I don't know if I agree that 14 years is right, but I'm sure that pretty much everyone can agree that 1 year is too short, and 60 years is too long.

Why wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to physical property? Why can't I just go live in any house I want? Take any car I want?

Imagine I believe that depriving people of hypothetical profits is morally wrong. By the same logic, libraries are stealing from authors by depriving them of potential sales. Peaceful protesters are stealing from retail businesses by obstructing hypothetical sales. Municipal water suppliers are stealing from bottled water companies by depriving hypothetical sales.

My logic wouldn't have internal consistency with societal norms unless I accepted that creative production is somehow unique and special, and warrants special rules to protect hypothetical profits with the threat of lawyers and state-backed violence.

Still, let's assume I agree. There are many scenarios, illegal under intellectual property law, where the author/creator isn't deprived of anything, even a hypothetical profit. Consider that copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. For 70 years, the author isn't deprived of even hypothetical profit, because they're already dead.

Personally, I always threw around 28 + 28 in my head (given that life expectancy in the 18th century was vastly different), with a slight twist: only the original copyright author can renew the term, and the copyright ownership in this context needs to be some sufficiently small group inventors. Anything owned by a corporation larger than X people won't renew.

So any potential transferral or relinquishing of ownership needs to at the very least appease the creator(s) so these corporations can get their other 28 years of their terms.

Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off.

>Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off.

In my eyes, I pay to show demand to the creator to keep doing this thing. We can certainly argue if authors get enough of this, but I don't think rewarding skilled labor is a "novelty".

Ideally, yes. In reality, far from it. Teaching and nursing are some of the easiest examples of how this structure is fundamentally broken.

>unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty

Well we don't take the time to measure the long term output of knowledge. That's a fundamental problem that goes against your view. If novelty is the value and we remove that, knowledge is no longer valuable and thus, not rewarded based on its output. Your novel research on the next iteration of AGI is no more valuable than some AI slop that spits out a recipe for a cake. And incorrectly at that.

Does that sound like a structure that can support a non-post scarcity society?

These shares are valued the same as any other shares for an opaque, non-public company, with a single owner, whose assets have very ambiguous and widely disparate values, and which has the ability to cease operations for long periods of time and still remain profitable.

In other words, they’re worth whatever the owner wants them to be worth.

This is just my cynical interpretation. But if you think valuing real estate is hard, try valuing copyrights.

Copyright is taken away, originally after 14 years, now 70(?) years. After the death of the creator

It started with Freud, and ended when Adolph Hitler and Anne Frank lost copyright protection on the same day.

It should be a fixed term that isn't very long. And if that term ends before death and they want more money then great, write something new.

I think most people objecting to copyright lasting after death are really reacting to how long it all is, and the average amount of time that is. Some of them really don't want it to go past death, but I think most of those objectors would be fine with copyright that lasts exactly 25 years no matter what.

Just because people call it "property rights" does not make it true.

It's as false a term as calling the events of 1939-1945 "World Peace 2".

Why is that? Property rights, like copyright, is merely a societal construct that have been agreed upon (via legislative processes).

There are countries today that does not respect copyright (or impose their own copyright rules), just like they do so for property rights.

Therefore, this copyright is _exactly_ like property rights. In fact, copyright is slightly less powerful, since they have the potential to expire unlike property rights (tho of course, under US copyright rules, the expiration seems to be getting extended every time disney starts losing theirs...).

Information is not rivalrous in that way: an additional person having it doesn't take it away from anyone else. Many people can read the same (e-)book.

There are other reasons why societies originally granted a completely artificial temporary monopoly on information: the theory that it'll incentivize the creation of more works, which is a thing the society might want more than they want the ability to copy and modify and remix it on day one.

Emphasis on "might" want: it's not obvious that that's the correct tradeoff today, in a world in which we have not merely the printing press but digital information that can be trivially copied and modified, and a society of people who all have the tools at their fingertips to use that information to create and remix and do wondrous creative things with all of culture.

Not literally, but in every other sense, yes. It does. You make a great idea, and someone with more money, time, and resources will mass produce your product. They become ubiquitous with the product and the creator is now disincentized from sharing more potentially great ideas.We use copyright to make sure creators aren't disincentized.

