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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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...

> 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.

> 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).

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.

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