The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
What's interesting is that this is true of all creators, not just artists.
Making money means running a business, and running a business requires more than just creating something. You also have to identify a good market for that creation, and find a way to distribute to them, and provide a viable model for them to pay for it, and (the hardest part) out-compete all the other businesses who are doing the same.
This is true for cooks. It's not good enough to create a meal. You have to also scope out the local market, find a good location, build a restaurant or a stand, attract customers, and sell your meals. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept cooking for free, or going to work for a restaurant who's going to do all those hard parts and take the bulk of the profits.
This is true for computer programmers. It's not good enough to write a program. You also have to build a business, find customers, attract them through ads or marketing or viral growth, collect credit carts, and sell your product. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept coding things that make no money, or go to work for corporation or startup who will pay you a salary while collecting bigger profits.
Etc.
For some reason artists are the only group that makes a big stink about this situation, and feels that they should get the benefits of running a business without doing the work or taking the risk of running a business.
Artists are not the only ones who make a stink about this; it's inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Everyone involved in a venture is risking something, but the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture. Other kinds of risk are solely rewarded with monetary wages at sub-profit margins. That's why labor unions exist, and why the nation's elites work tirelessly to stop them.
But with artists, there's a particular extra wrinkle, in that the law created a middle tier of reward specifically for the efforts of creative workers. Copyright was specifically intended to allow authors to have their own business ventures without necessarily having to share in the same risks that equity owners do. So, naturally, those equity owners all colluded with one another to steal this other form of equity and wear it as a second shell.
> the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture
I would argue that it's not solely the law rewarding that kind of risk, it's the market. There is no law that says that only equity owners can enjoy massive profits. Some employees get paid 7 figures, 8 figures, or more, even without equity.
Generally speaking, the rewards go to the hardest parts, the riskiest parts, the parts with the least supply and the most demand.
You are taking far more risk by being a business creator and blazing a new trail, than you are by studying a fixed set of knowledge and techniques to train to become a Front End Software Engineer or some other kind of well-defined high-demand pre-defined role. And the evidence for this is the fact that there are millions of people who've shaped themselves into that safer mould, and very few who have done the former.
And this doesn't just apply to owners vs employees, it applies within each group, too. There are far more restauranteurs than search engine founders, as the former is simply a less risk and less competitive endeavor. (Competing with your local market vs competing with the world.) And artists who create unique works tend to earn a lot more than copycats. Artists who master rare skills tend to earn a lot more than people generating stuff off Midjourney. Etc. Risk tends to go hand-in-hand with reward.
Of course there are exceptions, e.g. rent-seeking, sabotage, monopoly, collusion, etc. that can earn you a lot without you providing a lot of value or taking a lot of risk. And a huge role of the law is to make as much of this illegal as possible, to force people into more value-creating activities by process of elimination.
People who end up leading successful companies are often able to do so not because they’re more willing to take risks than others, but rather because they have experienced more good luck than others. Take Bill Gates, for example. His parents sent him to an exclusive private school, which afforded him regular access to computers from an early age, giving him valuable experience that most others his age could not access, through no fault of their own. Microsoft was able to make a crucial business deal with IBM because Gates’ mother knew the CEO. Someone else with equal skill and appetite for risk would have found it much more difficult to be as successful as Gates was, because their parents were likely not rich and not connected to the right people.
Luck is always going to play a role. No one has ever said that life is fair, and no system is based on life being fair. One of the many reasons that progressive taxation is justified.
I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.
The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.
The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.
If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.
And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.
Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.
An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.
> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
BigCorps could do a lot of things under a new regime, but they are already doing shitty things. I'd rather deal with the current problems and then see if/what kind of new issues crop up, and then course-correct then.
GRRM is already beating them at that game by publishing a new book in the series every couple decades. That might become a common tactic in such a copyright environment
So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.
> Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985
It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.
Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.
A person who wants to coast off the success of a single creation for eternity and not feel compelled to make future creations is not an artist.
They are a capitalist.
Artists create, despite the destitution, because they want to create and feel strongly compelled to create. Art is about that compulsion.
An artist wants enough money to pay rent/mortgage, raise a family, have a hobby, not be in debt, etc. But when Daniel Hardcastle received 0 pounds from his book because the publisher was a scammy cunt, he doesn't stop writing because there's no money in it, he continues to write despite the lack of profit. Because that's what he feels compelled to do.
When youtube made it impossible for animators to make money on Youtube, Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) started paying people to make animations out of his content, including people who started out doing it entirely without their permission. When many channels make pure profit from creating clip shows or compilations of their content, instead of throwing lawyers or the Youtube machine at those people, he paid someone to make official versions.
Compare how those two jackwads acted (the fine brothers), trying to trademark the concept of a "reaction video", to all the different channels and groups that do "Power Hour" or variety content like Good Mythical Morning. They even joke about how they are all stealing from each other. They know that their audience is looking for their unique output, not a specific format, and that protecting such a format would be a waste for everyone.
Because a real artist does not say "How dare you make better product with my formula", a real artist says "Aww man they used my formula to make something great, I should figure out how to make something great and up my game".
The sin in artistry is someone taking your style or content and shamelessly stealing it because it's a profitable business, rather than riffing on it or iterating on it.
Weird Al generally gets permission to do his work despite the law being clear that he does not have to because artistry is about respect and effort and collaboration.
More importantly for copyright law, despite no legal protection for a "Power hour" format, many groups are able to profit off it simultaneously, because art is not some winner takes all market. Copyright is not about enabling you to profit off of a work indefinitely, copyright is about ensuring that Greedy McBusinessman cannot take your book and sell it for cheaper because he doesn't have to pay your rent and does that for a hundred other artists. It's about who owns the Rights to Copy a work.
If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
Presumably people would consider a Song of Ice and Fire sequel by GRRM to be "official" and everything else "fanfiction", even if the fanfiction manages to appear in bookstores
Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/ Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived.
Someone who buys books at Barnes & Noble is not going to print online fan fiction on demand. If you think this is something a “mainstream consumer” would do, I think you’re very out of touch with the average person.
Isn’t reading stuff on the internet more mainstream than buying things at Barnes and Noble? Not necessarily those specific things, but the notion that something needs to be physically available at a bookstore to be relevant is at best dated.
I think you should also assume it's called "Archive of our own" because of the same sense that Woolf had in "A Room of one's own". This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed.
So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming that they can thrive in a shared space and then discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason, they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by employers despite having the same skills as successful male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to have a place of your own.
That's an interesting perspective, I hadn't considered that the name might be a reference to A Room of One's Own.
My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the community, which means everyone migrates to the next site which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3 run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of them
This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.
A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.
“The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by [E. L.] James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’.”
as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.
How do the sequels affect this? I read this once more in the same discussion so I am curious.
Let's assume the 1st book goes public. I should be able to use those characters and their known relationship in any which way, no? What's wrong with that, copyright wise?
For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not from the original author.
I mean, that sounds like a win from the point of view of copyright.
The whole purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of new works after all. In GRRM's case, the more successful his works became, the less he wrote which is kind of the opposite of what copyright was intended to do.
14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer than a patent lasts for.
Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)
> Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
Well, independently coming up with the same solution to a given problem is a lot more likely than independently writing the same novel. Personally, the chilling of independent invention is the thing I find most obnoxious about patents.
I might independently invent a cartoon character of a black mouse with a tan face that wears white gloves and red bibs and wish to publish a comic book featuring that character on the cover, but I'll never be able to do that -- no matter how long I wait: We have trademark law in the way.
Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they never automatically time out as a mere function of the calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse, they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney Company.
The addition of copyright makes it all a double-whammy. Trademarks can already last as long as time itself; copyright doesn't also have to be that way at all.
14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose, if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well, and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.
(Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of those is timing out soon and I really should check on it.)
Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).
It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy
IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity
Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and generates cash.
What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.
"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.
Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.
I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?
The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.
It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.
My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to defend — even if you agree with copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella term as it muddies the waters.
Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not talking about physical things. They're made up rules about made up things. It can all be different if we agree to make it so.
IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.
I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?
Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should say and do.
Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
A reasonable copyright term makes abandonware not a thing
If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.
Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.
>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.
This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.
Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.
I was about to respond to your comment yesterday about closed protocols but this is a better article!
> A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.
> This is the entire point of copyright.
Not only is the entire point, it is the thing that matters most when discussing "piracy" productively. Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media. "Consuming" intellectual property can never be piracy by definition because you are not providing anything.
If Netflix screws up their licensing agreements and provides too many seasons of a show and people watch it no one would be considered "pirates". Netflix is simply in violation of a licensing agreement. If they had no agreement whatsoever then they are directly infringing on the "IP holders exclusive right to control the distribution and sale".
>Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media.
I don't know if I go that far, since copyright is literally about the right of exclusive control over copies, and piracy is making a copy without authorization.
However, the advent of computers limited the "literalness" of that interpretation, and my understanding is that even without such consideration, many countries do not consider copying for personal use to be a breach of law. I am not in violation of copyright when copying a program from my hard drive to ram, and I think that would be true even if the proper owner of the copyright insisted otherwise.
Copyright was invented with the printing press. What was happening was that authors couldn't get compensated, because everyone with a printing press was re-printing their works. It never gave the author control over where their books were ultimately sold; just who could copy it.
Related: This is why the Bible became so popular and well-known. Printers could re-print the Bible because it wasn't protected by copyright.
Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.
A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.
But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.
Last time I looked into trying to get pricing from ASCAP and BMI so I could legally stream some music for a small number of people, I found the following to be true:
1. There is no public pricing. (Why? Because fuck you, that's why!)
2. If I insisted, then the simplest way to get a price is to stream whatever I want and wait for a nasty letter from one or more lawyers that will most assuredly tell me how much I owe.
3. The only safe way to proceed is not to play the game at all.
That's gonna be a "no" on the cartels for me, boss. We might as well just throw all of the money and all of the copyrighted stuff into the memory hole for all the good they do.
See if the scheme that BMG / Columbia house still works. (Apparently they would send a check to the rightsholder, and if they cashed it, it was considered payment.)
2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow account.
At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is forfeited.
(What happens to the money at that point? I think this is a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of us get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
(Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
I'd like to propose the following additions to help tie it all together:
Copyright must be registered. Registration requires sending a digital copy to some officious government body, such as the Library of Congress, for preservation. (It used to be ~about this way; it can be this way again. Disk is cheap. Git and email both exist. It can be figured out.)
This registration will be open and publicly-available to query (online, of course, but also by phone, and mail, and just by walking in the front door and asking), so the question of "Who to pay" is always easily answered.
All forfeited money from licensing goes to help pay for the preservation of the collected works, and for the ongoing expense of providing the registration database. It won't be nearly enough to cover those expenses, and that's fine: This means that the balance always has a place to land.
Copyright should not span generations. It should still time out completely, and do so after a period that is shorter than a normal human lifespan.
If a person saw a film when they were 5 that they really enjoyed, and if they manage to live long enough, then they should eventually be able to walk into the Library of Congress, give them some money, and walk out with a physical copy of it, and be able to freely upload that copy of it to YouCloud for their great, great grandchildren (and indeed, the world) to see, and be able to do all of this without becoming a criminal.
(How much money? Something in the realm of 15 Big Macs worth of dollars sounds about right.)
Members shall comply with Articles 1 through 21 of the Berne Convention (1971) and the Appendix thereto. However, Members shall not have rights or obligations under this Agreement in respect of the rights conferred under Article 6bis of that Convention or of the rights derived therefrom.
Author's rights under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration.
This would require the country to back out of the Berne Convention and TRIPS (and by implication the WTO). Protection of copyright is automatic and does not require registration.
Just because I haven't sent the latest batch of photographs to the Library of Congress for registration (so I can collect punitive damages rather than just compensatory damages) doesn't mean that the images that I have created are not copyrighted and protected.
How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)
What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?
What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?
---
I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
> I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments
Copyright only works if you have faith in your government to create and enforce laws.
Otherwise, if you don't have faith in your government, you have bigger problems than a poor system of copyright.
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Anyway, all of your points are wonderful things to argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need. When we argue about details like this, we can assume that compulsory licensing is a good concept overall.
Which government do I need to have faith in for enforcing the copyright for a citizen of Wakanda who is infringing upon my work?
The floor of copyright reform is set by TRIPS and the WTO. That's 50 years. If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that. Setting an floor that expires sooner is likely a non-starter given concerns about things getting slurped up into AI models.
Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
Much of the suggestions of copyright reform would involve the relevant country to leave the WTO and withdraw from the TRIPS agreement. That is unlikely to happen.
Resetting copyright to the floor dictated by TRIPS would be a possibility that a country could entertain.
> If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that.
This is less of a tough sell than you think. In pretty much every IP-related trade negotiation, you can divide the world into two categories:
* Ultra-rich countries that want to push through every insane IP idea they have (life+50, DMCA 1201, etc) onto as many other countries as possible
* Everyone else
Notably, the ultra rich are all "dealmaker countries". They're the ones dictating the terms of international trade to everyone else and whatever terms they insist upon will be accepted without question. So yeah, if, say, South Africa or India want shorter terms, they still have to respect America's terms, at least up to life+50. But if the US wants shorter terms out of India, they will get shorter terms out of India, come hell or high water.
Conversely, Mexico has life+100 terms, but nobody is trying to use them to ratchet up terms elsewhere. They're a deal taker.
The real question is if another ultra-rich country will stop one that tries to lower the Berne minimum. Keep in mind that the ultra-rich subdivide into groups that, in order of relative IP insanity, are: Europe, Japan, and then the US in the crazy slot. If the US were to, say, repeal DMCA 1201; Europe would cheer and Japan would grumble.
Actually, the Berne convention happened during a time when Europe was the copyright basketcase and America was in the "everyone else" category[0]. The US had 28+14 terms up until 1976, and we didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988 - almost a hundred years late[1]! So if the US were to drop the Berne floor, you could totally imagine the EU going insane and trying to trade war the US out of it. But at the same time, the EU isn't very good at fighting trade wars with other ultra-rich blocs. Or at the very least, they fold very easily.
[0] For exactly the same reason why China is today. China is in the same position America was a century ago, where it had a huge manufacturing base and basically no cares about copyright.
[1] In particular, the US really, really hated automatic registration. While it is true that you don't have to register copyright and users of creative works have to treat everything as copyrighted; creators still have to register anyway if they want to actually enforce their rights. And if they don't do it right away they don't get statutory damages, which are almost always the only damages that matter. So you get all the problems of automatic registration with all the problems of copyright formalities.
The US couldn't drop to the Berne floor... because it is a member of the WTO and restricted by TRIPS which has a floor of 50 years.
Going to anything less than 50 years would entail leaving the WTO and backing out of TRIPS. That in turn would be disastrous to the companies that work with information (music, movies, microcode (software), and ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶y̶).
Want to do away with registration for punitive damages? Absolutely. On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
The only three blocs at the WTO who would meaningfully oppose renegotiating TRIPS to lower the copyright floor are the US, EU, and Japan. If all three of them say "let's lower the floor", it's getting lowered. The fact that they cannot unilaterally do this does not mean their hands are tied, especially not when they are the ones tying other people's hands.
> On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
> Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
You just made the argument for mandatory licensing.
Why?
