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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Today copyright protection is in fact much longer than 75 years in the US.

For personal works, it's life of author + 70 years. So if you write a poem today and live another 60 years, your poem will enter public domain in the year 2145.

For "works made for hire" (which includes most commercial works), the term of copyright is either 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

So the movie "Ant Man" will enter public domain in 2110... Assuming that the US Congress doesn't extend the deadline indefinitely (which the Supreme Court has permitted).

Law text: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302

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Nothing will ever enter the public domain while Winnie the poo is bringing in the billions.

Since long copyright term exists solely to protect media companies' IP brand families, there could be an exponential tax on copyright extension.

The first nine years of copyright are free. After that, you pay $100 to renew for the tenth year. At year 20, the price is $1000 / year. At year 30, the price is $10,000 / year, which is still perfectly reasonable for profit-generating IP.

The 70th year of copyright will cost a billion each year. At that price, it becomes a major board room decision whether to keep milking the same IP or rather come up with something new.

The profits from this tax could go to culture and education, similar to what is done with gambling profits in many European countries that have a state-owned gambling monopoly.

Ideas like this is what we need.

I'd like to upvote this twice.

I am generally very anti-copyright ( I hold that ten- to twenty years should be enough for the creator/their family) but I really like this exponential tax proposal.

That's an odd shifting of the Overton Window. I would generally think that someone who was anti-copyright would start from the position that copyright shouldn't exist at all. And that someone who was very anti-copyright would be actively protesting against the law.

It's a compromise. If copyright really is so important to your business model, then you can afford to pay for the extension. Once it stops bringing in money, it becomes public domain within a decade.

As it is now, all art that does not generate money is forgotten and remains inaccessible forever.

In particular, there's a ton of interesting non-fiction (eg, niche history books containing original research) that's out of print but not out of copyright.

Nobody benefits from this. If we had a reasonable "orphaned works" law, the internet could contain much much more useful information.

Or, more likely, publishers would allow print-on-demand ordering of any book in their collection.

Either way, it's win-win.

Life of the author unless the author dies within 20 years of start of initial copyright in which case immediate family can extend by 20 more years, giving offspring, spouse etc, a chance to gain income from a deceased's work. (i chose 20 years because that would be baby to adult in the case of offspring).

Companies: 20 years then stfu. Remember, they can still sell their product, and they could come up with a scheme to mark it original or authentic, like wines and foods now do.

About companies this is what I think: If Mickey Mouse goes off copyright, sure there would be copycats making Mickey toys and not paying royalties/fees.

Possibly somebody non-Disney approved would be making a Mickey Mouse movie.

However, Disney could still be certifying approved toys(Nintendo seal worked quite well, there were non Nintendo cartridges but they were hard to find and generally horrible , I was tinking Custer's Revenge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer%27s_Revenge but that was a non Atari approved cartridge).

And if someone can make a new Mickey movie that stands along Fantasia then more power to them is what I say. Disney has been sitting on Mickey laurels for too long.

Atari didn't approve cartridges. That's exactly how something like Custer's Revenge got made.

Nintendo didn't just approve cartridges by attaching a sticker to them, there was a protection chip inside (sold to the manufacturer by Nintendo) that allowed access to the NES. The reverse-engineering of this chip led to lawsuits:

https://goo.gl/Cy736g

You're conflating trademark and copyright. They're two different things.

The copyright on Steamboat Willie expiring means that the cartoon, Steamboat Willie, falls into the public domain. That doesn't mean that anyone can make "copycat" Mickey Mouse toys, infringing on Disney's trademark.

You are correct, but then there is even less sense for Steamboat Willie to be still copyrighted (besides the obvious use in opening credits of recent Disney features, which the cynical me thinks is some attempt to extend the copyright protection not just a homage to the humble beginnings).

If the MM toys still have trademark protection why shouldn't Steamboat Willie go to public domain?

I would assume it's Disney's position that copyright terms should be indefinite. Such a policy allows them to indefinitely extract rents from the "assets" of "intellectual property" that their earlier works represent.

