I don’t think it’s a moral or cultural failure but a political one. A high level politician is successful by being able to convince large donors that they should govern, not by being able to convince the populace that they’re good an analyzing policy and laws to steer them to a better place. That, I believe, is the root of the current imbalance in copyright and patent law.

I think in a way there is a cultural failing. This feels like a problem some countries don't have. It's not uniquely US, but how big of a problem are large donors in the Netherlands, New Zealand, or Denmark?

Frankly I’m not especially familiar with politics outside of the US, but I think the US has two distinct disadvantages compared to a lot of other countries:

1. Being one of the first lintel democracies implemented, it got some things wrong. The electoral collage and that there’s a local optima in a two party system are the first two problems that come to mind and were avoided by many western democracies.

2. The US is really large - both in population and economy. The large population makes it hard to get enough consensus to make fundamental structural improvements (constitutional amendments), and it reduces the influence of an individual vote for any national office. The large economy means that a special interest can reap large economic rewards by steering policy in their favor, so they try really hard.

I guess we're a bit off topic at this point but I think the only glaring structural issue is the winner takes all voting.

> electoral collage

I'd disagree that the US got this wrong; it made a lot of sense historically. These days it arguably introduces some unnecessary inefficiency into the process but I don't think that really matters in practice. The primary objection seems to be that it doesn't reflect the popular vote, but that's entirely by design and arguably the right thing to do.

> two party system

I agree with this but want to clarify that it's specifically first past the post due to winner takes all voting that causes this. It badly needs to be fixed but why would party politicians directly vote against their own career interests like that?

Separately, political parties themselves were argued against when the country was founded but sadly they were allowed. I'd note that most (all?) western countries also got this part wrong (IMO).

> The large population makes it hard to get enough consensus to make fundamental structural improvements

This is intentional. AFAIU, the US political system was specifically designed to be resistant to change in order to avoid the failures of previous republics.

> reduces the influence of an individual vote for any national office

Things were hypothetically (AFAIU) supposed to be done at the state level (think EU) but the interstate commerce clause ended up doing wonders for that.

EC made sense historically solely because that was the only way the Constitution was getting ratified by small states and slave states. As it was, small states wanted to retain the Articles of Confederation approach (one vote per state); and slave states wanted to count the entirety of their population for the purposes of representation, without letting slaves vote. EC was what they hammered out as a compromise, because, on one hand, it threw the small states a bone by counting their senators, and on the other hand, neatly incorporated the already-agreed-upon Three Fifths Compromise from the House, while retaining the general principle of proportional representation.

But something being a compromise doesn't mean that it was sensible - only that it was the best they could do. Furthermore, that particular compromise was hammered out by a very different group of states, and in the context of a very different distribution of powers between the federal and the state governments. Today, we have a much more powerful federal government, we have no slavers to appease, and we have so many small states that, taken together, they can amend the Constitution (via convention) while representing less than 1/4 of the country's population. In this situation, EC becomes a tyranny of the minority, and the majority is not going to tolerate that forever.

Due to the nature of HN I have no idea if you'll actually see a response at this point, but ...

You said it yourself. Smaller states can amend the constitution while representing a minority of the population. (I didn't do the math on that but it sounds about right.) So why would they ever agree to directly proportional representation? It's not in their best interests!

Even today, proportional representation is bound to dissatisfy the less populous states whose interests would end up dwarfed by the majority of the population. Meanwhile the more populous states would hardly take well to a fixed number of votes per state. Applying one method to the house and the other to the senate makes perfect sense since bills have to pass both. The problem is that it's not clear how to apply such an arrangement to an election (the obvious schemes would be far too cumbersome). The electoral college seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

(Of course the house is no longer adjusted IIRC, so it's not really proportional representation either. Arguably the states should wield far more power and the feds far less - that would shift attention much closer to home for the majority of issues.)

