I think copyright length is the biggest issue, I don't see why it has to be more than 2 or 3 years. Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly.
If an indie artists created a song a studio could immediately remake the song and sell it before the artists had any distribution in place. 2 to 3 years should give the artists the opportunity to make some profit from his music.
Hardly. If the length were 2-3 years then the studios could (and probably would) remake songs by indie artists which didn't become popular in the first 2-3 years.
Copyright of 2-3 years is better than no copyright at all, but it's so short that it's basically useless.
Studios would spend their own money remaking songs that had failed to garner interest in the first place? Not only does that seem like a way to make a lot of flops, but if the original flopped for some reason that's correctable by someone else in order to make a hit, then isn't it a win for everyone for there to be a hit remake (the original writer/artist at least gets recognition that they would otherwise not have had)?
I have more of a problem with the fact that it could happen.
Besides, you really don't think there would be a market for taking less well known songs, rebranding them to make them palatable to the masses, and selling that? I can't imagine that if it were completely legal, they wouldn't try.
What about artists whose songs take more than 2 or 3 years to become popular? You don't think an artist should get anything if he writes a song that does so-so until it is featured a few years later in a hit movie and then the song becomes a hit?
Or what about people who write books? Shouldn't they get money if their book is turned into a movie? With only 2 to 3 years of copyright, many books will go public domain long before a major movie can be put together.
I think it deserves mention that without copyright, a studio doesn't even need to remake a song, they could rather simply and legally re-release the original, now public-domain song.
This is way too short. For example: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is currently #52 on Amazons top sellers list and has been in the top 100 for 1500 days now. I don't know what the best time for copyright protection is, but 2-3 years isn't it.
The vast, vast, vast majority of published works are ephemera: news articles, magazine articles, technical publications, sports broadcasts, TV programs, etc. The economic lifetime of many of these is a few days or weeks.
The original term of copyright was 14 years, with one extension. This has grown to the current ~105 years.
Economic present-value analysis shows that the present value of an additional year of copyright past a couple of decades is virtually nil. As an incentive to create NEW works, global copyright extension makes zero sense. This argument hasn't been tested by SCOTUS, though Lawrence Lessig has stated that he might have done better in Eldred v. Ashcroft if he'd made that argument rather than claiming continued extensions violated the "for limited terms" Constitutional clause.
7HOHEP was published in 1989, giving it a 22 year life to date. Frankly, I don't think it's all that outstanding, but that's another story.
While I agree that 2-3 years is probably too short time, your reasoning is wrong. The purpose of copyright should be to incentivise the creation of creative works, not to perpetually reward the owners of works with a sustained commercial value.
This is a great argument, but a bit too idealistic in my opinion. If copyright kicks in a few years after I write my hit novel and then I see my revenue plummet to $0 even though I know tons of people are still willing to pay me for it, then I'd be less willing to write another book because of this. I'd be willing to bet that the next JK Rowlings of the world would fight tooth an nail to prevent any type of copyright change that doesn't at least extend until the authors death. Rowling and Stephen King aren't just in it for the money, but they do want to get paid.
But the constitution gives Congress a wide latitude in the implementation, which is why the Supreme Court is unwilling to curtail the perpetual extensions that got us where we are today.
Why should the author's death have any bearing on the length of copyright? That seems entirely unfair to the estate of the hypothetical dead author whose bestselling crowning achievement was written on his death bed, and entirely unfair to the public who want to have the works of unusually long-lived authors enter the public domain sooner.
This was just a hypothetical, extend it even after the authors death, this is fine by me. I'd like to see copyright such that the actual creator of the work defines how long the item stays under copyright. I say 1 year? Fine. I say until my death? Great. I say this book shall remain under copyright for 300 years? So be it. Take the good with the bad.
Authors sell the rights to their books for income. The shorter the copyright period is the less valuable those rights will be. So it's not a question of "sustained commercial value", it's a question of the value of rights at the time of publication. 2-3 years would make writing a hobby for all but the very most popular authors.
I don't really care if the rights are less valuable. The author has no inherent (property) right to tell me that I can't make copies of his book. Furthermore, society would benefit if the book were in the public domain. It would be available from more sources than just the one state-granted monopoly that's selling them now.
>Furthermore, society would benefit if the book were in the public domain. It would be available from more sources than just the one state-granted monopoly that's selling them now.
