It's pretty clear that the legal system mostly exists to preserve big financial interests. I spent much of my adult life watching SCO play the system...
The hard part is getting enough other voters to care. If it is just you money is more important. If it is you and many others though you beat money.
People whose livelihoods and retirement depend on their copyright.
Or people who want to play old video-games for free.
> The 12-time Grammy Award winner made more than $780 million on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, according to an estimate by Forbes. The total ticket sales from Swift's 2023 Eras Tour could make her the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to Billboard. The Eras Tour could gross over $1 billion, making concert history as the first billion-dollar tour, according to The Wall Street Journal.
J.K. Rowling doesn't have exclusive rights to her books, past the first couple. Lots of copyright-related suits (most?) are made by Warner Bros. She's fully capable of mobilising her fanbase (or, was, at least, before she went off on the deep end) to prevent or restrict what she considers misuse of the Harry Potter brand. (And, as you say, she doesn't need the money.)
Copyright isn't why Toby Fox need never go hungry. His work is trivial to pirate, he doesn't even bother enforcing copyright on his music; and yet he's probably a millionaire, with more works on the way.
What is the name of the law that prevents the publisher from kicking me out of the building, printing the book I wrote, and making money off it?
Does this help? https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/
Or do you want a list of movie directors? Perhaps of authors of assets in asset stores for game development? Comic artists?
Do you want a Spotify playlist?
IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.
You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.
As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.
Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).
Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.
I like the current model of works becoming public domain after X years, but would prefer we shorten those timelines a bit given the speed of software.
Person B invents the same thing, and immediately sees a way to make it a big hit, with lots of demand. Should person A be blocking person B for 20 years? Why do you think person A should be entitled to that? What do you think would be more beneficial for the society?
E.g., if you write a book and realize $5,000 in sales per year, then 10 * 2^x=5000 where x is 8.97, so you only enjoy 8 years of revenues ($40,000) and you've paid Σ(1->8) 10 * 2^x = $5,100 for the privilege, for a net $34,900 or 6.98x the yearly royalty value.
If Dreamworks sees $500M a year in Minions merchandising, then 10 * 2^x=500,000,000 where x = 25.56 and so Dreamworks realizes 25 years of revenues ($12,500,000,000) and pays Σ(1->25) 10 * 2^x = $671,088,620 for the privilege, for a net $11,828,911,380 or 23.66x the yearly royalty value.
This is backward, in my opinion.
Moreover the amount of tax paid as a fraction of total value realized is actually lower for the large owner of IP because the total tax payment is dominated by the final years, but the total revenue is determined by the number of years. In the example above, we had:
$5,100 / $40,000 = 12.75% tax for the small author, and
$671,088,620 / $12,500,000,000 = 5.37% tax for Dreamworks.
The ratios would be even worse if the small author could've just barely justified the 9th year. Pretty much unconscionable.
The fact that we're collecting tax from IP is not interesting. We have progressive income tax for this purpose.
1) that something that takes in 500m in its useful lifetime should not be subject to a lower tax rate than something that takes in only 100k in its useful lifetime (in fact it should be subject to a higher tax rate, in line with income tax policy);
2) something that takes in 500m should not automatically be entitled to a longer useful lifetime than something that takes in 100k.
Unfortunately both things are true for this proposal. #1 can be ameliorated by offering an income tax credit, but #2 is fundamental.
Inequality is a natural outcome of capitalism, and critically it will get worse without limit unless there is significant policy intervention (ref. Capital in the Twenty-First Century). Existing progressive income taxes are not sufficient, even in Europe where they are far more aggressive. So from a policy perspective, this is exactly the opposite of what is desired.
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" requires quotes, and does not enjoy a constitutional protection, all for a good reason.
My proposal has a few benefits that, to my mind, outweigh the shortcomings.
* It is very simple. There's no room for any shenanigans, small print, etc.
* It is very uniform. It applies to every kind of IP (of the same class) equally. Again, no room or need for small print.
* It has a large enough free grace period, longer than the peak periods when most movies make the large box offices, most books have the first 2-3 successful reprints, most games have initial sales + DLC sales, etc. For most folks, nothing changes, because their revenues from a particular IP go to zero or near-zero by the end of the grace period.
* It's guaranteed to terminate the IP protection sooner or later, and most of the time, sooner. No demand curve stays exponential forever; the fee stays exponential as long as it takes.
* It does not depend on any accounting. No box office numbers to smear, no audience sizes to inflate. No matter how much you earn, you can pay for the protection as long as you care to afford it.
* It protects the most valuable / profitable IP preferentially. If something is really really huge, and people keep asking the authors to shut up, take their money, and produce moar, that thing can stay protected for longer. When most people stop caring enough, it becomes pointlessly costly to keep protecting it. This benefits the few that care though, the librarians and archivists of the world, and the new creators who now can build freely on top of the things that went to public domain.
So no, the small author just does not have to pay anything, small authors are just protected for 10 years for free, and may buy half a decade of protection cheaply if they care. But after that, they should admit that this particular cow is not worth milking forever.
Let's assume that Dreamworks are so good that they get $500M a year for a particular IP. For 10 years they enjoy free coverage.
But even if on year 25 of coverage they would still have been making some money on the franchise, next year they go badly into the red.
The code:
def fee(y):
return 0 if y <= 10 else 10 * 4 ** (y - 11)
def total_fee(y):
return sum(fee(yy) for yy in range(1, y + 1))
def total_revenue(years, yearly_revenue=500_000_000):
return yearly_revenue * years
def balance(y):
f = total_fee(y) / 1_000_000
r = total_revenue(y) / 1_000_000
return "%2d %8.1fM %8.1fM %6.1fM" % (y, f, r, r - f)
for y in range(21, 27):
print(balance(y))
21 14.0M 10500.0M 10486.0M
22 55.9M 11000.0M 10944.1M
23 223.7M 11500.0M 11276.3M
24 894.8M 12000.0M 11105.2M
25 3579.1M 12500.0M 8920.9M
26 14316.6M 13000.0M -1316.6M
And this is for a mega-popular franchise, that makes half a billion every year in a row for more than two decades. It's a very rare hit, comparable to Star Wars maybe, or the Mickey Mouse. Most IPs don't stay so staunchly popular for this long.
You can try playing with the parameters and check outcomes for different revenue shapes and fee bases.
A patent requires a clear explanation of an invention, in exchange for a limited time of monopoly on its use. After that, the invention enters public domain.
Before patents. important inventions would stay tightly guarded secrets, because once the invention leaks, there's no recourse, every competitor can freely use it, and put you out of business. Hence the inventions were lost forever (at best, need to be reinvented from scratch) if the original inventor went out of business somehow without sharing the secret.
Patents are a boon for everyone as long as the detrimental effects from the monopoly don't outweigh the beneficial effects of sharing knowledge and general ease of business operation without thick shrouds of secrecy. That is, as long as the time of protection is set right.
First 10 or so years the protection is free. Then, on the first year of paid protection, you pay $10. On the second, $20. On the tenth, $10,240. On the sixteenth, $655,360. The year you miss a payment the protection ceases.
If your IP is immensely valuable and is bringing you gobs of money, you can continue paying and keep your monopoly. But the case of keeping reams of stuff under the lock "just in case" would be largely eliminated. Anything that's not a cash cow currently being milked and paid for would get released to the public domain.
On top of that, the federal budget would receive some extra money, but only from those who is making money, and not the small guy who just has published an indie game on Steam.