Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, trying to convince you that copyright is bad so they can avoid copyright lawsuits and use everyone's data without paying licensing fees.
You know who also wants to avoid a copyright lawsuit? Me! I remixed some music and would like to show it to the other people. Too bad that if they like it, I will never ever be able to monetize it or will even have to delete it.
While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game.
While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts.
While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents.
Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour?
I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
> So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
Yes - sorry, I should have been more precise and said "in a licensed venue".
One additional point, in response to your comment: public performance licences are for events or venues, not DJs.
So if you are DJing in club, you are covered. Indeed, there are even specific technologies that log what DJs are playing, built into DJ hardware, and report back to collective licensing bodies so that the rights holders in the tracks played and mixed are properly compensated.
However, my point was less about the intricacies of licensing, and more about the ability to play the music to people under a "blanket" licence. There is no equivalent licensing framework for releasing remixes as recordings.
> Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
You have no idea what you are talking about. If something’s technically possible, it doesn’t mean that it is possible in reality or that people haven’t tried what you propose.
But I’ll try to answer what I think you’re asking.
YouTube is a directly negotiated licence - ie it doesn’t fall under any of the statutory blankets, and is licensed territory by territory. Most rights holders are able to license for multiplied territories and often globally. But if soemthing was not licensed for a particular territory in which you were based you would not be able to watch the music video.
The recording and publishing need to be separately licensed by the record label and publisher(s), with the performance and mechanicals handled differently, and potentially flowing via a CMO or mechanical licensing society. The video will be provided by the record label - and they generally own the copyright in the video as a work for hire. If there are sample in the recording they will have been cleared by the label for both the recording and publishing. If there’s an interpolation of a song that will be negotiated and licensed with the publisher(s) or writers as a derivative work.
YouTube uses Content ID to identify the works being exploited, and uses that to account to rights holders.
I didn’t say it was a perfect system. I often say, professionally, that the infrastructure around music rights and licensing is insanely complicated - and as you have personally experienced it can be very frustrating, confusing and dispiriting for creators. But I’m not really sure what the alternative would look like.
Honestly I wouldn't mind that, don't even really see a downside really, Hasbro can make one and the old members of the ZA/UM cultural association can make one, and I'll play whichever one is best! (Who knows, maybe Hasbro has something hidden deep inside it wants to utter out into the world!)
I want it gone for decades already, but no one listens to me. It has always been my hope that AI can finally make it happen by incentivizing people with bottomless pits full of money to solve the problem.
I'm not a fan of AI if that's what you're talking about, I still want copyright dead or drastically shortened. I'd say most people with an interest in free (as in freedom) software or computers in general should want similar.
It is bullshit also because it hasn’t protected anyone. Copyright only protects massive corporations.
It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us.
They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you.
At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
that's correct, I am against copyright in any form of sorts. I know this is unpopular, but I really can't think of a logical argument that justifies it (I have read plenty; luckily I have no decision making power). Copyright in my view is simply an obsolete concept that tries to coerce private property of scarce resources in the realm of ideas. But ideas aren't scarce, neither are digital copies. It's like private property of air.
Agreed. While copyright timescales are currently over-extended, copyright was introduced for a very practical reason: "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"[1].
Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.
If that was the reason, it should be completely abolished as the exact opposite was achieved.
See for example this article [1]
> unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.
> it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
>Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright.
How did the industrial revolution relate to copyright? Seems related to patents instead.
In the context of copyright we are talking about books in that century. Shakespeare predates copyright. Though, we are not only talking fiction, but also non-fiction. It's no coincidence that British inventors of that time were on to wealthy side, for the poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
It's not enough to invent (and patent) something. You also need to document it in various ways - so people know the invented thing exists, what it's for, how to use it, how to fix it, etc.
> poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
Thus the rise of circulating libraries in the 18th century, and the public (lending) library system in the 19th century. Especially after the establishment of mandatory education for children.
Knowledge diffusion was definitely crippled in the UK after 1710, and significantly restricted innovation.
Most of the things that were invented after 1710 were pretty trivial. Things like the spinning jenny, the steam engine, water powered weaving, wrought iron, steam locomotion, the electric telegraph, the lightbulb, waterproof fabric, the hydraulic press, the telephone. Imagine what else could have been achieved if copyright didn't incentivise authors and publishers to disseminate knowledge by allowing them to sell books, magazines and news sheets.