The problem isn't scarcity, but falls into the same core issue. Lots of people want thing, but the owner wants either security or compensation that it's their thing.

>Emphasis on "might" want: it's not obvious that that's the correct tradeoff today

I'd still say so. More so today than before where it's only gotten much more expensive to live. Now we go to people outcopying each other and the creator is simply homeless.

How can we be sure of this?

Some artists create art for fame, or just to be in that zen-like zone of consciousness that happens with making art

Also, why is the current model assumed to be the best, when it is based on a lot of outdated assumptions (e.g., physical copies)?

It's theft. How many people, no matter how altruistic, will feel truly zen seeing their own idea copied by people who care nothing about thw craft making money, exploiting other labor, and otherwise making the world a worse place?

I argue less than the amount that at least want a steady living at the bare minimum. Something many struggle to achieve.

>why is the current model assumed to be the best, when it is based on a lot of outdated assumptions (e.g., physical copies)?

Because I've heard no better alternatives?

We don't need to throw the baby out with that bathwater. In increasing orderof viability: Implement UBI so artists don't starve guarantee an easy trial for proper compensation (which may still be pennies for thieves) if/when their art is stolen and makes hand over fist in money, or reduce the current time of exclusivity. The concept of keeping some time to benefit from your ideas exclusively isn't a flawed one, it just needs tweaks to the idea, or a fundamental shift in how humans survive in the modern world.

That's not remotely true even with today's absurd laws.

>(the act of) dishonestly taking something that belongs to someone else and keeping it.

How is this action of taking someone else's idea and keeping the fruits of their mental labor not thievery?

Again, not legally arguing. The point here was to exercise the psychological reason that having your ideas taken without permission nor even acknowledgemrnt feels bad. Theft is bad and feels bad. People want to avoid that where possible.

Given the variety of agreements on international intellectual property law such as the Berne Convention, WCT, TRIPS pushed through multinational organizations like the WTO, the only country in the world with 0 copyright is the Marshall Islands (excluding audio-visual media regulated by the Unauthorized Copies of Recorded Materials Act, 1991). Even North Korea has life + 50 years.

Some countries decide to leave their copyright laws unenforced (or selectively enforced if they don't like you). Not much choice for people who don't agree with copyright law itself though.

Could you assign the copyrights to a corporation (that then doesn't die). Would that prevent them from going into the public domain?

If I write some software and assign its copyright to the Apache Foundation or FSF or some other organization through a CLA, what happens to the license if I kick the bucket tomorrow?

For that matter, what happens if I don't assign its copyright to some other organization... does all the GPL software that I write suddenly become public domain?

If no, there is reason for it to remain under the GPL or Apache license so that it can continue on in the spirit of the license it was created under (which copyright enforces) ... then there is equal reason for the works of an author or photographer or singer or song writer to also remain under copyright for some duration.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.en.html

> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.

> That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is—as a copyleft. All code added to a GPL-covered program must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file. I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

If the GPLed project lost all of its teeth upon the untimely death of a contributor, would that be a bad thing?

Copyright terms were running out.

Also, by your logic, every contributor of a project, contemporary or previously, must die in order for the "GPL losing its teeth".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...

--

For Linux, the "every contributor" might be true.

For a lot of other projects, they've got a CLA in place. https://www.mongodb.com/legal/contributor-agreement

    (a) Assignment. By submitting a Contribution, you assign to MongoDB all right, title and interest in any copyright you have in the Contribution, and you waive any rights, including any moral rights, database rights, etc., that may affect our ownership of the copyright in the Contribution.

Consider also the "I don't know who you cookiengineer are, therefore I assert that you're dead and the copyright on your previous comment has expired and I'll just slurp this up into an LLM training model."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302

    (c) Anonymous Works, Pseudonymous Works, and Works Made for Hire.—

    In the case of an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. If, before the end of such term, the identity of one or more of the authors of an anonymous or pseudonymous work is revealed in the records of a registration made for that work under subsections (a) or (d) of section 408, or in the records provided by this subsection, the copyright in the work endures for the term specified by subsection (a) or (b), based on the life of the author or authors whose identity has been revealed. ...
    
