Current copyright is dramatically limiting culture and cultural growth.
Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not inadvertently copying anything from their entire lifetime, and that of their parents.
It’s rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists taking one of two paths: 1) working in secret, trying desperately to thread the needle between making a living creating and losing it all by being discovered. 2) Forgoing the idea of true creative expression altogether, and limiting themselves to samples that they can pay for up front.
So you can make that “the lifetime of their grandparents” too.
People get around it by producing Fauxpaign under various other names.
As far as I'm aware, even laws for the small business play into the favor of larger corporations either directly or via auxiliary laws.
One needs only to taste legit French cheese, compared with, say, Austrian manufactured French cheese, to know food quality laws have little to do with actual food quality, and Austria has one of the strictest food legal systems in the World.
Not sure how you got from food safety to how much you like the taste of particular cheese, but to me they're very different problems. I'm only talking about food safety.
> They also conveniently keep volunteers and churches from feeding the homeless, so subsidized corporations can handle that.
Not generally, but perhaps in your area. Where I am there are special exemptions for charitable organizations giving out food: https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/lscfo.asp
There are still some requirements, which I think is good. Nobody, homeless people included, should receive unsafe food.
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2017/05/what-are-the-odds-840...
https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/rawmilk-outbreaks.htm...
But this all seems pretty far afield from my point, which is that food safety laws benefit the poor. I am happy to believe that some dangerous food, like casu martzu or blowfish sushi, is also very tasty. But taking risks for exotic, connoisseur food experiences is also generally the provenance of the rich. So it seems like this also proves my point.
Further I'm aware of Food Not Bombs winning a case by claiming an expressive first amendment right to share food.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/crime/os-homeless-feedi...
Though local ordinances, they require certified and licensed establishments, so it still rolls back to the original issue.
For example milk started to be regulated more only after someone in Al Capone's family got poisoned and he bribed the right people to make it a thing. You're kidding yourself if you think any of that was to benefit the poor in the first place lmao, just happens to be a side effect.
I can assure you that amazon and walmart care at least a little about the health of the minimum wage workers they depend on to move inventory.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-...
But I do agree with your general argument, a healthy workforce is better for a country's economy.
A lot of our food safety regulations are a result of public outrage over horrendous conditions in factories that produced low cost foodstuffs primarily eaten by the poor in the early 20th century.
Though you could easily argue that the rich still benefit from these laws because they help insure a healthy labor pool.
I agree they pose a barrier to entry, but I think that's good. People not ready to run a clean kitchen should are not ready to serve food. Now it's possible that the bar is unnecessarily high in places. But I live in a city with lots of restaurants and a relatively low number of chains, so I'm sure it's not always the case.
For a long time, Wisconsin was a perfect example. Home canned goods were allowed to be sold, but home baked goods were not, even though canning involves many more safety risks. The Wisconin Bakers Association successfully lobbied against legislation, but home baked goods were eventually allowed after a two year lawsuit. Even after the lawsuit, the Wisconsin agricultural department insisted that "baked goods" were limited to those items that contained wheat flour. It took another lawsuit concluding in 2021 to expand baked goods to include all non-perishable baked goods (gluten-free products, etc).
Most states don't even allow this "cottage food" industry.
Granted, I'm not arguing that some grandma selling kolaches down at the farmer's market is going to build the next Hostess brand, but everyone starts somewhere.
I'm willing to believe there are actual examples out there, but this is not it. Starting a bakery is not hard. I've traveled extensively in Wisconsin and there are plenty of small bakeries. And at least here in CA, a common way to get started building a food business is to rent time in a shared industrial kitchen. That suggests there are plenty of ways for people to get started, and that food safety laws are not a big burden.
Look, I'm not going to say regulatory capture doesn't exist, or that the wealthy don't have advantages in getting laws passed that favor their interests, but there's a great deal of stuff that gets done that is specifically for the poor or the average citizen.
