You're talking about a monumental lobbying effort against a vigilant public. That's not the sort of thing that can happen overnight, and the article dealt with the possibility of last-minute trickery.
The article makes some really good points. The political landscape really has changed since 1998. The content industry may still have more resources overall, but it's definitely going to get ugly if they try again. Hollywood does not want the public turning against them, that'll just make it worse.
Honestly I wish there were a way to compromise. Let companies pay for perpetual copyright. They want to hold onto Steamboat Willie forever, let them. Just don't drag everybody else with you. We just need to make it an economic decision for them, so that the public's interests are served eventually.
We want a thriving ecosystem in which apex predators like Disney and the caribou can thrive.
Is the public really that vigilant here? It might actually be news to most that Disney is primarily responsible for long copyrights in the first place.
They do when farmed as a theft of their potential culture.
Start with Disney and all that they made from the works of The Brothers Grimm. Hint at all that could be done, if it were not for greed pulling the ladder up behind them.
Then point to the endless reboots.
RAMBO 35 COMING TO THAT THEATRE NEAR YOU NOBODY CARES ABOUT.
A long time ago, I got one of the Lessig FREE THE MOUSE bumper stickers. It has been the most effective one I ever used.
I tell the story about once per month. People wonder about "THE MOUSE" and why it must be freed.
Nearly all of my (mostly highly educated) friends are entirely indifferent about indefinite copyright: they care less than about network neutrality and don't care that much about that.
Honestly, if I was them I'd be worried about copyright shrinking. Yet another reason for them not to push for an increase now may be that they worry an increase will lead to more push back. Possible even past what they have now.
This. You bet that Disney will do everything it can (and maybe some illegal crap as well) to convince everyone Mickey needs to be protected for the next gazillion years.
I don't think a trademark can prevent redistributing Steamboat Willie. It can prevent you from making a logo with Steamboat Willie on it, though. Or using it as the unlicensed mascot on your breakfast cereal.
> Even if Mickey’s copyright does expire in 2023, Disney has no less than 19 trademarks on the words “Mickey Mouse” [...]
> According a precedent set in a 1979 court case, a trademark can protect a character in the public domain as long as that character has obtained what is called “secondary meaning.” This means that the character and the company are virtually inseparable: upon seeing it, one will immediately identify it with a brand. [...]
> In other words, Disney has ingrained Mickey Mouse so deeply in its corporate identity that the character is essentially afforded legal protection for eternity, so long as Disney protects him (trademarks last indefinitely, so long as they are renewed).
Nothing in that says Disney can block producing derivative works based on works in the public domain. It's simply stating that Mickey Mouse can be a trademark and trademarks can last forever. But trademarks are also subject to fair use, for example when factually describing a product.
So a Steamboat Willie YouTube video would be either redistributing a public domain work or it would be a derivative work. And calling it "Steamboat Willie" would be descriptive.
I think Disney would have an uphill battle to stamp out all uses of Steamboat Willie. Though they certainly have the money to do so regardless of what the law seems to indicate.
I'm not a lawyer, but the 1979 ruling seems to be in disagreement with Dastar v Fox[1] (2003)
> The Court reasoned that although the Lanham Act forbids a reverse passing off, the rule regarding the misuse of trademarks is trumped by the fact that once a copyrighted work (or even a patented invention) passes into the public domain, anyone in the public may do anything with the work, with or without attribution to the author.
Is Steamboat Willie really valuable to Disney? Kids aren't exactly fighting to watch old black & white cartoons from the 20s and 30s (one could say the same of the masterpieces of 1930s cinema, a minority of cinephiles still watch them but are they really commercially valuable)?
That is covered by the fair use exception as parody. There are plenty of porn parodies of movies as they are in theatres and there isn’t really a lot the studios can do about it.
Trademark only protects against trademark confusion. Meaning it only protects the owner's right to use the trademark as a unique identifier with respect to certain services and goods. I believe Disney uses Mickey for a trademark so that character may be protected to some extent. Other characters not so much. And in any case, they're only protected to the extent that Disney is the only company that can use them as unique identifiers for goods and services.
Isn't the whole discussion moot though? Mickey Mouse as a character can enter the public domain today and it won't change a thing since it's a trademark held by Disney, and the trademark is valid for as long as the corporation exist, no?
As it stands, copyright serves little positive social purpose. The overwhelming majority of creators get paid little if anything for their
work, and still there is a glut of content. So there should be no fear of the world losing lots of great content if there was no copyright.
Most of the benefit of copyright is reaped by the middle men, who profit off the work when the creatives that made it have long ceased to do
so (if they ever did). Abolishing copyright will thus mostly affect these middle men, and have little effect on content creation itself.
Those creatives that still want to get paid in a copyright-free era can find business models that don't rely on copyright, like performances,
donations, or kickstarter-like models where one is paid for future work.