Piracy is about to become a lot harder to prosecute. (See the news coverage of the Cox case in the Supreme Court.) All those usages of your work that you object to (which many people consider fair use), are about to become much harder to prosecute.
Thus, shortening the period of exclusive control and introducing a period of mandatory licensing allows you to get paid in situations where it is extremely hard to prosecute for copyright infringement.
Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Because once you make information available to the general public, you have no way to control what the general public does with that information. (This is the reason why DRM failed.)
(In general, my proposal is more in context with things like movies, TV shows, music; situations where in the past anyone could make a DVD/CD player that could play any DVD/CD, anyone could sell any DVD/CD by buying into the patent pool. No one could sell a DVD/CD that could only play in a specific model, and a CD/DVD player maker didn't have to negotiate with every studio. So my licensing model isn't quite the same situation that you're talking about.)
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In this case, the problem is that fair use is eroded. The questions are:
> Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
1: Once you make information available to the general public, how long do you retain exclusive control of that information? At what point is the general public's fair use eroded?
> Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
2: That's really the formula. It's a wonderful thing to argue about. Again, though, it's about making sure that fair use is preserved.
> Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
3: (Please also see answer 1) Why do people still flock to the Lourve (sp?) to see the Mona Lisa? That being said, copyright isn't intended to support artificial scarcity, and I think breaking down artificial scarcity makes popular items more valuable. (IE, the knockoff prints, that you collect royalties from, make the limited "artist made prints" more valuable.)
> Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Fair use. (Sorry, running out of time, see my example about the DC/DVD market. Also, radio stations used to be able to play any song and follow a formula to pay the right holder. The artists couldn't refuse a station from playing their song.)
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> Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
The same copyright laws apply to all things that are copyrightable regardless of medium. Anything that can be put into a fixed medium, be it print, digital recording, film.
Such a proposal needs to take into consideration everything that is copyrightable rather than just literature or film productions... but also software and photographs.
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50 years after publication date. If you want to license it before then for some other purpose, that's something that depends on your use of it and what I'm willing to accept.
If you have a formula, put it on the table. How much should it cost for me to commercially license some open source software?
How much should it cost you to license my photographs for fine art replicas? for placemats?
My contention is that any price that is legislated is wrong for the majority of the use cases. Any attempt to make it right gets into absurd nuance.
It is the same copyright laws that frustrate people for getting literature or movies into the public domain that also protects open source.
The alternative to copyright isn't "everything is free" but rather "everything is locked up."
The GPL was created because Stallman wanted to be able to modify printers. Getting rid of copyright (or making it very short duration) wouldn't have changed his experience with printers. What it would have changed would have been that that the GPL would lose all its teeth to compel people make their software licensed the same (under copyright law!).
However, all of this is pretty much moot and performative. If you want to change it to something shorter than 50 years - get the WTO to renegotiate TRIPS.
That ain't happening.
Spending effort to say "this is how it should be..." go write a story and release it to the public domain about that utopia of copyright freedom.
Speaking for myself, if I lost the rights provided by copyright to my photographs after a decade and half or so - I would not have posted them.
I do not want art locked up behind patronage and restricted to those few... though if that was the only alternative to being able to make some money off my photographs, then that's what I would have done.
You're getting far too defensive, and are missing the point that I'm making about fair use.
Then perhaps let me explain what I mean by fair use:
For example, I'd like to write an ebook reader that can give me an AI summary of the last chapter that I read, or give me a quick AI based summary of who a character is on the page that I'm reading.
Fair use means that I don't need to negotiate with every publisher and every author, or negotiate with Kindle to be able to access their content.
This is why we need compulsory licensing; it makes a middle ground between the exclusive control that you have when you create something, and the eventual entry into public domain.
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.
But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).
And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
Right; so according to your own assessment, for the "14+14 no extensions" thing , you're always going to have have "a minority of opinionated geeks" on one side, and "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests willing to fight tooth and nail for a gold mine" on the other side. You're never going to win that one.
Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one.
IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
Sorry, did I accidentally wander into a political action group working meeting, and you're mistaking me for the chairperson or something? If you have actual money and people working on this, don't take your cues form some rando on the internet!
I thought this was a site where we talk about ideas and see what people's perspectives are. @basilikum asked why on earth @mchusma would advocate "pay to extend" instead of "14+14 no extensions". I gave my own personal take. I'd be totally happy to be wrong about the political viability of "14+14 no extensions". If you have actual data, or even just a different take on the situation, I'm all ears.
Again, you seem to misunderstand what this kind of forum is about. I gave my layperson's judgement and my reasons. If you don't agree with them, the thing to do is to point out where you think things are wrong, or add in your own take. That's what will lead to an interesting discussion where we learn from each other.
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings.
The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
> Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.
Which is why the artist may deserve royalties over a number of years: they did the work (a possible multi-year investment of time/effort can deserve a multi-year payback period). It does not explain why their (grand)children, who may not have even been born when the work was done, deserve royalties.
The Hobbit was published in 1937, and the final volume of LotR in 1955: does Simon Tolkien (b. 1959) deserve royalties?
I didn't say anyone deserved anything -- I'm just saying that as a society we do have other (potentially) income generating assets that do pass down to heirs who didn't "do anything to deserve them".
e.g. Some cultures think it is normal that someone can own thousands of acres of wilderness land that they've never even seen just because a distant relative hundreds of years ago had a piece of paper that says they own it. Other cultures believe the earth is a collective resource that is merely used by humans for their lifetime.
> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all.
That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.
Isn't the question whether it's reasonable for people to be rentiers? Clearly lots of the population are, but wouldn't it be better if they carried on creating rather than sitting back and doing nothing for the remainder of their place on earth?
I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S. Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently, but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan).
Not at all, that question has quite real and far reaching economic and political consequences, it's not about endless debating, it's about proper and timely deciding, precisely in the framework of economics and politics within the Constitution.
I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.
> Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
I would suggest that artists who say they're producing fully original works are just poorly educated in art history. Making something that has no prior influences would be extraordinary in the modern world.
Also, the entities most capable of exploiting long copyright terms are corporations. Individuals simply don't have the resources to keep something relevant decade after decade save for a very small handful of exceptions like J.R.R. Tolkien.
I'm not even really advocating for or against the copyright position.
I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause you study lots of works and create an original creation which borrows influences isn't the same thing as requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.
It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have no influences cause I classified works without any copyrighted material as original.
My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted work becomes available does not necessarily imply creators and artists lives will be substantially different or better off.
Oh really? You don't think all the creators who do things like make video essays on 20 year old movies would benefit from not getting the rug pulled out from under them? You don't think they would prefer being legally in the right making money from analysis of media that was a generation ago?
You don't think the Techmoans and Technology connections would prefer having better demonstration material than whatever recordings from 1912 exist, so that they could actually show you what they are trying to demonstrate without having their livelihood threatened by a capricious and byzantine system hell bent on pleasing a few megacorps?
You don't think the creatives who made "The Katering show" for example would prefer that more people watch their artistic output than have it locked behind some business leaving it languishing in a random digital storefront rather than letting more people buy it because they just cannot be assed? Oh, you don't actually have to guess, because they uploaded a youtube video where they encourage people to pirate their work so they can see it.
Creatives and artists tend to enjoy their work being consumed and riffed on (not plagiarized) and well adjusted artists recognize that there's "nothing new under the sun" and that remixing and riffing are essential parts of the creative and artistic process.
Hell, the music industry even understands this, which is why letting songs get licensed out for remixes and future use is common.
However, ultimately, few people really are holding any cards. Most will have to compromise a great deal, to be able to generate income and benefit from existing publishing infrastructure.
Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.
I actually don’t mind 14+14 for corps. Because corps could conceivably never “die”. (In fact, I wouldn’t even be too opposed to getting rid of the +14 part).
But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs. And I’m a guy who’s not a creative.
I just think if you come up with a painting, or story, or video game, why should a big corporate be able to swoop in and just copy it while you’re alive without paying you?
The copyright should lapse after a reasonable amount of time following your death. But while you’re alive, what you made should be yours.
> But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs.
But it is theirs... well, until they sell it. We aren't talking about the things they make but about copies of them. I can't believe there are people who still don't understand the difference.
The copies aren't theirs to begin with, copyright isn't natural property and it's not a natural right, that much is set in stone. Don't be confused by the ridiculous name "Intellectual Property".
I'm not saying the legal right called copyright should not exist but it should be paired back to the terms it was originally limited to, there are good reasons for those limits.
Maybe, but their economic role might be more like an angel investor or VC— fund a hundred failed efforts and hang on for dear life to the few runaway successes.
The sweet spot would have been an initial term of 14years or something like that, and generous duration thereafter, limited to works that are registered and re-registered on a regular basis.
Yeah, this sounds very similar to people who vote as if they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires. "There's a minuscule chance my work will become super lucrative for decades, so I want a super long copyright" when they don't realize that a much shorter copyright can help them creatively in the near term.
Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting creative works, which are, by their nature, much much easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to copy, that I can sell exceptions to.
Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.
IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your rights to, including the production of derivative works and the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or something significantly different). For the next 2 decades after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-all.
You surprise me with a proposal for shorter copyright terms. Interesting!
For fun, here's an interesting discussion countering my own earlier statements - Once a work is in the public domain, it seems there's very little to do with an idea except drag it through the mud. Audacity is what drives commerce i suppose. For example as soon as Mickey Mouse entered public domain all the news could talk about was horror films and "adult" films capitalizing on the "what're you gonna do about it" of the moment.
Similarly when Peter Pan entered the public domain there was a short glut of "now he's a nightmare / villain" representations before becoming irrelevant again.
Imagine creating something like Sesame Street or Mr Roger Neighborhood then a mere 30 years later everyone has more fun making "Mr Grouch Goes On A Murder Rampage" bloodbath and "Mr Rogers + Freddie Kruger Teamup" art / film / trite youtube videos.
It'd be pretty soul crushing.
"Tragedy of the commons", as it were.
With this in mind, perhaps... your idea could deal with that via tiered pricing of "official / approved / canon" works are charged the standard fee whilst "unofficial / unapproved" works tithe a larger proportion of the proceeds to the original author...
The biggest annoyance here is the discussion always focuses on protecting individual creators whilst the laws and benefits seem to go to large corporations. e.g. Disney would have no problem using Peter Pan without consequence, while the rest of us wouldn't dare use Steamboat Willie.
Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
I don’t blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he ever become public domain?
The film is in the public domain and the original versions of Mickey and Minnie are public domain. But that does NOT apply to the later versions of Mickey that you'd find Disney pushing today (e.g., at parks, on apparel, etc.). Further, Disney has been trying to continue to assert copyright even over the original version of the character. See here for more info: https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-publi...
This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).
I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.
My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:
By inhibiting cheap reprints of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce a genteel impression that English literature itself had stopped about that date...
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
> even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.
With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of English.
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter
There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.
This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.
Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).
Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).
It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.
You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.
The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with regulation and limits on building rights than with income inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and other constraints keep supply artificially low, which pushes developers toward higher-end units because the fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more building by right, supply would go up and prices would come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is primarily an inequality problem.
RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn’t a meaningful way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a software distribution business just reflects scale. Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a big market, not because Valve is “extracting” in some zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the distribution market would become less efficient, not more equal, and consumers or developers wouldn’t actually be better off.
People that can be taxed at several order of magnitude of wealth compared to a median income obviously didn’t work several degree of magnitude harder/longer/smarter. They more "efficiently" capture the benefits, certainly, but that’s it. And even there, mainly through network effect and pre-existing social forces.
If instead distribution of wealth was flatter in an equally wealthy society, a tax could still capture just as much.
When vladms speaks about high taxes on the rich, it already assumes the continuation of social structure which exaggerates the uneven distribution of wealth.
This is great in theory, but not practice and not practiced anywhere. You could site some EU countries with a very homogeneous population and a GDP < half of the states, but it's not convincing.
I don't think we currently have the most efficient tax vs productivity situation now, but I don't agree with equality being the goal.
Obviously no argument can convince a party which say literally that proofs will be rejected, even those which might be provided on some concrete example. All the more when this party doesn’t align with the underlying praised values anyway.
It is about the practicality of convincing people to do something. Many people I know are inert and would say no to change. Even those that want change have a favorite topic.
So, personally, when discussing economic topics I discuss the taxes part, which is so clearly unjust when explained (most countries tax less capital gains than work, which results in rich people able to accumulate things faster).
Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work - humans are complex. So while I hope that it is possible to have "A society can also thrive without high income disparities.", proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.
> Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work
Sure. It doesn't mean anyone else know better from some absolute perspective that we should blindly trust.
>proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.
Not proposing any change, letting the same egocentric people with selfish intentions always have the last word on what should change or not, also proved to be a sure source of great human catastrophic outcomes.
Success isn't real. All things are internal, but we make/pretend they are external. I dont care at all of your accolades or accomplishments. Exactly like you dont care of mine. If we ever do care about others' success, its not bc of the other people. We are just playing games with ourselves and calling it stuff like expectations, admiration, respect, and responsibility - its all bullshit.
UBI allows a different life. You can only fail so much, only fall so far - rather than people being lazy, it will be a huge boon for creativity. The 9-5 for 45 is creative death.
Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders and users about how to go about uploading and downloading copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the geographical differences from region to region on copyright expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at their own risk)?
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
One could even combine How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Diary of Anne Frank, the works of Einstein and Adolf Hitler into a some strange gory anime and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless.
"and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless."
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about it. Just because other people have no more copyright legal angle, there are still other legal and plenty of non legal ways to bother you, if you manage to piss enough people off.
Do they? Do they really think I'm going to come back each day to see what the new reveal is, and on the 17th day I'm going to decide "Oh, hey, maybe I should send them some money"?
No. No, I'm not. I'm gone and I'm not coming back. Ain't nobody got time for games like this.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
“Copying” here refers to distribution and derivation, at least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of media for personal usage for instance (so long as you aren’t circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C.
corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
> corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
That would surely be a license violation, not a copyright violation?
They absolutely can (and do) make copies of the Microsoft office binary and shuttle it around their network/backups/etc, activating licenses only when they need to assign a copy to a particular user
This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
What you describe would almost certainly be considered fair use until point of distribution - it’s non commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact on the market value of Harry Potter.
Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while I’m not a lawyer it feels like it’d be a hard case to make that work being conducted in private is going to have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew novels in the next 30 days.
Market harm is not required for something to count as infringement, but it matters for certain defenses and damages.
Simply writing new adventures for existing copyrighted characters is usually treated as creating an unauthorized derivative work. Writing Harry Potter from the perspective of the Weasley twins, for example, is not fair use.
Distribution is one part of fair use but it isn't the focus of it - fair use is a defense against infringement, but it's still infringement.
You're really missing the crux of fair use:
"Noncommercial, educational, critical, or transformative uses (like commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research)"
How closely does writing Harry Potter fanfiction align with commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research?
Fair use is more about: writing a critique about Harry Potter. Or a Weird Al style song about it. Or presenting parts of it in a paper you're writing for class.
This is all easily searchable stuff. Copyright is extremely draconian when you really look into it.
Seems to say that market harm is the single most important factor in fair use, and it's basically impossible to show that a person writing their own fan fiction without any distribution would prevent an author from exploiting their own work.