No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be available from any source, because it would never get written at all. There's only so much time people are willing to put into an unpaid hobby.
Anyone who thinks it's worth the money, anyone who wants to thank him for writing a book, anyone who wants to encourage him to make more books, anyone who makes an impulse buy, anyone who wants a physical copy... you know, all the same exact people who pay for it now.
Except for all the people who will be happy to get it for free instead, which they couldn't do previously without breaking the (copyright) law. If you were able to walk into your local Barnes & Noble tomorrow and everything was free to take, I'm sure you wouldn't be ponying up the money for everything you walked out the door with in your arms.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Will they still pay when the novelty wears off, though? Also, it's one thing to send money to a guy who makes you laugh. How many people would voluntarily send money for a textbook or an SAT prep workbook?
I doubt anyone would be buying music if Napster hadn't been shut down.
> I doubt anyone would be buying music if Napster hadn't been shut down.
Did you actually use Napster during its heyday? Of all the P2P software I've ever tried, it was probably the worst--or perhaps just the one most poorly suited to casual piracy. The search system was a joke. Even when your search turned up results, it was hit or miss whether they were actually what you were looking for. My favorite example was a file named "Beethoven's 9th symphony - by Mozart" (it was actually a Handel piece).
Now it's easy to find private torrent trackers with huge, well-maintained collections in very high quality. Comments and ratings make it easy to decide which of several versions to download, and moderators will even help look for rare files if someone can't find what they want.
I think the death of Napster was a big favor to pirates everywhere.
I'm sure bittorrent & private trackers is better for the discerning pirate, however napster was far more accessible.
You simply typed in what you wanted, waited for the search to finish and clicked to download rather than found an indexing site, selected a torrent based on "seeds" and "peers" and then worried about things like magnet links.
Many people who are not tech savvy and want to pirate either get their friends to do it for them or are still using kazaa and friends.
I also imagine that Louis C.Ks audience is of a particular demographic where this may work (think relatively Internet savvy & intelligent , middle class 21-40 year old white people with disposable income).
If you were somebody creating lowest common denominator entertainment for an unemployed mother to put their kids in front of do you think you would get the same results?
You're asking the wrong question. The question isn't "would '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' be making less money today if copyright were shorter?" (obviously yes). The real question is, "Would '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' been written in the first place if copyright were shorter?"
This is a much more complex question, and I'd argue the answer is probably yes, even if copyright was as short as 2-3 years. The writer of '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' didn't know ahead of time that it would become a perennially popular international bestseller, so the potential revenue from 50+ years of copyright protection likely played a small role in his motivation.
Personally, I'd like see copyright entirely abolished. However, I think as a compromise something in the 2-5 year range could work.
This is plenty of time to exploit the financial possibilities of the initial release of a creative work, and it still allows remixes and adaptions in a reasonable time frame.
There is already a specification between employees and private inventors, and I like how it favors the individual discovery. Even though that just leads businesses to say every discovery was by the owner.
In a perfect world, copyright produced by big name corporations such as Microsoft would last 5 years or so, so that a product they make can mature, take market, they can make their profit, and then it goes public domain. They can still sell licenses for the automatic updates and such, and they don't need to make the source available - they just can't sue for duplication anymore.
Likewise, I would like to see independent content creators given a means to extend copyrights on things they keep iterating upon. An example would be Penny Arcade - it started as a small venture and has since matured to a recognizable standard amongst game circles. However, Tycho and Gabe continue to make comics and have been doing so for ~15 years. I figure their early work should be public domain by this point (consider how few people read the entire archive of their comic that far back) but they should be able to file a renewal after 5 years to double a copyright to 10 if they are actively iterating on a copyrighted product or concept.
I could settle for a blanket decade copyright if it included patents. Everything copyrighted expires after 10 years without exception under any circumstance and after expiration duplication and reproduction is no longer restricted to the copyright holder. Reproducing content and material becomes the responsibility of the one seeking it or someone else providing it, such as when the patents on some car engine expire after a decade of being on the roads, you can reverse engineer that engine without fear of patent infringement but you still need to take the steps to actually rebuild the thing.
