right to rent seek the whole world for next 70 years with it.

What does this even mean? If you chose to work for someone, you don't own shit.

It means what I wrote it means - there's no inherent reason why any content creator should be entitled to rent for a text they wrote or image they put together for their whole lifetime. A carpenter selling his work of art doesn't get rent for 70 years. Neither does a painter. Or a software developer based on the code they commited. What makes a writer or a singer (in reality, for MOST content that would be a publisher megacorporation) so special, that they deserve rent until end of life for a piece of text they wrote?

Let me reiterate, VAST, VAST majority of all cultural works aren't owned by authors themselves, but their publishers which don't pass on most of the rent they collect. Huge piece of this is owned by rent-seeking megacorporations collecting rent for things they did not create and which royalty agreements have passed long since.

Make copyright 20 years - most profits from content are made in first 5 years. 15 extra on top to be fair. After that, the artists will just actually have to create something new to earn money - just like everyone else in the world.

Someone who only ever published a single work almost certainly was never a professional author / artist / whatever.

Really? That would have been news to Harper Lee.

No it wouldn't.

In no way are smaller creators "hurt" by shortening copyright. They'd still be able to enjoy their special privileges long enough to make plenty of money, and can continue to make money on their works long after they have entered the public domain.

Pushing for copyright change is actual change. It's just unlikely to happen while our law makers are representing the interests of corporations instead of the people.

Sure, but owning a physical disc / movie file is also part of it.

> We need more restrictive legislation around storing then data mining user activity

How would such a law be enforced?

You don't know if your data is being mined and it's way to easy for a company to simply lie to a regulator about it. If they are following good security practices, it would be impossible for a regulator to really know whether or not that's going on.

It's either that or give the government backdoors into info systems so they can verify nobody is mining data... which seems not good.

I'd want some way to coerce companies into making physical media but I'm not sure that can be done. Perhaps as part of the library of congress? It seems like it would probably be reasonable for the government to say "If you won't provide physical media prints of your content, we will".

> I'd want some way to coerce companies into making physical media but I'm not sure that can be done.

Don't worry about physical media. Formats come and go. In order for a company to have any copyright protections at all on a work, a high quality digital version should have to be submitted to the copyright office which should automatically make that copy available at copyright.gov the instant the copyright on the work expires. Any edits or censored versions a company puts out later would then need to be copyrighted and submitted to the copyright office separately making sure that the originals are always preserved and available.

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