These benefit the wealthy. They are used the quell the thirst for wealthy blood that would otherwise be prevalent. They are crumbs thrown to the masses to keep them from revolting during uncertain times.
> The vast majority of regulatory apparatus
I'd argue most regulatory bodies are captured agenies in the US. The delineation between state and industry has been fading for decades. They either look the other way, or overregulate to choke out any competition that would unseat existing players. Regulation in the US is almost entirely in service to capital.
> weather forecasting, GPS
Again, these are likely more in service to the economy (capital) than normal citizens.
> state/federal parks
Fair enough. I'd add libraries to this list as well. These institutions are actually kind of an odd exception to America's complete obsession with privatization, consumerism, and capital.
> laws like the CRA, VRA or ADA which help those disadvantaged by racism, disability, etc.
Again, fair enough.
> federally funded research
Yes, often funded by the citizens such that private industry can sell the result without recompense.
> Look, I'm not going to say regulatory capture doesn't exist
It's the the rule, not the exception.
By that standard, a law completely redistributed wealth from top to bottom could still be viewed as primarily "benefiting the wealthy"...
This is how Germany got some of its welfare state way back in the 1800's. Monarchy and statesmen realized they had to quell the masses or they'd get socialist revolutions from the burgeoning socialist movements at the time, and headed them off by implementing things like universal healthcare under Otto von Bismarck.
What muddles the picture is people do benefit from economies of scale. So, if you make the law actually hostile for large companies both the general public and corporations are worse off.
Unless we're calling construction workers buying F150s with 72 month loans wealthy these days.
Once a vehicle gets lemon lawed, it gets sent to auction where it is disclosed to dealers, and then it's just sold again to the public as a used car without the ability to be lemon lawed at that point.
There is nothing wrong with buying a lemon car at a sufficient discount.
Thus lemon law benefits every single consumer whether buying a new or used car.
What an overly broad thing to say!
I mean, no coincidence that they are always on the top of the list to threaten and scheme to cut by the right wing.
As your chart shows ever since the first Copyright Act in the US, there has been a major revision every 40-70 years, typically to update for things that have changed since the previous Act such as new technology.
As far as I've been able to tell Disney has nothing to do with creating the 1976 Act, which was the first time their copyright term was extended. The 1976 was created largely to address the massive changes in technology and international trade since 1909.
As part of that there was wide consensus that the US needed to make its copyright law more like the rest of the world, to pave the way for the US joining the Berne Convention. The change in terms came as part of that, making US copyright terms match what nearly everyone else had.
>The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – also known as the Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or (derisively) the Mickey Mouse Protection Act[1] – extended copyright terms in the United States in 1998. It is one of several acts extending the terms of copyrights.[2]
The people who grew up in the culture permeated with such stories are stunted expressively. Because they're denied the use of an ever-growing share of the tropes and characters of the common culture. Many Disney films themselves are retellings of classic stories in the public domain. If you want to reference the original Cindarella, or Greek mythology, or Oliver Twist, you're free to do so.
You cannot do that with Luke Skywalker, or Aragorn. Now, maybe you shouldn't be able to within the author's life. But how many centuries should we keep this privilege? Would you or I (or Disney) be able to tell a new story about Hercules if copyright had been around 2000 years ago? Imagine Shakespeare still under copyright! No Hamlet or Macbeth characters in any other works without permission. We can strike several important 20th century books right there. In the future, the equivalent of Shakespeare will still be under copyright long, long after they are dead. Derivation and reuse are normal in art. Disney can borrow from the public domain to make Cindarella, but it in turn will never become public domain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy's_Despecialized_Edition
Even then, it wasn't really what was being asked for by fans. The goal at that time was to get LucasFilm to release the pre-Special Edition versions of the movies, which were available on VHS and Laserdisc, on DVD at DVD resolution.
LucasFilm insisted that it was impossible to reassemble the negatives and that they had no suitable print from which to produce a new digital scan. Instead, they released digitized copies of the Laserdiscs on DVD bonus discs.