I don't agree with the position, morally, but from a purely practical perspective it makes sense that they'd want to maintain the value of these assets ad infinitum.

The flip side of this is that the boardroom decision will come down to can the billion dollar tax be passed onto the consumer or competitors? If you apply that to some other forms of IP like patents, the answer is "quite possibly yes"

The individual creative will relinquish copyright after 20 years, even if they're still hoping somebody might one day make a film out of their work and are kinda keen on having some sort of creative control. On the other hand, Disney will potentially still be shifting enough videos and merchandise to be renewing copyrights up to year 49. It's not exactly unprecedented for major studios to create high value brand families out of 20 year old books either, but in this case they'd rarely need to cut the author in on the profits.

Other than the revenue raising potential, that actually seems worse than the current situation for skewing copyright in favour of the brand families.

I like our german version "Urheberrecht". It is different from copyright because it cannot be transfered. Some comic character cannot be owned by a corporation which milks it for decades and centennials. An author can only give a licence to a company.

I always wonder what really happens whenever I transfer copyright for my papers to some publisher. It probably has no effect here in Germany, but is it valid in the US? Then I also wonder if TTIP might change anything about this?

Oh, please. That's a distinction without a difference unless you're saying that German authors can't hire legal representation or assistants and must actively negotiate and manage each license solo.

The distinction is that once the author dies the work falls into the public domain. For as long as they are alive they can license it to a company, and the company can defend it or do whatever, but when the owner dies the copyright dies with them.

I don't see how that can be possible. The Berne Convention established a minimum of 50 years after death and the EU harmonized to 70 years after death.

Some parts can not be transferred, but others can, particularly usage rights (publishing etc.) and licensing happens all the time.

It's a great idea - if IP is property, it should be taxed like property - but then you realise how few places have a property tax because property-owning money dominates the political process.

Are those fees 'per work'? Is it one fee per episode of a TV show? One fee for every issue of the New York Times? You'd be incentivizing IP creators to combine as much content into one conceptual 'work' as possible.

Bring it closer to home. Would it be one fee per source-file in, say, the Linux codebase? Much of that code is over 20 years old. When you modify one of those sourcefiles, you're creating a new derivative work which has its own copyright date and author, so do you need to pay to extend copyright on every version of every file, lest they fall into the public domain and then lose the protection of the GPL?

Every new update under GPL get's it's own copywrite date. So, having a 20 year old Linux codebase enter the public domain would do little.

I like this thinking.

I think this was Larry Lessig's position at one point. I think it's a a nice, practical solution that acknowledges that copyright is a political animal - let Disney keep Mickey forever, but the public gets everything of a lesser order of magnitude in value faster.

The problem with copyright is one of corruption, which a copyright tax does not solve. At the point of billion dollar renewals the board decision becomes, "How can we best spend our marketing and lobbying dollars to gain an exemption to or remove this tax?"

It also is very imbalanced. The average IP holding corporation will be much more able to pay $1000 or $10000 fee to hold onto a copyright, as well as able to determine which copyrights will be profitable in the future. They are also better able to leverage marketing power to make content profitable more quickly.

In contrast the average individual content creator is more emotionally attached to a work, less able to pay fees, and less able to market it effectively in order to make it profitable so he or she can afford the fees.

Patents I can understand needing often to be shorter than they end up being, but personal copyright I'm not so disturbed by. When should people be able to publish derivative copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls on self-published Amazon accounts without royalties going to Hemingway's estate?

Works made for hire, 100 years feels like a really long time.

Because the idea that one individual - who is now long dead - can create a work that then should be protected for several generations of descendants is a wealth stratifier.

What implicit societal value are it's modern beneficiaries creating that entitles them to that revenue?

It's social status and worth are that value. At creator's life + 75 years, the existing law is the lifetime, sort of, of the creator's offspring, not several generations.

Should I be able to take his bibliography, self-pub it on Amazon with flashy covers and take the profits from it? I'm not sure.