There's no incentive to make a movie if it will never make any money. Without copyright, anyone can purchase it once and give it away for free or sell each copy for $0.01 and undercut all competition. Digital content takes X amount of work and then allows it to be duplicated by creating infinite copies. If someone can infinitely copy your work, you will never get paid for that X amount (or make any profit). While I don't strongly support current IP law, getting rid of it isn't the solution. It's like having an economy based on fake money, after a very short period of time the money becomes worthless (except here the money = work).
> There's no incentive to make a movie if it will never make any money.
> Without copyright, anyone can purchase it once and give it away for free or sell each copy for $0.01 and undercut all competition.
That's not a problem if the creators were paid to make the movie.
The parent mentioned several mechanisms to do this. It's not hard: after all, that's how basically all industries have worked since forever.
Anecdotally: half of the jobs I've had were producing private, in-house software; I got a regular wage for doing this, since the companies found such software useful. No need for copyright. The other half were paying me to produce FOSS which, once it was written, we wanted people to copy and spread for free, since that would gain us more attention (and potential customers for our related services). Again, no need for copyright (although some were strong copyleft, with network-use clauses)
I don't think it's wise to compare software development with other creative production. Software can provide a quantitative value through functionality to its users. Copyleft software often makes sense because it becomes possible to create a community of users that also support the project, making it cheaper and functionally superior for everyone.
Media is a much different story, and transforming creators into beggars (as suggested) is not a solution. At that point, creators are competing with their ability to beg, and not their ability to create. Any person with a reasonable amount of self-respect and pride in their work would not tolerate that kind of existence.
Content creators can not justly be called "beggars", because they provide services and create goods that people value. Most people recognize this and want these creatives to be rewarded. Sometimes it's done through donations, other times through commissions. Patronage of the arts through these means has been going on for most of human history.
Because "customer acquisition" means that a business offers something of value, reaches out to entities that might be interested in obtaining that value, and enters into an agreement to supply that value for another value.
That process is totally different from asking for donations (which is literally begging -- no value is being offered, but value is expected to be received.) Kickstarter can certainly produce valuable media, but it eliminates the possibility of a small group of people taking a risk on content. That will undoubtedly have major effects on the kind of content that is produced, the question is what will that impact be?
> That process is totally different from asking for donations
Whilst donations might work for some, I was mostly talking about doing work (to provide value, e.g. writing, sculpting, etc.) for an amount agreed-upon in advance (either paid to an escrow service, or invoiced afterwards). Movie companies could take on the role of escrow service, rather than their current role as investment vehicle.
> (which is literally begging -- no value is being offered, but value is expected to be received.)
If 'no value is being offered' by movies, games, etc. then why do people already pay money for things like DVDs? Copyright can't be the reason, since that doesn't compel anyone to buy stuff they see no value in (copyright just restricts who can do the selling).
> That's not a problem if the creators were paid to make the movie.
Where do you think the money to pay the creators comes from? Movies, games, and most other modern forms of mass art are incredibly expensive to produce. If the content creators can't recoup their expenses, they produce less of the content.
> Movies, games, and most other modern forms of mass art are incredibly expensive to produce.
Meh. Work expands to consume the available resources. There's nothing special about "modern forms of mass art": it just sits at a local optimum of available capital, risk, labour and technology costs, projected returns, etc. (optimised by the market). Change those factors (e.g. with a labour strike, or an improvement in CGI tools) and the balance comes out differently, and so do the movies.
> If the content creators can't recoup their expenses, they produce less of the content.
Or they reduce the expense. In general, I would rather have 10 movies made for $1,000,000 each than a single movie with a $10,000,000 budget.
It's really easy to throw money at graphics, special effects, technology, etc. which are mostly superficial. Good storytelling, interesting game mechanics, etc. are much cheaper, and have been around for thousands of years.
Consider Pixar, for example: they've managed to funnel hollywood money into fundamental computer graphics research (a very neat trick!). They do this under the premise that it's needed for their movies, which could have actually been executed very well as traditional cartoons.
I would rather have 1 quality movie made for $10,000,000 than 10 crappy movies made for a million. Movies are more expensive to make than people realize. For $10,000,000, you're not paying for much, if anything, for VFX. Case study: Get Out's budget was $6 million, not including marketing. That includes a single non-practical special effect (the sinking scene). All the actors worked for minimum wages [edit: movie wages]. The movie was limited to 3-4 physical locations. Split had a budget of between $6-9 million, and that movie takes place in two locations.
What's wrong with that? The price to the first person would go up astronomically and they would get all the rights to resell it. It would be the difference of getting paid 10k upfront or 10k over the course of royalties. You would have incentive to make new works.
I guess I could have been clearer. there is no exclusive resale right. I meant because the lack of rights, there would be competition to drive down distribution costs. The idea is that the first purchaser pays full price to be able to know what the item is, as the idea is otherwise a secret. Consumers could then pay content creators directly to generate the content, rather than going through a publisher. There could be demand to have a distribution network that is up to date.
That's not true, but why let the facts get in the way?