If you think about it, writing “Harry Potter” on the internet could be infringement because those words might be in the book, and most worrisomely you are inducing people to make “copies” of the books in their minds. There’s no way to calculate what you owe Rowling from this post, it could be infinite.
(Thankfully I’ve never read those books so I can say the name without infringing)
Because people insist on discussing copyright as if there is any part of it that makes sense, and as if it operates how they think it should.
They derive a history of it from all of these principles that they made up, then propose a future which is always a moderate compromise between the guiding principles that they made up and the history that they made up from the guiding principles that they made up.
Things are as they are because powerful people made them that way, and built on that. The length of copyright is justified by the fact that it got past Congress and judges. What you're allowed to do is vague know it when I see it stuff, and has always been a patch on top of what you're not allowed to do which is always very clear: anything you don't have a written grant of permission to do.
People talk about "fair use" like it is a real abstract principle, rather than being some weird legal wording by a judge from a few court cases where something felt just too minor and silly to be a violation but was obviously, by the letter of the law, a violation.
I'm fairly sure that under the letter of the law you're allowed to read a book you own or listen to a record you own more than once, but I wouldn't bet on it. For all I know it could be an exception called "private repeat performance of licensed material" which is not a law but actually guidance written by the counsel for the Librarian of Congress based on two court cases from the 1930s.
edit: when I was a kid, you wouldn't put the song "Happy Birthday To You" in a movie, and you would edit it out of a documentary. This was never determined not to be a violation, it just got so embarrassing that it was somehow determined that the copyright had lapsed. Archive.org was in a years-long kerfuffle about 78s. It's not about sense, it's about power.
Fair use and the 4 criteria for determining if it applies to usage is literally written into the letter of the law, passed by congress in 1976: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
Its squishy and specific application relies on interpretation guided by precedent, but that's true of just about everything in legal systems guided by common law.
Yeah they've done a lobbying campaign about a dozen times when Mickey was set to enter public domain. I think GP was saying they're surprised they didn't do a 13th time. Like why give up now?
The last (general) copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. What’s happened since then? Google, who has power, money, and incentive to lobby against future copyright extensions.
Because in reality it hasn't entered public domain completely, only the very first movies and the way it was drawn in the 1930's. They are still protecting the one most people all know better.
The funny thing is that Mickey Mouse barely registers for kids these days. We went to Disney World this year and Mickey had a bit part in some of the shows. Elsa, Moana and the other modern characters were the real stars.
Not exactly true, they have hacked the end of the copyright for SteamBoat Willie, by adding a few second extract of it, as part of the actual "Walt Disney Animation Studios" actual logo.
They cannot sue anymore for copyright infringements, but they may do it the registered trademark way, by saying "It's in our logo !".
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
Because every-time this comes up it is the same Mickey mouse complaints over and over. If you're young and your read this the first time I'm sure you're outraged.
Meanwhile there are 1000's of works that people are free to take. Better yet, there are 1000's of works that will be destroyed and not preserved that are open that should be preserved and used.
That because there's a large corpus of public domain works, then the long copyright protection is ok? That people want a short copyright protection because they're done with everything in the public domain?
Would that also imply that if the number of public domain works gets large enough, then the duration copyright protections should also increase?
Long copyright protection is not okay, but letting the huge corpus of existing public domain works languish in obscurity is not okay either; that does a lot more damage to our shared culture, and in a way that's even quite easy to address. But the damage done by keeping works in copyright is easier to see than the damage done by not making remarkably similar works accessible at all.
It doesn’t do more damage though. Our shared culture is like 99% copyrighted media for a variety of reasons. In books for example, the language becomes harder to read, and while many things remain constant across time, old works can become outdated and not address issues relevant today.
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
Does the following comment make logical sense? "Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown."
---
Yes, the comment makes logical sense. It argues that while copyright terms are long, there's a vast amount of public domain material that is not easily accessible due to lack of digitization and organization. The commenter suggests focusing on making this "low-hanging fruit" accessible instead of solely focusing on copyright issues.
===
let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?
---
The comment does present a logical argument, although it's an argument by juxtaposition rather than direct logical entailment. Here's a breakdown:
P1: Copyright terms are long. This is a statement of fact/opinion about the duration of copyright protection.
P2: A vast amount of public domain work is inaccessible. This highlights the existence of a large, underutilized resource.
Implicit Argument: The commenter implies that effort might be better spent on making existing public domain works accessible rather than focusing solely on the length of copyright terms. The "but" signals a contrast and a suggested alternative focus.
You're right that P1 and P2 aren't directly logically connected in a way that P1 causes P2 or vice versa. The connection is more pragmatic:
Opportunity Cost: The commenter suggests that focusing on copyright reform might divert attention and resources from the readily available opportunity to make existing public domain works more accessible.
Practical Benefit: Making public domain works accessible provides immediate cultural and educational benefits, regardless of copyright law.
The commenter isn't saying long copyright terms are okay because of the amount of public domain work. They're saying that focusing solely on copyright is perhaps missing a big, easily addressable opportunity. The absurdity you introduce (infinite copyright terms being okay) doesn't follow because the commenter isn't trying to justify long copyright terms. They're shifting the focus to a different, potentially more immediately beneficial area.
As do people. Which ends up weakening copyright even further as it becomes a law everyone ignores, on the level of speeding or jaywalking. The same knock-on effects as Prohibition, we become a nation of scofflaws.
People don't know copyright law. They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
> They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
This is also why companies have slowed down on enforcing it too much: if people actually understood copyright, there would be too much pushback.
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers from normal people will be less than the current "author's lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
My answer is "a generation". There's so many ideas and behaviors that don't persist between generations that it seems as natural of a division as you could have.
The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems about right.
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I walked away with basically no new information other than some stuff will enter public domain at new years.
> In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled — look out for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
> Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
> If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
Suppose Lucy paints original portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. She makes no copies of them; there are no copies of them for her to sell.
And Lucy is just a painter. She's not a printer. She's not a publisher. Again: Lucy only paints portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. That's all that she does.
But because Lucy isn't selling copies, then the portraits become public domain and anyone is free to copy them.
Why would that ever be a thing that encourages Lucy to paint more portraits of Barbra Streisand?
At the very least a system like this might force publishers to not drop ebooks from their stores just because.
But others would point out that being able to not distribute a work is part of having the copyright. If a corporation doesn't want to sell old works because they want to encourage people to only buy new works then that's their right. The government saying that it's fair game simply because there's no legal option to purchase it is an infringement on their right to withhold the work from the public. They could even have a policy of destroying all copies of the work once it goes off sale to make sure it never enters the public domain, that's also within their rights.
Entering PD at death+70y usually means a 100+-20y duration. Does anyone respect this silly timescale? Does any fine been imposed for a forgotten old work?
Compare that with a drug's IP: total of 20 years after the molecule patent, of which 8-10y in clinical trials and only 10-12y in profitable life. But everyone respects that until the last day and it brings billions back.
A short IP time would favor the small/poor creators that could earn something during their lifetime when the work is fresh, while a long one favors companies like Disney which can protect the copyright with their group of lawyers.
Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that individual cities and states are large enough markets people can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A staggering difference from Europe.
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the impatient:
1 William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
2 Arthur Ransome – Swallows and Amazons
3 Albert Einstein
4 Nan Shepherd – The Weatherhouse
5 Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter
6 Wallace Stevens
7 Hermann Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund
8 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film)
9 Barbara Hepworth
10 Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
11 Geoffrey Dennis – The End of the World
12 Charlie Parker
13 Margaret Ayer Barnes – Years of Grace
14 Hellbound Train
15 Hannah Arendt
16 Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities
17 T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday
18 Thomas Mann
19 Agatha Christie – The Murder at the Vicarage
20 Franz Kafka – The Castle (English translation)
21 Walker Evans
22 Sigmund Freud – Civilization and Its Discontents
23 Stella Benson – The Far-Away Bride
24 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
25 E. H. Young – Miss Mole
26 P. G. Wodehouse
27 Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense
28 Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
29 Roger Mais
30 Saadat Hasan Manto
31 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Insatiability
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022. Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
That's NEAT! I live in Japan myself, and I am a passionate Japanese learner (and used to be a teacher too) of multiple decades. Besides, I'm interested in natural language processing and language related technology, and used to study second language acquisition research back in the university. If you ever take part into any tech / language events or meetups, it would be nice to hang out and hear about the development of that app.
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case. Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
I agree (and we should not need patents either), but I think it might be better to prevent you from saying that someone else wrote something if they did not write it, or to say someone else wrote it if you modified it unless you also mention that it has been modified from the original version.
I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever? Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door without reimbursing me in any way?
I don’t think copyright shouldn’t exist at all, I think the general consensus in this topic has been that the length of copyright protection is longer than is considered reasonable.
You don’t have to sell the prints if you don’t want to. But if someone else does fulfill that market demand by selling or giving away your photographs after those photographs have entered into public domain, that’s a win for all those who wished to enjoy your art. Without having to visit that particular restaurant. The length of time to get to public domain is the issue at hand.
I want you to make money on your photography. It’s a good incentive to keep doing that scope of work and more art in the world is a win for humanity. But if you haven’t been able to recuperate losses and make profit on a particular photo after 70 years, I don’t think it’s going to happen for ya.
If I understand this correctly, your assertion is that me selling you a print 14 years ago (or 28) would now give you (or anyone) permission to put that on T-shirts and sell them despite that I'm still making prints of that photograph and selling it?
Aside on this is that it disincentivizes me to display anything that I don't want to sell and think I can make money on during the copyright protected period.
I have hundreds of photographs... the idea that I'd need to pay some amount to re-register them (individually?) extend their copyright protection is likewise absurd. (Compare : do you pay to re-register the copyright on each file in an open source repository ... because each file has a different copyright on it ... or the entire collection? But what is a logical collection of photographs?)
I have photographs that have made more money in the past 5 years than they have in the 30 years prior.
Moving things to the public domain faster than the artists who created the material would likely make them less likely to produce, publish, or sell things that would enter the public domain before they could benefit from them would result in the material becoming a patronage based system or the material never being created at all.
I do not want all artwork to be locked behind a patronage system. e.g. "Here's my patreon - all members at the $20 level get a high quality digital image each week." That would be bad for art as a whole... you'd never see it at an art festival or in a gallery or a restaurant wall.
I realize this is becoming more and more popular... but I don't think it is good. Shorter copyright terms would make this even more prevalent because of the difficulties being able to make money as an artist off the material. The long tail of a photographer's library is very much a thing and part of one's livelihood. Cutting off that tail prematurely doesn't put more material into the public domain - it results in less material being created.
Your response has shifted the discussion to a different topic and doesn’t really address my original point. I was explicitly calling out situations in which an owner refuses to make their product available by any legal means and they can legally prevent anyone else from making it available if they so choose for the remainder of its copyright lifespan, which could very well terminate after I die.
As a human with limited lifespan, that sucks.
In your scenario, as an artist you are still actively selling and making money on your art. That’s great, and maybe there should be exceptions in copyright for late bloomers who found their popular stride way later in their career with their earlier art. Regardless, you’re selling it and now I can buy it, awesome. This solves my problem.
However if I saw a photo of yours, from say 35 years ago in a restaurant you did as a commission, and you don’t want to sell me that print (totally fair) but also you don’t want anyone else to sell the print to make money off your 35 year old work, then I’m kinda hosed. I’ve got no options. I just have to travel to that restaurant, hopefully still open and they kept the photo on the wall, or just use my good ole noggin to remember what it looked like.
Just feels fundamentally broken, ya know?
I’m sure you could argue “well it’s my art and I’m allowed to determine its availability.” Now we’re into morals and what’s good for humanity. I will say art is in my subjective opinion good for humanity. Keeping it locked away is bad.
I don’t recommend a binary all or nothing approach to copyright protections, I just think at a certain point it’s for the betterment of the people now, not for the individual.
I appreciate your healthy challenging to my ideals.
You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as nonsensical.
I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.
Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?
Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.
Imagine a little known work from 1920 written by an author that died in 1955 featuring a boy wizard in a magic school who's estate sues J. K. Rowling in 1998 for copyright infringement. We might never have gotten any further books.
This probably seems unlikely, but it's the flipside of exceptionally long copyrights, especially ones held by corporate interests who hire lawyers specifically to enforce copyright. The growth of AI is only going to make this more of a problem in the future. Imagine a ContentID like system but on the concepts and themes of works.
The issue is with limiting creativity in all kinds of works and areas. It would be great, if we could organize society in a way, that makes artificial limits and boundaries to information sharing unnecessary.
That is tautological. Why is limiting creativity in works and areas "the issue"? What concrete problem is happening because Mickey Mouse was under copyright until recently?
The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living.
I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to tweak and modify content they consume within their lifetime. It's a balanced time scale rather than one that exists solely to serve mega corporations giving them the capability to hold cultural icons hostage.
I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
So many ideas better than the current regime.
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
What's interesting is that this is true of all creators, not just artists.
Making money means running a business, and running a business requires more than just creating something. You also have to identify a good market for that creation, and find a way to distribute to them, and provide a viable model for them to pay for it, and (the hardest part) out-compete all the other businesses who are doing the same.
This is true for cooks. It's not good enough to create a meal. You have to also scope out the local market, find a good location, build a restaurant or a stand, attract customers, and sell your meals. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept cooking for free, or going to work for a restaurant who's going to do all those hard parts and take the bulk of the profits.
This is true for computer programmers. It's not good enough to write a program. You also have to build a business, find customers, attract them through ads or marketing or viral growth, collect credit carts, and sell your product. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept coding things that make no money, or go to work for corporation or startup who will pay you a salary while collecting bigger profits.
Etc.
For some reason artists are the only group that makes a big stink about this situation, and feels that they should get the benefits of running a business without doing the work or taking the risk of running a business.
Artists are not the only ones who make a stink about this; it's inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Everyone involved in a venture is risking something, but the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture. Other kinds of risk are solely rewarded with monetary wages at sub-profit margins. That's why labor unions exist, and why the nation's elites work tirelessly to stop them.
But with artists, there's a particular extra wrinkle, in that the law created a middle tier of reward specifically for the efforts of creative workers. Copyright was specifically intended to allow authors to have their own business ventures without necessarily having to share in the same risks that equity owners do. So, naturally, those equity owners all colluded with one another to steal this other form of equity and wear it as a second shell.
> the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture
I would argue that it's not solely the law rewarding that kind of risk, it's the market. There is no law that says that only equity owners can enjoy massive profits. Some employees get paid 7 figures, 8 figures, or more, even without equity.
Generally speaking, the rewards go to the hardest parts, the riskiest parts, the parts with the least supply and the most demand.
You are taking far more risk by being a business creator and blazing a new trail, than you are by studying a fixed set of knowledge and techniques to train to become a Front End Software Engineer or some other kind of well-defined high-demand pre-defined role. And the evidence for this is the fact that there are millions of people who've shaped themselves into that safer mould, and very few who have done the former.
And this doesn't just apply to owners vs employees, it applies within each group, too. There are far more restauranteurs than search engine founders, as the former is simply a less risk and less competitive endeavor. (Competing with your local market vs competing with the world.) And artists who create unique works tend to earn a lot more than copycats. Artists who master rare skills tend to earn a lot more than people generating stuff off Midjourney. Etc. Risk tends to go hand-in-hand with reward.