If you are able to figure out how to make a profit with a public domain text, you are very entitled to them.

If he wrote the books half a lifetime ago?

What's a reasonable time, then? 10 years? 20? From when it was published, or when it was written? It can take years for a manuscript to move through editing, and many of our beloved classics did terribly their first run or two.

Is it anymore fair should a publishing house go all 90's Star Wars on works their stable of authors wrote a few decades after first publication, with the authors not seeing a penny from them?

75 to, what, 150 years may indeed be too much, but the answer is not so clear as to what the alternative should be.

I don't know what time is reasonable, but I think there has to be a deadline at some point.

I'm trying to argue that if after a finite X amount of time the work falls into the public domain, then very likely nobody will make very much profit from that work in its unmodified original form at all, unless they provide some sort of service that is of value.

Also it opens new opportunities for _everybody_ to build upon the previous work with a unique and good fresh idea, which they can then try to market.

The original author had their fair chance to make money and monetise their idea to the best of their ability. Now let's find out what other people can create from it.

Copyright could be separated into multiple tiers that expire over time. First all rights reserved, then CC-BY-NC after 20, then CC-BY-SA with moral rights to protect living authors' reputations, then CC-BY, then CC-0.

At creator's life + 75 years, the existing law is the lifetime, sort of, of the creator's offspring, not several generations.

No, not at all. That would only be the case if authors generally died immediately after the birth of their children.

If you live to see your grandchildren, which isn't exactly uncommon, they'll still have your copyright inheritance long after their parents have died.

With the recent increase in lifetimes, it'll be common for great-grandchildren to have the inheritance of copyright over works for almost their whole lives.

It will still run out after 75 years... So, sure, the grandkids will manage the estate for a decade before it expires. It doesn't say "the lifetime of the copyright holder at expiration," unless I've missed something.

If we're going to get silly, recent increases in lifetimes are also being followed by lower birth rates and parents having children older, so no it doesn't follow that three full lifetimes will be covered by these copyrights. I know copyright isn't popular here so I'll leave this be, but let's not get hyperbolic, please.

Hmm, It's not uncommon today for grandchildren to be in there 30's when a grandparent dies. Thats around children having age also.

I could easily see it being common already for an author to die at age 90, leaving children (aged ~60), grand children (aged ~30) and great-grandchildren (aged ~1)

That gives all of those people 75 more years of income from the original authors work. Which leaves us with grandchildren (aged ~105), great grandchildren (aged ~75), great-great-grandchildren (aged ~45), great-great-great-grandchildren (aged ~15) once the copyright expires, if it is never extended.

I'm not sure i see why the great-great-great-grandchildren of an author deserve the income from that work into their mid to late teens.

Yes. If you can do that, so could anyone else. And Gutenberg would give it away for free, so if you can make a few cents, why not?

The only reasonable provision to make for the offspring of a creator is to extend the copyright term to a maximum of the creator's lifespan, plus the mean human gestation period, plus the age of legal majority. For the sake of simplicity, we'll just call it 20 years.

I'm willing to support a creator's minor children until they are old enough to support themselves. I am not willing to give them a free pass for their entire lives just because they were lucky enough to be born to a popular artist.

I wouldn't even let my own kids freeload off of me once they get old enough to leave home, and I actually like them.

Nor do I think that an artist should be able to make something while young, and rest on the same laurels until the day they die. Certainly, they should be able to retire at the same age as the rest of us, and expect their last work to remain protected until they die, so the regular term should probably be no more than the numbers conservative retirement planners use: the 95th percentile for life expectancy from age 65, or about 35 years.

So a maximum term of 35 years, and a minimum term of 20, with the term for works in between those ages ending upon the death of the creator. Works done for hire would simply have a term of 20 years.

That's very reasonable, in my opinion.

But at the same time, anyone could distribute the work for free. Self-publishing on Amazon would have to add value to the work in some way, for example in formatting it as an e-book.

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