6/10 highest-grossing movies last year were not comic book movies:
Dunkirk - Original property
Fast & Furious 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property
Despicable Me - non-comic franchise based on original property
It - remake
Beauty and the Beast - remake
Get Out - original property
Star Wars Episode 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property
The most profitable movie of 2017, Get Out, was an original franchise. This follows on the heels of 2016s most profitable movie, Split, a sequel to an original property (The Sixth Sense/Unbreakable universe).
I am honestly sick of hearing "but no one will create anything without copyright" as if money was the sole motivator that made doing anything worthwhile.
To be fair, I think copyright has its place as a minimal safeguard for artists' work, but in its current form it is entirely too aggressive and lasts way beyond its scope should cover. Copyright should not be reason to send SWAT raids to people's homes, just as much as it should not cover 70 years after the artists' death.
I am certain that if we seriously rolled back copyright, our art would still thrive, albeit perhaps less AAA content.
The issue isn’t whether you can create things without copyright. It’s whether you can create Star Wars Episode XYZ without copyright. The answer is probably not, for the same reason you don’t have open source laptops with the fit and finish of a MacBook Pro.
The thing is: absolutely nothing is preventing people from creating content without copyright. So what exactly is the problem? AAA content gets produced and monetized using copyright protection. People are free to use copyleft for their indie content. And at the end of the day, the market speaks and AAA content is what people want. Saying that “getting rid of copyright would be fine except we’d probably get less AAA content” this is completely unresponsive.
The “SWAT team” issue is a red herring. I don’t think we should have SWAT teams responding if my neighbor’s fence encroaches onto my land, but that doesn’t say anything about whether I should have an enforceable property right in the boundaries of my yard.
The Kim Dotcom raid was fairly public knowledge at the time it occurred. I'd start there.
Not quite to the level of actual SWAT operations, but far more common are Anton Piller orders. These orders are still used with decent frequency in IP cases because the evidence in question is often easily destroyed and the cases are often existential-crisis-level disputes for one or both parties.
I find it fascinating how the industry is so powerful that when you watch a Hollywood film in a foreign country you are shown a message which threatens with jail time for recording video and or audio.
There's a tendency to think of copyright mostly in money terms. For the big earners like disney, and certainly for most of the middlemen you mention it is mostly money.
For some creators though, it's different. I heard George RR Martin comment on this once. Tolkien's family (according to GRRM) did a great job guarding and protecting his works. He's horrified at the thought of a descendent making selling Targaryan cream buns or allowing shitty derivative novels. That isn't a money concern, but it is a property rights concern of sorts.
In any case, I think the sorts of right GRRM feels are his could still be preserved, without keeping all copyright the same.
> He's horrified at the thought of a descendent making selling Targaryan cream buns or allowing shitty derivative novels. That isn't a money concern, but it is a property rights concern of sorts.
I get the desire to rule from beyond the grave, but do not believe it is a legitimate property right.
Do you like to read? If you listed your top 20 books, by whatever criteria you choose, were any of them popular?
Would you feel good if under your system, the donations or other alternate payments ended up in the author’s rewards being cut? What if they were cut in half? Or even became negligible, because I don’t see any guarantees prescribed.
This is not just about Taylor Swift (no offense if you are a fan). We’re talking about works that can change lives, inspire people to do great things, even change the course of history.
The system has been abused and distorted. However I don’t see how that can make us sure the best solution is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
What's he's advocating is all software being public domain, not MIT.
Copyleft licenses could be potentially be replaced by viral contracts... but frankly, I'd take the tradeoff of no copyright and no copyleft over the hellish system of copyright we have now.
As it stands, capitalism serves little positive social purpose. The overwhelming majority of laborers get paid little if anything for their work, and still there is a glut of production. So there should be no fear of the world losing lots of great production if there was no capitalism.
Most of the benefit of capitalism is reaped by the middle men, who profit off the work when the laborers that made it have long ceased to do so (if they ever did). Abolishing capitalism will thus mostly affect these middle men, and have little effect on labor itself.
Those laborers that still want to get paid in a capitalism-free era can find business models that don't rely on capitalism, like the military, collective farming, or secret police-like models where one is paid for future work.
Plenty of content producers make money. Sure it’s the companies that employ the artists that make the most money, but that’s a general feature of our economy, not anything unique to copyright. I think Netflix is a huge vindication of copyright. It started out as a middleman simple peddling other people’s content. But copyright forced them to start producing their own content, and they’ve turned television on its head as a result. It’s probably s bigger change in the TV market than cable studios.
The thing about copyright is that it’s existenxe isn’t preventing the alternative models you’re talking about. Unlike any other form of property, copyright covers an individual’s own creations. Owning land is staking claim to something that existed for eons before you were born and will exist for eons after you’re dead. But copyright is over something unique you brought into the universe. With recording and distribution being so cheap, nothing prevents creatives from giving away their work and making money on their own unique contributions with performances or Kickstarter. But people want AAA production values. Just like how Kickstarter can’t raise enough capital to design and build something with mass market appeal like a MacBook Pro, it’s not suitable for making something like the new Star Wars movie. (Which I refuse to watch because blockbuster movies are dreck, but the public wants what it wants.)