That last point is important to understand. Just because something goes public domain doesn't mean that the original manufacturer (example, the car engine) can't continue to sell that engine. They can sell it for whatever they want. Having patents expire just means their competitors can copy design decisions in that engine after 10 years to improve their own engines and sell them competitively.
Same thing with media. Piracy only exists because the cost of reproduction is near 0 for almost any digital data. But people would still pay for features - Steam games could sell for a dollar or two to have cloud saved games, screenshots, built in recording features, etc.
And then when the steam platform passes into public domain, that doesn't mean Valve can't sell games with it - it just means people can alter or reverse engineer the software if they have it and if they want to and sell it however they want. But Valve would still have all the servers, and would be selling the usage of them - and they don't just become public goods. They are always private property.
Depends on how long people are willing to postpone.
If you have a choice between seeing a movie today for $x or waiting a couple of years and seeing it for free and legally, what would you take?
The legal part is important , because there would be a good business model in simply taking all of the copyright expired works and creating a download/streaming website for it all and charging basically for the bandwidth and easy UI, not to mention that every TV manufacturer would want to integrate this.
That would be a massive library of stuff, far more than you could watch or listen to in your lifetime, would you really be worried about seeing the newest blockbuster the day it came out?
I think a lot of people want to keep up with the latest media, and there are lots of social reasons to do so. The latest TV shows, movies, and books will be the ones your friends are watching/reading. As xkcd eloquently put it:
http://xkcd.com/606/
This points out one more factor: content prices decrease dramatically after several years. Videogames go from $60 to $10 on Steam; Movies end up in discount bins; books end up cheap on amazon or from used bookstores.
Books are an interesting example: when they are first published it is difficult to acquire them at a local library (because lots of other people want to read the same new book), but after some time (usually much less than a year), they are easily acquirable for free. If the library model works, such that authors are satisfied with the profitability of writing books, then reducing copyright term to a few years
is probably reasonable.
EDIT: I personally think somewhere around 10 years is probably more reasonable, but I think the discussion around a more extreme 2-5 years is interesting, and the current term length is ridiculous.
2-3 years is probably too short. Somewhere around 10 years seems more reasonable. The same should be true for patents, although the biggest problem with patents is not the length of the patent, but what is considered a valid patent by the Patent Office in the first place, when most of them get invalidated in Court when tested.
I've read it takes 13 years to take a new agricultural threshing design from concept to production. If the patent expired after 10 years, there would be no ability to recoup those massive R&D expenses. For other patents, 10 years is practically an eternity.
It seems the problem is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution to intellectual property rights, despite our best efforts to try and fine one.
Perhaps then only R&D would be put into things that would truly benefit all of society. The amount of thought and discussion that would go into each decision would be unprecedented. It could be controlled to allow competition of sorts, though less resources would be wasted by there being many times more duplication than necessary.
Sweeping some problems under the rug, this seems like an incentive to only patent something when you're ready for production... Sounds like a win for anyone who wants to use a new threshing design.
As a compromise, the infinite copyright with a required payment to maintain it of $2ⁿ⁻¹ with n being the number of years since the creation of the work seems reasonable to me.
People would hold copyright as long as it made financial sense, and orphaned works would rapidly drop to Public Domain.
It would be too hard to define what a "work" is. If I publish a collection of short stories does each story need a payment? Or just the book as a whole?
>It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art.
I highly doubt there is any significant number of independent artists who depend on copyright for their income. Most will have already realized that it's better to seek new ways to make ends meet.
The argument is bullshit. It wouldn't be any different than now. Probably better, because people would stop relying on an entirely broken system of controlling the uncontrollable (the sharing of information).
Oh, and copyright was never meant for the "small, starving artist". It was made by distributors for distributors. That's historical fact, and hasn't changed in the ~450 years this nonsensical system has prevailed.
Or in HN fashion engineers are protected and other creatives are left out in the libertarian cold?
I think going back to 14 years and one renewal is more than fair. It's far longer than all but the most popular works are profitable for but gives the creator a generation of control over it. No one can feel cheated.
In the old days, most people didn't even renew after the first term expired. You wouldn't have seen Star Wars enter the public domain after 14 years but most of the movies in MST3K, books about certain time periods written at the moment, software that won't sell another copy would all be there.
Simple, everything would become SaaS and while it would not technically be copyright; all the code would be holed up in a maximum security datacentre somewhere.