Since then, enthusiasts have managed to produce Blu-ray resolution versions of the original movies first by piecing together a variety of sources and later by acquiring and scanning surviving prints.
This, lets call it, "cross pollination" would be much more difficult today.
That's always my go-to example for copyright because:
1. Disney has benefited both from extending copyright and from the previous shorter duration of copyright
2. The fact that a work from the 19th century would still be under copyright in 1959 is astonishing to many people
3. Disney's Sleeping Beauty, despite opening to mixed reviews, is generally well received today and is a great example of what we are missing out on; this work (judged "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the LoC) could not have been made if today's rules existed in 1959.
If someone wanted to do "The New Stories of Mickey Mouse" they should be free to do so.
If someone wanted to act as Disney using Micky Mouse, then they should be sued into oblivion for acting as another company.
Everyone else is free to do with IP, do remixes etc. and if they make something with original IP that is better than originals, so be it ,competition actually working.
A trademark means if I buy AMD, I'm not getting "shitty rebrand of chip 10y old by jank fab". Or it means if I buy branded food, I know what I'm getting.
Trademarks are essential for the protection to know the goods you buy from a company are what you're expecting.
And that's why I'm realllllly curious when a whole bunch of big companies sue Amazon for allowing counterfeit co-mingling (or being charged $$$$$ for separate SKUs), relating to trademark dilution. This is straight up provable damage.
Corporations barely need to do any propaganda because so many artists advocate for exploitative system without any prompting.
I haven't figured out a way to push this narrative in any meaningful way. People have a hard time distinguishing arguments against copyright from arguments for copyright reform. Most of the time I have to stress that I'm not for copyright abolishment but more reasonable copyright terms and extension protocols.
One tradeoff is to have the fee be proportional to the revenue it is generating. But this could encourage extension-by-default, rather than making it an intentional decision the copyright holder has to make: Is it worth "buying the monopoly rights." I think I would be ok with that if the increase for future extensions was steep. But that does also come at the cost of the second part,
> that doesn't become popular until later
You have a small-time creator that doesn't extend, and so loses out on massive potential revenue derived from future popularity of the work decades later. This would be unfortunate ... but on the other hand I think society would be more likely to make this true and create interesting derivative works if there were more works that were derivable. You need to keep durations short to make that happen.
Every 10 years, declare that your work is worth $x, then pay a renewal fee of $x/10 (or some other fraction based on more solid economics).
If anyone volunteers to pay more than $x in place of your $x/10 your work is now public domain.
We are not just balancing the individual creators vs corporations, but also creators of derived works, and societies benefit at-large of more creative works in general. We want to maintain and compensate creators "enough" to maintain incentives for creation, but otherwise maximize the commons.
I have a much simpler solution: copyright terms are fourteen years from date of publication. There are no extensions.
It could even be a lot shorter nowadays. Nearly all media gets nearly all of its profit in the first year. A lot of commercial software goes out of date in a few months rather than yearly releases.
It really isn't. It's a temporary privilege of state enforced monopoly.
Patent law would, ideally, be abolished altogether as I'm not convinced that other types of patents are any more legitimate than software patents. Trademarks should not expire, of course, but there should be restrictions on what you can trademark to protect the public domain (for example, the mouse corporation shouldn't be able to evade the copyright term limits by trademarking its characters).
Copyright is meant to be a "public pact" to encourage creation and innovation.
But think about that goal for a minute. It doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to create one awesome thing once and then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.
Instead, it should give you a reasonable amount of time to benefit from the fruits of it, but afterward, you should be encouraged to create again. So you'd be motivated not just by the carrot of making a lot of money over a 10-year span after launch, but also by the stick that you will no longer get royalties after 10 years, so you need to keep innovating. There is even a study out there that shows that the buyers of most books drastically drops after 10 years.