I love how almost everyone in here seems to confuse the DMCA with copyright itself and that there seems to be such a wide spread opinion that copyright does more harm than good.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Many people don't like the GPL for exactly that reason. Free software (i.e. copyleft) benefits from copyright at the expense of the wider open source community.
Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
If it were not for copyright and copyleft software licenses there would be no open source software of any significance.
All these projects only took off because people were forced to contribute back. Want an example? Look at the state of opensource boot firmware on x86. The "open source" version heavily relies on proprietary firmware blobs and the only actual open source alternative had been heavily ridiculed for pursuing that goal and trading basically any significant compatibility for it.
Copyleft licenses make software basically self-regulating utilities. You can draw power from the grid and in return help finance it for everyone else, or you could build your own power plants.
You can draw excellent pre-made software and tooling from copylefted repositories and contribute back, helping to make the software even better for everyone else, or you could build all of it yourself. Or, you could put in the work to replace all major copyleft software with non-copyleft versions, eventually gaining the ability to pull up the ladder behind you.
The real propaganda is pretending people weren't complaining about copyright for decades and crying "Pirating isn't stealing!!" when it came to them getting GTA for free.
Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
Ah yes, the big tech propaganda that undermines their entire business model. Without copyright, you would be free to modify or alter any data collection capabilities of tech you purchase.
Yep. What Stallman and his friends call "free software" would not exist if not for the copyright system. The company legal team who tell you to not touch any GPL code would love to see the licensing enforcement mechanism be abolished.
This is a completely pointless debate, because even if it's true the people who currently be benefit from copyright have far more money, power and influence than any rational argument against it.
Yes, there should be some limit on the amount of IP that can be accumulated. I don't know how one would do it in a way that couldn't be perverted/abused though.
>It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
"Copyright" covers a lot of areas, from films to books to software etc. So blanket statements about it are not helpful.
From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.
And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?
For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.
Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.
Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL are doing the best they can in the current world. Abolishing copyright would not harm the free software movement.
I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere.
Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.
You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
It's not only Hollywood, these anarcho-capitalists that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation. (This is where people's brains will turn off)
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the AnCap government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
> these anarcho-capitalists that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
Which side you're taking here? Sudden and Legal are pretty unobjectionable to folks who aren't pro-copyright for other reasons. But could sound excellent to (say) folks who "bought and owned" digital property...then had their access cut off suddenly and legally.
Even if you don't have sympathy on an individual level for hundreds of thousands of ordinary, working-class people with decades-long careers suddenly losing their livelihood (and you really should have sympathy for them), you should at least care on a selfish level for the increased risk of civil unrest that such a socioeconomic upheaval can cause.
I'm from a country that transitioned from free market and private property to planned economy and socialism, and then, 70 years later, back again. I'm sure it'll be fine. You can't scare me with such things :)
Copyright shouldn't be abolished, it should be reformed however.
It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.
It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
Because Disney paying ever-increasing fees to keep Snow White is not particularly harmful. Vs. if we allowed ever-extending patents on essential medicines and foundational technologies? How much could the heirs of the Wright Brothers add to the price of every plane ticket?
Okay, but IP protections exist to benefit society. Being less harmful isn't good enough, the justification has to be "here's how being longer than twenty years benefits society".
Do movie companies or authors choose to make stuff because they'll be able to pick up more revenue 25 or 50 years from now? Seems unlikely. Both indiviudals and corporations are typically focused on the immediate future.
OP's idea was that copyright renewal costs would skyrocket after 30-ish years - I'd presume the intended benefits to the public would come from (1) increased revenue to the Treasury, and (2) most creative works leaving copyright in 30 or 35 years, because even GigaGreedyCo would only pay the renewal fees for a few of their most lucrative works.
30 years doesn't seem very objectionable to me. That's about what it was in the US in the 1800's. From an author's PoV - yes, there probably are niches where an optimist could figure "I'll write one each year. Sales of each will be low - but if I can work up to having 30 of 'em in copyright, then the total royalties will let me live comfortably." And your "immediate future" argument seems to contradict how many people plan their careers and save for retirement.
As a Linux user of over 20 years, I really don't like thinking of myself as some Aborigine barely holding on to a scrap of ancestral land. My tech preferences have become so ubiquitous that nearly the entire Internet runs them.
In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.
I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
I've published and sold my own software. I'm a writer (unpublished as yet, but I hope to use CC4 like Cory Doctorow - ethical copyright.) I've seen my software pirated; I've benefited financially from selling it. I know authors and their struggles with income.
