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Comment by dotwaffle | Hacker News Reader

20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee. You ideally want it long enough that someone can benefit from their work, without being so long that society is unduly prohibited from creating derivative works.

If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.

For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...

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50 years is insane for software. There may be 1 or 2 versions of 1976 software that people still buy today, although I’m skeptical. 30 years is also far too long; same deal for 1996 versions of software. Who’s buying new copies of Windows 95 today? 20 years seems about right.

Continuing down that line, Windows Vista turns 20 in a few weeks, and is equally irrelevant. IIRC even the default Windows 7 installer has issues with AHCI, so your SATA SSD won't even work correctly out of the box, much less NVMe. And then of course there will be no video or networking drivers for modern hardware.

10 years seems closer to obsolescence, and that's for productivity software.

You only would license something that’s already successful.

How much money does George Lucas need, I guess he’d only have a networth of a few hundred million vs a few billion.

I make music and buy tons of it. I’ve never been like, yo Nas is coming out with a new project, I’ll just wait 20 years to buy it on sale.

Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.

Most of the money goes to some massive label.

Likewise, I don’t think Nas would struggle if his older albums were made public domain.

He’s still the only one who can perform the tracks live. He can still make new music, like the 6 projects he made in the last few years.

Sony/Columbia would only stop profiting off the deal they had an 18 year old sign decades ago.

> You only would license something that’s already successful.

That's the point. Someone finds something not successful, sees that they could make a lot of money off it, takes it for their own, has copyright over their new content. The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.

The point is that everything is copyrighted by default, unless you release it into the public domain.

> Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.

And that's right. Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it, if they haven't released it to the public domain?

You're assuming that copyright protects the big labels -- it protects your creations too. The most famous case of this is Charles Dickens: https://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/making-your-ma...

> The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.

This will happen regardless. We've already built a massive wealth of recordings over the last 100 years that, if the law is followed, will eventually become available for free use. Unless the idea is to lock it up forever in order to keep present artists from having to compete?

But 20+ year old culture largely loses relevance. Even in a world where people pay for access to everything via streaming, the most popular music from 2006 is basically unknown to gen alpha. Only the very coolest people are still listening to Jibbs' masterpiece, "Chain Hang Low." In fact, one might argue that if it did cause people to retain their connection to previous culture, that such "mining" would be a positive (indeed, Jibbs could not have produced what he did without standing on the shoulders of his predecessors).

> Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it

Pretty hard to send money to the afterlife.

50 years after the album came out means that most of the original artists aren’t going to be here.

With LLMs training on everyone’s copyrighted material anyway we’ll need to rethink copyright anyway.

A lot of media is defacto lost anyway as the rights holders refuse to republish it.

A 20 year period makes it much easier to save this stuff.

If the thing wasn’t successful in 20 years, someone else taking it and making it successful will do more good to the original creator than letting it languish in obscurity until they die and then someone takes it anyway.

> 20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee.

“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?

Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.

I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.

You're assuming copyright exists to protect studios first. No, it protects everyone equally. A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story. That is precisely what would happen with a short-term copyright system. It won't be that studios will wait 20 years, they'll just look predominantly at 20 year old publications to see what just became available.

The studio doesn't need to, they're powerful enough to change it enough to be legally distinct and advertise it enough that people forget the original.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

> No, it protects everyone equally.

That is a laughable fantasy. It protects those with money and legal resources to enforce it, and that’s it.

I’m reminded of the case where some late night show played a video they found online as part of a segment, then later were able to copyright strike the original video. The original creator, being an individual, had no recourse.

> A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story.

Again, laughable. Disney has done it but was never sued for being too big. It was done to Harlan Ellison too (who did spend years fighting it and won). Ripoffs happens frequently, you don’t hear about them that much precisely because studios in general know to rip off those without the means to put up a fight.

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