I would like to see a copyright that expired quickly, but had unlimited renewals for ever increasing fees.
This would allow the top % of copyright works that remain profitable to be held by their creators, while the vast majority of work would quickly pass into the public domain. Plus, the larger fees on ridiculously long copyrights (Mickey Mouse) would help pay for the officials who oversee the whole thing.
An exponential function which suppresses early costs would be ideal. Something that approaches billions / year some time around year 40, for example.
I'm not sure whether it's the right approach for patents -- pharmaceutical companies for example would just keep cranking up the prices until they reached the maximum economic return.
This article is rather light on how these proposals make life better for those pushing SOPA and ACTA. As it is, it's not a "today" solution since you'll have to go to war with those folks.
55 comments
[ 46.2 ms ] story [ 2919 ms ] threadCopyright of 2-3 years is better than no copyright at all, but it's so short that it's basically useless.
Besides, you really don't think there would be a market for taking less well known songs, rebranding them to make them palatable to the masses, and selling that? I can't imagine that if it were completely legal, they wouldn't try.
Or what about people who write books? Shouldn't they get money if their book is turned into a movie? With only 2 to 3 years of copyright, many books will go public domain long before a major movie can be put together.
The original term of copyright was 14 years, with one extension. This has grown to the current ~105 years.
Economic present-value analysis shows that the present value of an additional year of copyright past a couple of decades is virtually nil. As an incentive to create NEW works, global copyright extension makes zero sense. This argument hasn't been tested by SCOTUS, though Lawrence Lessig has stated that he might have done better in Eldred v. Ashcroft if he'd made that argument rather than claiming continued extensions violated the "for limited terms" Constitutional clause.
7HOHEP was published in 1989, giving it a 22 year life to date. Frankly, I don't think it's all that outstanding, but that's another story.
No it wouldn't. It wouldn't be available from any source, because it would never get written at all. There's only so much time people are willing to put into an unpaid hobby.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely, Louis C.K.
I doubt anyone would be buying music if Napster hadn't been shut down.
Did you actually use Napster during its heyday? Of all the P2P software I've ever tried, it was probably the worst--or perhaps just the one most poorly suited to casual piracy. The search system was a joke. Even when your search turned up results, it was hit or miss whether they were actually what you were looking for. My favorite example was a file named "Beethoven's 9th symphony - by Mozart" (it was actually a Handel piece).
Now it's easy to find private torrent trackers with huge, well-maintained collections in very high quality. Comments and ratings make it easy to decide which of several versions to download, and moderators will even help look for rare files if someone can't find what they want.
I think the death of Napster was a big favor to pirates everywhere.
You simply typed in what you wanted, waited for the search to finish and clicked to download rather than found an indexing site, selected a torrent based on "seeds" and "peers" and then worried about things like magnet links.
Many people who are not tech savvy and want to pirate either get their friends to do it for them or are still using kazaa and friends.
If you were somebody creating lowest common denominator entertainment for an unemployed mother to put their kids in front of do you think you would get the same results?
This is a much more complex question, and I'd argue the answer is probably yes, even if copyright was as short as 2-3 years. The writer of '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' didn't know ahead of time that it would become a perennially popular international bestseller, so the potential revenue from 50+ years of copyright protection likely played a small role in his motivation.
This is plenty of time to exploit the financial possibilities of the initial release of a creative work, and it still allows remixes and adaptions in a reasonable time frame.
In a perfect world, copyright produced by big name corporations such as Microsoft would last 5 years or so, so that a product they make can mature, take market, they can make their profit, and then it goes public domain. They can still sell licenses for the automatic updates and such, and they don't need to make the source available - they just can't sue for duplication anymore.
Likewise, I would like to see independent content creators given a means to extend copyrights on things they keep iterating upon. An example would be Penny Arcade - it started as a small venture and has since matured to a recognizable standard amongst game circles. However, Tycho and Gabe continue to make comics and have been doing so for ~15 years. I figure their early work should be public domain by this point (consider how few people read the entire archive of their comic that far back) but they should be able to file a renewal after 5 years to double a copyright to 10 if they are actively iterating on a copyrighted product or concept.