And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.
Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.
Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.
Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
Changing copyright durations without touching patent law is useless. In your example we would also need to shorten software patents to e.g. 3 years. Otherwise the big fish will just create a patent maze.
What if you keep the protections that actually benefit you, but doesn't restrict your clients? ie. if you keep the exclusive combined right to distribute reproduced works, but not to distribute (you already sold a copy) or reproduce (after you sold a copy it doesn't matter what happens with that copy).
The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.
Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.
Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.
The industry can just push and promote people it picked itself and then bind them some other way. How would this work with open software, which is not public domain and often sees the original creator step away down the line?
The major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first year or two of release, and yet we extend protection 70 years past the author's death! If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
You're free to release your own work with Creative Commons License (or any other license that shorten the copyright).
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
> It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
Issue of pharma development is not that you need a protection from copycats. You need to pass a mountain of regulations and bureaucracy. Most of the medications are easily copyable but would take years to be able to get to the market.
> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
Chinese and Western models on IP are completely different. In our system, the inventor of a Thing gets a period of exclusive rights and everyone who wants to build off of that Thing has to pay license fees to cover the expenses of the original inventor.
In China, copying a Thing is seen completely different (well, at least as far as I know, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt) - an appreciation that the original inventor of the Thing did something good. Getting copied is a symbol of honor.
Both worldviews are completely valid, but it's obvious IMHO that these two views cannot coexist in one single global capitalist economy framework.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
> And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point, at which maximum effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult.
So someone who has suffered incurable harm and damage at the hands of health insurers is a "hate monger" while the health insurance executive prioritising their company profits over human health is just a normal person doing their normal job?
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Sure. I think copyright is broken far beyond just the length of it, but let's focus on the length of copyright. There's a phenomenon called the Copyright Cliff, where works published from the early to mid 20th century are unavailable far more often than older books. The Atlantic wrote about Paul J. Heald's study of this back in 2013.
> There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
> Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."
It would make sense to make it possible, but increasingly expensive to extend the copyright. It's fine for Disney to keep their successful creations, it just makes no sense to drag all other copyrighted works in existence along for the ride.
I'm not sure what your point is. Harry Potter is in the top ten most successful media franchises ever. Sure, top 10 franchises make a lot of money, but they're outliers. Is it in the public interest to grant every author in the country a copyright monopoly for life + 70 so that we can ensure JK Rowling's grandchildren continue to make billions from Harry Potter? Clearly not!
Sometimes I imagine the world where each installment got, say, 14 years of copyright exclusivity before becoming part of a shared cultural mythos that anyone could contribute to. Imagine the boon for small artists to have access to such recognizable characters, but also the big-budget takes and spins on the setting that could come from literally anyone.
Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.
"
Since 1990, The Walt Disney Company had lobbied for copyright extension. The legislation delayed the entry into the public domain of the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, leading detractors to the nickname "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act".
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.
"For some categories of works, the minimum duration is shorter: for example, the minimum term for applied art is 25 years, while movies have a minimum term of 50 years. Most countries have opted for a longer term of protection, as permitted."
However, I stand corrected because I was under impression they expired after 50 years in Europe, or less. Turns out the movies I had in mind were intentionally made available to public but this did not come as a result of copyright expiration.
> If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
Who's going to pay you to work for five years for a book that has a two-year commercial window, and even for that many people won't buy it until another company that just does printing sells it for half price two years from the first published date?
Well, if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit, it would make sense to pay you a reasonable salary for the five years it takes you to write it. It's not completely implausible that people would pay for something that could be had for cheaper soon, considering that there are grifters selling "new editions" (with a publication date in the future, to game recency-biased search algorithms) of out-of-copyright works that are available for free elsewhere.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
You are thinking in reverse, think it more like a kickstarter, you sponsor the author, at that point the author would probably just release as public domain and you could buy a physical "official" copy on kindle or whatever, but you think it as just a tip/convenience or a merchandise, not the product.
This is actually a fairly well studied area and surprisingly even a term as short as two years would likely be enough to ensure that a profit was returned on the investment. Most media including books, movies, music and video games earns the overwhelming share of its profits in the first 4 weeks after its release and sales decay quickly in the first year hitting single digit percentage by year end. At two years out you'd be approaching zero. The curves differ between the media types (movies and video games decay fastest, music decays slowest) but they are close enough to generalize. The only major complication for an extremely short copyright length would be media that experience a resurgence due to developing a cult following, going viral or some other form of mass interest later on.