>I think Netflix is a huge vindication of copyright. It started out as a middleman simple peddling other people’s content. But copyright forced them to start producing their own content, and they’ve turned television on its head as a result.
Really? They make license agreements with the content/copywright owners in order to stream it. It does break apart the idea of using a single copy and lending it to someone though. I thought they were investing in their own content in order to attract more users, and improve the overall offering.
Netflix realized that they couldn’t just be a distribution platform because content owners could build their own. They were forced to invest in making their own content because that was a competitive advantage its competitors couldn’t duplicate as easily. Which is exactly the point of copyright. More content was created because Netflix couldn’t simply get away with distributing someone else’s content and nothing more.
I had a great idea for a book, but I decided not to write it when I realized that my great grandchildren might not be able to continue to collect royalties from it.
In my head, I was making a clever remark that succinctly poked fun at HN discussions, Bill Gates, transhumanism and the difficulties of futurology. I may have been overly-optimistic.
No, but children and grandchildren might live on after their dead. Copyright after death is mainly for heritage-reasons, to close the gap to families who inherit valuable physical objects or land owning-rights.
So your parents made stuff which due to a legal monopoly they were able to earn money and property from.
Not only are you to inherit the money and property they earned. You are also to inherit the right to further make new money from this legal monopoly on something you have done nothing for at all.
Well.... the whole premise is that copyright is a type of property, or that it should be. You could replace "legal monopoly" with "property rights" and it works equally well for both songs and buildings. You are only able to collect rent for a building because exclusive property rights give you the .. erm.. right to allow or deny(exclude) use of the property . This could also be called "legal monopoly" though not in the more modern antitrust influenced sense of the term.
I don't really have a problem with copyright being a "made up" legal fiction. A lot of things are fictions made "real" by laws, customs and such.
The questions (IMO) shouldn't be around what is real or not, based on some abstract reasoning. It should be about what is beneficial, practically, in our time.
Anyway, I think we need to rethink patents and copyright entirely. For patents, it isn't entirely clear they work as intended (incentivising innovation). The downsides, at least, seem more visible now than before.
Copyrights in the digital age.... It's just a completely different thing. A book or song or whatnot needed to be published regardless of copyright. Print costs, retail, etc. The only difference was royalties. The difference between a public domain and copyrighted work now is much bigger. Free means flexible, accessible, obscurity tolerant... For a lot of works, copyright by default is like burning the only copy.
Combining and reworking is also different in this age.
You know, I have no problem with treating copyrights as a type of property. That means it must be registered and taxed in proportion to its value. It may be a better situation than both always short lived duration and the taxed by increased amounts options.
Most property isn't taxed, in most places. The big exception is land/real estate, which is sometimes taxed.
For copyright, part of the problem is that most copyright is valueless in many senses (including financial). No one is making money off it. No one is reading/watching it. It's like art in a vault. Freeing the works would allow people to access them. Free as in liberty, as well as beer. The two are related, often.
Your description applies precisely to a farm or vacation property too. And at least a copyrighted work is something that exists in the universe due to your parent’s effort. That farm is just some land that your parent’s predecessor stole from the Indians. The government helped someone enclose land that had not existed as private property before, helped defend it by driving out the Indians, and then gave legal protection to the chain of transactions that led to you inheriting it. That’s a government monopoly as much as any copyright.
I think thats too general of a statement, plenty of people take issue with inherited wealth. The USA for a long time had extremely steep inheritance taxes for instance.
That said, the idea that your "life" has any role in this whatsoever is also unreasonable.
Copyright should last X years. If the author dies, X is still X, and if the author lives then X is still X.
This maintains the incentives, despite terminal illnesses, while also preserving the rights of the greater society to reflect on its own culture and encourage new artistic works. It's also how copyright originally worked (IIRC).
My own perception of fair would be that copyright expires 25 years after creation, or 20 years after publication, whichever comes first. If any of the creators are alive at that time and still own the copyright, they may extend by 10 years if no other creator objects.
If you create a copyrightable work and die the next day, and your executor manages to get it published the next year, your estate owns the copyrights for the next 20. That is enough time for any child sired by a male author on the day he died to be supported by his estate until it becomes an adult. It also provides a reasonable 5 year window to get something published before later publication is punished by a shortened copyright term. Still-living creators will, of course, be able to deny that a work was actually finished--and therefore started the 25-year clock--until just before the day the first copy is made available for sale--which starts the 20-year clock--so that would pretty much just be enforceable on posthumous publications and on bizarre edicts from eccentric or reclusive creators who try to exert too much control over how other people may enjoy their work.
And it allows for a work still profitable after 20 years to squeeze a little more out. I think the extension may encourage corporations that commission works for hire to support their successful creators for 20 years so that they will not object to the extension.
