Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done

Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by tptacek on Monday January 03, 2022 @07:31PM (#29789222)

That 70 vs. 20 year argument assumes a bunch of facts not in evidence. In a star-search business, the outlier winners are a big part of what sets compensation levels for the authors that don't have runaway successes. It's possible, even likely, that cutting copyright terms back to an unprecedented 20 years --- that's shorter than the term we had in the 1700s --- would in fact drastically reduce the amount of work that gets produced, by making even the hits so unprofitable that nobody will invest in their authors.

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?

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Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by cortesoft on Monday January 03, 2022 @07:42PM (#29789372)

I probably should have left off mentioning any actual number of years, since my argument was not trying to argue for any specific length of time.

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.

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Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by tptacek on Monday January 03, 2022 @07:47PM (#29789446)

I agree it shouldn't be forever. Maybe it should even be shorter. But I don't look at the market for original authorship of cultural works and think "wow, this a lucrative field to get into". Most authors are just barely getting by.

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Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by cortesoft on Monday January 03, 2022 @07:56PM (#29789555)

That is also part of what the article is pointing out… after a few years, only the wildly successful works are going to continue to have demand enough to make copyright matter… 99% of creators aren’t going to be affected at all by the length of copyright, so 99% of creators will not care either way.

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Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by tptacek on Monday January 03, 2022 @08:44PM (#29790061)

I know I'm saying this for the 50th time on this thread so I'll keep this short: it is not the case that just because only 1% of works are still throwing off cash 50 years later that a 50 year term only benefits 1% of work. The probability that any given work will be profitable 50 years from now is priced into lots of deals; that's how star-search businesses work.

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Re:Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done by cortesoft on Monday January 03, 2022 @09:23PM (#29790433)

I’d be curious on the economics for publishing… probably varies by the genre. I can’t imagine most tech publishers, for example, are banking on profits in 50 years.

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

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