Personally, I'd still prefer a term of 10 years since it is psychologically more appealing and allows for the rarer cases where a work becomes popular well after its release. It would also be a better fit for music so it would avoid the complication of having different rules for different media types.
>Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
Copyright does no such thing. The copyright owner is free to alter or change their material at any time, or to discard it and force it to remain unused until it deteriorates and is destroyed (e.g. video game preservation is mostly done by copyright violators).
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this ...
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to orginator/owner agency.
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984.
Copyright doesn't protect a work, there's probably also a reasonable argument that exact reproduction of a work is overrated in the first place. Others could just as easily produce a verbatim copy of 1984 if there wasn't copyright. The original theatrical release of Star Wars is almost impossible to find because Lucas altered it several times. Copyright isn't protecting the work, it's letting the holders exploit a rerelease 50 years after the initial release.
Very much this. And another problem is that the US forced most of the world to adopt similar laws through various cartels, oh, sorry, trade agreements. I distinctly remember when suddenly it was no longer okay to openly sell pirated software in Russia "because we're joining WTO". I still have no idea why we joined it.
One should pay a exponential "upholding" fee doubling every year of copyright. People would be very careful with clinging to rights- when they have a yearly break even.
It wouldn't have mattered how long copyright is if it wasn't expanded beyond the immediate economic desincentives that it is supposed to address for the most insidious problems it causes. It should be been limited exclusively to the combined right to reproduction and distribution. Yes, that means that I could reproduce the protected work without limit, so long as don't distribute it. Also means that I could distribute the protected work so long as I do only the copies I acquired.
I, like you, through for a while that length was the problem, now I've poked around enough and known about enough actual examples where shorter length wouldn't have prevented the problems that happens with copyright. The content Sony had repeatedly removed from people's libraries was well within copyright term, shorter copyright wouldn't have saved it. What would have saved it is copyright scope that never extended to controlling access to copies already sold
IMO, the bigger issue is all the things copyright covers. I don't think there's a particularly damning public interest in being able to publish an author's book without paying them. For art preservation reasons, the copyright limit shouldn't be indefinite, but IMO as long as somebody's around to claim ownership, and offer a legitimate means of obtaining access to a work of art, it's not a big deal for them to have a monopoly on such.
But copyright covers a lot more than just the right to produce copies of a specific work. The monopoly on derivative works serves the public significantly less. IMO, this one should taper off pretty rapidly. Maybe 20 years as is, then another 20 where you lose the ability decide who can or can't use your work, but they still owe you royalties.
Then there's the clusterfuck that is software. With how rapidly the world around software changes, its protections should be substantially shorter. For derivative works of source code, I'd pitch skipping the complete monopoly step entirely. You get a decade or two where people using your software owe you royalties unless you say otherwise, then nothing.
Funny how copyright used to be held to such extreme value before that many governments agreed to implement the "empty cassette laws" which then got conveniently also applied to empty cd-s, even though there's no guarantee that every single empty cd would be used to burn copyrighted material. And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing.
I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
Copyright is good. It's the justice system letting money buy it's way out of enforcement that is bad.
If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.
Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.
Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
Let’s face it, justice system uses money as proxy for how important things are for society not for single citizens.
As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute.
I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
I agree that this is often the situation in practice. I feel it's kind of bleak to just accept that status quo. Democracy lost? Back to the medieval system of nobles and serfs? Where having money means having rights?
We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way.
> waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.
Copyright needs to be shorter, but also it should be non-transferable and unable to held by anybody except the individual it originates from. Corporations shouldn't have rights to start with, only restrictions, and they certainly shouldn't have rights over thoughts or ideas.
All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.
Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.
So they silently also did the same thing.
With that, copyright in training went to shit.
Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
I agree, copyright is a just yet another monopolistic tool and it isn't making the market any favor.
Copyright could be gradually be reduced to a few years, the market will adapt, for example collecting money before producing the content (like a movie or an album), collecting more money from concert rather than music directly (which is going to happen anyway since it's competing against generated content), etc...
Having a weak copyright or having it replaced with a far lighter framework is not science fiction and i honestly believe it would improve the quality of life for the vast majority.
> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,
If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
From the perspective of "The general purpose computing device I own should be able to run any instructions written by anyone without legal issues" then copyright sucks. Massively abused by corporations to unproductively charge rent by squatting on obvious implementations.