    (e) Presumption as to Author’s Death.—
    
    After a period of 95 years from the year of first publication of a work, or a period of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first, any person who obtains from the Copyright Office a certified report that the records provided by subsection (d) disclose nothing to indicate that the author of the work is living, or died less than 70 years before, is entitled to the benefits of a presumption that the author has been dead for at least 70 years. Reliance in good faith upon this presumption shall be a complete defense to any action for infringement under this title.

Having copyright on anonymous or psuedoanonymous or being able to assign copyright to another entity are incompatible with copyright expiring upon the death of the author.

Resetting that number back to 50 years as covered by the Berne Convention would be a good thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#Term_of_prote...

Having it be less than 50 years implies that the United States would be leaving the Berne Convention (signed by 181 countries) and that would put the United States in very small group of countries that do not recognize any intellectual property laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...

Trying to change the copyright to a very short period implies that the United States would be leaving the Berne Convention and TRIPS and the WTO and would go about trying to renegotiate those treaties with about 200 countries all over again (and getting those treaties signed by congress)

Authors that get paid can certainly leave the assets they received to their families. They could also transfer ownership of unpublished intangible assets. More than that sucks the general public into a quasi-contractual relationship with a posthumous person; I disclaim fiscal obligations of strangers toward ghosts.

and copyright doesnt prevent you from writing a story about a boy wizard attending a school and fighting against a evil big bad. Nor does it prevent you from writing a story about a rag tag group of rebels fighting against an empire.

Copyright puts a chilling effect on making anything resembling the original work, so long as the plaintiff (usually a large corp or hedge fund) has a better team of lawyers than the defendant (new writer)

If I have an idea and you have an idea and we exchange ideas, both of us end up with two ideas each.

There may be labour in both but there's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual property.

How would that work? Given that one exposed to an idea, a person cannot exactly erase it from their mind...

I mean if I have an idea and I give it to you the idea itself is still in my mind. And in order to give it to you I have to communicate it to you, so now it is in your mind too. So innately, while physical objects are physically moved, ideas are only ever copied; the former creates a sense of ownership because when a brick is in your hand it is not in mine, whereas the latter makes this notion of ownership impossible.

Let's try anyway. If I write the idea on a piece of paper, zip it into an envelope, and give the envelope to you, not only do I still have the idea in my head but can you really claim to somehow "have" the idea too? Unless you open the envelope and you don't get to actually "have" it, you have an envelope which contains a copy of the idea that's still in my mind and not in yours. You don't even know what I've given you unless I shared the idea with you beforehand, at which point we're back to square one and the piece of paper is moot (it may carry more detail but that's immaterial to the concept of ideas fundamentally being only copied).

A person has an idea and writes it on a piece of paper, puts it in an envelope, gives it to me, the person dies, I don't ever open the envelope and then I give it to you. Did I ever "own" the idea? I don't even know what it is? A copy of the idea has disappeared when the person died, the piece of paper has a copy on it, and once you read it that idea will be in both in your mind and the paper until you burn the latter.

So maybe you're thinking, but the person of origin of the idea matters. Okay, let's go along with it. Say you and I never even remotely interacted, and I come up with a "foobarbaz" idea and you come up with a "foobarbaz" idea, and we happen to meet. We exchange ideas and realise "oh we had the same idea!"; how can the idea be "the same" if it has been independently conceived and the person of origin matters? To double down on that, after the transactional exchange, we both have one "foobarbaz" idea , not two identical ones each: the operation was a complete noop.

We could drill down further about whether any idea can ever be truly original or if it's about standing in the shoulders of giants, so a huge proportion of any idea or the process having led to is is actually not original at all but instead remixes.

All this to essentially say that "ownership of ideas" and "usage rights" are really a completely artificial construct, one that aims to replicate ownership as it is born out of physical reality.

Which brings me to TFA's situation, in which half a million books are essentially disappeared purely for the sake of pretending ideas are like bricks, as in they should be "owned" because someone could make money off of it, which is not even true because even if I wanted to throw a truckload of money at these folks they would still not allow the ideas to be accessed because they can't be bothered to republish - even though they can be bothered to sue - so the paper/bits might just as well be set on fire, which is most certainly not what the authors would have desired.