I could settle for a blanket decade copyright if it included patents. Everything copyrighted expires after 10 years without exception under any circumstance and after expiration duplication and reproduction is no longer restricted to the copyright holder. Reproducing content and material becomes the responsibility of the one seeking it or someone else providing it, such as when the patents on some car engine expire after a decade of being on the roads, you can reverse engineer that engine without fear of patent infringement but you still need to take the steps to actually rebuild the thing.
That last point is important to understand. Just because something goes public domain doesn't mean that the original manufacturer (example, the car engine) can't continue to sell that engine. They can sell it for whatever they want. Having patents expire just means their competitors can copy design decisions in that engine after 10 years to improve their own engines and sell them competitively.
Same thing with media. Piracy only exists because the cost of reproduction is near 0 for almost any digital data. But people would still pay for features - Steam games could sell for a dollar or two to have cloud saved games, screenshots, built in recording features, etc.
And then when the steam platform passes into public domain, that doesn't mean Valve can't sell games with it - it just means people can alter or reverse engineer the software if they have it and if they want to and sell it however they want. But Valve would still have all the servers, and would be selling the usage of them - and they don't just become public goods. They are always private property.
The legal part is important , because there would be a good business model in simply taking all of the copyright expired works and creating a download/streaming website for it all and charging basically for the bandwidth and easy UI, not to mention that every TV manufacturer would want to integrate this.
That would be a massive library of stuff, far more than you could watch or listen to in your lifetime, would you really be worried about seeing the newest blockbuster the day it came out?
I think a lot of people want to keep up with the latest media, and there are lots of social reasons to do so. The latest TV shows, movies, and books will be the ones your friends are watching/reading. As xkcd eloquently put it: http://xkcd.com/606/
This points out one more factor: content prices decrease dramatically after several years. Videogames go from $60 to $10 on Steam; Movies end up in discount bins; books end up cheap on amazon or from used bookstores.
Books are an interesting example: when they are first published it is difficult to acquire them at a local library (because lots of other people want to read the same new book), but after some time (usually much less than a year), they are easily acquirable for free. If the library model works, such that authors are satisfied with the profitability of writing books, then reducing copyright term to a few years is probably reasonable.
EDIT: I personally think somewhere around 10 years is probably more reasonable, but I think the discussion around a more extreme 2-5 years is interesting, and the current term length is ridiculous.
I suspect the business model that is most likely to work is an extension of the current one.
Larger multiplexes with more screens, when you go to the cinema you have a wide choice of movies to see.
Movies would no longer drop out of the cinema within a week or two.
In this controlled environment it is easier for the cinemas to prevent copying.
Only after a long cinema run would the film be released on DVD, after which point the copyright expires and you can copy to your hearts content.
I can even see this business model perhaps working for music as well.
It seems the problem is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution to intellectual property rights, despite our best efforts to try and fine one.
People would hold copyright as long as it made financial sense, and orphaned works would rapidly drop to Public Domain.
What about a collection of blog posts?
But the current limits are indeed completely out of whack.
> Imagine how much different things would be if copyright expired that quickly.
It would be significantly more difficult for independents to live from their art.
I highly doubt there is any significant number of independent artists who depend on copyright for their income. Most will have already realized that it's better to seek new ways to make ends meet.
The argument is bullshit. It wouldn't be any different than now. Probably better, because people would stop relying on an entirely broken system of controlling the uncontrollable (the sharing of information).
Oh, and copyright was never meant for the "small, starving artist". It was made by distributors for distributors. That's historical fact, and hasn't changed in the ~450 years this nonsensical system has prevailed.
Or in HN fashion engineers are protected and other creatives are left out in the libertarian cold?
I think going back to 14 years and one renewal is more than fair. It's far longer than all but the most popular works are profitable for but gives the creator a generation of control over it. No one can feel cheated.
In the old days, most people didn't even renew after the first term expired. You wouldn't have seen Star Wars enter the public domain after 14 years but most of the movies in MST3K, books about certain time periods written at the moment, software that won't sell another copy would all be there.
This would allow the top % of copyright works that remain profitable to be held by their creators, while the vast majority of work would quickly pass into the public domain. Plus, the larger fees on ridiculously long copyrights (Mickey Mouse) would help pay for the officials who oversee the whole thing.
I'm not sure whether it's the right approach for patents -- pharmaceutical companies for example would just keep cranking up the prices until they reached the maximum economic return.