Works-for-hire, by the way, would have all the individual humans and the corporation as the creators, and the default would be tenancy-in-common, with the humans temporarily assigning their interest to the corporation in exchange for a regular salary. (I think the current works-for-hire system encourages immortal corporations to use up and throw away their human talent.) So if the corporation stops making the payments, the creators regain their full interest in the work, according to the size of their contribution defined by the work-for-hire agreement, if one exists, or an equal share if not. So the only reason to fire a creator would be if the profits from the works they create aren't sufficient to pay their salary, at which time they get their (lesser) share of the profits instead.
A session musician, for instance, might be hired by a record label to get a 4% share of every recorded music track, and assign that interest to the company in exchange for salary of $1200 every week working in the home studio and $1800 every week spent touring. If the tracks that musician played on bring in more than $2.34M, the company should keep them as salaried employees indefinitely. Otherwise, they could fire them as an employee and just pay out their 4% until the copyright term runs out.
You sign a publishing contract with a publisher, you (and your estate so your kids) collect money from that. After the contract ends it's done. Which is reasonable in my opinion. If I die, my kids don't get my monthly payment anyway.
Since other publishers do not have the manuscript, they can take the book and write it over completely to their own publishing house but due to market lag they it's too little, to late. And if you are wondering, digital reproductions usually fall under the same rights as reproductions (e.g. playing Beethoven, you cannot reproduce that specific work while the author has been dead for years).
There's no reason that inheriting wealth means you must also inherit crimes. Just because they are related concepts doesn't make them have to both be reasonable or unreasonable together.
Inheriting wealth is reasonable because gives people a(nother) reason to contribute to the world - to secure a place for their children in a potentially uncertain future. Parents who have spent a large portion of their life caring and provisioning for there children want to see that they have a level of security when gone.
Inheriting crime is unreasonable for, hopefully, obvious reasons.
Luckily, we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Right but if you kill someone and stay living your heirs are not criminals either.
If you create the next billion dollar game and survive your heirs (or those you specify in your will) will surely be enriched, perhaps it should be 70 years alive or dead that copyright persists for.
Nope. They get 70 years from your death. Since 1976, copyright ticks from the date the work was created, not the date it was published. That's also why it changed from a fixed period (X years after publication) to life + so many years (X years after death of the author).
It would be 70 years after the author died. Here, read this:
> Often when and how a copyright owner registers a copyrighted work will depend on whether that work is published or unpublished because the requirements for registration differ slightly depending on whether the work is considered to be published or unpublished under the law. The “under the law” phrase is important here because what the normal person might consider to be published does not necessarily correspond to the Copyright Office’s definition of the term. Moreover, sometimes even knowing these definitions doesn’t help because there is some ambiguity in the term and how it applies to new digital environments. So this is one area to proceed with caution.
> The Copyright Office’s definition of published includes: the distribution of copies of a work to “the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending” or offering to distribute copies … “to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication.” A public performance or display of a work does not by itself constitute publication.
> In the online environment this gets confusing. For example, a blog post or a photo posted on a website might be considered to be a “distribution of copies,” which would mean it’s a published work under the definition or it could be a “public display,” which would mean it’s unpublished.
It's there to incentivize. If you acknowledge that copyright exists to incentivize a 20-year old with possible monetary gains, then what incentivizes a 60 or 70 year old to create? Why should they be incentivized less?
When you're 60+, you either still need to make money (life is expensive) or you're creating because you want to. Creating so that your grandchildren can keep making money 50 years from now doesn't seem like a strong motivation.
Legacy and providing for your offspring is a huge motivation for many people. It's interwoven through all aspects of our society. Why should it be ignored here? To say it's not a "strong" motivation for older people misses the mark, IMHO. It may not be a motivation for you (at this point in your life, or forever), but that doesn't mean it's not a significant factor.
Again, you're essentially saying that older people don't need as much incentive as younger people to create, which I don't necessarily agree with.
Plenty of economists have negative views about inherited wealth, and the negative sociological and economic effects of inheritance inequality that result. Copyright goes beyond wealth -- it is a defacto monopoly on creative work that the public cannot benefit from without paying someone for the privilege of usage.
Although you are taking the "family" viewpoint, the reality is that copyright more atypically tends to be shuffled around and bought up by large rent-seekers corporations. Many times, the original artist's descendants don't even make a penny. Example: Before invalidated in 2015, who benefited from the strange copyright on "Happy Birthday"? Was it the ancestors of the originators (Mildred J. Hill at the most direct, but probably with several other hands involved before it morphed into its familiar form)? No, it was Warner/Chappell Music.
To me, it would be very hard to argue that the benefits of extended copyright at this point. It's a form of rent-seeking, an activity many economists have problems with. (It was actually pretty easy to find an economist -- a Nobel winner -- blasting rent-seeking. Nobel winner Angus Daton did so here for instance around the 30 minute mark -- https://www.c-span.org/video/?424924-5/national-association-.... It was more in the context of our broken health care system, but similar issues apply with government-sanctioned monopolies of creative works.)
Then people should save money they made from their works and pass it to their children. I've never heard of someone continuing to work after their death to provide for their children, which is what the current copyright system basically amounts to.
The argument against copyright sounds too simplistic to me.
