Half of mean median life expectancy which is something like 40 years. Same for everyone. Makes no sense that one can write a book and then live off it forever. That does not encourage more books. Good gig though.

The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total.

It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows.

There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

I think it should be limited to thirty years at the absolute maximum. In addition, I feel as though copyright should have to be defended. If the copyright holder does not make their copyrighted work available for a certain amount of time, it should fall into public domain.

Personally I think copyright has extended into way too many realms that have nothing to do with what most people probably think it's for, like locking out repairs of tractors and cars. It's also gotten rid of many sales where instead of ownership of what you buy it's a restrictive license to use.

I also feel like there's a lot of social questions as to what we want copyright to do for our society. Even today we tend to think of laws to do something beneficial for some part of society, and argue about who should get what benefits and who might lose out with the laws.

Copyright enables large businesses and creation of content. But unlike from the dawn of modern content business through the late 1990s, today even Disney doesn't really make money strictly via copyright in the traditional sense of selling copies of content. No, they make money via streaming subscriptions, and theme parks and hotels etc.

Now let's see what happens if we got rid of copyright. Well, presumably less people would make money selling copies of what they already created. And this presumably would lead to less content, so the argument goes. I actually over the last 15 years have doubted this more and more with youtube, podcasts and streaming which combined with patreon and substack seem to work with rather lesser or free models for people listening. Piracy of content is both easier than ever and yet way more people pay for the various streaming services mostly for convenience and first run access.

But lets grant that some new content isn't made. So what? From a societal POV we have more content already existing and being made than we can handle. If 50% less netflix movies or YouTube channels existed - would that actually hurt society for entertainment or visual art?

Then there's the jobs aspect. I still maintain that currently under copyright the companies want to and are outsourcing to much cheaper locations and eventually will fight to just use AI. I don't think jobs are really saved by copyright.

I also think this method of getting paid is kind of unfair. If you're anything but a creator you by law get paid for doing the job one time. Mechanic? You get paid for the job. Consultant, you get paid for the hours worked. Teacher? You get paid salary. Why is everyone else limited in what they can do and how they can use their property for one special group of jobs? In some ways it's worse than that - think of all the surveillance, court cases, and extra charges to pay for "copy protection" to try and artificially limit what people can do. It's almost like the drug war.

And like the drug war, I don't think it achieves it's stated goal on the face of it. You put in place all these restrictions, try to limit new beneficial technology like VCRs, all to possibly make someone pay you later. There's no guarantee - it's still legal to just not view the content and so not ever pay for it. And for the VAST majority of people - this is what happens. Buyers don't know you and don't want to pay for something they're not interested in. So you end up providing it for "free" anyway just so someone knows you exist. But 99% ends up being the loss leader.

Today, and for a long time now, there are alternatives that have nothing to do with copyright. You tour and sell tickets. You sell merchandise. You use patreon or ads or kickstarter to fund the release up front. I would argue aside from the absolute biggest names, little would change. And even for the big names, they can sell even more tickets or special access, zoom meet and greets or even just "I bought the official release".

Who would maybe be hurt are the big companies twisting copyright in ways that really suck, like forcing you to buy a new whatever because it can't be repaired, or limiting you to expensive and slow dealer fixes. Disney could no longer "lock stuff up in the vault", which is the opposite of what copyright was supposed to accomplish btw.

All this allows is an economically bad monopoly rent seeking. So I would prefer copyright went away, and we drastically limit patents and locked out patent trolling.

I don't believe in the concept of "intellectual property" so any laws built around that concept are nonsense to me.

Laws about protecting intellectual property are to me, like laws preventing the poaching of unicorns, they don't make sense because the thing they are built around doesn't exist.

I do think there should be protections against fraud, ie: falsely attributing somebody else's work or not giving due credit. But the idea that a person, group of people, or a company can "own" a concept in the same way somebody owns a shovel or owns a house, that just makes zero sense to me.

It's a fallacy, it's like somebody saying, "I tried to go see Harvard University, but the tour guide just spent hours showing me a bunch of different buildings. I never actually saw Harvard University."