Of course there are exceptions, e.g. rent-seeking, sabotage, monopoly, collusion, etc. that can earn you a lot without you providing a lot of value or taking a lot of risk. And a huge role of the law is to make as much of this illegal as possible, to force people into more value-creating activities by process of elimination.
People who end up leading successful companies are often able to do so not because they’re more willing to take risks than others, but rather because they have experienced more good luck than others. Take Bill Gates, for example. His parents sent him to an exclusive private school, which afforded him regular access to computers from an early age, giving him valuable experience that most others his age could not access, through no fault of their own. Microsoft was able to make a crucial business deal with IBM because Gates’ mother knew the CEO. Someone else with equal skill and appetite for risk would have found it much more difficult to be as successful as Gates was, because their parents were likely not rich and not connected to the right people.
Luck is always going to play a role. No one has ever said that life is fair, and no system is based on life being fair. One of the many reasons that progressive taxation is justified.
I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.
The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.
The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.
If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.
And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.
Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.
An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.
> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
This still seems very reasonable to me.
Keep in mind that under such a system, corporations would have a financial incentive to wait just a bit longer to do an adaptation
> Keep in mind that under such a system, corporations would have a financial incentive to wait just a bit longer to do an adaptation
Meanwhile they are currently buying up IP and locking it up for decades in such a way that no one can build on it.
Sherlock Holmes, who was created in the 1800s, only became public domain (but not all of it) a few years ago:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/27/sherlock-holme...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2025/01/how-sherlo...
BigCorps could do a lot of things under a new regime, but they are already doing shitty things. I'd rather deal with the current problems and then see if/what kind of new issues crop up, and then course-correct then.
GRRM is already beating them at that game by publishing a new book in the series every couple decades. That might become a common tactic in such a copyright environment
I find it strange how people are so invested in spiting $BigCorpThatMightDoBadThing that they're willing to harm the public at large as well.
So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.
> Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985
It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.
Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.
A person who wants to coast off the success of a single creation for eternity and not feel compelled to make future creations is not an artist.
They are a capitalist.
Artists create, despite the destitution, because they want to create and feel strongly compelled to create. Art is about that compulsion.
An artist wants enough money to pay rent/mortgage, raise a family, have a hobby, not be in debt, etc. But when Daniel Hardcastle received 0 pounds from his book because the publisher was a scammy cunt, he doesn't stop writing because there's no money in it, he continues to write despite the lack of profit. Because that's what he feels compelled to do.
When youtube made it impossible for animators to make money on Youtube, Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) started paying people to make animations out of his content, including people who started out doing it entirely without their permission. When many channels make pure profit from creating clip shows or compilations of their content, instead of throwing lawyers or the Youtube machine at those people, he paid someone to make official versions.
Compare how those two jackwads acted (the fine brothers), trying to trademark the concept of a "reaction video", to all the different channels and groups that do "Power Hour" or variety content like Good Mythical Morning. They even joke about how they are all stealing from each other. They know that their audience is looking for their unique output, not a specific format, and that protecting such a format would be a waste for everyone.
Because a real artist does not say "How dare you make better product with my formula", a real artist says "Aww man they used my formula to make something great, I should figure out how to make something great and up my game".
The sin in artistry is someone taking your style or content and shamelessly stealing it because it's a profitable business, rather than riffing on it or iterating on it.
Weird Al generally gets permission to do his work despite the law being clear that he does not have to because artistry is about respect and effort and collaboration.
More importantly for copyright law, despite no legal protection for a "Power hour" format, many groups are able to profit off it simultaneously, because art is not some winner takes all market. Copyright is not about enabling you to profit off of a work indefinitely, copyright is about ensuring that Greedy McBusinessman cannot take your book and sell it for cheaper because he doesn't have to pay your rent and does that for a hundred other artists. It's about who owns the Rights to Copy a work.
If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
Or you can't because 57 new sequels were published the week before.
Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have completely killed famous book series? Me neither.
No, but I think it might happen if copyright lapsed in 14 years.
Presumably people would consider a Song of Ice and Fire sequel by GRRM to be "official" and everything else "fanfiction", even if the fanfiction manages to appear in bookstores
But it would only lapse after 28, assuming the author is still interested in pursuing it. 28 years is plenty, IMO.
*28 years, unless you were not invested enough in your work to bother renewing it.
What fan fiction?
Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/ Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived.
So where can a mainstream consumer purchase or borrow a paperback edition of those stories?
I mean https://www.printingcenterusa.com/printing/book-printing
Someone who buys books at Barnes & Noble is not going to print online fan fiction on demand. If you think this is something a “mainstream consumer” would do, I think you’re very out of touch with the average person.
Isn’t reading stuff on the internet more mainstream than buying things at Barnes and Noble? Not necessarily those specific things, but the notion that something needs to be physically available at a bookstore to be relevant is at best dated.
If you spend a lot of time online, it would certainly seem that way.
Or spend a lot of time with certain demographics. My parents don't know what ao3 is, but a couple of female coworkers are huge fans
Edit: according to [1] 93% of users are 44 or younger, and women outnumber men 10:1
[1] https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3/
I think you should also assume it's called "Archive of our own" because of the same sense that Woolf had in "A Room of one's own". This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed.
So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming that they can thrive in a shared space and then discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason, they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by employers despite having the same skills as successful male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to have a place of your own.
That's an interesting perspective, I hadn't considered that the name might be a reference to A Room of One's Own.
My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the community, which means everyone migrates to the next site which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3 run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of them
This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.
A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.
50 Shades is decidedly not a fanfic for the exact reason that it couldn't be sold as one.
Quoting Wikipedia:
“The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by [E. L.] James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’.”
Exactly so. It was not able to be published in its initial state as a Twilight fanfic due to copyright and had to be re-worked so as not to infringe.
exactly.
Because copyright lasts longer than 14 years.
as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.
How do the sequels affect this? I read this once more in the same discussion so I am curious.
Let's assume the 1st book goes public. I should be able to use those characters and their known relationship in any which way, no? What's wrong with that, copyright wise?
For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not from the original author.
I mean, that sounds like a win from the point of view of copyright.
The whole purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of new works after all. In GRRM's case, the more successful his works became, the less he wrote which is kind of the opposite of what copyright was intended to do.
>IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never the intent.
Similar to the Patriot act.
14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer than a patent lasts for.
Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)
> Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
Well, independently coming up with the same solution to a given problem is a lot more likely than independently writing the same novel. Personally, the chilling of independent invention is the thing I find most obnoxious about patents.
I might independently invent a cartoon character of a black mouse with a tan face that wears white gloves and red bibs and wish to publish a comic book featuring that character on the cover, but I'll never be able to do that -- no matter how long I wait: We have trademark law in the way.
Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they never automatically time out as a mere function of the calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse, they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney Company.
The addition of copyright makes it all a double-whammy. Trademarks can already last as long as time itself; copyright doesn't also have to be that way at all.
14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose, if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well, and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.
(Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of those is timing out soon and I really should check on it.)
Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).
It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy
IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity
Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
> The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
The author’s book got popular based on the efforts of others based on the author’s book.
That's true of course, but the book series wouldn't have become a cultural phenomenon that makes billions.
Unlike, for probably the only example, Harry Potter, which was already a cultural phenomenon when the first film was announced.
Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and generates cash.
What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.
Nah it was popular among people who read books long before the tv show.
I read it too before the series came out, but it wasn't the same level of popularity.
> The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
LMAO the serie would not even exists if not of his books
I'm not saying it would. Sorry to spoil the laughter.
14+14 seems to cover these two scenarios? Lifetime+whatever is far too on the other end of this seesaw.
"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.
Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.
I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?
The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.
14 years is already too long.
Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid. Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.
IP is just the umbrella term for copyright/design/trademark/patent, isn't it?
It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.
My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to defend — even if you agree with copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella term as it muddies the waters.
Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
Not really - you have IP lawyers who might do all of it.
It is good for those lawyers, sure.
You can also have people who do both plumbing and electrical work or electrical work and home Ethernet wiring...
> IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid.
Your opinion does not make that fact.
The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not talking about physical things. They're made up rules about made up things. It can all be different if we agree to make it so.
IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.
I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?
Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should say and do.
Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.
Property isn’t real either.
It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.
I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...
Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.
finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.
I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
A reasonable copyright term makes abandonware not a thing
If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.
Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.
>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.
This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.
Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.
I was about to respond to your comment yesterday about closed protocols but this is a better article!
> A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work. > This is the entire point of copyright.
Not only is the entire point, it is the thing that matters most when discussing "piracy" productively. Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media. "Consuming" intellectual property can never be piracy by definition because you are not providing anything.
If Netflix screws up their licensing agreements and provides too many seasons of a show and people watch it no one would be considered "pirates". Netflix is simply in violation of a licensing agreement. If they had no agreement whatsoever then they are directly infringing on the "IP holders exclusive right to control the distribution and sale".
>Putting aside "you wouldn't download a car" jokes side, infringement on that exclusive right is only possible by distributing the media.
I don't know if I go that far, since copyright is literally about the right of exclusive control over copies, and piracy is making a copy without authorization.
However, the advent of computers limited the "literalness" of that interpretation, and my understanding is that even without such consideration, many countries do not consider copying for personal use to be a breach of law. I am not in violation of copyright when copying a program from my hard drive to ram, and I think that would be true even if the proper owner of the copyright insisted otherwise.
> This is the entire point of copyright.
That was never the point.
Copyright was invented with the printing press. What was happening was that authors couldn't get compensated, because everyone with a printing press was re-printing their works. It never gave the author control over where their books were ultimately sold; just who could copy it.
Related: This is why the Bible became so popular and well-known. Printers could re-print the Bible because it wasn't protected by copyright.
Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.
A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.
But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.
Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
>Who do you pay? How do you pay them?
Create a non-government copyright collective[0] that manage copyright unrelated to music (musicians already have their).
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective
That's somewhat hilarious.
Last time I looked into trying to get pricing from ASCAP and BMI so I could legally stream some music for a small number of people, I found the following to be true:
1. There is no public pricing. (Why? Because fuck you, that's why!)
2. If I insisted, then the simplest way to get a price is to stream whatever I want and wait for a nasty letter from one or more lawyers that will most assuredly tell me how much I owe.
3. The only safe way to proceed is not to play the game at all.
That's gonna be a "no" on the cartels for me, boss. We might as well just throw all of the money and all of the copyrighted stuff into the memory hole for all the good they do.
See if the scheme that BMG / Columbia house still works. (Apparently they would send a check to the rightsholder, and if they cashed it, it was considered payment.)
(But don't quote me, I'm not an expert.)
That's a good question. IMO:
1: The formula dictates what you pay.
2: The money goes into a government-controlled escrow account.
At that point, the rights holder has a reasonable amount of time (years) to claim the money. Otherwise, if the rightsholder doesn't come forward, the money is forfeited.
(What happens to the money at that point? I think this is a great thing for people to argue about while the rest of us get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
(Likewise, what happens if the money gets refunded to someone impersonating the rights holder? That's also a wonderful thing to let people argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need.)
Those are great answers.
I'd like to propose the following additions to help tie it all together:
Copyright must be registered. Registration requires sending a digital copy to some officious government body, such as the Library of Congress, for preservation. (It used to be ~about this way; it can be this way again. Disk is cheap. Git and email both exist. It can be figured out.)
This registration will be open and publicly-available to query (online, of course, but also by phone, and mail, and just by walking in the front door and asking), so the question of "Who to pay" is always easily answered.
All forfeited money from licensing goes to help pay for the preservation of the collected works, and for the ongoing expense of providing the registration database. It won't be nearly enough to cover those expenses, and that's fine: This means that the balance always has a place to land.
Copyright should not span generations. It should still time out completely, and do so after a period that is shorter than a normal human lifespan.
If a person saw a film when they were 5 that they really enjoyed, and if they manage to live long enough, then they should eventually be able to walk into the Library of Congress, give them some money, and walk out with a physical copy of it, and be able to freely upload that copy of it to YouCloud for their great, great grandchildren (and indeed, the world) to see, and be able to do all of this without becoming a criminal.
(How much money? Something in the realm of 15 Big Macs worth of dollars sounds about right.)
> Copyright must be registered.
https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention This would require the country to back out of the Berne Convention and TRIPS (and by implication the WTO). Protection of copyright is automatic and does not require registration.Just because I haven't sent the latest batch of photographs to the Library of Congress for registration (so I can collect punitive damages rather than just compensatory damages) doesn't mean that the images that I have created are not copyrighted and protected.
I'm aware of the Berne Convention. It can be vacated. Sweeping changes have sweeping effects.
I can't conceive of a way for any of this hypothetical copyright system to work (ie, to not fall completely apart) without requiring registration.
You know the UK and EU already operate such schemes for Orphan Works?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-over...
All without registration...
How would this impact open source? Would I be required to register every repository that I have on GitHub?
Would anyone be able to license that repository for $(legislated amount) and make it into a closed source product?
Which government? Who controls the account?
How do I claim it?
How does this work across national boundaries? (e.g. how does someone in Wakanda license a work created by someone in the US? How does someone in the US license a work created by someone in Wakanda?)
What happens if the government refuses to pay me (or return the money to me after the period of time has elapsed)?
What happens if the government refuses to acknowledge the escrow and uses the money themselves?
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I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments and their handling of money, record keeping, and not using financial tools to penalize individuals and countries.
> I would contend that this suggestion puts too much faith in governments
Copyright only works if you have faith in your government to create and enforce laws.
Otherwise, if you don't have faith in your government, you have bigger problems than a poor system of copyright.
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Anyway, all of your points are wonderful things to argue about while we get the kind of copyright reform we need. When we argue about details like this, we can assume that compulsory licensing is a good concept overall.
Which government do I need to have faith in for enforcing the copyright for a citizen of Wakanda who is infringing upon my work?
The floor of copyright reform is set by TRIPS and the WTO. That's 50 years. If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that. Setting an floor that expires sooner is likely a non-starter given concerns about things getting slurped up into AI models.
Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
Much of the suggestions of copyright reform would involve the relevant country to leave the WTO and withdraw from the TRIPS agreement. That is unlikely to happen.
Resetting copyright to the floor dictated by TRIPS would be a possibility that a country could entertain.
> If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that.
This is less of a tough sell than you think. In pretty much every IP-related trade negotiation, you can divide the world into two categories:
* Ultra-rich countries that want to push through every insane IP idea they have (life+50, DMCA 1201, etc) onto as many other countries as possible
* Everyone else
Notably, the ultra rich are all "dealmaker countries". They're the ones dictating the terms of international trade to everyone else and whatever terms they insist upon will be accepted without question. So yeah, if, say, South Africa or India want shorter terms, they still have to respect America's terms, at least up to life+50. But if the US wants shorter terms out of India, they will get shorter terms out of India, come hell or high water.
Conversely, Mexico has life+100 terms, but nobody is trying to use them to ratchet up terms elsewhere. They're a deal taker.
