I feel like “default is that they belong to everyone” is a framing that doesn’t quite make sense, it’s mis-using the word “belong”. The less loaded way to phrase what you’re saying is that without copyright, there’s nothing preventing someone from copying my work, not that it’s somehow inherently everyone’s property (which is literally to say that it’s no-one’s property.)
However, to answer your question, the reason is right in the linked article… the first order benefit of allowing everyone to copy everything freely makes the world a better place… if everyone can download and read a great book for free, everyone gets a free book and no extra resources are used… that is a lot of utility created.
Of course, the worry is the that the second order effect will be fewer people create works because they can’t support themselves if everyone can just copy their work.
So we create copyright to mitigate that second order effect, but we still want to maximize the first order benefit of as many people getting access as possible… so the best way to do that is to set the copyright term as short as possible so that people are incentivized to create as much work as possible, but still get the benefit of free copying as soon as we can.
As the author points out, no one is going to decide not to create a work just because they know they won’t be able to profit from it in 70 years… if people are still going to want it in 70 years, that means it will be very popular and certainly financially still worth creating even if you can only profit for say, 20 years.
So the tl;dr… we want copyrights to expire because we aren’t incentivizing more creation by having copyrights not expire. Basically, the ideal would be to tune the length to keep being shorter until we see a drop off in output of creative works.
Yes, this is the actual reason that copyrights aren’t infinite. It just seems hand-wavy, full of assumptions, and rather vague as a justification from the creator’s point of view.
What I’m hoping for is the kind of clarity and specificity behind “makes the world a better place” that could actually be used to guide thinking about how long copyrights should last. Right now, the article and this entire comment section feels more like an argument over personal opinions and assumptions, and lacking enough evidence, enough historical understanding of copyright, and enough philosophical rigor to justify a specific number of years.
BTW, I completely disagree with the article’s framing of “first order” and “second order”. They are reversed, as a persuasive tactic, but incorrectly so. The first order effect is the money and content value that changes hands as part of the transaction on offer by a creator. Letting the public at large benefit from free copies is both an economic and a temporal second order effect that doesn’t have tangible value, and comes with some economic harm that requires balancing.
The article is not speaking about the first order benefit of the work being created originally… it is talking about from the perspective of piracy… piracy advocates always make the argument “well the creator doesn’t lose any money when I download the movie, and I get to watch a movie… I win and no one loses, how can that be bad?”
The article is trying to point out that the counterpoint to that is that yes, for the particular work you are downloading that might be true (no one loses and you gain), the second order effect of piracy might be a reduction in creative works being produced.
So what is first order vs second depends on what you are talking about… the creation of the work or the copying. I think it is useful to frame it this way because piracy advocates always start their argument from the work already existing.
I mentioned somewhere else, but Copyright Law already specifically rejects the claim that copying without permission is not hurting the creator. That claim doesn’t hold water when the pirate is enjoying the value of the work, and is ignoring the costs of it’s creation including time. Piracy advocates need to address the history and philosophy of copyright that’s already been debated and decided if the argument is to be taken seriously.
Short of piracy, I’m still left wondering how to decide copyright terms.
It's a bit like a startup. That is: creating the thing isn't the only part - getting people to want it, i.e., finding a market for your product, is intrinsical.
Case in point: Van Gogh. He only became greatly appreciated after his death.
What does that mean for copyright? In this line of reasoning, copyright during life of the creator is reasonable. A work may become a cultural touchstone for ever (Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Bach/Mozart/Beethoven), for one or two generations (Elvis Presley/Cliff Richards[1]), or maybe it becomes simply widely known without being considered an indispensable part of culture (Venga Boys - Boom Boom Boom). During life of the creator, the creator's efforts should be protected and she/he should be allowed time to get her/his creation ingrained in general consciousness. Post-life, the heirs could be allowed some time to reap what was sown - e.g. 10 years, extendible once for 10 years for payment.
As the OP, I'm not saying this is my view on copyright. I am wondering why society should think it owns something I created. "Because others benefit" is insufficient in my opinion: if you're posting on HN, you're in the wealthy half of the world population. Others would benefit if society took half of what you own and distributed its value to those significantly less well off.
I'm in favour of the concept of ownership myself, but I don't see why creative works should be exempt from that.
[1] at one point in time, there was an Elvis vs. Cliff vibe. Possibly strength depending on where you lived (more apparent for UK/EU folks?).
when you look at the Disney animation classic's back catalogue you see an awful lot of work from the commons. does this not display the value of having these works in the commons?
Meanwhile, if you rolled back the last two big extensions --- CTEA and the Berne-joining Copyright Act of '76 --- and brought us back to 1909, you'd still have 60 year terms. I'd flip the argument around and claim that no copyright opponent on HN would accept 60 years either. So what are we arguing about? Does term have anything real to do with this?