You should ask yourself the opposite question: why should the large states tolerate lack of proportional representation indefinitely, given that it's not in their best interests? And the thing is, if large states find that the present arrangement stymies their interests too much (which is increasingly the case due to polarization on the federal level), and there's no legal way out of that bind, they can set legalities aside. By virtue of their sheer size, if they choose to openly conflict with the smaller states over this, the latter would lose. That's why it's really up to the smaller states to continuously ensure that the compromise doesn't become too unreasonable - if it breaks down, they will be entirely at the mercy of large states, with the latter having no particular reason to feel merciful.

The Founders warned about this, by the way. This particular bit from the Federalist Papers (#22) was explaining why keeping the Articles of Confederation as they were was no longer tenable. But it's equally applicable to the Senate and EC as they exist today.

"Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."

I agree that equal representation isn't in the best interests of the more populous states. The problem is that there's a fundamental tension here. Regardless of differences in population size, it's not reasonable for the legal system in a less populous state (say Idaho) to be dominated by the interests of those in a more populous one (say California). Neither is the reverse acceptable (for Idaho's interests to dominate California's). Short of somehow enforcing an equal population distribution across all the states a simple solution just doesn't exist. To that end, the original intent behind the house and senate is an elegant compromise.

As a matter of principle government should be as local as possible so as to minimize such concerns. Even without bringing population size into it, it doesn't seem reasonable to be subject to the whims of others across such vast distances. Too much is done at the federal level; states such as California, Texas, and Alaska are already far too large from a governance perspective.

> The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration.

This is the one line of argument that I do buy, but I think it will always be a fairly subjective balancing act at the federal level.

Honestly I strongly suspect that eliminating the interstate commerce clause and outright banning simple plurality voting schemes in political contexts at all levels would resolve most of the currently perceived political dysfunctions.

The Commerce Clause is quite useful, which is why it was there in the first place. We don't want states to impose tariffs on other states' goods, for example.

That it was appropriated to justify the massive expansion of federal power is another matter, but, well... given how absurd Wickard was, I'm pretty sure that if it weren't the Commerce Clause, it would have been something else.

As for majority voting, all alternatives are strictly worse. The problem, rather, is that there's no meaningful democracy at federal or even state level, because there's no meaningful representation at that scale - the "representatives" are anything but. I'm not sure there's such a thing at any scale, actually - for all the purported benefits of representative democracy wrt preventing mob rule, history has plenty of counter-examples, including US here and now (it's a minority mob rule, which is even worse).

I'd rather have direct democracy, but only so long as it's truly deliberative (i.e. not just people voting on a list of yes/no questions put in front of them, like referendums - think more along the lines of, say, how the Constitutional Convention worked). And scaling that requires some form of council democracy, with enough levels that meaningful deliberation remains possible on every one of them, all the way to the top.

Denmark has just under 6 million people, the Netherlands has ~17 million, and NZ has about 5 million.

By comparison, California has ~40 million people and would be the 9th largest economy in the world if it was an independent country. Ohio has around 11 million people, and the Greater New York City area has ~20 million people.

Aside from structural / legal differences in the US, there are just massive differences in scaling and wealth in the US vs. those countries. They don't have these problems because they just don't have that kind of money and population base.

Population has nothing to do with it. Those countries don't have these problems because they have sane limitations on political donations.

I think that's an unfair take on the law. If you create something you decide what happens with it. That seems reasonable to me.

Why are the rest of us entitled to your creation?

There's a good modern day example we could look at. Reggae music. Jamaica lacks (or did) copyright laws. Because of this, music was reused over and over again. From the 1950's onwards, kids, poor people, anyone with technical knowhow could build a soundsystem, cobbled together from spare parts, get some records and play music. Eventually, many of those people went on to form recording studios and such. Because there was no laws against it, music was widely taken and reused amongst different studios, to the point where these same songs are still being remade today. Because of this, many, many people were lifted from poverty and were able to make careers from this, to the point where reggae has become a global phenomenon, primarily outside north america, where people are still taking these songs and making new versions of them.