The real question is if another ultra-rich country will stop one that tries to lower the Berne minimum. Keep in mind that the ultra-rich subdivide into groups that, in order of relative IP insanity, are: Europe, Japan, and then the US in the crazy slot. If the US were to, say, repeal DMCA 1201; Europe would cheer and Japan would grumble.
Actually, the Berne convention happened during a time when Europe was the copyright basketcase and America was in the "everyone else" category[0]. The US had 28+14 terms up until 1976, and we didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988 - almost a hundred years late[1]! So if the US were to drop the Berne floor, you could totally imagine the EU going insane and trying to trade war the US out of it. But at the same time, the EU isn't very good at fighting trade wars with other ultra-rich blocs. Or at the very least, they fold very easily.
[0] For exactly the same reason why China is today. China is in the same position America was a century ago, where it had a huge manufacturing base and basically no cares about copyright.
[1] In particular, the US really, really hated automatic registration. While it is true that you don't have to register copyright and users of creative works have to treat everything as copyrighted; creators still have to register anyway if they want to actually enforce their rights. And if they don't do it right away they don't get statutory damages, which are almost always the only damages that matter. So you get all the problems of automatic registration with all the problems of copyright formalities.
The US couldn't drop to the Berne floor... because it is a member of the WTO and restricted by TRIPS which has a floor of 50 years.
Going to anything less than 50 years would entail leaving the WTO and backing out of TRIPS. That in turn would be disastrous to the companies that work with information (music, movies, microcode (software), and ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶i̶z̶z̶a̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶i̶v̶e̶r̶y̶).
Want to do away with registration for punitive damages? Absolutely. On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
The only three blocs at the WTO who would meaningfully oppose renegotiating TRIPS to lower the copyright floor are the US, EU, and Japan. If all three of them say "let's lower the floor", it's getting lowered. The fact that they cannot unilaterally do this does not mean their hands are tied, especially not when they are the ones tying other people's hands.
> On the other hand, want to make it so that anyone can wholesale copy my photographs and sell them for pennies after a few years? No.
The Berne floor is way longer than "a few years".
> Mandatory licensing is a "no". I should not be required to license my material to anyone. I do not want my works of photography, fiction, or software development to be mandatorily licensed to someone who could then take it and make derivative works that I don't want them to. Consider how many people object to their CC work being included in AI models.
You just made the argument for mandatory licensing.
Why?
Piracy is about to become a lot harder to prosecute. (See the news coverage of the Cox case in the Supreme Court.) All those usages of your work that you object to (which many people consider fair use), are about to become much harder to prosecute.
Thus, shortening the period of exclusive control and introducing a period of mandatory licensing allows you to get paid in situations where it is extremely hard to prosecute for copyright infringement.
Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Because once you make information available to the general public, you have no way to control what the general public does with that information. (This is the reason why DRM failed.)
(In general, my proposal is more in context with things like movies, TV shows, music; situations where in the past anyone could make a DVD/CD player that could play any DVD/CD, anyone could sell any DVD/CD by buying into the patent pool. No one could sell a DVD/CD that could only play in a specific model, and a CD/DVD player maker didn't have to negotiate with every studio. So my licensing model isn't quite the same situation that you're talking about.)
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In this case, the problem is that fair use is eroded. The questions are:
> Why should I be required to license my (non-stock) photographs hanging in a gallery to someone who wants to make placemats of those images?
1: Once you make information available to the general public, how long do you retain exclusive control of that information? At what point is the general public's fair use eroded?
> Why should I be required to accept the finances in licensing terms as someone who is posting neat photographs and looking to make some beer money? vs someone who is a well known photographer and selling prints for a couple hundred dollars at art fairs? vs someone who is world famous and sells prints for tens of thousands of dollars?
2: That's really the formula. It's a wonderful thing to argue about. Again, though, it's about making sure that fair use is preserved.
> Can I even make/guarntee limited edition photographs anymore?
3: (Please also see answer 1) Why do people still flock to the Lourve (sp?) to see the Mona Lisa? That being said, copyright isn't intended to support artificial scarcity, and I think breaking down artificial scarcity makes popular items more valuable. (IE, the knockoff prints, that you collect royalties from, make the limited "artist made prints" more valuable.)
> Why do I have to sell a license to you? Why do I not have the same rights as a company making a product and being able to refuse to accept a client?
Fair use. (Sorry, running out of time, see my example about the DC/DVD market. Also, radio stations used to be able to play any song and follow a formula to pay the right holder. The artists couldn't refuse a station from playing their song.)
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> Why should a photograph of a model (I have a model release) that I took be something I am required to license to someone who wants to use it in a way that is defamatory to the model?
This isn't a copyright / fair use issue
The same copyright laws apply to all things that are copyrightable regardless of medium. Anything that can be put into a fixed medium, be it print, digital recording, film.
Such a proposal needs to take into consideration everything that is copyrightable rather than just literature or film productions... but also software and photographs.
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50 years after publication date. If you want to license it before then for some other purpose, that's something that depends on your use of it and what I'm willing to accept.
If you have a formula, put it on the table. How much should it cost for me to commercially license some open source software?
How much should it cost you to license my photographs for fine art replicas? for placemats?
My contention is that any price that is legislated is wrong for the majority of the use cases. Any attempt to make it right gets into absurd nuance.
It is the same copyright laws that frustrate people for getting literature or movies into the public domain that also protects open source.
The alternative to copyright isn't "everything is free" but rather "everything is locked up."
The GPL was created because Stallman wanted to be able to modify printers. Getting rid of copyright (or making it very short duration) wouldn't have changed his experience with printers. What it would have changed would have been that that the GPL would lose all its teeth to compel people make their software licensed the same (under copyright law!).
People are upset about content they created two decades ago being incorporated into an AI model ( https://www.deviantart.com/shagie/art/Moonrise-over-San-Fran... )... without copyright I would have no right to complain about this.
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However, all of this is pretty much moot and performative. If you want to change it to something shorter than 50 years - get the WTO to renegotiate TRIPS.
That ain't happening.
Spending effort to say "this is how it should be..." go write a story and release it to the public domain about that utopia of copyright freedom.
Speaking for myself, if I lost the rights provided by copyright to my photographs after a decade and half or so - I would not have posted them.
I do not want art locked up behind patronage and restricted to those few... though if that was the only alternative to being able to make some money off my photographs, then that's what I would have done.
Let me oversimplify
Current system: exclusive control for a period of time, then public domain.
My proposal: exclusive control for a period of time, then compulsory licensing (for fair use), then public domain.
Makes sense?
The point of compulsory licensing is to preserve fair use.
You're getting far too defensive, and are missing the point that I'm making about fair use.
Then perhaps let me explain what I mean by fair use:
For example, I'd like to write an ebook reader that can give me an AI summary of the last chapter that I read, or give me a quick AI based summary of who a character is on the page that I'm reading.
Fair use means that I don't need to negotiate with every publisher and every author, or negotiate with Kindle to be able to access their content.
This is why we need compulsory licensing; it makes a middle ground between the exclusive control that you have when you create something, and the eventual entry into public domain.
Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.
It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.
But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).
And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.
I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
Right; so according to your own assessment, for the "14+14 no extensions" thing , you're always going to have have "a minority of opinionated geeks" on one side, and "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests willing to fight tooth and nail for a gold mine" on the other side. You're never going to win that one.
Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one.
IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
Can you write down your actual analysis of the disposition of political capital, factions, interest groups, etc.?
People aren’t just going to take your word that A outweighs B modulo C, or that B outweighs A modulo C. There needs to be some credible substance.
Sorry, did I accidentally wander into a political action group working meeting, and you're mistaking me for the chairperson or something? If you have actual money and people working on this, don't take your cues form some rando on the internet!
I thought this was a site where we talk about ideas and see what people's perspectives are. @basilikum asked why on earth @mchusma would advocate "pay to extend" instead of "14+14 no extensions". I gave my own personal take. I'd be totally happy to be wrong about the political viability of "14+14 no extensions". If you have actual data, or even just a different take on the situation, I'm all ears.
So then "You're never going to win that one.” was just a random guess?
Why pretend if there’s no substance at all backing it up?
Again, you seem to misunderstand what this kind of forum is about. I gave my layperson's judgement and my reasons. If you don't agree with them, the thing to do is to point out where you think things are wrong, or add in your own take. That's what will lead to an interesting discussion where we learn from each other.
And this opinion is also based on your… random guesses?
You can probably see the problem then. How do I know if your random guesses have any meaning at all, couldn’t they just be gibberish?
> So many ideas better than the current regime.
Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.
The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.
Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?
Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.
Why No ip is created in a vacuum. It’s built on the ideas and concepts that came before it. It’s built on the shared open culture that we all own.
Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.
Nobody who uses the word “copywritten” can be taken seriously.
Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act
>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer
The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.
That's the point.
The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.
Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.
Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.
Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.
A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.
The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.
Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.
So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.
Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.
The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings.
The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
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> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.
> I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Having children (and even grandchildren) coast on work that was created decades ago is ludicrous IMHO. If you can't profit off your work after 14+14 years (as per above) then I'm not sure what you're doing, but it's not (economically) beneficial to society.
> If I'm an (e.g.) accountant, my work does not generate income for my offspring after I pass.
Because an accountant’s work is timely and transactional. Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.
As a contrasting example: pretty much all other income generating assets can be passed down.
Copyright is a compromise between society and authors, and I think that’s the right way to frame things.
(Also some countries have this same compromise for assets such as land, where land “ownership” is subject to time limits)
> Creative works may have lasting value for multiple customers.
Which is why the artist may deserve royalties over a number of years: they did the work (a possible multi-year investment of time/effort can deserve a multi-year payback period). It does not explain why their (grand)children, who may not have even been born when the work was done, deserve royalties.
The Hobbit was published in 1937, and the final volume of LotR in 1955: does Simon Tolkien (b. 1959) deserve royalties?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Tolkien
I didn't say anyone deserved anything -- I'm just saying that as a society we do have other (potentially) income generating assets that do pass down to heirs who didn't "do anything to deserve them".
e.g. Some cultures think it is normal that someone can own thousands of acres of wilderness land that they've never even seen just because a distant relative hundreds of years ago had a piece of paper that says they own it. Other cultures believe the earth is a collective resource that is merely used by humans for their lifetime.
> They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
Copyright is a practical compromise between society and them; their interests are not absolute.
> their interests are not absolute
The question of interests is a cultural debate, and also not an absolute either direction. In one culture the interests of the author could be held as an absolute; in another culture the exact opposite could be held as the value: no copyrights at all.
That's up to the society to debate. We see considerable cultural variance across the globe on the matter.
Isn't the question whether it's reasonable for people to be rentiers? Clearly lots of the population are, but wouldn't it be better if they carried on creating rather than sitting back and doing nothing for the remainder of their place on earth?
I speak only regarding the view expressed in the U.S. Constitution[0]. Other cultures may view it differently, but in my opinion, the US is where copyright is most out of control (save for a few other nations, such as Japan).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
> The question of interests is a cultural debate
Not at all, that question has quite real and far reaching economic and political consequences, it's not about endless debating, it's about proper and timely deciding, precisely in the framework of economics and politics within the Constitution.
Which constitution would that be, again?
When asked "do you want more or less income?", most people, including me, will answer "more".
That doesn't mean it's always the right decision.
Of course they do, their bias is to keep all the cards in their favor. Our (the consumer's) bias is to shorten copyright.
Remember, ultimately it is the consumer who pays the creator; thus the consumer has a vested interest in negotiating how long copyright should last.
Which is absurd, because most creators would benefit hugely from an expanded public domain.
I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.
> Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
I would suggest that artists who say they're producing fully original works are just poorly educated in art history. Making something that has no prior influences would be extraordinary in the modern world.
Also, the entities most capable of exploiting long copyright terms are corporations. Individuals simply don't have the resources to keep something relevant decade after decade save for a very small handful of exceptions like J.R.R. Tolkien.
I'm not even really advocating for or against the copyright position.
I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause you study lots of works and create an original creation which borrows influences isn't the same thing as requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.
It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have no influences cause I classified works without any copyrighted material as original.
My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted work becomes available does not necessarily imply creators and artists lives will be substantially different or better off.
maybe 'creator' in the youtuber sense
But most creative people I know aren't really that interested in trying to co-opt someone else's work
Oh really? You don't think all the creators who do things like make video essays on 20 year old movies would benefit from not getting the rug pulled out from under them? You don't think they would prefer being legally in the right making money from analysis of media that was a generation ago?
You don't think the Techmoans and Technology connections would prefer having better demonstration material than whatever recordings from 1912 exist, so that they could actually show you what they are trying to demonstrate without having their livelihood threatened by a capricious and byzantine system hell bent on pleasing a few megacorps?
You don't think the creatives who made "The Katering show" for example would prefer that more people watch their artistic output than have it locked behind some business leaving it languishing in a random digital storefront rather than letting more people buy it because they just cannot be assed? Oh, you don't actually have to guess, because they uploaded a youtube video where they encourage people to pirate their work so they can see it.
Creatives and artists tend to enjoy their work being consumed and riffed on (not plagiarized) and well adjusted artists recognize that there's "nothing new under the sun" and that remixing and riffing are essential parts of the creative and artistic process.
Hell, the music industry even understands this, which is why letting songs get licensed out for remixes and future use is common.
What "Creative" people do you know?
However, ultimately, few people really are holding any cards. Most will have to compromise a great deal, to be able to generate income and benefit from existing publishing infrastructure.
Sounds a bit unlikely, that most of them will make a living with stuff older than 14 or 28 years, their legacy creations. Sounds more like they are chasing a dream, which most likely will not be achieved by most of them.
Mmmm..
I don’t know man?
I actually don’t mind 14+14 for corps. Because corps could conceivably never “die”. (In fact, I wouldn’t even be too opposed to getting rid of the +14 part).
But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs. And I’m a guy who’s not a creative.
I just think if you come up with a painting, or story, or video game, why should a big corporate be able to swoop in and just copy it while you’re alive without paying you?
The copyright should lapse after a reasonable amount of time following your death. But while you’re alive, what you made should be yours.
> But for individual people who make things, I think if they’re alive, it should be theirs.
But it is theirs... well, until they sell it. We aren't talking about the things they make but about copies of them. I can't believe there are people who still don't understand the difference.
The copies aren't theirs to begin with, copyright isn't natural property and it's not a natural right, that much is set in stone. Don't be confused by the ridiculous name "Intellectual Property".
I'm not saying the legal right called copyright should not exist but it should be paired back to the terms it was originally limited to, there are good reasons for those limits.
Corporations can't create copyrighted works, only people can. The date of copyright expires is based on when the actual humans authors die.
Maybe, but their economic role might be more like an angel investor or VC— fund a hundred failed efforts and hang on for dear life to the few runaway successes.
The sweet spot would have been an initial term of 14years or something like that, and generous duration thereafter, limited to works that are registered and re-registered on a regular basis.
Yeah, this sounds very similar to people who vote as if they're temporarily embarrassed billionaires. "There's a minuscule chance my work will become super lucrative for decades, so I want a super long copyright" when they don't realize that a much shorter copyright can help them creatively in the near term.
Lot's of people are short sighted, like children who would consume candy every day if their parents didn't tell them no. Current copyright laws allowed Disney to essentially buy up all of popular culture. This has not been a good thing for the world.