The question I was answering is if we have copyright at all, why shouldn’t it be infinite in length? The answer is that the incentive copyright provides to creators has diminishing returns, and eventually provides no extra incentive… how long that period actually is is not obvious, but it is likely somewhere way before 95 years. And since society gets a benefit when works enter public domain, society has an incentive to try to set the length of time as short as possible while maintaining the incentive to create.
I am not trying to argue for an exact length of time, just explaining why we don’t want it to be forever.
Someone probably could get industry numbers for how much publishers make on copyright older than 50 years… and with the time discount for 50 years of not having the money to use for other purposes… and see how much each creator gets in the star-search lottery
If you share with society should you be able to control other people's use of it?
How does that benefit society? Remember the rules are enforced by society and need to serve society.
Patents and copyright go hand-in-hand in protecting ideas. But patents last 20 years.
That’s just circular, not a reason. The explanation & philosophy behind limited terms isn’t justified with “because it was designed with limited terms”. The rationale was stated in the article, and is written into copyright law. I don’t have any beef with your opinion, but so far it’s only an opinion and not backed up by clear reasoning or evidence. 25 years is shorter than copyright has ever been in the US, even in 1790, more than 200 years ago.
If you believe creator lifetime is too long, part of the question is whether you would really stick to that if you were making money from your own work. Imagine, if you will, that you write software for your employer. Your software is currently protected by copyrights. But if that software copyright protection expires in 25 years, then any software you write can be legally taken by a brand new startup that doesn’t write code, it only sells code other people wrote, even using other people’s marketing material, including videos and imagery your company built. They offer your product for cheaper than your employer can, because their operating expenses are one hundredth of yours. Can your product & employer survive this, will your job last? If your job were actually on the line and might disappear suddenly anytime the company you work for has their work expire, do you still stick to your opinion that 25 years is enough?
> That’s just circular, not a reason.
Oh, sure -- but no more circular than:
>>> I was talking about within a society that already has copyright. Let me ask it another way: assuming that we have a copyright system, why should my copyrights ever expire?
...now is it? The obvious counter-question is, why should you have any copyright at all; why should we assume that we have a copyright system in the first place?
> The explanation & philosophy behind limited terms isn’t justified with “because it was designed with limited terms”
No, exactly. So, as the article says: Limited terms are a practical compromise between the per se equally unjustifiable extremes of "no copyright at all" and "eternal copyright". So what's the use of even asking for some principled a-priori-rationable reason in response to an article that explains why precisely that is not attainable?
Trademarks are also different from copyright. It gets complicated, but you shouldn't be able to do confusing things with them.
Because copyright exists for a reason, not by nature. Assume we have a copyright system, sure. We've got one. The thing is that people made that system. Why did they do it? What was the reasoning for making that system, and is the current system still functioning the way we wanted it to function when we created it?
We can't completely ignore the reason why copyright exists, because copyright isn't real. Copyright isn't a right, there's no natural moral reason to for it to exist, it's not a property right and there's no coherent framing of copyright as a property right that makes sense when examined with the same rigor that we use to examine other property rights. Copying an idea doesn't deprive anyone else of anything other than a monopoly over other people's behaviors, which is not something that we usually care about when talking about natural rights.
We don't claim that inventing a better mousetrap is violence because it puts the old mousetrap makers out of business, so there's no good way to phrase "a monopoly over profits" as a natural right that people are morally entitled to. And the more we go down that road (independent invention, the fact that copyright can't exist without a public domain because very little of what we create is original, etc, etc...) -- we just keep finding problems and situations where copyright doesn't make sense as a moral right.
But there's an even bigger problem: it's not just that copyright isn't a moral right, copyright is also a restriction on the rights of culture itself. One of the most human things in the world that you'll find in every culture is that human beings share things with each other: ideas, stories, thoughts, and emotions. Copyright restricts people's freedom to share ideas, to fix their problems, and to exercise their own autonomy. It also intrudes into the free market, allowing emerging monopolies over content, and allows content to be weaponized to manipulate other parts of the market. It also restricts the collective autonomy of a culture to define itself and and to define its own cultural language.
However, despite all of these problems copyright is also a very convenient way to make sure artists get paid for the things they make. This is why humans invented it.
So the question becomes: given that copyright is a pragmatic restriction of both individual and cultural rights, are we going just far enough to make sure that artists get paid and that they're incentivized to make new art, or are we going farther than that and restricting people unnecessarily?
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> The less loaded way to phrase what you’re saying is that without copyright, there’s nothing preventing someone from copying my work, not that it’s somehow inherently everyone’s property (which is literally to say that it’s no-one’s property.)