From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)
I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.
I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
Copyright should be commoditized. A possible first step could be giving copyright owners a single obligation: you have to sell what you own. That thing you have must be available on the market.
This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.
This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
But what does “available on the market” mean? Let’s say I own the copyright to something of cultural significance. I make it “available on the market” but at a very high price. Or are you saying that the price would be enforced?
What happens if I wrote a book - sent around to a few publishers and then personally had a change of heart - perhap it has content which I now disavow.
Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication?
Or because I refuse to publish, but the publishers have a copy - I should lose the right to control my own work and the copyright falls and the publisher can just publish freely?
You could establish contracts with publishers outside of copyright, which is how NDAs work today. It's probably a reasonable thing to do anyway, otherwise there's nothing stopping a publisher from telling everyone the plot summary of your newest novel.
By the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement.
Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?
> It seems the consensus in this thread [if I'm skimming correctly] is most want copyright completely removed.
I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it.
For example if I buy a physical book, I own it. I'm free to sell it or give it away. Things like the DMCA and the switch from an ownership model to a rental model are more the problem.
ie does getting rid of copyright enable right to repair? Does getting rid of copyright suddenly stop a games company pulling software from your library that you 'bought'?
Wouldn't these companies just put all the restrictions directly into the purchase agreement?
Don't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
> GrapheneOS is permissively licensed and is usable for building devices with an immutable root of trust. GPLv3 is deliberately incompatible with these kinds of locked down devices, unlike GPLv2 code such as the Linux kernel. This means GrapheneOS can't include GPLv3 code without forbidding use cases we want to support. GPLv3 is no problem for our own usage, but we don't want to forbid using GrapheneOS as a replacement for the Android Open Source Project in locked down devices.
They're not against GPLv3 and, but they explain why it's not suited for a project like GrapheneOS.
We use GPLv2 licensing for substantial portions of our code beyond our Linux kernel changes. Vanadium is licensed as GPLv2. As long as copyright exists then there's a place for copyleft to counter it.
> probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors
That's a strange thing to claim about Proton and Cape. Those are the only companies we're aware of sending us any substantial monetary donations in the past couple years. It has several $10k donations from Proton and maybe around 10x that for Cape which sells phones with GrapheneOS for a $50 fee.
We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
> copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all
What does it protect it from? GPL is widely violated with minimal consequences. The main impact is that a lot of Android OEMs and similar companies release Linux kernel drivers as open source while the firmware and userspace drivers are closed source.
> Proprietary software can be kept secret
The source code can be kept secret but not the code running on the device. That can be reverse engineered and forked. If copyright was abolished, it would be legal to fork closed source software. That's becoming far easier to do from a technical perspective.
> We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
Where are the details about any arrangements with the Motorola partnership?
216 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThat said let's cut copyright back to 28 years.
While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game.
While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts.
While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents.
Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour?
I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
One additional point, in response to your comment: public performance licences are for events or venues, not DJs.
So if you are DJing in club, you are covered. Indeed, there are even specific technologies that log what DJs are playing, built into DJ hardware, and report back to collective licensing bodies so that the rights holders in the tracks played and mixed are properly compensated.
However, my point was less about the intricacies of licensing, and more about the ability to play the music to people under a "blanket" licence. There is no equivalent licensing framework for releasing remixes as recordings.
You have no idea what you are talking about. If something’s technically possible, it doesn’t mean that it is possible in reality or that people haven’t tried what you propose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgO7i40-Ce8
But I’ll try to answer what I think you’re asking.
YouTube is a directly negotiated licence - ie it doesn’t fall under any of the statutory blankets, and is licensed territory by territory. Most rights holders are able to license for multiplied territories and often globally. But if soemthing was not licensed for a particular territory in which you were based you would not be able to watch the music video.
The recording and publishing need to be separately licensed by the record label and publisher(s), with the performance and mechanicals handled differently, and potentially flowing via a CMO or mechanical licensing society. The video will be provided by the record label - and they generally own the copyright in the video as a work for hire. If there are sample in the recording they will have been cleared by the label for both the recording and publishing. If there’s an interpolation of a song that will be negotiated and licensed with the publisher(s) or writers as a derivative work.
YouTube uses Content ID to identify the works being exploited, and uses that to account to rights holders.
Is that what you were asking?