Its a shame that people who supposedly work "in the arts" can be so blind to the world.
> they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years
Copyright is meant to reward innovators while it's still an innovation, and reward society once it has been fully inculcated.Would the original creator prefer to rest on his laurels and collect checks instead? yep.
Would all the hundreds of people out there wanting to innovate on that copyrighted idea also like to make a buck? yep.
It's all a balance of competing interests.
Well. It's supposed to be.
Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting creative works, which are, by their nature, much much easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to copy, that I can sell exceptions to.
Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.
IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your rights to, including the production of derivative works and the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or something significantly different). For the next 2 decades after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-all.
You're right on the innovation speech, mea culpa.
You surprise me with a proposal for shorter copyright terms. Interesting!
For fun, here's an interesting discussion countering my own earlier statements - Once a work is in the public domain, it seems there's very little to do with an idea except drag it through the mud. Audacity is what drives commerce i suppose. For example as soon as Mickey Mouse entered public domain all the news could talk about was horror films and "adult" films capitalizing on the "what're you gonna do about it" of the moment.
Similarly when Peter Pan entered the public domain there was a short glut of "now he's a nightmare / villain" representations before becoming irrelevant again.
Imagine creating something like Sesame Street or Mr Roger Neighborhood then a mere 30 years later everyone has more fun making "Mr Grouch Goes On A Murder Rampage" bloodbath and "Mr Rogers + Freddie Kruger Teamup" art / film / trite youtube videos.
It'd be pretty soul crushing.
"Tragedy of the commons", as it were.
With this in mind, perhaps... your idea could deal with that via tiered pricing of "official / approved / canon" works are charged the standard fee whilst "unofficial / unapproved" works tithe a larger proportion of the proceeds to the original author...
The biggest annoyance here is the discussion always focuses on protecting individual creators whilst the laws and benefits seem to go to large corporations. e.g. Disney would have no problem using Peter Pan without consequence, while the rest of us wouldn't dare use Steamboat Willie.
Of course they are happy with that, they are not the ones affected by the problem and even benefit financially from it.
Of course they are. If I could arrange for someone to hand me money over the course of my entire life for work I did 25 years ago, I'd absolutely take that deal.
... it may not be in society's best interest to offer it to me though.
(Honestly, the better deal would be for society to hand all of us money from a giant taxation pool monthly and, freed up from the need to put so many hours into working to eat, we could do a lot more writing, performing, and general making-of-art and fundamental-no-capitalist-benefit scientific exploration).
Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture is a great read in this space. It discusses all the societal issues with long copyright terms. Mostly, long copyright terms are driven by Mickey Mouse. Every time Mickey is near going into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress for an extension. This has an impact on culture in that culture is a mashup of all the things that have gone before. Disney, for instance, made a fortune making animated movies based on stories that were existing fairy tales and legends and therefore out of copyright. Now, Disney wants to prevent others from doing the same with its characters. Yes, we want creators compensated. But we can do that without letting copyright policy be driven by the special interests of a global mega corporation like Disney.
It's understandable that disney wants to hold Mickey as their symbol, I do not blame them for it, but, ironically as a child, I did not know Mickey Mouse, and I bet even fewer children know who Mickey Mouse is now.
I don’t blame Disney for having a copyright or for trying to protect it at some level. Again, we want creators to be compensated. But where does it end with Mickey? Does he ever become public domain?
Well his origin "Steam Boat Willie" became public domain last year.
The film is in the public domain and the original versions of Mickey and Minnie are public domain. But that does NOT apply to the later versions of Mickey that you'd find Disney pushing today (e.g., at parks, on apparel, etc.). Further, Disney has been trying to continue to assert copyright even over the original version of the character. See here for more info: https://www.cullenllp.com/blog/steamboat-willie-in-the-publi...
The irony of sticking your finger in the dyke with a racial slur long forgotten.
This is largely a moot point unless the US wants to withdraw from TRIPS (and implicitly the WTO) and join the list of countries that don't observe it such as... Eritrea, Kiribati, North Korea, South Sudan, and Turkmenistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
> Copyright terms must extend at least 50 years, unless based on the life of the author. (Art. 12 and 14)
> Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations, as specified in the Berne Convention. (Art. 9)
---
14+14 itself isn't a bad idea, however it also implies that all of the other countries in the WTO agree to it.
Given concerns about companies based in the US being carless with copyright, that might be a hard sell.
Perhaps Trumpian madness will do something good for once.
Under the 14+14 law, even if an author chose to renew the copyright, most people could remix games (that had gone into the public domain) that were released when they were in their teens, with their kids (if they had any), which sounds amazing - I'd love to do that with my kids, or hit up my parents and find a game from their childhood and mess around with it.
Being able to riff on something in the public domain that was only made 28 years ago is categorically different than something made 70-120 years ago. I think the impact to the commons would be huge.
I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.
Give 14 years free.
Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.
Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
Citizens united maybe? when corporations have liability they’re a group and no one is responsible. when they want to assert rights and make $ “they’re an individual” it’s complete corruption
Especially now in a world where creating and publicizing abstract ideas is easier than ever, anything we're worried about people losing in duration they can make up for in volume.
And given that the actual purpose of copyright (in the US at least) is promoting the sciences and "useful" arts, making people a little "hungrier" by loosening the protection seems to be the way society should tilt.
And if you think that OpenAI, Anthropic and others have all hijacked it to train their models, it's kind of crazy that these are only limitations applied to private persons or small companies, but don't touch big corps at all.
This whole thing pisses me off so much. I would be fine with an absolute anarchy in which copyright and patents no longer exist but these same dickheads have been terrorizing the entire planet with lawsuits and DRM for downloading Metallica CDs for the last 30 years and even now they don't actually want to reform the copyright system, just grant themselves a special exception because everything is supposed to unconditionally work in their favor regardless of circumstances.
We've endlessly talked about it here on HN and I think most people agree. I'm in favor of charging the copyright holder and increasing amount (doubles every 5 years or so), which eventually forces them to give up paying for so many different copyrighted works, and also if the work is insanely old, they would cost way above ROI.
Alternatively sell "Subscription Copyright" licenses that renew every 10 years at 10 million dollars, that's per story, so Disney would have to renew for all of their movies, every 10 years. Could probably put that revenue to better use somewhere else anyway.
Even simpler is you have to register within a year to get a copyright on a work and renew each year with an exponentially increasing fee.
Ie If you want to hold the copyright to a movie for 40 years you’re welcome to pay 2 billion dollars.
>Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
Why?
We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.
Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.
Classics absolutely matter and we should read more of them, but relying only on public domain works ignores how cultural participation is driven by shared contemporary moments. The ever-changing stream of new content is critical for our social experience.
It's also it's necessary that we have culture that is recognisable in our own lives. Pride and Prejudice is a great book, but it's arguably more alien than Star Trek.
When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.
At some point I looked into it, and if the laws were what they are today, Disney wouldn't have been able to make Alice in Wonderland (1951) without paying Lewis Carroll's (d. 1898) estate until 1968. The Little Mermaid (1989) was safe though, since Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 (so his copyright would have expired in 1950).
While your end goal is admirable, it’s more fun to share new experiences with others.
Also, there’s a lot of really good albums from the past 70 years you’d be missing out on.
I used to be a patient video gamer, waiting for games to go on deep discount before buying them. Somehow it never occurred to me that I was missing out on the experiencing with everyone else at launch. I bought one game at launch and it was an absolute blast. We’re social animals, so of course sharing a new experience with others makes it more fun. I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand.
"I’m just surprised I couldn’t figure this simple fact out before hand."
Maybe you should have enjoyed more xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/606/
My friends and I have been doing a book club like this online for years, where we only read books in the public domain. It’s been an amazing experience and I think we look forward to it each week. https://b00k.club
In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:
Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) has only recently entered the public domain for life+50 countries due to JRR Tolkien dying in 1973, despite the work being over 70 years old. It won't enter the public domain in life+70 countries until 2044.
Only recently are works written in the early to mid 1900s being released in the public domain. This limits the works to around the first world war. For example:
- HG Wells (Died 1946, Life+70 in 2017), works like War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
- LM Montgomery (Died 1942, Life+70 in 2013), works like Anne of Green Gables -- In the US where publication + 90 years is in effect, her later works (after ~1925) are not yet in the public domain there.
With comic IPs, most are not yet in the public domain:
- Superman (1938, P+95 of 2034) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
- Batman (1939, P+95 of 2035) and will only cover that incarnation of the character.
So the current copyright terms are very limiting for IPs that are nearly a decade old.
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
> even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.
With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of English.
True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?
Why? If something is wildly popular then there are even more fans who deserve to own their childhood.
"Worth it" would mean someone is willing to pay huge fees for the extension. An exponential scale ensures that nobody can afford it for long.
> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.
Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
(I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)
> Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?
This kind of baby and bathwater argument could as well be used to ban writing altogether!
Shorter copyrights would lead to less beatings of dead tauntauns or thestrals.
It allows you the freedom to publish works in those worlds, reference characters, etc. See for example the horror game Alice: Madness Returns based on the Alice in Wonderland series.
What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?
The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.
Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.
The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...
If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter, because it would reduce the risk of entrenching the differences or giving too much power to a few.
I find more important what is the society's perceived "success" in life. For US (one of the two countries in the study), as a foreigner, I perceive that "success" is considered to be "the self made man". So people feel valuable if they have stuff. I doubt UBI will fix that - and unhappy / depressed people is not great, even if they are not homeless and starving.
In other countries "success" can be considered also about "just" living a nice life, enjoying food, or friends, or sport (even if you are not top). And these countries will try to offer paths to some stability, even for the ones that are not the greatest, such that as many people as possible in the society feel good. Makes a nicer environment for all...
>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter
There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.
>captured from the non-rich.
What do you mean by this? The economy is not zero sum, it is possible for everyone to get "wealthier", even if the spread increases.
This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.
Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).
Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).
It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.
You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.
The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with regulation and limits on building rights than with income inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and other constraints keep supply artificially low, which pushes developers toward higher-end units because the fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more building by right, supply would go up and prices would come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is primarily an inequality problem.
RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn’t a meaningful way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a software distribution business just reflects scale. Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a big market, not because Valve is “extracting” in some zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the distribution market would become less efficient, not more equal, and consumers or developers wouldn’t actually be better off.
There are no prizes for effort. People reward you if you please them, not if you spin on a hamster wheel.
People that can be taxed at several order of magnitude of wealth compared to a median income obviously didn’t work several degree of magnitude harder/longer/smarter. They more "efficiently" capture the benefits, certainly, but that’s it. And even there, mainly through network effect and pre-existing social forces.
If instead distribution of wealth was flatter in an equally wealthy society, a tax could still capture just as much.
When vladms speaks about high taxes on the rich, it already assumes the continuation of social structure which exaggerates the uneven distribution of wealth.
This is great in theory, but not practice and not practiced anywhere. You could site some EU countries with a very homogeneous population and a GDP < half of the states, but it's not convincing.
I don't think we currently have the most efficient tax vs productivity situation now, but I don't agree with equality being the goal.
Obviously no argument can convince a party which say literally that proofs will be rejected, even those which might be provided on some concrete example. All the more when this party doesn’t align with the underlying praised values anyway.
It is about the practicality of convincing people to do something. Many people I know are inert and would say no to change. Even those that want change have a favorite topic.
So, personally, when discussing economic topics I discuss the taxes part, which is so clearly unjust when explained (most countries tax less capital gains than work, which results in rich people able to accumulate things faster).
Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work - humans are complex. So while I hope that it is possible to have "A society can also thrive without high income disparities.", proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.
> Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work
Sure. It doesn't mean anyone else know better from some absolute perspective that we should blindly trust.
>proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.
Not proposing any change, letting the same egocentric people with selfish intentions always have the last word on what should change or not, also proved to be a sure source of great human catastrophic outcomes.
Success isn't real. All things are internal, but we make/pretend they are external. I dont care at all of your accolades or accomplishments. Exactly like you dont care of mine. If we ever do care about others' success, its not bc of the other people. We are just playing games with ourselves and calling it stuff like expectations, admiration, respect, and responsibility - its all bullshit.
UBI allows a different life. You can only fail so much, only fall so far - rather than people being lazy, it will be a huge boon for creativity. The 9-5 for 45 is creative death.
We'll be celebrating this at the Internet Archive! As a lead-up, we're again hosting our Public Domain Film Remix Contest: https://blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2026-public-domain-day-r...
We'll be having an in-person celebration at our SF HQ later in January as well, details to come!
Does the Internet Archive provide any instruction to uploaders and users about how to go about uploading and downloading copyright-expired public domain works legally, given the geographical differences from region to region on copyright expiration? For example, does the Internet Archive host its servers in USA, and would that make the US copyright expiry law operative? Or does it have servers in Europe or Asia (more lenient copyright expiration laws) that can be intentionally uploaded to, and leaving it to users to download from their respective regional locations on their own cognizances (i.e. at their own risk)?
To avoid the advent calendar, this may be more useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain
What really sends home just how ridiculously long it takes public domain to kick in to me is that Mein Kampf is on that list.
It feels like something that even in 1996 would have been a bit eye-raisingly overdue.
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Wow, I didn't know the connections between Mickey Mouse and Mein Kampf ran that deep. ;-)
I was like you once...
takes long drag from cigarette
That is only for Spain, which has copyright of Death of Author + 80.
Then why is he listed in that table? I don’t get it.
Because that table is "Entering the public domain in countries with life + 80 years".
Are you mistaking William Faulkner's mustache for Hitler's?
What does it mean to be in public domain
That question is answered by the first sentence on the page that this thread is discussing:
> At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.
that the Hitler estate can't sue you for copyright infringement if you publish it yourself and distribute copies.
Interesting that he still has an estate. And thanks for explaining what it means
Estate is a common law concept. There’s no direct equivalent in German law.
In practice, there was not a Hitler estate - the government of Bavaria (a state in Germany) took ownership of the copyright.
Hitler did have a nephew by blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston
and I guess a few others, but dwindling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_family
https://nypost.com/2018/10/08/some-of-hitlers-last-relatives...
...did they exercise it?
Rather the opposite, they disallowed anyone from printing copies
Neat! I just discovered that Carolyn Keene's first Nancy Drew story, "The Secret of the Old Clock", will be in the public domain next year. I remember reading this in elementary school when I was on a big mystery kick for a while (I had some of the computer games, too). I had no idea it was that old.
I see that How to Win Friends and Influence People is on there. I'm looking forward to the inevitable And Zombies adaptation coming in 2027.
So is the Diary of Anne Frank, that will surely get some sort of zombie remix in poor taste, I’m sure.
There's already the new musical, Slam Frank, which gives the story of Ann Frank the Hamilton treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam_Frank
One could even combine How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Diary of Anne Frank, the works of Einstein and Adolf Hitler into a some strange gory anime and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless.
"and others could do nothing about that. The possibilities are endless."
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about it. Just because other people have no more copyright legal angle, there are still other legal and plenty of non legal ways to bother you, if you manage to piss enough people off.
Well yeah, but that's just being part of this universe and applicable to anything.
If one were to write fanfic with all those things combined, legally there are no repercussions, but people have indeed been tried and burned for less.