To be clear, I am not in the first camp. I would say that no one has a moral claim over an idea, you can not logically own a thought or a story, and I don't think that is a way of looking at the world that stands up to scrutiny. I would not say copyright is just the way that society protects your idea, I would say that an idea is literally "no-one's property", the latter part of your sentence is correct.
I'll kind of issue the same challenge back to you in the opposite direction: I have heard moral arguments for copyright based on ideals of fairness or out of people deserving compensation when they help society. Some of those make sense, that's stuff we care about. However, I have never heard an internally consistent explanation of how someone can inherently own an idea that stands up to scrutiny in the real world; IP as a natural property right doesn't make sense either from a Libertarian/Anarchist perspective or from a Collectivist/Communist perspective, it's kind of amazing how many different worldviews it clashes with.
There's a huge amount of work that has been put into the phrasing of copyright and IP as "property" and "right", the names aren't accidental. But it's just pure propaganda, it's phrased that way so it sounds better to you. Copyright is a purely pragmatic invention designed to encourage production and to compensate artists. It has the same moral weight as any other administrative law we've invented: that is to say important and beneficial and worth having around, but only important in so-far as it accomplishes its original goal. Past that point, IP is an abridgement of actual natural rights to things like free speech, cultural exchange, and even (when we get the DMCA involved) actual property rights to tamper with and inspect products that people actually own.
There are decent arguments for multiple different copyright policies in multiple directions. But most of the decent arguments are based around pragmatism and policy (whether or not copyright is actually accomplishing its goals in its current form); they're rarely based around some kind of mythological right people should have to control everyone else's ability to imitate them or share information freely.
What we're discussing here is a right that's been baked into American law since its creation; it's not a random idea Sonny Bono had in 1997.
Also, IP law is relatively recent in American law which originates from England and France. Originally copyright only protected works from authors inside the country was only extended to foreign works in 1891 making it roughly half the age of the US.
To say that in the natural world people don't always have their rights guaranteed does not mean that Senator age requirements are in the same category of Right as a Right to a fair trial. One of those is a moral right and one of them is an administrative policy.
The age of copyright in the relation to the US is kind of weird debate to have, because in general we would want to look considerably earlier than the formation of the US to talk about moral rights, or at least we would want to look at arguments outside of the Constitution to try and figure out whether Copyright is a moral right or a pragmatic policy.
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All we really get from the Constitution is:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Which just leads to more endless debate over what "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" actually means, and whether a government right to regulate something is the same as an individual right/entitlement to a specific regulatory outcome (usually we don't treat those two things as the same). And we can go down that rabbit hole of what the founders intended, but in some ways that debate almost doesn't even matter when we get into what people are morally entitled to, because if the argument is that copyright is a natural property right that people are morally entitled to, that argument shouldn't boil down to "Jefferson thought so."
Looking at what the founders intended really only matters if copyright isn't a moral right, it matters if it's a policy designed to produce an outcome because then we can look at intent and see if the policy is producing the desired outcome. If people want to argue that they're morally entitled to a monopoly on pieces of culture, then they need a much stronger argument for that position.
What does that mean though? If you want to claim that copyright is a moral right, saying that it was invented early on in American history isn't a good enough argument to justify that. Lots of things were invented early on in American history that are not moral rights, they're just useful policies.
The US Constitution includes language like:
> [Senators and Representatives] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
No one would seriously claim that this means the Constitution is arguing that people have an inherent right not to be prosecuted while they're at a government job. It's a practical policy we put in place for practical reasons that should be examined through that lens.
And copyright is the same. The fact that the US Government reserves for itself the right to regulate commerce/sharing around ideas/inventions does not confer any moral right to any individual to have a monopoly over ideas. It merely gives Congress the right to establish that monopoly as it sees fit.
And as I just said it only recognized works created in the US and therefore didn’t represent any recognition of copyright as some universal fact. It was a relatively ad hock compromise extending some at the time recent developments in English law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...
The article explained how limited copyright is a useful incentive apart from any moral view. And it explained how the term affects the costs.
You describe this as something positive without considering that it was basically impossible to survive as an author (or any other creative professional) before copyright existed unless you had a rich patron sponsoring you (who obviously had his own agenda) or were independently wealthy. It wasn't really feasible to make a living by selling your work to actual consumers. I mean just look at Cervantes one of the most popular writers in Europe at the time who died in relative poverty and obscurity and who was basically only able to write and publish what he did because he found a rich nobleman willing to finance him.
Because you've got it backwards, you have no inherent right to any intellectual property you create, it's a legal fiction. Before copyright was a thing, freely copying and remixing the ideas and stories of others was the default. Once an idea is out there, you have no moral right to tell others they cannot share it.
Copyright is an attempt to give an incentive to people to come up with more good ideas and stories and music, but the default is that they belong to everyone.