I want dozens of them. And then I can play the one with the best reviews.
Of course, without copyright meaning that people have to pay for the games, the chances of those games being made is pretty slim.
The AI companies are the ones that want copyright gone.
It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us.
They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you.
At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
See for example this article [1]
> unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.
> it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
>Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
How do you account for the industrial revolution under this framing, or the global dominance of the British Empire?
Its really hard to argue that 1710 onwards marked the downfall of Britain, given everything that happened in history after that.
In the context of copyright we are talking about books in that century. Shakespeare predates copyright. Though, we are not only talking fiction, but also non-fiction. It's no coincidence that British inventors of that time were on to wealthy side, for the poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
> poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.
Thus the rise of circulating libraries in the 18th century, and the public (lending) library system in the 19th century. Especially after the establishment of mandatory education for children.
Most of the things that were invented after 1710 were pretty trivial. Things like the spinning jenny, the steam engine, water powered weaving, wrought iron, steam locomotion, the electric telegraph, the lightbulb, waterproof fabric, the hydraulic press, the telephone. Imagine what else could have been achieved if copyright didn't incentivise authors and publishers to disseminate knowledge by allowing them to sell books, magazines and news sheets.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
All these projects only took off because people were forced to contribute back. Want an example? Look at the state of opensource boot firmware on x86. The "open source" version heavily relies on proprietary firmware blobs and the only actual open source alternative had been heavily ridiculed for pursuing that goal and trading basically any significant compatibility for it.
Copyleft licenses make software basically self-regulating utilities. You can draw power from the grid and in return help finance it for everyone else, or you could build your own power plants.
You can draw excellent pre-made software and tooling from copylefted repositories and contribute back, helping to make the software even better for everyone else, or you could build all of it yourself. Or, you could put in the work to replace all major copyleft software with non-copyleft versions, eventually gaining the ability to pull up the ladder behind you.
Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.
And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?
For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.
Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.
Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere.
Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the AnCap government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
>AnCap govenment
what?
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
They are a mixed economy overall, but the medical side of things is directly state owned or state funded.
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
That didn't happen overnight and was not done out of an immediate law change.
ps - If you're not aware that the offshoring was a legal change, you might want to read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_the_Unit...
Are you arguing that a lesser evil (compared to the evil of offshoring) is not evil? Is offshoring supposed to be relevant here? Why bring this up?
Any downsides?
It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.
It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
Why should authors be granted vastly larger IP protections than inventors?
Do movie companies or authors choose to make stuff because they'll be able to pick up more revenue 25 or 50 years from now? Seems unlikely. Both indiviudals and corporations are typically focused on the immediate future.
30 years doesn't seem very objectionable to me. That's about what it was in the US in the 1800's. From an author's PoV - yes, there probably are niches where an optimist could figure "I'll write one each year. Sales of each will be low - but if I can work up to having 30 of 'em in copyright, then the total royalties will let me live comfortably." And your "immediate future" argument seems to contradict how many people plan their careers and save for retirement.
Whereas that orphaned work you have never heard of could find a new audience.
I've considered artists lifetime or 20 years whichever is longer too.
A book which is long out of print, with ambiguous copyright status is.
In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.
I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.
Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.
Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.
Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.
Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
That's a question I have: if you abolish copyright, does that mean that anyone is free to do what they please with leaked code?
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
I think this is an inversion of cause and effect.
See insulin prices difference in europe vs US
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
In China, copying a Thing is seen completely different (well, at least as far as I know, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt) - an appreciation that the original inventor of the Thing did something good. Getting copied is a symbol of honor.
Both worldviews are completely valid, but it's obvious IMHO that these two views cannot coexist in one single global capitalist economy framework.
Seems like we are coming up on a limit where if they put that much more money into R&D + marketing, then won't be able to afford the product anyway.
So this counterpoint is practically moot for all but the most wealthy people.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point, at which maximum effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult.
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Once we've set ourselves up as judge; jury; and executioner, the unintended consequences abound.
It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.
A kid growing up obsessed with a franchise is unlikely to ever be permitted to create and sell derivative works within their lifetime.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h...
> There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
> Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."
We're there already, considering the cost of actually enforcing your rights, but it would be bizarre to codify that into law.
Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
That's an americocentric view. Copyrights are shorter around the world. In fact, iirc, US has some of the longest ones.
Might want to check your facts mate.
However, I stand corrected because I was under impression they expired after 50 years in Europe, or less. Turns out the movies I had in mind were intentionally made available to public but this did not come as a result of copyright expiration.