I can understand owning an object, I even understand owning a piece of land to some degree, although that's somewhat dubious IMO. But an idea? It just makes no sense to me.

I'm thinking of a planet right now called "HS-9970 Xagian Prime" where the oceans are all honey and the land is all gingerbread. How do I "own" that idea? What does that even mean?

I came up with the concept in my imagination sure. I'm the person that originated it, I put some kind of labor into it. But it's impossible to steal from me, unlike land, a shovel, etc. Unless you literally went into my brain, removed the idea somehow and placed it into your brain.

Do I have some sort of rights to that idea? What rights though. Rights of ownership with normal property seem to be rooted in some kind of basic violations of person. As in, the only way you can steal my shovel is if you deprive me directly of the ability to use it. Your stealing directly entails me losing the ability to use that thing. Stealing my land entails kicking me off of it by force against my will, depriving me of using it.

But if you "steal" my idea of Xagian Prime, what am I being deprived of? Anything you add to it is your own creation, it follows the same rules as my ideas I came up with. One could argue that you couldn't have come up with your new ideas without starting from mine, but that seems somewhat dubious, and even if true, it's not like my idea of Xagian Prime was 100% original. It required concepts and ideas that other people already came up with too, and we don't see that as "stealing." I still have full access to my ideas of Xagian Prime.

One might argue that I am deprived of potential profit or social gains, but that seems extremely dubious. How am I "owed" potential profit that isn't guaranteed?

It seems to me that the only arguments that are compelling for so called "Intellectual Property" are actually just arguments about fraud. Like it's wrong to claim my idea of Xagian Prime is actually yours and then sell books on it. Sure, but that has nothing to do with property ownership, that is just fraud. That's the same as saying it's wrong to go around pretending I'm selling medicine when actually it's just water with food coloring.

I am open to changing my position, but I've been discussing this for years with folks and I've never heard a compelling argument for the existence of IP. The most compelling arguments I've heard are ones about rights of people to have their work represented in ways they allow. That makes sense, but again, that seems like an argument against fraud, not for IP.

I always really liked this writeup by a published author on DRM and copyright. I consider it a classic. Seems relevant here.

Yes. Software developer's perspective: Copyright is needed for open source projects to be able to protect their work. The GPL license and similar ones exist so that Microsoft or Google can't slap a few features on your project and sell it themselves without giving back to the community. If nobody can be a copyright holder for their work, big corporations would jump on the opportunity to eat up small projects for their own benefit, probably while using unpaid artists' music in the background during their sales presentations for them.

In some countries they don't have copyright, but they have author's right.

Author's right is apply to the work and is exclusively the property of the author until the end of times (literary). This right is apply automatically on the idea of the work (it doesn't have to be made flesh).

It's a moral right that make the author the only one to have paternity over the work and the keeper of the work's integrity.

It's also a patrimonial right as the copyright (the one to make money with), which is transferred to the children at death for 70 years.

The good thing with this is : the author is 100% responsible for what becomes of the work. The author have a hudge power. And artists should be held responsible for the things done with their work. The sad thing is authors mostly still behave has if the were exploited by labels and editors. The bad thing is the patrimonial rights should expire at death not 70 years later.

As others have said libre and open source licences are a way to gain that kind of control over the work under copyright laws.

A flat 20 years for everything. Individuals, companies, patents, trademarks, everything.

from a certain standpoint I understand wanting to protect your ideas, they are yours you came up with them. but at the same time it can restrict innovation harshly, i think it's bandai namco but they have a copyright on loading screen games in the video games and like Nintendo has a copyright for the d-pad design. it's just too much

Copyright should exist or artists and writers can't avoid having their work stolen by much larger companies.

I think it's worth defining a hard limit for non-person entities to own copyright. That'd mean post a certain limit, game code, artwork, music etc would be free to use. Human-owned copyright should probably be life with a minimum period of average life expectancy, with maybe provisions to allow it to cover your children too? Prevents corporations from waiting until your mum dies in an accident and immediately taking her life's work and using it everywhere.