Imagine all the weird generative AI now these works all go public. Don't have to like it, but just imagine. So much crap will be produced in 2026.
Is this a reference to a public domain zombie reboot that already happened, or just sounds like something Hollywood would do?
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pride_and_prejudice_and_zom...
Pretty sad that even a well intentioned non profit thinks it has to resort to "engagement" shenanigans.
[flagged]
They need money to recover the money they spent on “engagement” “experts”?
You get predatory tactics in part because you accept them as normal.
Do they? Do they really think I'm going to come back each day to see what the new reveal is, and on the 17th day I'm going to decide "Oh, hey, maybe I should send them some money"?
No. No, I'm not. I'm gone and I'm not coming back. Ain't nobody got time for games like this.
For a literature-focused list of items entering the US public domain on 2026, Standard Ebooks has 20 ebooks prepared for release on January 1: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
I don't think that they are allowed to prepare copyrighted items for release in advance of them being in the public domain.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
Why would that be the case? Copyright (at least in the US) only restricts distribution, performance and derivation.
no, it restricts copying, making copies
“Copying” here refers to distribution and derivation, at least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of media for personal usage for instance (so long as you aren’t circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
from the about page:
Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C.
corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
> corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
That would surely be a license violation, not a copyright violation?
They absolutely can (and do) make copies of the Microsoft office binary and shuttle it around their network/backups/etc, activating licenses only when they need to assign a copy to a particular user
This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
What you describe would almost certainly be considered fair use until point of distribution - it’s non commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact on the market value of Harry Potter.
Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while I’m not a lawyer it feels like it’d be a hard case to make that work being conducted in private is going to have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew novels in the next 30 days.
Market harm is not required for something to count as infringement, but it matters for certain defenses and damages.
Simply writing new adventures for existing copyrighted characters is usually treated as creating an unauthorized derivative work. Writing Harry Potter from the perspective of the Weasley twins, for example, is not fair use.
Distribution is one part of fair use but it isn't the focus of it - fair use is a defense against infringement, but it's still infringement.
You're really missing the crux of fair use:
"Noncommercial, educational, critical, or transformative uses (like commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research)"
How closely does writing Harry Potter fanfiction align with commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research?
Fair use is more about: writing a critique about Harry Potter. Or a Weird Al style song about it. Or presenting parts of it in a paper you're writing for class.
This is all easily searchable stuff. Copyright is extremely draconian when you really look into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#4._Effect_upon_work's...
Seems to say that market harm is the single most important factor in fair use, and it's basically impossible to show that a person writing their own fan fiction without any distribution would prevent an author from exploiting their own work.
If you think about it, writing “Harry Potter” on the internet could be infringement because those words might be in the book, and most worrisomely you are inducing people to make “copies” of the books in their minds. There’s no way to calculate what you owe Rowling from this post, it could be infinite.
(Thankfully I’ve never read those books so I can say the name without infringing)
Better let AO3 in on that
Not sure why this is downvoted. It's factually correct and is said in what I believe to be a fairly neutral way?
Because people insist on discussing copyright as if there is any part of it that makes sense, and as if it operates how they think it should.
They derive a history of it from all of these principles that they made up, then propose a future which is always a moderate compromise between the guiding principles that they made up and the history that they made up from the guiding principles that they made up.
Things are as they are because powerful people made them that way, and built on that. The length of copyright is justified by the fact that it got past Congress and judges. What you're allowed to do is vague know it when I see it stuff, and has always been a patch on top of what you're not allowed to do which is always very clear: anything you don't have a written grant of permission to do.
People talk about "fair use" like it is a real abstract principle, rather than being some weird legal wording by a judge from a few court cases where something felt just too minor and silly to be a violation but was obviously, by the letter of the law, a violation.
I'm fairly sure that under the letter of the law you're allowed to read a book you own or listen to a record you own more than once, but I wouldn't bet on it. For all I know it could be an exception called "private repeat performance of licensed material" which is not a law but actually guidance written by the counsel for the Librarian of Congress based on two court cases from the 1930s.
edit: when I was a kid, you wouldn't put the song "Happy Birthday To You" in a movie, and you would edit it out of a documentary. This was never determined not to be a violation, it just got so embarrassing that it was somehow determined that the copyright had lapsed. Archive.org was in a years-long kerfuffle about 78s. It's not about sense, it's about power.
Fair use and the 4 criteria for determining if it applies to usage is literally written into the letter of the law, passed by congress in 1976: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
Its squishy and specific application relies on interpretation guided by precedent, but that's true of just about everything in legal systems guided by common law.
Is it factually correct? Has anyone been able to prove infringement or apply a fine for writing fanfiction in your own journal or something?
> works by people who died in 1955
70 years. After death.
The rules have to change. 70 years is way too long.
I was actually extremely surprised that Disney didn't bribe congress and stop Mickey Mouse from ending up in the public domain.
They did. Before it was 50 years and get extended several times just before Mickey would enter public domain.
Yeah they've done a lobbying campaign about a dozen times when Mickey was set to enter public domain. I think GP was saying they're surprised they didn't do a 13th time. Like why give up now?
The last (general) copyright extension in the US was the CTEA in 1998. What’s happened since then? Google, who has power, money, and incentive to lobby against future copyright extensions.
I'm sure I'm being obtuse here, but what's Google's game in the copyright sphere?
Because in reality it hasn't entered public domain completely, only the very first movies and the way it was drawn in the 1930's. They are still protecting the one most people all know better.
The funny thing is that Mickey Mouse barely registers for kids these days. We went to Disney World this year and Mickey had a bit part in some of the shows. Elsa, Moana and the other modern characters were the real stars.
It is not even figuring in the Disney logo.
Not exactly true, they have hacked the end of the copyright for SteamBoat Willie, by adding a few second extract of it, as part of the actual "Walt Disney Animation Studios" actual logo.
They cannot sue anymore for copyright infringements, but they may do it the registered trademark way, by saying "It's in our logo !".
They have Baby Yoda now, much better than Mickey Mouse.
Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown.
Not sure why the amount of works in the public domain has any relevance to how long copyright protection is. Seems to me like they're two orthogonal issues.
Because every-time this comes up it is the same Mickey mouse complaints over and over. If you're young and your read this the first time I'm sure you're outraged.
Meanwhile there are 1000's of works that people are free to take. Better yet, there are 1000's of works that will be destroyed and not preserved that are open that should be preserved and used.
I'm not sure what the argument is here.
That because there's a large corpus of public domain works, then the long copyright protection is ok? That people want a short copyright protection because they're done with everything in the public domain?
Would that also imply that if the number of public domain works gets large enough, then the duration copyright protections should also increase?
Long copyright protection is not okay, but letting the huge corpus of existing public domain works languish in obscurity is not okay either; that does a lot more damage to our shared culture, and in a way that's even quite easy to address. But the damage done by keeping works in copyright is easier to see than the damage done by not making remarkably similar works accessible at all.
It doesn’t do more damage though. Our shared culture is like 99% copyrighted media for a variety of reasons. In books for example, the language becomes harder to read, and while many things remain constant across time, old works can become outdated and not address issues relevant today.
I think it's selective outrage and people really don't care what happens to Micky Mouse.
I'm not a fan of Disney, but I don't think my life would be better if we saw a bunch of clones from China because it's now "public domain".
> Meanwhile there are 1000's of works that people are free to take.
Yeah, if you know where they are. Where can I download a public domain, silent movie ?
Part of the reason for that is precisely that copyright is too long so works get lost or forgotten before they enter the public domain.
No, it's because people don't care about it. If it had value they would.
Cultural value is not an objective measure independent from availability. We value what is popular.
Offtopic.
Want to see something cool?
Run the following prompt through your favorite LLM:
"Does the following comment make logical sense:
<insert OP comment above>"
The model will agree the argument is valid, logical and coherent (chatgpt, claude and gemini 3 pro all agreed).
THEN
run this prompt:
"let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?"
Enjoy!
You wanna link a chat of that for us to read ourselves?
I'm very sorry, no, I'm too afraid to leak something.
FastGPT (+ Notepad for maintaining context):
===
Does the following comment make logical sense? "Sure, the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works that are legally 100% in the public domain and even Internet-accessible in some form but simply languishing in obscurity and have yet to be made comprehensively accessible to the general public (via digitizing, transcribing, indexing and comprehensive classification) may well be orders-of-magnitude larger! There's a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that's effectively free for the taking, should anyone be interested enough to put in the work; consider the huge amount of serialized publications that might have been issued throughout the 19th century, many of which are so obscure as to be essentially unknown."
---
Yes, the comment makes logical sense. It argues that while copyright terms are long, there's a vast amount of public domain material that is not easily accessible due to lack of digitization and organization. The commenter suggests focusing on making this "low-hanging fruit" accessible instead of solely focusing on copyright issues.
===
let's not be too hasty here.
we have "the term of copyright protection is quite long; but the amount of works [...is large enough...]"
p1: the term of copyright protection is quite long
p2: the amount of works [...is large enough...]
it doesn't seem to me that p1 and p2 are logically connected. As an absurd case: if the amount of works in the public domain gets large enough, would that mean that evern larger (infinite) terms of copyright protection are ok?
---
The comment does present a logical argument, although it's an argument by juxtaposition rather than direct logical entailment. Here's a breakdown:
P1: Copyright terms are long. This is a statement of fact/opinion about the duration of copyright protection. P2: A vast amount of public domain work is inaccessible. This highlights the existence of a large, underutilized resource. Implicit Argument: The commenter implies that effort might be better spent on making existing public domain works accessible rather than focusing solely on the length of copyright terms. The "but" signals a contrast and a suggested alternative focus. You're right that P1 and P2 aren't directly logically connected in a way that P1 causes P2 or vice versa. The connection is more pragmatic:
Opportunity Cost: The commenter suggests that focusing on copyright reform might divert attention and resources from the readily available opportunity to make existing public domain works more accessible. Practical Benefit: Making public domain works accessible provides immediate cultural and educational benefits, regardless of copyright law. The commenter isn't saying long copyright terms are okay because of the amount of public domain work. They're saying that focusing solely on copyright is perhaps missing a big, easily addressable opportunity. The absurdity you introduce (infinite copyright terms being okay) doesn't follow because the commenter isn't trying to justify long copyright terms. They're shifting the focus to a different, potentially more immediately beneficial area.
Thankfully this is already happening thanks to the glorious AI - revolution. AI crawlers just ignore copyright - and any other rules and laws. ;-)
As do people. Which ends up weakening copyright even further as it becomes a law everyone ignores, on the level of speeding or jaywalking. The same knock-on effects as Prohibition, we become a nation of scofflaws.
People don't know copyright law. They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
> They think they do and are alright with the construct they made up in their heads. But they don't actually know what it says and does and means, otherwise they'd hate it much more.
This is also why companies have slowed down on enforcing it too much: if people actually understood copyright, there would be too much pushback.
>70 years is way too long.
Objectively, why? It's in our lifetimes, I'd say it's just about right.
If someone publishes a novel when they are twenty and dies when they are 90 the novel won't be in the public domain for 140 years. That's rediculous.
Nobody can create derivative works from anything that was created while they were alive.
How often is 70 years in your lifetime? only if you read a book as a teenager or child, right?
Just wait until they manage to keep creators artificially alive indefinitely.
I wouldn't put it past some Jack Valenti type to arrange some kind of Henrietta Lacks scenario to create indefinite copyright terms.
Interesting case in point is Argentina. The Falklands War happened in 1982, so well within some people's lifetimes. I learnt a few years ago that photographs and writings from Argentina from 1982 are already out of copyright. Photographs from the UK are not, and won't be until seventy years after the deaths of the people who took them. So total contrast between the two jurisdictions and reflected in publications about the conflict.
In the former Soviet Union, pre-1973 material is out of copyright. Again within living memory. I don't know what Russia etc have done with copyright since then.
Keep in mind in Argentina public domain works are not free (free as beer) of use, you have to pay a fee to the government, for example if you play Beethoven music in your short film or any work you created.
This is likely going to change since the organism responsible for collecting the fees is undergoing a big restructuring.
I would love to see a public poll on how long people think that copyright should be. I'm betting that the majority of the answers from normal people will be less than the current "author's lifetime plus 70 years" but also greater than 5 years. This is probably not a very profitable poll for Gallup to do, though...
My answer is "a generation". There's so many ideas and behaviors that don't persist between generations that it seems as natural of a division as you could have.
The median age of new mothers is 27 around here, which seems about right.
A generation is usually considered to be ~20 years, which is less than 14+14, not that I'm complaining.
Wasn't it 14+14 at some point? I wonder if that would be above or below the average response
"What I need should be copyrighted zero years and what I sell should be copyrighter indefinitely", this is an answer you will get.
The article has a link to
https://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/08/do-bad-things-happen-when-w... (Do Bad things happen when works enter the public domain?)
There are answer is no, but they’re ignoring the fact that when works enter the public domain they will invariably spawn horror movies “based” on the work. Pooh: Blood and Honey is the warning sign we all ignored to our detriment and now we’ll all have to watch the slasher version of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” in 2026.
I hope you’re happy.
I didn't realize we were forcing people to watch movies now, that is quite concerning.
Certainly you have your Clockwork Orange movie theater setup in your house right?
Finally! We'll get the Hollywood cinematic version of How to Win Friends and Influence People..
Oh, no! Hollywood will get richer and the poor author will get nothing!
Something about this page doesn't seem to work for me. Clicking the tiles doesn't do anything. It's not ad-blocker-related, I disabled those to test.
The entire page is underwhelming. For someone in the US, I walked away with basically no new information other than some stuff will enter public domain at new years.
The comments here seem to link many better lists (in case they didn't before).
> In our advent-style calendar below, find our top pick of what lies in store for 2026. Each day, as we move through December, we’ll open a new window to reveal our highlights! By public domain day on January 1st they will all be unveiled — look out for a special blogpost from us on that day. (And, of course, if you want to dive straight in and explore the vast swathe of new entrants for yourself, just visit the links above).
It's in the style of an advent calendar, the other days will be available later on in the month.
If you want to skip to December 31st, you can enter the following into your browser console to make all the tiles/doors openable:
It's tracker blocking. If you're using pihole or some other DNS-based blocking it won't work.
Even if it did work it's a bad UX. Just give us a list we can easily read.
As others have noted copyright duration is ridiculous. But more importantly it lacks severe counter-forces to balance out the explicit monopoly.
Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
If X is kept for sale for the sake of keeping copyright alive but it's not really selling much that should also affect the nature of the copyright. For example, a minimum fee you have to pay annually to keep copyright going would cull out the works that are no longer commercially viable.
The fee could be proportional to the overall sales of the works so that if your works were a huge hit in the 80's but sales have trickled down to a minimum you'd have to pay more (from the profits you've obviously received over time) to keep it copyrighted (which would force you to balance your copyrights to your net income from current sales), but if you published an obscure album decades ago that never got much traction your fees would be negligible (but you'd still have a minimum fee you'd have to pay regardless) so you would be incentivized to give up the "protection" and make it cheaper for everyone to let it fall in public domain.
Further, the various aspects of copyright could be torn down in different timeframes. Let's say you wrote a successful book in 1963 which made money but no longer sells much. You probably wouldn't mind letting the copies of the book fall in public domain but if you could keep the option to hold onto copyright for derivative works in case someone wants to make a film out of the book you could do that (again, with annual fees, but these could be lower if the original book could be freely copied).