Over the years, because of this system, not just the original creators, but hundreds if not thousands of people have benefited, profited and bettered their lives because of music originally recorded in the 1950's and 60's by people, in many cases, long dead.

Under the north american system, the copyright owner would have made millions of dollars, and entire genres of music would.never have been created in their current form.

The value to humanity in that situation far outweighs the profit of the original creators.

> Under the north american system, the copyright owner would have made millions of dollars, and entire genres of music would.never have been created in their current form.

Not the most convincing conjecture when the "loser" in your comparison is one of the biggest music genre-creating powerhouses in the world and its music is rife with sampling, and the "winner" in your comparison is mainly known for a single genre of music.

many of those sampling heavy American music styles (hip-hop, much electronic music) were very directly and strongly influenced by Jamaican dub which grew out of reggae.

I think the argument is reasonable that we don't get any of it, at least not in the forms we have now, without Jamaican music. DJ Kool Herc was Jamaican.

on the other hand, it is definitely true that the American music industry with its strict copyright has not exactly been stagnant. but it is different.

I have an hard time understanding your point, are you saying that the ones that build music out of someone else music, couldn't have done something similar without building out someone else works? They couldn't either if they had to pay a small license fee to the original author?

What made they come out of poverty? Their creation? Or their distribution? Because how you make it seems, the ones that came out of proverty aren't the creative ones... just like the good old copyright owner in America.... It's the ones that found something good and were able to sell it better. The only difference is that the creative one didn't have a choice but to forgo their ownership... just like in America though, which happens under economic pressure instead of by law, but at least, they can at least refuse that.

> The value to humanity in that situation far outweighs the profit of the original creators.

It does though if the original creator couldn't make money out of his original creation... Your premise depends on the fact that without the original creator, the subsequent creation wouldn't be worth it... You want to scrap what's worth it... for something that can't even exist without it.

If you create somethibg, you decide what happens to it. In the case of IP, this should mean you decide whether or not you want to release it/tell others about it. But an idea is not a physical object. Once you tell somebody else your idea, they can tell somebody else with no loss to yourself.

It's like lighting a candle. If you create one, you do not have to share it with anybody. But once you do light somebody else's candle from your own, they are now free to light anybody else's without taking anything away from your candle. That's how ideas work.

The only reason IP law exists, is because people have decided that profit might be lost if people share your idea with others. We are artificially stifling the spreading of ideas from person to person, because of profit. This is a tragedy.

> The only reason IP law exists, is because people have decided that profit might be lost if people share your idea with others. We are artificially stifling the spreading of ideas from person to person, because of profit. This is a tragedy.

IP law exists so people share ideas, because they can do so while still being compensated. Otherwise they might keep them secret, not devote a lot of time and resources into developing them etc.

"You spent a billion dollars to develop a medication for this type of cancer. Now everybody can manufacture it and you're down a billion dollars. Thanks for your generosity!"

How often do you believe that will be said before people stop investing money into development?

No man is an island.

There are explicit influences in things that are created, but there are many implicit influences too. That thing that was created, could it have been made without this society or culture? Could it have been made in a different culture? Didn't we all contribute a little bit to it?

So, while I do agree with your general point that people must have incentive to create and profit/control is one way to do that, my concern is that when things are locked up tight they die and our culture does not benefit from their creation. It would be easy to say that if they are forgotten then maybe they weren't of any use, but history of full of art and science that was not appreciated until much later.

Or conversely, a creation that is a clear product of the zeitgeist could be very influential but if no one can use it, then waiting decades for rights to clear will render it useless.

Imagine if cooking were invented today. Only one individual in the world would be allowed to make sausages without paying royalties.

As Rayiner often points out, this argument applies even more powerfully to real property, which was usually expropriated coercively from its original owners.

I'm not familiar with that person (poster?). But taken to the extreme it could also be an endorsement for Communism or something like it too, but I don't think it's usually healthy to take things to the extreme.

