> Copyright in its current form needs to die. It doesn't protect the artist, it protects their publishers

Then it isn't the copyright at fault here but the agreement between the artist/author and publisher. Artists are famously forced to make bad deals when they don't have any leverage.

7 years isn't realistic in the case of many authors and artists whose work becomes more valuable after time on the market, awards given as they mature etc.

Additionally if your concern is that artists and authors aren’t being paid, a 14 year copyright term is nothing. A corporation would just contract you to make a work, complete whatever minimum release is necessary to get copyright, then wait until it’s public domain to wide release a remastered version that they no longer have to pay royalties on since it is public domain.

Despite how many negatives the current copyright regime has, having to wait 70 years after the death of the author is far too long of a timeframe for that strategy to play out.

> A corporation would just contract you to make a work

In that case, by definition, the artist was paid.

The last round of strikes by the writers and actors unions were about royalties.

Being paid for a spec or a per diem while making the movie can be peanuts. Big name actors and writers make percentages on the backend.

I'm not concerned about that. And if I was, why should artists be treated differently to anyone else who chooses to charge for the product of their efforts? Copyright didn't exist before 1710. Art sure did though. A protection of 7 years seems fine by that measure. Go make some more art after that expires. Or even before!

>> Copyright didn't exist before 1710. Art sure did though. A protection of 7 years seems fine by that measure.

This seems utterly arbitrary. I fail to understand your logic here.

Please accept my apologies. I mean that the ostensible reason for copyright is to protect and thereby incentivise the production of artistic work. By extension, without copyright, artists would not create anything. But artistic work existed before copyright was created in law in 1710. Ergo, protection of 7 years would seem more than generous when, for example, builders are not paid every time somebody enters their buildings, or lawyers are not paid every time somebody reads the contracts they wrote.

Well if I can get your art for free after a few years of waiting why would I ever pay? Shortening copyright so much has secondary effects.

By secondary effects, do you mean artists would cease to create art? If so, then artists living in the many hundreds of years before copyright existed in law would disagree. Or do you mean there isn't enough music, or film or literature, etc. in the world? Spotify doesn't have an input problem as far as I know.

No the secondary effects would be people no longer having to pay for art. Including corporations like Spotify and Netflix.

Artists would still make art but would have to either have patronage or find an alternative income source to make a living.

Easy fix: corporations can't hold IP. Only people can.

There. Fix't.

If I install the plumbing in your house, you don't pay me every time you have a shower. I'm willing to concede an artist might be "better" than a plumber (commercially), but if copyright is intended to incentivise production of art, then 7 years seems perfectly reasonable time to let a work accrue some money before it goes into the public domain. 7+7 was in fact how copyright first existed.

Plumber does job work based on agreed price in advance and gets paid for every job.

The artist has no sort of guarantee of income from any particular piece of work or really even subsistence from their entire life's output of work.

I think most people would agree that the physical trades and the arts are not well-suited for comparisons. They are just fundamentally too different.

> I think most people would agree that the physical trades and the arts are not well-suited for comparisons.

How is the writing of a book, the production of a movie or the recording of a song any different from the building of a bridge, the drafting of a contract, or the provision of management consultancy? How are they "fundamentally too different" if it's not the way we pay for them?

But more importantly, how is is that we see this difference as so fundamental that we afford protection to an artist (or more accurately, their publishers and the industry that surrounds them) via copyright for so long?

Simple. If I fashion a shovel and sell it to you, the value I got is the $20 or whatever, and the value you got is the indefinite use of one shovel.

You do not get to clone the shovel by magic for about .1 cent and sell 50M copies of it for $20 each for the next forever.

If the copyright system existed for shovels in that analogy, nobody else could make a shovel like yours during your lifetime, and for about 50 years after that, during which time your rights holders would get rich and shovel design would stand still.

Again - the copyright system as it currently exists needs to die. 7 years protection is enuogh.

The question was how is the value of the labor of an author different from the value of the labor of a plumber. There is a difference, and part of the difference is that if someone wants another sink installed tomorrow, they have to hire the plumber again to do another days work, while the authors work can be copied for free and, if allowed, a company will happily pay the author $50 one time, and then resell that same work 500 million times over for $50 each.

The point was not to defend the current copyright system and certainly not some of the more notable abusers. You asked a question, and that that is one part of the answer. Writing a book or doing any form of creative information-product work is different from doing physical-product or service work.

Not to mention, no one gets to make 50M reselling the plumbers one day pay work.

Reading comments like yours convinces me that open sourcing my stuff wouldn't be a good idea. I very much like the idea that I own what I created. At least as long as owning stuff is how society works.

Yes! That worked for Linus Torvalds! Oh, wait... https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/linus-...

50 Million for the most successful open-source project(s) of all time? That is peanuts.

If you want to make money, open-sourcing your work seems to be a very hard way of doing so.

What is the value of all the software I've been able to use all my life for free? What is the value of the fact that all of that software behaved sanely and in my interests at all times? Both are basically incalculable. There is more than dollars to consider in the equation, and there are even many dollars too, merely indirectly.

Thats not really relevant unless you think it will significantly reduce high quality output, which i dont think it will. Copyright is a perversion of the free market as a trade off to incent fixed cost investment (i.e. creating content) in an industry with zero marginal cost (i.e distribution is so close to free it might as well be thought of as free). The goal should be to pervert the free market as little as possible because raising the distribution price above zero very clearly causes deadweight loss to society and the longer the copyright term the more tenuous the claim of increased productiin and venefit to society is relative to the large deadweight loss it causes.

I am a researcher and new technology developer in materials science and those inventions are only protectable for 20 years.

I believe you are referring to patents. We're talking about copyright though, which is a different thing really - but related I suppose.

Software copyright needs to die?

No more software licenses?

Contract trumps copyright - it's a whole different thing.

Agree but also disagree on the terms. Make the renewal fee exponponential (i.e first 10 year term is included second term to n terms renewal costs 100^n, which would make the renewals cost 10k,1mm,100mm,10b, etc.) That would put the vast majority of content into the public domain after the first term and let the amazing stuff pay the author longer but not much longer.