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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

It's a real shame that copyright lasts as long as it does so that people can only really get access to things in their parent's past rather than being able to do something with the things they grew up with.

I'm still a little shocked Disney didn't try to get another extension this last time. Maybe they did quietly and were rebuffed or foiled by the utter gridlock of the US Congress.

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IMO copyright should be short enough that things going into the public domain should be in the foreseeable future territory. So that it'd always be the choice of "do I watch this movie now and pay for it, or do I watch it in 5 years for free". This would disincentivize the current practice of hoarding copyrighted works for easy passive income and incentivize being actually useful for the society.

Ehh... I feel like this is heavily blockbuster-bias. If everything goes into the public domain in five years, authors will never make a dime (they already don't), and movie studios will literally just adapt the best books from the previous decade for free.

I think you need to have enough time to incentivize the creative arts to flourish. I'd say 30 to 50 years is probably fine. Enough where people are able to adapt their favorite things from their youth.

Maybe it should be different based on the type of the creative work. Movies will be fine with 3 years, music albums maybe 5-10, books maybe yes, even 30, and software (including games) let's say 10 years after release or 5 years after that particular version was last offered for sale, whichever comes first. My idea with this is that it should strike the balance between fairly compensating the author for their work and preventing the gross abuse of copyright we're currently seeing from major entertainment companies. For software, the goal is also to eliminate that whole "abandonware" grey zone that currently exists.

Movies might not work with that short of a timespan. At least formerly a good amount of the revenue happened long term on DVD and TV airings.

Do they? Usually, at least in all those movie databases, only the box office revenue is listed. And for good movies, that revenue alone covers the expenses (also listed in those databases) many times over. And, usually, if a movie failed in cinema, it's considered a failure overall. So I get the impression that it's only the cinema screenings that actually matter, and all the streaming and DVD deals are very much "nice to have" to squeeze a few more pennies.

It's not universal but a lot of movies made a lot on the long tail of DVD and broadcast rights. All the analysis articles about box office numbers are written long before the movies make it to other distribution channels. There's a whole sub category of movies out there that don't make it to the box office, "made for TV" and "direct to DVD/VHS", so need the longer tail to make their money.

But it doesn't last so long. Many countries are life plus fifty years.

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

The US is life of author plus 70 though meaning anything written in my lifetime will never be available in my lifetime. That number dominates for me personally and by dint of the weight and output of the US it has a big impact world wide too.

Disney's lobbying has been matched by tech companies who make money when more content is shared. Some more reading below.

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2022/12/20/a-tr...

Gridlock? They passed tiktok law in haste

That’s because they spammed every member of congress and they got really freaked out

Well yeah, but that’s xenophobia and neophobia. Try getting something done with positive motives.

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