PS: Obviously authors deserve tools that help them make a living and combat plagiarism, but this situation is way beyond that and highlights how these artificial constructs are completely upended to the detriment of all.

Just step back and think about how irrational this is. Abstract constructs like this are arbitrary.

Yes, it's arbitrary - just like practically everything else. Having to drive my car on a road and not kill anyone is arbitrary, but leads to good outcomes.

Easy. The ownership of intellectual property can indefinitely remain with the author (or be passed on to their children, spouses, etc).

We even have a great model for it now: NFTs.

The right to copy that work, however, isn't something that was either created or owned by the author. That exclusivity is a privilege granted by the state, introduced because it was believed to benefit the society overall.

You can inherit a car, but not a driver's license. The argument is that the exclusive license to copy a work of art is really more like the latter.

You're free to give away your work. Stop telling others what to do with their work and that you want to take it because they died.

And an appeal to putting all your eggs in one basket and then demanding that eggs remain valuable long after you're dead and replicators are invented.

Also, why does your family get to shirk their obligation to contribute to society?

What about the families of people who toil over creative work and don't hit the jackpot? There are many fine writers/artists who never gain more than a niche audience while garbage sells big. Go to a bookstore and look at the history section, pseudo-historians like Bill O'Reilly are given more shelf space than serious historians. To be frank I almost exclusively buy from used book stores for the last decade because nonfiction offerings in chain/non-specialist bookstores are so bad. Vendors of used books tend to select for quality rather than popularity.

> Stop telling others what to do with their work

We are not telling them what to do we are saying authors shouldn't have the right to restrict what we can do, or to be more precise, say - because that's what copyright is in the end, a limitation on free speech.

FWIW, this is also why we have copyright. In fact, this is explicitly why we allow copyright in US.

The founders of the US intended copyright to last for 14 years, with the ability to renew for a single extra 14-year extension. Like patents, copyright was intended to expire quickly in order to serve the good of the public. Thank Disney for fucking that up for everyone. You have refuted your own argument.

But specifically a lot of us have an issue with the fact that beginning in the 20th century, copyright durations have been increasing so quickly that it's starting to look more like copyright is becoming permanent.

The founders were well aware of the negative societal effects of monopoly. We are well aware of them and suffering under several forms of monopoly today, many of which are enforced through copyright. The founders chose to grant a LIMITED and TEMPORARY monopoly to copyright holders, not an UNLIMITED and PERMANENT one, because of this. The eminently reasonable and middle of the road position is that we should reduce the duration of copyright, restoring it to its original intent. This corrects one of the general class of pro-monopoly errors we have made which have increased wealth inequality and damaged our society.

It is truly extraordinary how much damage Disney has done (with government as a willing collaborator) against the original intent of the founders and the will of the people.

Nor encorugae assassinations by having stuff go public domain immediately upon death.

We have copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"

If our current implementation is not an optimal way to achieve this goal, then it needs to be re-evaluated.

The terms is too long as is, but I see no reason to not have any posthumous transfer period so the family can figure out what they want to do with their knowledge.

If you don't want to share your knowledge, the solution is simple.

Once you've put it out there, it becomes a tiny piece of human culture that can be referenced and discussed, and ultimately reproduced.

Just because an artist releases a work to the world, doesn't mean they have any natural rights to own what the culture does with it.

Whats the difference here? Have idea, share some of it, monetize it from peope who want to use it, later on it's a free for all or enough knowledge comes to easily reverse engineer it anyway.

^Just because an artist releases a work to the world, doesn't mean they have any natural rights to own what the culture does with it.

No natural right, no. But humans are greedy, tragedy of the commons, etc. So governments made copyright to protect those artists.

It's been, as usual, perverted by the people who least need that protection, but the idea is still sound. In a world of greed, give the creators time to be greedy so they can make a living off their own work. Then later on its a free for all.

They certainly can. Certain assets are depreciating with time though, like copyrightable works. They only have value because of the law in the first place, and the law sets the timeline for that value to depreciate to zero.

Perhaps supporting a writer shouldn't be a career/investment opportunity though.

>Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?

Like, with taxes on inheritance? We should and we do. And arguably, we don't do it enough.

The question is: are the authors that much better off from the way the laws are now? Is the society overall? If we tell the authors that, in fact, their grandchildren won't be able to profit off of their books, what kind of literature shall we lose?

We already have the answer, since the draconian copyright laws are pretty recent. Great works of literature have been written before such laws existed, and introduction of these laws hardly improved writing overall (or the plight of the author, for that matter).

So if Disney wants to make a TV show out of your novel series and you turn them down, I suppose they now have an alternative way of making the problem disappear and getting the outcome they wanted...

Joking aside, this idea really seems to create a perverse incentive to make authors die sooner.

I mean, I know a bunch of authors. All of them wrote because they needed to write (even the textbook authors). And almost none of them earned much of anything from it (even the textbook authors). One English prof told me that he received almost enough for his morning coffee for about three years. Then he didn't. And he drank just plain coffee.

"The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity." "Less copyright" != "piracy", but I think it has the same effect in this case (theoretically less value placed on the work of an author, but not practically).

Also, this might be coincidence, but copyright has gotten extended at the same time as most authors have received less from publishing.

All that said, I want society as a whole to be better, people to have more opportunities to grow, good ideas more of a chance to flourish. I think that overly strong copyright fights against that. And IME (ok, secondhand experience) that 99.9% of the profits added by strong copyright goes to the publishers, not the authors.

A reverse motte and Bailey, if you will. There's a perfectly objectionable issue that we can band together to solve, ignored in liue of the extreme argument that'd take decades in court to resolve.

"Why should we lessen or diminish the legal right of authors to control how copies of their work are distributed; the way we've been doing it works well."

is what you SHOULD have said. Doesn't sound as sexy, but here, the accuracy matters.

I don't think this should be discounted so quickly. Nothing in this domain — money, private property, laws, justice — are obviously naturally occurring things. One of the great traditions in the effort to understand how rights and value come to be is the creation of narratives that connect the rights to early natural states. We see this in Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, etc. You could just ask the question of whether the current state "works well", but then you are in the wheelhouse of Jeremy Bentham and other utilitarians. Fine, but so far these kinds of arguments don't lead to worlds many of us like.

You cannot have both systems so if you justify copyright you have to justify jailing “copyright violators” even if that person is singing a song they have memorized.

This is not a thing that happens, and it’s hard to take anyone seriously when they’re presenting this as a counter argument.

If you can’t even understand the difference between criminal and civil matters, how can you even begin to discuss this topic?

try to upload to YouTube your birthday party with a barely audible pop music playing in the background.

now which argument can't be taken seriously?

granted, it's not jail. but being removed from the monopoly forum for internet videos could be worse than jail if you're business depends on that.

That's a pretty important distinction.

>being removed from the monopoly forum for internet videos could be worse than jail if you're business depends on that.

If your business relies on thst then strike up a deal. That's what copyright should be doing.

The situation is still stupid, yes. But the core issue of people profiting off of material they dont own is still something we want to protect against.

But back in reality, you just don't monetize the content. Publishers don't really care about some unlisted kid's party with 50 views and monetization off. The YouTube stuff is draconian but not that asinine.

This is a ridiculous strawman that is completely irrelevant to any discussion happening here.

If you're arguing that copyright length should be shortened, I strongly agree.

If you're arguing that we should eliminate copyright completely because we should only regulate things you would immediately throw people in jail for, I strongly disagree.

As a society we need to be able to regulate some behavior that is not severe enough for jail time on its own, or for most standard offenses, even if the state ultimately has the power of incarceration to punish non-compliance. Just because moderately speeding shouldn't land you in jail, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have speed limits.

This was just today.

Deadline: “Operators Of Jetflicks, An Illegal Streaming Service With A Catalog Larger Than Netflix, Prime Video And Hulu Put Together, Convicted By Federal Jury”

https://deadline.com/2024/06/jetflicks-illegal-streaming-ser...

> > > Who's been jailed for singing Happy Birthday? How many people have been jailed for copyright violations at all?

Note the second sentence which brought the wider topic into discussion.