A lot of things that are subject to copyright are not as simple as scratching out a poem on a rainy afternoon.
If I was to spend my resources to design and build a building, most reasonable people would not argue that my estate should be forced to give up its rights to the building when I die. There may be an estate tax, but the estate can choose to keep the building and its income, decide to sell it, or whatever. Seems logical. In fact, the very reason I may have deployed my resources into a building was because it would outlast me and provide economic benefits to those I love after I die.
Are not many (if not most) works subject to copyright just another type of developed asset, like a building? Sure, there are no sticks and bricks, but valuable time, resources and money went into developing the asset. Is that irrelevant because the developed asset is intellectual rather than tangible? Should my estate be denied of benefits based on the type of asset I spent my time and resources creating?
As a society, we have decided to limit the scope in which certain works are protected, for the greater good. I support this. But to abolish copyright or to truncate benefits based on death of the creator doesn’t seem to make economic sense to me.
> Is that irrelevant because the developed asset is intellectual rather than tangible?
Copyright has a sort of enthalpy (an appreciation) that grows into new forms of protections with socio-techno changes increasing the value, as opposed to a depreciation. The value is also appreciated by how much it's already been used to make! (e.g. Star Wars) Without physical entropy, like a building, you have a very different economic mechanism. The benefit to the originator's estate is not the single determining factor. Copyright is bad, in the current form. A simple depreciation factor would be far superior to the copyright expiry.
"I was gonna write a world changing poem, and thank goodness I'm young and will make $ off of it for decades"
That's a perfectly fine motivation, from my point of view, but I'm contrasting it against yours, because why are we expecting older people to have more altruistic motivations than young people?
(poetry is a poor example because it's not very lucrative in general)
They're still being incentivized less, since they'll live fewer years and copyright is tied to their life. You'd need a fixed term - like the US had originally - to incentivize both equally.
I'd agree with guelo. Kids, maybe OK. But grand kids? And especially 70 years after the death? At that point in most common scenarios we're talking about the 3rd or 4th generation of descendants.
My grand-grand children should just get off their lazy bums and go work :p
The reason why it was "life plus X years" was to provide a means for the family if the creator had an untimely death. After all the logic is that the world has their creation, and compensation shouldn't be snuffed out simply cause (s)he died early.
The reason why it was "life plus X years" was to provide a means for the family if the creator had an untimely death.
While that was the ostensible reason, corporations who have had rights assigned to them want to milk those rights after the author's death, indeed often the creator's death is a catalyst for higher sales, which will usually go mostly to the publisher/media conglomerate, not their family.
I always wonder how low the IP for Mickey will sink when that copyright expires. Disney can usually produce good enough content with Mickey including some games (Kingdom Hearts series) and animation for kids. It might not hit the mark for everyone, but I think Disney prides itself on never producing shovelware - even if the content is bland.
Imagine the App/Play Store (or whatever exists then) once it expires though. If you thought the Flappy Bird spam was bad...
> The reason why it was "life plus X years" was to provide a means for the family if the creator had an untimely death.
Doesn't make any sense; a fixed term copyright as is used for corporate-author works (currently 90 years) does that just as well.
All a “Life plus X” term for, in terms of expected to benefit, is give decreasing expected copyright term as your age increases (well, as remaining life expectancy given known facts decreases, more precisely.)
I suspect “Life plus” was more about eliminating disputes about creation date for individually-authored works that aren't immediately published, not about what it provides to author’s families. With a “Life plus” term, creation dates become immaterial in computing the end of the copyright term, if you know who the author is then, once their death date is known, expiration of all copyrights is known even if the exact creation date of some works is not known.
I get that if somebody's partner dies an untimely death it's unkind to simultaneously remove their family income, but 70 years seems like a ridiculously long buffer.
When these rules were invented, the ostensible concern really was about destitute artist families.
Today it's just an excuse, wheel out Jimmy and have him say about how his grandfather just wanted to do right by the kids and imply that people using Jim's granddad's story idea now it's entering the public domain are "stealing" from him and this is an outrage.
Copyright is by its nature rent-seeking, you get income from owning something, and not by actually contributing anything of value. Even in the rare cases where it really _does_ keep some artist's recently bereaved family out of poverty we ought to be asking why aren't we keeping _everybody_ out of poverty?
The original argument tried to justify this rent-seeking by saying we are getting something from it, these brilliant ideas might never get published if Copyright doesn't ensure there's a reward. And if they're not published we'd never know about them, you can't riff on Mickey if nobody has ever seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon. And you know what, I don't agree but if the bargain had stuck at 28 years I'd hold my nose. But of course it didn't. We managed to get _Big Pharma_ to put up with a genuinely limited exclusivity period for their drugs, and a world where generic medicines not only exist but thrive - yet somehow Big Content got extension after extension for some guy's idea for a cartoon mouse (among many other things).
That is true, initially with extensions past the creator's death. But as you also point out, it is very much rent seeking behavior by companies.
