Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
copyrightlately.com
copyrightlately.com
Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing.
No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.
Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this.
Until it changes, pirate everything.
The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.
Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.
This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.
It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.
No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.
Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.
No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.
The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.
That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.
If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.
It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.
In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.
Make the incentive "if I don't share my information in exchange for a patent, any of my engineers could leave for a competitor and share all of my information tomorrow anyway." You take the offer society gives, or you get nothing.
Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).
So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?
Looking past that specific word choice, there's an implication here that only the author would have an unbiased opinion on it. I'd argue that they're just as likely to have a bias that would cause them to argue for a policy that is unnecessarily onerous because by the same logic, they're not the ones who would be missing or on anything from it.
Saying it's all theft entirely misses the point.
There is if it's taken without license when it would otherwise be restricted...
The vast majority of works make the vast majority of their money during that time frame. Indeed, for some works (like software), it's still probably much too long!
Citing a few wildly extreme outliers as evidence that we should stick with anything remotely resembling the current scheme a) is either disingenuous or betrays a deep misunderstanding of statistics, and b) can only work based on an appeal to emotion derived from growing up under the current scheme and seeing a creator's work as indelibly theirs forever, rather than something that should, once they have been allowed to make a living from it for a reasonable time, become the collective property of all humanity.
I find it highly probable that the negotiation for the rights to adapt for the screen included contractual agreements for him to do so to prevent them from hiring someone cheaper who would screw with his intended vision. He had leverage to ensure this outcome. They didn’t pay him a great deal more than they could have paid some unknown name because they are nice and friendly.
I especially like no-permission-needed for commercial use with predetermined royalties. Throw in patents and I'll be your best friend for life.
Another reform notion I heard (IIRC): Require formal renewal of copyrights. $10 fee per year to cover expenses. Allows Disney to keep their Tug Boat Willie and Mickey Mouse for as long as they like, without borking the rest of society.
My own reform idea: Royalty also paid to the government. For all IP, for all time. To enjoy our govt's subsidies, protection (tort), and adjudication (contracts), you gotta pay.
The aircraft carrier groups, diplomats, intelligence services, and lawyers needed to keep our markets open don't just pay for themselves.
Expect something similar when the next big author dies; my prediction: JK Rowling.
Notes:
0 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/505
1- https://hughstephensblog.net/2023/12/18/winnie-the-poohs-cop...
Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity.
An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard; but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption amount means that few estates pay any tax.
> Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party.
A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of an untimely death.
Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.
JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
/s
This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a negative signal.
We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something.
Or more simply: if you’re not selling it presently, you don’t get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights are solved, and we can all move on.
I fundamentally disagree to only for one example in a thread here have a copyright of 5 years for a Book Author. Many book authors could never finish their series without their first books becoming public domain or so.
On the other hand Everything created by corporations i.e. where a corporation not a single human holds a copyright can get fucked.
This ain’t working for the interests of the public anymore, and AI has exacerbated it (large corps getting settlements, smaller creators getting shafted). We need a new model entirely that addresses these issues.
If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of that action.
And that's in the US, other countries have similar exceptions but they are also usually quite limited.
This is a fantastic example - the Harry Potter movies have already been wildly profitable, surely enough to have solidly incentivized their creation. And they are now firmly part of our collective cultural background, to the point that most of the value comes from the network effects of people who have watched them rather than the works themselves.
The first book was written in 1997, and released as a movie in 2001. The last book was written in 2007, and released as a movie in 2011.
Putting a 20-year limit on the copyright would mean that one could use the characters/story (from the book) starting in 2017 - either riffing on them or perhaps even a complete remake. And this would still be 6 years after the final movie was released. The movies themselves would of course each have their own 20 year periods of monetization. You could legally watch the whole series of movies on a personal computer starting in 2031, which is still 5 years away. This all seems eminently reasonable to me.
But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.
That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then a game development studio made a series of wildly successfully videogames based on his work, which definitely made way more money than his books, to the point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I struggle to imagine how it could be just that the videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him nothing.
Personally, I think 50 years strikes the best balance. Everything from the '60s would be fair use, so Spiderman would be public domain but not a wizard named Harry.
There's a reason why writers want their books to become videogames and or movies. I would not be surprised if the Tolkien estate made more money after the Peter Jackson movie came out than in all the decades before...
And most importantly artists are not children. If they don't have business sense enough to read a contract they should hire an agent.
Yeah, and why do you think he had those rights to sell? Copyright is a good thing, with flaws in its current implementation.
CDs and streaming are just advertisements for the concerts.
The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
But they don’t?
Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding.
Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes.
People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case.
The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
Often the property is never found and returned.
We all get legal protections for our property.
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written.
Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.
If what matters is actually revenue, well, revenue is already taxed when it’s incurred. Suppose there is no future revenue, do I get the tax back eventually?
With no offense to you or your novel; I would appraise an unpublished novel by an unknown author at something like $100, which might be too high. Some turn out to be worth much more, but most will be produce $0 or less for the author's estate.