Or some other scheme. I could soon think of dozens if I wanted to but you get the idea. How about a tax on the sales of copyrighted works that starts from 0% but increases by some percentage point each year. You can profit first but as years go by you will have to start paying more and more to keep it going as the overall balance approaches unprofitability.
Copyright doesn't have to be a complete monopoly, it could have shades of gray. Sure there are exemptions already (such as fair use, in some countries, or right to make backups under certain conditions) but none of them address the commercial stronghold copyright allows for companies to keep works of art hostage for decades and eventually, for centuries.
Yeah i think books that are out of print since decades should become public domain.
> Since the point of copyright is to offer an incentive (to profit) from works it should be tightly tied to the market value of said works and the willingness of its owner to present them for sale.
> If nobody keeps selling X there's no reason to let X enjoy the protection of copyright.
Suppose Lucy paints original portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. She makes no copies of them; there are no copies of them for her to sell.
And Lucy is just a painter. She's not a printer. She's not a publisher. Again: Lucy only paints portraits of Barbra Streisand and sells them on eBay. That's all that she does.
But because Lucy isn't selling copies, then the portraits become public domain and anyone is free to copy them.
Why would that ever be a thing that encourages Lucy to paint more portraits of Barbra Streisand?
At the very least a system like this might force publishers to not drop ebooks from their stores just because.
But others would point out that being able to not distribute a work is part of having the copyright. If a corporation doesn't want to sell old works because they want to encourage people to only buy new works then that's their right. The government saying that it's fair game simply because there's no legal option to purchase it is an infringement on their right to withhold the work from the public. They could even have a policy of destroying all copies of the work once it goes off sale to make sure it never enters the public domain, that's also within their rights.
Why should someone have a right to void content?
How does that "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Entering PD at death+70y usually means a 100+-20y duration. Does anyone respect this silly timescale? Does any fine been imposed for a forgotten old work?
Compare that with a drug's IP: total of 20 years after the molecule patent, of which 8-10y in clinical trials and only 10-12y in profitable life. But everyone respects that until the last day and it brings billions back.
A short IP time would favor the small/poor creators that could earn something during their lifetime when the work is fresh, while a long one favors companies like Disney which can protect the copyright with their group of lawyers.
Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
No software in the list, duration of copyright for software is not adapted to the specifics of the field, no hardware would exist anymore to make this kind of software useful. Pure waste.
I would’ve loved to see some notable highlights in this article!
I just noticed the site contains a very misleading description of what a Community Interest Company is. They are not necessarily not for profits (a certain proportion of profits has to be used for the stated purpose) and they are not as tightly regulated as charities (they do not get the tax breaks charities do either) .
That is not to say this particular company is a bad thing (I have not problem with people getting reasonable remuneration) but if you want to know (e.g. if you are considering donating) its something you need to find out on a case by case basis.
This is not well known in the UK, let along outside the UK.
The maltese falcon (the book, not the movie) is entering the public domain next year!
Also of interest is vile bodies, which is a very good but characteristically depressing book by evelyn waugh.
The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff is one of my favourites on that list.
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
Read this to my daughters. What a great story! Wish I had known of it as a kid.
This article seems to imply that when works enter into the public domain depend on where they were published. This is not true! It's based on where you are and when it was published.I E, if you're in the USA and some work published in a death+50 year country is in the public domain in said country, it would still be illegal to distribute in the US.
Similarly, some works that are published in the US but are not in the public domain there could be perfectly legal to publish in a death+50 year country.
Copyright has no business holding as long as it does.
in my old neighbourhood, there was a couple where the husband creatd the intro-jingle for one of the major local news shows.
they are playing his jingle for more than 20 years now.
he became so wealhty that he could afford to tear down his old house, move temporaly to a hotel with the whole family, while the new villa was built on the old ground.
This always blows my mind about the US - the fact that individual cities and states are large enough markets people can become enormously wealthy catering to their locality. A staggering difference from Europe.
...I'm in the EU - its not an US specific feature
This article and the articles linked in it only provide a selection of works entering public domain in 2026. Does anyone know of a database or list of works so that I can see all of them? Other than the Wikipedia article that only has a list of names.
There wasn't easy hover text or other way to reveal what's coming "this month" on their advent calendar. So spoilers for the impatient:
I wonder if there is a less annoying list I can read.
Wow. The first Nancy Drew came out the same year as the first Miss Marple. I always thought of Nancy Drew as a much later phenomenon.
Mark Twain was one of the first writers to push for longer copyright, so his daughters could receive royalties.
Nothing in Japan from what I could find here or elsewhere… don’t understand why
edit: thanks to the dead commenter for clarifying. that sucks.
I’m adding a one-act Tanizaki play to Standard Ebooks’ Tanizaki collection[1] on the 1st January. Some Akutagawa shorts go into US public domain next year too. (Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.)
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/tanizaki-junichiro/short-f...
> Note: copyright is based on the translation date, not the original language.
It’s based on both. For example, a translation or other derivative work whose copyright expired “early” in the US due to non‐renewal would still be encumbered by the copyright of the original. That’s basically what happened to It’s a Wonderful Life—the film is technically in the public domain, but is still held in Paramount’s iron grip by way of the renewed copyright of the original short story.
Fair point!
The "TPP11," which includes a provision to extend the term of protection to 70 years, will enter into force on December 30, 2018.
In Japan, the term of copyright protection will, in principle, be 70 years after the death of the author (or 70 years after publication for works published anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a corporate body).
Copyrights that have already expired at the time of enforcement will not be revived (principle of non-retroactivity of protection).
Consequently, no works will newly enter the public domain for the next 20 years.
From Japan Library Association: https://www.jla.or.jp/hogokikan-encho/#:~:text=%E4%BF%9D%E8%...
Worth noting that Canada is in the same boat since 2022. Australia has only recently seen authors enter the public domain again, since the change there was made in 2004.
Note that the copyright is not about the source country of the work, but where do make/distribute the copy. Do you live in Japan, or are you interested in Japanese works? (Or both, possibly.)
I make https://reader.manabi.io for a living
That's NEAT! I live in Japan myself, and I am a passionate Japanese learner (and used to be a teacher too) of multiple decades. Besides, I'm interested in natural language processing and language related technology, and used to study second language acquisition research back in the university. If you ever take part into any tech / language events or meetups, it would be nice to hang out and hear about the development of that app.
I'm often in Japan (Tokyo and Mie) so I'll try to let you know if I join something!
My e-mail is pyry.kontio@drasa.eu in case you happen to be around.
A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:
Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank and Einstein.
Weird Question, but who would even collect the royalties from Hitler or Goebels?
For Hitler, the rights to the original text of Mein Kampf (and probably many of his other writings) went to Bavaria after he died.
However various translations and abridgements were made with their own copyright.
Houghton Mifflin owns the rights to the US version of Mein Kampf, which was published in the 30s with a lot of the Hitler-iest parts removed (the rights are separate from the British version even though the text is identical). During WW2 and even up until the 1970s, the US government confiscated the royalties that were owed to Hitler.
Houghton Mifflin was eventually able to purchase the full rights. After an article in 2000 about how profitable it was, they started donating the profits to Holocaust-related charities. A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
> A few years ago they decided to go back to pocketing the money.
The American way *salutes*
Total Copyright Death. I am unconvinced that we need copyright at all, if there are strong antifraud laws that prevent people or corps from saying "I am the originator" when not the case. Copyright stifles distribution, derivative work, and longevity
I agree (and we should not need patents either), but I think it might be better to prevent you from saying that someone else wrote something if they did not write it, or to say someone else wrote it if you modified it unless you also mention that it has been modified from the original version.
Ridiculous that stuff from 1930 is what's coming out in the US.
Just make it 50-ish years, absolute max.
On a side note, that web page's presentation of the items is leaving much to be desired. I can't click on each individual item out-of-order on Safari.
EDIT:
Oh, it's a countdown/Advent calendar.
I mean I admire the creativity but I don't care enough to visit the page each day. Just give me the list.
nice
Interesting that copyright terms vary so much globally. Are there any notable works from non-Western countries entering public domain in 2026?
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I genuinely don't understand the instinct of HN to decry copyright for fictional works in general. I would not find it distasteful for even a far longer copyright to exist. I just don't see it as a problem. What is the societal ill that is caused by being unable to sell Harry Potter fan fiction, ever? Why can the author not invent his own setting? I understand people want free things, but this sentiment seems to go beyond that. The work is still available to be bought and sold, and if the price isn't right, there are billions of other options. I don't get it. I don't feel personally entitled to make derivations of Moby Dick, so if I found out it had exited public domain somehow, that would not upset me at all.
My issue isn’t so much derivative works, but the original content being sat upon by the owner and refusing to make it available to the public (for free or for sale) in any meaningful way. Keeping with the theme of Disney, I always enjoyed the Captain Eo attraction. I’d love to be able to regularly rewatch that short film. Other than a bootleg YouTube version, there is no way for me to access it right now, and there is a very real risk that Disney copyright strikes that. I just have to hope that someday Disney makes a high quality version available to me or adds it back into the park. If it were copyright free though, I might have a chance at seeing it. Now just because it’s copyright free doesn’t mean it magically appears in front of me, but it does open the door to anyone who has a high quality version squirreled away somewhere to make it available to me for sale or for free, and TWDC would be unable to stop that from happening.
As a photographer, why should I be forced to sell prints of the photographs that are hanging in a restaurant?
If the limitations on copyright weren't present, why wouldn't the restaurant make copies of the photograph that I took that they have hanging on the wall and sell it at the front door without reimbursing me in any way?
I don’t think copyright shouldn’t exist at all, I think the general consensus in this topic has been that the length of copyright protection is longer than is considered reasonable.
You don’t have to sell the prints if you don’t want to. But if someone else does fulfill that market demand by selling or giving away your photographs after those photographs have entered into public domain, that’s a win for all those who wished to enjoy your art. Without having to visit that particular restaurant. The length of time to get to public domain is the issue at hand.
I want you to make money on your photography. It’s a good incentive to keep doing that scope of work and more art in the world is a win for humanity. But if you haven’t been able to recuperate losses and make profit on a particular photo after 70 years, I don’t think it’s going to happen for ya.
If I understand this correctly, your assertion is that me selling you a print 14 years ago (or 28) would now give you (or anyone) permission to put that on T-shirts and sell them despite that I'm still making prints of that photograph and selling it?
Aside on this is that it disincentivizes me to display anything that I don't want to sell and think I can make money on during the copyright protected period.
I have hundreds of photographs... the idea that I'd need to pay some amount to re-register them (individually?) extend their copyright protection is likewise absurd. (Compare : do you pay to re-register the copyright on each file in an open source repository ... because each file has a different copyright on it ... or the entire collection? But what is a logical collection of photographs?)
I have photographs that have made more money in the past 5 years than they have in the 30 years prior.
Moving things to the public domain faster than the artists who created the material would likely make them less likely to produce, publish, or sell things that would enter the public domain before they could benefit from them would result in the material becoming a patronage based system or the material never being created at all.
I do not want all artwork to be locked behind a patronage system. e.g. "Here's my patreon - all members at the $20 level get a high quality digital image each week." That would be bad for art as a whole... you'd never see it at an art festival or in a gallery or a restaurant wall.
I realize this is becoming more and more popular... but I don't think it is good. Shorter copyright terms would make this even more prevalent because of the difficulties being able to make money as an artist off the material. The long tail of a photographer's library is very much a thing and part of one's livelihood. Cutting off that tail prematurely doesn't put more material into the public domain - it results in less material being created.
Your response has shifted the discussion to a different topic and doesn’t really address my original point. I was explicitly calling out situations in which an owner refuses to make their product available by any legal means and they can legally prevent anyone else from making it available if they so choose for the remainder of its copyright lifespan, which could very well terminate after I die.
As a human with limited lifespan, that sucks.
In your scenario, as an artist you are still actively selling and making money on your art. That’s great, and maybe there should be exceptions in copyright for late bloomers who found their popular stride way later in their career with their earlier art. Regardless, you’re selling it and now I can buy it, awesome. This solves my problem.
However if I saw a photo of yours, from say 35 years ago in a restaurant you did as a commission, and you don’t want to sell me that print (totally fair) but also you don’t want anyone else to sell the print to make money off your 35 year old work, then I’m kinda hosed. I’ve got no options. I just have to travel to that restaurant, hopefully still open and they kept the photo on the wall, or just use my good ole noggin to remember what it looked like.
Just feels fundamentally broken, ya know?
I’m sure you could argue “well it’s my art and I’m allowed to determine its availability.” Now we’re into morals and what’s good for humanity. I will say art is in my subjective opinion good for humanity. Keeping it locked away is bad.
I don’t recommend a binary all or nothing approach to copyright protections, I just think at a certain point it’s for the betterment of the people now, not for the individual.
I appreciate your healthy challenging to my ideals.
You make a good point -- it's easy to knee-jerk react based on the "I like free things" vibe and decry long-copyright as nonsensical.
I think a reasonable argument against copyright being so long is that things I experienced as a child, and especially shared experiences with others, have become a part of me: they've become shared culture, even parts of our shared language. "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting..."; still under copyright in the US for another ~15 years) is just as much a part of Christmas to me as "Angels We Have Heard on High" (public domain). Maybe a good example of this is the "Happy Birthday" song: that song is synonymous with birthdays to me and those I associate with -- if you have a birthday that song is sung, if you hear that song sung it must be somebody's birthday. Yet for the longest time it was excluded from movies, TV, radio, establishments, because somebody was thought to own the copyright for it. It was part of our shared language and experience as much as aspirin or kleenex or thermos (genericized trademarks). Similarly, "hobbit" means the same thing as "halfling" to me, but don't use the word in a published work. Eventually copyrighted works seem to become pretty genericized, much quicker than ~100 years, yet their protection remains.
Disney's Snow White is about as old now as the Brothers Grimm version was when Disney's was made. I'm not allowed to make derivative works of Disney's version; should Disney have been disallowed from making it because elements of the story were "so recent"?
Obviously people should be able to profit from their own work, but I think the "shared culture/language" aspect is a decent argument that the public has an interest that counterbalances the interests of authors/creators.
Imagine a little known work from 1920 written by an author that died in 1955 featuring a boy wizard in a magic school who's estate sues J. K. Rowling in 1998 for copyright infringement. We might never have gotten any further books.
This probably seems unlikely, but it's the flipside of exceptionally long copyrights, especially ones held by corporate interests who hire lawyers specifically to enforce copyright. The growth of AI is only going to make this more of a problem in the future. Imagine a ContentID like system but on the concepts and themes of works.
Why should the author have rights to my Harry Potter fan fiction idea? They only came up with the characters but somehow control the whole thing?
The issue is with limiting creativity in all kinds of works and areas. It would be great, if we could organize society in a way, that makes artificial limits and boundaries to information sharing unnecessary.
That is tautological. Why is limiting creativity in works and areas "the issue"? What concrete problem is happening because Mickey Mouse was under copyright until recently?
of all websites, hacker news dot com is not ready to discuss the abolition of the profit motive from society.