However to understand why we even have copyright, you have to know your renaissance European history. Prior to copyright/patents, you had the guild system. Knowledge was hidden, obfuscated, and destroyed. Those whom wanted to share the secrets of the guild were imprisoned and/or killed.
Fast-forward to the creation of the USA - most of the people here were second sons whom had little to no claims on European riches. They also knew of the guilds, and the danger they have. So, they posited copyright, trademark, and patent. It wasn't cause they were the best tools, but they were better than the guilds that preceded them.
It's about time we revisit the idea of copyright, patent, and trademark and how they apply in the 21'st century.
Patents originated in 15th Century Venice and Copyright in 17th Century Britain and trademarks in France in the (iirc) 19th Century.
Patents were, indeed, a way to encourage people to share their inventions rather than keep them as trade secrets, but this doesn't apply to copyright (rampant book piracy after the invention of the printing press) or trademark (consumer protection and counterfitting).
I have never heard of any link the the USA or second sons etc, and the way these laws developed doesn't support your hypothesis.
Absolutely with you that these things need modernising though (and not in a Digital Millenium way)
Yup, Trademarks are fine, the insistence on muddling Trademark, Patent and Copyright together is bad mojo and people (even lawyers!) need to cut it out.
The same principle as Trademarks even pre-date the formal existence of registrable trademarks, because everybody can see that if "Jameson Beans" are considered to be good quality beans then buying some crap beans and selling them on as "Jameson Beans" is clearly not OK. English law has a tort of "passing off" which is committed when you trick customers in this way, and you can still use it for unregistered marks today, it's just harder than the Registered Trademark law.
If I die my family doesn't keep getting my paycheck. The living are expected to work. Financially comfortable "heirs" are not a good that society needs to protect.
The reasons your family wouldn't keep getting your paycheck are practical though (you'd stop doing the work that earns your employer an income). Those reasons don't really exist in the case of "Intellectual Property", and it seems unnecessarily mean to make their loss harsh just because other people's losses are harsh. Although I think it should be more like a few years' buffer rather than a lifetime income.
> I get that if somebody's partner dies an untimely death it's unkind to simultaneously remove their family income, but 70 years seems like a ridiculously long buffer.
at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think we can eliminate a lot of this "friction" if we have an effective basic income. I get that eliminating things like copyright could lead us back to an age where only art that people make is basically with some wealthy feudal lord's patronage but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
Yeah, but post-mortem activity hasn't seen a lot of progress lately. If anything, the dead do less useful stuff beyond their life now than ever what with all these pesky laws against violating corpses.
Even if it won't be extended, the damage has already been done.
Imho this whole complex around "copyright" and "intellectual property" is probably the biggest "capital bubble" in human history.
Tangible goods are finite on this planet, intangible goods (like IP) are not, so they are the perfect tool for keeping this "perpetual growth machine" aka world economy going, even if actual resources become scarce, we will never run out of ideas to "monetize".
In that regard, I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the developed economies have moved from manufacturing industries, dealing with actual goods and finite resources, to "service industries", where most of the value is generated through "ideas" which are infinite.
It's easy to put a value on something tangible, you can calculate the resources that go in there, the man-hours needed to manufacture it, the costs of the manufacturing facilities. The same does not apply to most intellectual property, its whole value is pretty much an arbitrary estimation with no limiting factors in terms of real-world resources, as such there are no rational limits to how much one could charge for them.
As you say, it's not perfect, but it would absolutely help us preserve culture beyond what is still classic 75+ years from now.
We have lost the vast majority of silent era films and more historical films will follow since it's illegal for you to save them to digital format without the explicit consent from the content creator. We won't lose Casablanca or The Seventh Seal since they're preserved by historical archives and companies can still make money screening them but TV-movies like Star Wars the Holiday Special is only being preserved by illegal means because nobody bothers enforcing its copyright. Sure, that movie is an abomination, but film historians 100 years from now would presumably want some proof that Lucas made it and that it really was the first appearance of Boba Fett.
I think this is a good solution. There are and will still be companies that want to protect and make money off of their old assets. I really don't want to see a market flooded with Mickey Mouse knock off garbage.
But if the creator is dead and nobody is making any money off their work, then put it in the public domain so it doesn't get lost in time.
In 2018, the copyright on those early Mickey cartoons will end (if Congress doesn't repeat the sins of '76 and '98, that is—and you can bet we'll be pulling out all the stops to prevent that). What happens then?
Almost nothing, if Disney and friends get their way.
title card for Steamboat Willie Those Mickey cartoons are almost certainly in the public domain anyway. In the late 1920s, copyright wasn't automatic: rightsholders had to undertake certain "formalities"—registering with the Copyright Office and displaying correctly formatted notices—and then renew those formalities periodically. Scholars who've looked into the matter make a very good case that the early Disney organization flubbed its registration, notice and renewal, and there are probably cartoons that are in the public domain today.
Which is not to say that Disney wouldn't sue you if you tried to remix them, upload them to the Internet Archive, or sell them in on a compilation DVD of other public domain cartoons from the period. They almost certainly would, and it would cost you an unthinkable sum of money to defend yourself. Emerging victorious but impoverished, you would have won a small victory.