I prefer a middle ground and the original intent (at least as much as is commonly told) around copyright, trade secrets, and patents seemed to be a relatively healthy take on that even if it now needs an update. Depending which path you choose there's a trade-off between how much the creator gets and how much society gets, with varying degrees of control, protection, and communal ownership. The creator gets to choose, but they have a limited set of choices agreed upon by society, rather than individual agreements for every item we buy.

> I'm not familiar with that person (poster?). But taken to the extreme it could also be an endorsement for Communism or something like it too

I think this example might serve: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22250260

I see. Well that seems to mostly talk about physical property. That makes sense - there is one thing, it takes effort to make more, and only one person can have it at a time.

Many people have a problem with equating "theft" to intellectual property since the concept doesn't map directly. If I make a dining table, I shouldn't have to hand it over to my country after a "limited" time (life of the creator plus 70 years now, isn't it?). But perhaps other people should be able to create similar looking tables after a while, to help advance any new techniques or artistic styles used. Ideas can be used while still belonging to the creator.

If I try to block that cultural evolution with a license of some kind, I think I'm doing a disservice to the culture that helped me create the table.

Anyway, does that still relate to the article? Probably not, I was replying more to the concept that everything is made in isolation so full control should be kept. As a society we already decided that doesn't always apply to IP which books are definitely part of. If we aren't careful in separating the concepts of products and ideas, then we get tractors we aren't allowed to fix.

I think the root issue is the creator didn't entirely understand what they were giving away. Harper Collins and all publishers don't create content. They are a delivery platform. Unfortunately to use their delivery platform I have to give them exclusive rights to the content (it's even worse than face book and reddit where they merely claim right to use the content).

In return they'll give you <10% of the profits of publishing the book. That seems like a terrible deal today.

On top of that we're also talking about books where the author is dead.

Why is anyone entitled to my creation isn't a valid question to ask of book publishers. They didn't create a thing.

If it were such a terrible deal authors wouldn't take it, especially successful authors. They overwhelmingly do because it's absolutely more successful the vast, vast majority of the time in getting paid than any of the alternatives are.

I think you make valid point and pose an interesting question. Your comment shouldn’t be downvoted.

There isn’t an easy answer to this. On one side there are many cases where people give away powerful things for free, which has huge positive implications and on the other hand there I sympathize with the notion of wanting to reap benefits of their work.

The underlying problem may be that you only profit if you demand or enforce it?

> If you create something you decide what happens with it. That seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, with the original physical thing you created with your own two hands. Not with a copy of some text or image in a file.

A lot of couples out there would very much disagree that everyone should have access to the image files they created for each other.

You're conflating two orthogonal issues: Privacy and copyrights.

If they posted their photo collection online for all to see, they can't expect people not to make a copy of some of the photos.

Without profit, people couldn't have created those things in the first place. Not because nessarily even they wouldn't have wanted to out of greed: if you can't feed your family at all with something it is less likely you will spend the amount of time on it that you would on something you can. Not to mention a lot of movies/books (Because of printing costs)/shows would just not have been possible without enough captial which comes from people who get said captial by making a profit.

I could list countless examples of things created without profit in mind just for the sheer joy of creation, I could list countless things where profit was not in mind, yet profit was generated, I could list countless things where things were created without profit as a motivation, those things never really generated profit, yet profit was generate later on future creations because of previous creations.

Assuming everything is created with profit as a motive is fairly disingenuous. Look at the open software community just for a start. How many person-hours of labour has been put into those alone without profit ever coming into play as a motive? How much profit over how many people has been generated because of that work? Take say linux for example. What is the sheer number of people that have profited off of linux and the insane amount of overall profit generated vs. Linus, the 'original' creator of the kernel? Just to take one very small example. I'm guessing at least to start, and I may be wrong, but Linus probably isn't struggling financially, meanwhile just how many people now make a living off of linux existing?

I imagine anyone would be hard pressed to actually calculate the amount of people that have profited off of linux being available freely, the actual amount of money made by literally everyone that's made money off it being created and distributed the way it has been, without profit being a sole motivator.