My bad.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
This is madness.
> With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
Even then - who would buy it if they could just wait two years and read it for much less?
Personally, I'd still prefer a term of 10 years since it is psychologically more appealing and allows for the rarer cases where a work becomes popular well after its release. It would also be a better fit for music so it would avoid the complication of having different rules for different media types.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this ...
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to orginator/owner agency.
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984.
https://youtu.be/O0-j89LJysY
I, like you, through for a while that length was the problem, now I've poked around enough and known about enough actual examples where shorter length wouldn't have prevented the problems that happens with copyright. The content Sony had repeatedly removed from people's libraries was well within copyright term, shorter copyright wouldn't have saved it. What would have saved it is copyright scope that never extended to controlling access to copies already sold
But copyright covers a lot more than just the right to produce copies of a specific work. The monopoly on derivative works serves the public significantly less. IMO, this one should taper off pretty rapidly. Maybe 20 years as is, then another 20 where you lose the ability decide who can or can't use your work, but they still owe you royalties.
Then there's the clusterfuck that is software. With how rapidly the world around software changes, its protections should be substantially shorter. For derivative works of source code, I'd pitch skipping the complete monopoly step entirely. You get a decade or two where people using your software owe you royalties unless you say otherwise, then nothing.
Very well aligned with my beliefs not to mention it's one of if not the most private OS.
I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
My observation is the opposite. Copyright was never as popular as it is now in the public discourse I have seen.
Now that the unpopular companies are against copyright, it is useful and more popular. (at least as long as the context is those companies)
If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.
Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.
Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute.
I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way.
> waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.
So yes we don’t live in total anarchy but a lot depends on people being decent.
All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.
Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.
So they silently also did the same thing.
With that, copyright in training went to shit.
Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,
If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)
I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.
I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
So, which one is it?
This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.
This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication?
Or because I refuse to publish, but the publishers have a copy - I should lose the right to control my own work and the copyright falls and the publisher can just publish freely?
Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?
So in your hypothetical: you write the book and have a change of heart, I'll just copy it verbatim, slap my name on it and now I'm the author.
I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it.
For example if I buy a physical book, I own it. I'm free to sell it or give it away. Things like the DMCA and the switch from an ownership model to a rental model are more the problem.
ie does getting rid of copyright enable right to repair? Does getting rid of copyright suddenly stop a games company pulling software from your library that you 'bought'?
Wouldn't these companies just put all the restrictions directly into the purchase agreement?
This would be wildly unreasonable and totally unethical. Every picture taken by a photographer has to be available on the market immediately?
Think through the ethical implications of that.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
> GrapheneOS is permissively licensed and is usable for building devices with an immutable root of trust. GPLv3 is deliberately incompatible with these kinds of locked down devices, unlike GPLv2 code such as the Linux kernel. This means GrapheneOS can't include GPLv3 code without forbidding use cases we want to support. GPLv3 is no problem for our own usage, but we don't want to forbid using GrapheneOS as a replacement for the Android Open Source Project in locked down devices.
They're not against GPLv3 and, but they explain why it's not suited for a project like GrapheneOS.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=In%20some%20cases,locked%...
We use GPLv2 licensing for substantial portions of our code beyond our Linux kernel changes. Vanadium is licensed as GPLv2. As long as copyright exists then there's a place for copyleft to counter it.
> probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors
That's a strange thing to claim about Proton and Cape. Those are the only companies we're aware of sending us any substantial monetary donations in the past couple years. It has several $10k donations from Proton and maybe around 10x that for Cape which sells phones with GrapheneOS for a $50 fee.
We have a list of formal sponsors at https://grapheneos.org/sponsors which are 4 server companies sponsoring dedicated servers, a GeoIP database company giving us sponsored access to the downloadable database and a VPN company sponsoring 2 DataPacket servers. We could list Cape too but they started donating to us on their own.
> copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all
What does it protect it from? GPL is widely violated with minimal consequences. The main impact is that a lot of Android OEMs and similar companies release Linux kernel drivers as open source while the firmware and userspace drivers are closed source.
> Proprietary software can be kept secret
The source code can be kept secret but not the code running on the device. That can be reverse engineered and forked. If copyright was abolished, it would be legal to fork closed source software. That's becoming far easier to do from a technical perspective.
Where are the details about any arrangements with the Motorola partnership?