This benefits society at large, since it creates more competition, both from the original author of a work, but also by others who are then allowed to make iterations of the original work.
That's why patents are time-limited, too. The idea isn't to give one company the "right" to make money off an invention for eternity, but to allow the whole society to profit from it eventually by allowing others to drastically improve upon that original idea afterward.
But why was it ever intended as a "public pact" and not like an "actual right" that authors have? Because let's not forget that no idea is 100% original.
In fact, most aren't even 10% original. We all live "on the shoulders of giants" as they say. So most works are just rehashing of old works - so that also means that if enforcement was 100% the inflow of new works would drastically be reduced. So you don't "deserve" to benefit from a "new work" that's actually mostly rehashed old ideas anyway.
I always recommend watching the Everything is a Remix series to get a new perspective on this based on the history of copyrighted works:
You probably should abandon this account and create a new one that isn't "dead" on post.
--------------
> Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it originally had.
Samuel Clemens stated that if copyright was shortened to this long or shorter, then he would not issue books. Instead he'd public chapters as to restart the clock for each. And naturally, would arbitrarily lengthen copyright to however long he'd string readers by.
As for me, I have no answers. This problem is larger than I think anyone can view.
Regardless, that copyright was 7-10 years originally is close but not quite right in a way that matters: it was 14 years with the ability to request a 14 year extension. (This being the same in the US law which came much later, but was originally from the Statute of Anne in the UK.)
So like, 10 is close enough to 14 and yet, not only do those 4 years feel (to me) like they matter a lot, it is arguably 28, and 7 is definitely underselling the protection they were being granted. That said, it also only applied (in the US) to books, maps, and charts, so in some sense wasn't even the same, broad concept.
The discussion of how long over time is interesting as, in a very real sense, our ability to monetize copyright quickly has increased: the Internet lets you immediately address a nationwide market, while it easily could have taken decades with nothing but (expensive to use) printing presses making materials to distribute around using (slow) horses and (for even wider distribution) boats.
These days, I almost get the impression that a lot of media companies try to make the vast majority of money off of something in the first few MONTHS and then nigh-unto discard it entirely--not even bothering to finish things for later syndication--while they move on to new content and new IP.
They are then occasionally mining their old catalogs of IP to do like, a "reboot", but I frankly feel like no one would stop making content if they lost the ability to later do that, and I also doubt that the original creators are being compensated much for that later possibility (as it is so hit and miss).
Instead the benefit of creative works would almost exclusively to middle-men who created nothing.
7 years is sooo short. Many TV shows and book series take longer than that from start to finish. And often times they grow in popularity.
Movies based on books frequently come out more than 10 years after the book resulting in a surge of popularity. With 10 years the original author would see no benefit from either the movie or their new book sales! There’d be a lot of fat cats, just not the actual creator.
It does not protect the artists, the creative works, or the little guy. It is a product of decades' worth of lobbying by very rich and powerful organizations and megacorps.
I'm not against the idea of a copyright. An artist has the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and creative works do have value.
However, the original idea of copyright has been bent, broken, dismembered, and sown back together in a Frankensteinian abomination and now serves only to line up pockets of people in the publishing industry. And the US has, through its trade deals, exported this thing worldwide.
Disney lobbies for life of author + 70 years copyright duration not out of goodwill towards authors (in fact, it's been trying to wriggle out of paying royalties to some of them!). Amazon uses copyright as an excuse to push DRM, locking out competition and limiting users' rights (Kindle, Audible DRM). DMCA is constantly abused to take down fair-use content.
Meanwhile, book authors are struggling to find a reason to write books, since many barely recoup the costs. Musicians decry royalties paid out by Spotify (that aren't actually so small, but the majority of the cut is taken by the music industry). Photographers try in vain to stop people just copy/pasting their photos online (what are they going to do, sue everyone?), including in some cases big companies that didn't even bother to check the copyright.
They aren't being protected. They are being milked.