Your response can be defeated by tweaking their statement, for charitable interpretation, into this: "Without profit, people couldn't have created [most of] those things in the first place [that people want the most]."

It's not the free, hobby stuff that's giving IA trouble. And if you look at what people are consuming the most (games, books, movies, tv shows), they obviously prefer the content made by people trying to make a living, not the free-time hobby projects. The biggest games on Twitch are League of Legends and Fortnite, not The Battle of Wesnoth.

Pointing out that people will make some content for fun doesn't really mean much because a world where we depend on hobby/passion projects is obviously not the optimum. I want someone to profit by making the exact content that I want.

That is an argument for the existence of some ip laws, not that the current incarnation of them is the right one.

But I would also draw your attention to the fashion industry. Before the 1980s logomania allowed for trademark law to be applied, there was basically zero IP protection on fashion... but it turns out it was a pretty robust industry anyway.

As a society we've gotten pretty hooked on IP law, but I'm pretty convinced we'd all be a lot better off with MUCH much less.

Not sure if it can be applied to book authoring. I work on open sourced projects in my free time, not for-profit; I have income from other source (jobs) to cover my financial need.

The law actually balances many considerations, profit is only one of them. Maybe educate yourself, archival copies are one of the many exemptions to copyright.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

> The law actually balances many considerations, profit is only one of them. Maybe educate yourself, archival copies are one of the many exemptions to copyright.

One can say a lot about copyright law, but saying it 'balances' many considerations is a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. Copyright law pays lip service to a number of non-commercial interests, like archiving (up to a point).

On the whole, it is strongly biased toward the interests of the big publishing industry that has managed, over the years, to greatly expand its scope and duration.

Just wait for it, it's almost time for another term extension, or else Steamboat Willy is going to become public domain in a few years.

> Just wait for it, it's almost time for another term extension, or else Steamboat Willy is going to become public domain in a few years.

This is broadly a myth.

Most extensions of copyright globally have been about unification of duration, which tends to settle at the longest as any international treaties about anything do. Ultimately Germany and France were the biggest drivers of this globally, far more than works out of the US.

Now that process and unification has broadly happened (at least for newer works) it's unlikely there will be any meaningful term extensions. It's not impossible that some works that receive lower protections might be equalised, or that there might be some mandatory collective schemes for works of completely unknown provenance, but even they seem unlikely.

The truth is that a term extension for Steamboat doesn't really do much for Disney for the political capital required to obtain it. They still have the trademark effectively in perpetuity, Steamboat itself as a work generates no revenue, and there's no real risk to Mickey as a character as Disney likes to portray him nowadays anyway as it's materially different.

Steamboat Willy is a massive red herring in terms of discussion of copyright policy.

I assume you intended to link to 108 (Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives) rather than 107 (Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use): https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108

In any case, profit is a specific limitation on what libraries and archives can do:

108(h)(2) -- No reproduction, distribution, display, or performance is authorized under this subsection if—

(A) the work is subject to normal commercial exploitation;

(B) a copy or phonorecord of the work can be obtained at a reasonable price; or

(C) the copyright owner or its agent provides notice pursuant to regulations promulgated by the Register of Copyrights that either of the conditions set forth in subparagraphs (A) and (B) applies.

I would say B is debatable in all cases considering you'd have to factor in the costs of ebook medium, and the fact that there is a real argument that agreeing to publisher's licensing/DRM scheme can be trivially argued to be an unreasonable price.

Throw in the constraints arising from social distancing strongly disfavoring physical purchasing, and it sounds to me like the industry is simply refusing to adapt to the times.

If people will not purchase your book at the price you set it at, I'd argue that it isn't a reasonable price. Further, if you invest large amounts of capital into technological infrastructure to thwart free dissemination of digital content, and people decide not to aid you by recouping your investment through purchases, I'd consider that the Invisible Hand at work.

The publishing industry is less a disseminate anymore, but more an IP speculator. I file them with patent trolls at this point.