I have recently been thinking that copyright and patents should be enforced until the creator made back their money plus a set profit; like 30%. The reason for this is that it makes it similar to physical products which are often sold at cost plus some profit; usually around 20-50% depending on competition.

Doing it this way has some interesting side effects.

• It puts creative production on par with physical production.
• It requires transparent accounting.
• It covers the hard work required to develop something while not giving windfall profits to minor discoveries that just piggyback off the work of others.
• The more that is charged for a protected product, the quicker it enters the public domain. If you needed to keep a copyright for a long time then you wouldn’t charge a lot for it which is still beneficial to the public.

There could be some nuances. I’d imagine that there would be some threshold amount that covers smaller items. Maybe everything is covered for the first $200,000 or so. If one was claiming more than that for R&D then they would have to produce accounting demonstrating that amount. That way smaller creators aren’t necessarily burdened like a large corporation that does R&D for a living would be.

Obviously numbers could be fudged, but it could be set up so that is difficult. Accounting could be adjusted. Perhaps quarterly or yearly reports have to be made on which projects money was spent on. That way there would be a paper trail that would make it harder to pretend like more work was done on something than actually was.

Just a thought.

The first 20 years should be free. I think that's a reasonable timeframe for an author to make a reasonable amount of money from a work - or at least to determine if it's worth extending the copyright.

After the initial 20 year period, it should need to be renewed every decade, on an increasingly steep scale. Let's face it - some works can go on making money for a very long time. I think the creators deserve to continue making money off their works if they can, but only if it's really worth it to them, and they're pretty sure that the work will continue to be increasingly profitable. I suggest that the fees to extend the copyright be based on the profits from the work, and should increase with each extension, up to say 80% of the previous decade's profits at 60 years. That way, virtually everything would fall out of copyright by that point, unless the holder was very sure it was going to be incredibly profitable going forward.

This interview with Cory Doctorow is super relevant.

He explains how the music labels have used copyrights power to structure the streaming market AGAINST the interested of the artists. I linked to the relevant timestamp (45:30)

I think copywrite should exist in some form for creative works made by an individual (maybe 20 years with extensions as some series take forever to finish) but for corporations it should be much much shorter or nonexistant. I wonder what would happen if any new groundbreaking tech was automatically public domain. How much more affordable and innovative would everything be?

It should exist, but be far shorter. The original copyright law in the US was for 14 years, and I'd say that's about right. We can argue about the exact length, but that's a good starting point. In the modern age, that's ample time to profit off of a work, and apparently it was back then, too.

If your movie, for example, hasn't made you any money in the first fourteen years, it's not going to make you anything. The vast majority of people aren't going to see a new movie come out and think "Cool, I'm going to wait fourteen years and watch it for free." A few might, but not a significant amount.

So the downside, lost revenue for creators (or more realistically, the companies employing the creators) is minimal. The upside? Huge amounts of content becomes available for use. From an economic perspective, this will boost productivity far beyond the lost revenue, leading to a net gain. Those clinging to immortal copyrights will hurt, but the economy on the whole will benefit.

There's also the moral argument. Free Mickey, man!

im alright with the protection of specific works from copying, but patents can fuck off

'ideas' should not be protected unless there was a reasonable expectation of privacy or compensation

I.E. ideas that were made public without consent or ideas that were part of a sales pitch or something, sure, but the moment that ideas are made public with consent, they should be considered public domain

exclusive right to make something because you happened to be the first one to think of it shouldnt exist, other parties should have the option to directly compete with your product to encourage innovation

also, any trademark law that isnt expressly for consumer protection can fuck off

if i buy a laptop that clearly has the apply logo on it, sure, i should be able to reasonably expect that i am actually buying an apple laptop, with the quality expected of an apple laptop

if im buying a t-shirt with an apple logo on it, or stickers with the apple logo on them, or a phone case with an apple logo on it but that's clearly from a different company there shouldn't be any issue