But at that point, we expect that Disney will try to use another body of law to suppress creativity and commerce involving Mickey Mouse, whether or not "Steamboat Willie" and "Plane Crazy" are in the public domain: trademark law. If you sell something Mickeyish—including its public domain cartoons—Disney might ask a court to stop you because people who buy the
cartoons from you may think they're buying from Disney. Back to court with you!
They discuss is briefly but my understanding is the copyright only protects the work itself. IE the movie steamboat willie could now be freely published by anyone with access to it? But Disney will still own the trademark and be the only entity that can produce new original Mickey Mouse content?
> ...and be the only entity that can produce new original Mickey Mouse content?
This is confusing to me. If copyright is up on Steamboat Willie, producing derivative works based on Steamboat Willie has to be allowed, so original content that remixes and adds to Steamboat Willie to make a new cartoon must be OK.
That’s correct. But Disney has trademarks around Mickey. So you can’t call your work Mickey Mouse. And you may find yourself in court if your work too closely matches any of the trademarks Disney has on the Mouse. So it will be risky as Disney may wish to drown you in legal filings based not on copyright but trademarks.
You'll probably find yourself in court in any case. That doesn't mean that Disney is right, just powerful.
And there is such a thing as fair use in a trademark. Being descriptive is fair use of a trademark. You can market your breadbox as being compatible with Acme Bread. And you can describe your Sherlock Holmes book as containing Sherlock Holmes and as an extension to the public domain canon.
I don't see why Mickey Mouse gets special treatment just because he's also on logos and such. Disney, at the least, is forcing a conflict between trademark law and public domain law to see what it can get away with.
Trademarks are about protecting the use of "marks" (i.e., logos, names, etc.) for use in "trade". So having a trademark on Mickey Mouse means that you can't use Mickey Mouse to advertise or promote your product, and this can probably construed broadly (e.g., sample screenshots of a game, packaging material). Even if it can't Disney is not known for being shy on litigation, and it's totally possible for them to sue you even if they have only a slim chance of victory. Using Mickey Mouse as a cameo would be totally legal if he's not used to advertise it, although the tricky part could be holding that the cameo comes from public domain work and not later, still-copyrighted derivatives.
Sherlock Holmes appears in unauthorized works even though some of the original Doyle works are not public domain, but I'm not sure how trademark complicates things.
The basic argument is that "big content" don't seem to be pushing it, scared off by the protests against SOPA.
Honestly, I think the clickbait "why" does the article a disservice: it is a more in depth work than the 150 word bullet point with gifs that the "why" advertises.
You’re missing the point. If Steamboat Willie was allowed to lapse out of copyright, and Disney decided to release it on DVD, it would still be illegal to copy it, since that would be breaking the DRM, which is in itself illegal.
Which was my original point – if they allow copyright to lapse, they’ll just add more DRM to everything to make copyright irrelevant.
Copyright was never meant to make anything hard to copy, and neither is most DRM. Both are there to make it illegal to copy.
Most people wouldn't complain if a new category of copyright were created just for Disney, and anyone else who wants an extra 75 years. Let it be opt in. Most people understand why Disney values its mouse etc., and that it stands to lose income if copyright expires. We get it that they're a special case. We the people can live without that stuff in the public domain. Why doesn't Congress just ask us? (Or would that be unequal protection under the law?)
I disagree. Disney has money, and all politicians spend at least half of their working hours soliciting money in exchange for the promise of writing laws. It will be extended.
The founders idea of patent and copyright as being meant to last as long as a working lifetime (20 years) died a long time ago. This is just one more evidence of the democracy moving to plutocracy.
Let's watch it get renewed. Then, up-vote my comment.
What does this mean in reality... You could make derivative works of the original Mickey Mouse free from copyright infringement? Would copyright still be in place for subsequent Mickey Mouse productions?
I think the copyright is slowly becoming irrelevant, I have a feeling that the real push is to treat copyrights the same way as patents (intelectual property), so for instance, you cannot make a cartoon with Mickey Mouse even if you make character a bit different or call it differently, or you cannot take a Disney story with slightly different characters. Basically, it won't be any more about protecting own creative work but about creating an artificial scarcity.
I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
> I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
False. Here's some of their animated features based on copyrighted works (as best as I can tell):
Dumbo
Bambi
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Treasure Planet (partially based on the 1987 TV miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space)
You should probably the entire linked section, Lucas's own quote included.
"it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books"
They will, and the article addresses that (edit: see EFF article at the bottom for in-depth explanation), but they won't have the copyright to "Steamboat Willie" anymore, which is as it should be.
Disney itself benefited greatly from the Grimm Brothers and other fairy tales, they should let new generations benefit from theirs.
I imagine Disney would rather Mickey Mouse show up in porn than someone else’s advertising. Mickey in porn is distasteful but realistically doesn’t diminish Disney’s brand. Mickey in someone else’s advertising absolutely does.