Like what is the McDonalds tradework worth? What is tbe stream of payments?
For a copyrighted work, you would examine the work, find similar works, what were the stream of payments for similar works. Take into account age of the work, the artist's other works, etc.
McDonald's does hold copyright in many things. But many of those are unlikely to produce significant income; training videos, promotional materials, etc don't tend to sell for much if at all.
If you needed to appraise a new song by a popular artist, you could do a reasonable job by looking at the stream of payments generated by their average song, and projecting future payments based on the general trends of payments for songs over time. You might also consider current popularity of the artist/song and how that impacts longevity; songs don't acheive many sales initially often hit zero sales and never come back, whereas songs that chart tend to have continued, if meager, sales for a long time.
But, ok, copyright.
Who exactly is going to do these audits, find comparable works, etc? For every single copyright (500,000-ish registered in the US per year, far more unregistered but real copyrights)?
And you’d need to audit all existing copyrights… that song may have produced very little revenue, but then a big artist covers it, and the composition rights (but not performance rights) are suddenly worth a lot more.
It all seems like an exercise in applying engineering to law, which never goes well.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
Should I be forced to pay something every year to prevent some AI company from bidding $1 and taking ownership?
Your current situation is a prime example of the failure of current copyrights. You aren't incentivised to produce any new art, it was unearned as you weren't the author, and yet still the state enforces the copyright for you.
This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210
capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally. These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
Actually seems a bit weird to find a tax situation in the U.S that seems less beneficial to the person paying the tax than many other countries.
It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention.
Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not.
In some countries taxes are annual.
In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.
In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..
(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
I can understand some of the arguments for a time limit on copyright, but are you really claiming that you're being "creative" when you cut and paste?
5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us.
Fuck the copyright cartels.
There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.
Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.
These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?
What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected.
There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though.
I really don't like how the discussion on HN always ignores the ways copyright protects individual expression as a fundamental right. Instead we're STEM dorks, focusing on how getting rid of copyright protection lets us increase content volume at the entertainment factory.
Random people arguing for expanded public domain is not the same thing.
Next paragraph: "Mondrian died in 1944. Any of his works subject to a life-plus-70 regime would have entered the public domain" 10 years ago. Who even thought of including that in a legal argument??
There's all sorts of quirks for anything published before that rule got standardised more-or-less worldwide, but in general 1930-1945 is still like a legal grey area that can be challenged in court and you should be good to go for anything published before that. And don't get me even started on posthumous publications, that's a whole different can of worms where a family member might claim some contribution (like for example Anne Frank's father), pushing the copyright further to the life of the author + life of that family member + 70.
As a concept it existed in one way or the other pretty much ever since the printing press.
The original treaty, if I am not misunderstanding here: https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/berne/summary_berne includes a "dead + 50 recomended" protection since the 1908 revision, before that it was up to each country laws, and in 1948 it changed to "dead + 50 minimum mandatory". In 1993 it was raised to "dead + 70" in the UE, to be followed by the US with the same extension in 1988 in Sonny Bono Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act.
You're not contradicting anything I'm saying, you're just saying the same thing with more words because you don't understand where my argument comes from. What I don't understand is why you would even want to take credit for such a broken system to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...:
“For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed during the 28th year following publication. Copyright renewal has been automatic since the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992.
For works created before 1978, but not published or registered before 1978, the standard §302 copyright duration of 70 years from the author's death also applies. Prior to 1978, works had to be published or registered to receive copyright protection. Upon the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act (which was January 1, 1978) this requirement was removed and these unpublished, unregistered works received protection. However, Congress intended to provide an incentive for these authors to publish their unpublished works. To provide that incentive, these works, if published before 2003, would not have their protection expire before 2048.”
So I wasn't doing a legal analysis of which rule is the correct one, but rather observing how their arguments are ridiculous.
Copyright is primarily concerned with one-to-one recreations of existing works. That is the primary reason for copyright's existence. All the other stuff is built out of trying to close stupid loopholes that people would try exploit.
I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things better if they couldn't patent it?
Note that Tesla open sources its patents.
The problem, of course, is that many companies see patents as a way to rent-seek. Establish enough patents in your niche and now nobody can compete with you. This is particularly a problem in the modern world where technological advancements have accelerated so much that a 20 year long patent is an eternity. An entire industry can just die off in that time.
There is also this version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260301183248/https://copyright...
(Origin site is presently down.)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
Mondrian died decades ago. He is not creating any more. Copyright of his works is not serving us any more.
Copyright should have ended when the balance between encouraging his creation and encouraging others to create based on his works was reached. i.e. About 5 years after he made the piece.
Fuck the copyright parasites whining about this.
> 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
One could argue that a colored box promotes neither science nor useful arts, and therefore applying any copyright protection at all to this non-useful art is unconstitutional.
Let's just say that one day I found myself in the Tate Gallery with a Mondrian that needed some work... tech consultancy takes you into the most interesting places.
How does paying money to Mondrian's great great great great grandchildren enhance society?