In my head, I was making a clever remark that succinctly poked fun at HN discussions, Bill Gates, transhumanism and the difficulties of futurology. I may have been overly-optimistic.
No, but children and grandchildren might live on after their dead. Copyright after death is mainly for heritage-reasons, to close the gap to families who inherit valuable physical objects or land owning-rights.
So your parents made stuff which due to a legal monopoly they were able to earn money and property from.
Not only are you to inherit the money and property they earned. You are also to inherit the right to further make new money from this legal monopoly on something you have done nothing for at all.
Well.... the whole premise is that copyright is a type of property, or that it should be. You could replace "legal monopoly" with "property rights" and it works equally well for both songs and buildings. You are only able to collect rent for a building because exclusive property rights give you the .. erm.. right to allow or deny(exclude) use of the property . This could also be called "legal monopoly" though not in the more modern antitrust influenced sense of the term.
I don't really have a problem with copyright being a "made up" legal fiction. A lot of things are fictions made "real" by laws, customs and such.
The questions (IMO) shouldn't be around what is real or not, based on some abstract reasoning. It should be about what is beneficial, practically, in our time.
Anyway, I think we need to rethink patents and copyright entirely. For patents, it isn't entirely clear they work as intended (incentivising innovation). The downsides, at least, seem more visible now than before.
Copyrights in the digital age.... It's just a completely different thing. A book or song or whatnot needed to be published regardless of copyright. Print costs, retail, etc. The only difference was royalties. The difference between a public domain and copyrighted work now is much bigger. Free means flexible, accessible, obscurity tolerant... For a lot of works, copyright by default is like burning the only copy.
Combining and reworking is also different in this age.
You know, I have no problem with treating copyrights as a type of property. That means it must be registered and taxed in proportion to its value. It may be a better situation than both always short lived duration and the taxed by increased amounts options.
Most property isn't taxed, in most places. The big exception is land/real estate, which is sometimes taxed.
For copyright, part of the problem is that most copyright is valueless in many senses (including financial). No one is making money off it. No one is reading/watching it. It's like art in a vault. Freeing the works would allow people to access them. Free as in liberty, as well as beer. The two are related, often.
Your description applies precisely to a farm or vacation property too. And at least a copyrighted work is something that exists in the universe due to your parent’s effort. That farm is just some land that your parent’s predecessor stole from the Indians. The government helped someone enclose land that had not existed as private property before, helped defend it by driving out the Indians, and then gave legal protection to the chain of transactions that led to you inheriting it. That’s a government monopoly as much as any copyright.
I think thats too general of a statement, plenty of people take issue with inherited wealth. The USA for a long time had extremely steep inheritance taxes for instance.
That said, the idea that your "life" has any role in this whatsoever is also unreasonable.
Copyright should last X years. If the author dies, X is still X, and if the author lives then X is still X.
This maintains the incentives, despite terminal illnesses, while also preserving the rights of the greater society to reflect on its own culture and encourage new artistic works. It's also how copyright originally worked (IIRC).
My own perception of fair would be that copyright expires 25 years after creation, or 20 years after publication, whichever comes first. If any of the creators are alive at that time and still own the copyright, they may extend by 10 years if no other creator objects.
If you create a copyrightable work and die the next day, and your executor manages to get it published the next year, your estate owns the copyrights for the next 20. That is enough time for any child sired by a male author on the day he died to be supported by his estate until it becomes an adult. It also provides a reasonable 5 year window to get something published before later publication is punished by a shortened copyright term. Still-living creators will, of course, be able to deny that a work was actually finished--and therefore started the 25-year clock--until just before the day the first copy is made available for sale--which starts the 20-year clock--so that would pretty much just be enforceable on posthumous publications and on bizarre edicts from eccentric or reclusive creators who try to exert too much control over how other people may enjoy their work.
And it allows for a work still profitable after 20 years to squeeze a little more out. I think the extension may encourage corporations that commission works for hire to support their successful creators for 20 years so that they will not object to the extension.
Works-for-hire, by the way, would have all the individual humans and the corporation as the creators, and the default would be tenancy-in-common, with the humans temporarily assigning their interest to the corporation in exchange for a regular salary. (I think the current works-for-hire system encourages immortal corporations to use up and throw away their human talent.) So if the corporation stops making the payments, the creators regain their full interest in the work, according to the size of their contribution defined by the work-for-hire agreement, if one exists, or an equal share if not. So the only reason to fire a creator would be if the profits from the works they create aren't sufficient to pay their salary, at which time they get their (lesser) share of the profits instead.
A session musician, for instance, might be hired by a record label to get a 4% share of every recorded music track, and assign that interest to the company in exchange for salary of $1200 every week working in the home studio and $1800 every week spent touring. If the tracks that musician played on bring in more than $2.34M, the company should keep them as salaried employees indefinitely. Otherwise, they could fire them as an employee and just pay out their 4% until the copyright term runs out.
You sign a publishing contract with a publisher, you (and your estate so your kids) collect money from that. After the contract ends it's done. Which is reasonable in my opinion. If I die, my kids don't get my monthly payment anyway.
Since other publishers do not have the manuscript, they can take the book and write it over completely to their own publishing house but due to market lag they it's too little, to late. And if you are wondering, digital reproductions usually fall under the same rights as reproductions (e.g. playing Beethoven, you cannot reproduce that specific work while the author has been dead for years).
There's no reason that inheriting wealth means you must also inherit crimes. Just because they are related concepts doesn't make them have to both be reasonable or unreasonable together.
Inheriting wealth is reasonable because gives people a(nother) reason to contribute to the world - to secure a place for their children in a potentially uncertain future. Parents who have spent a large portion of their life caring and provisioning for there children want to see that they have a level of security when gone.
Inheriting crime is unreasonable for, hopefully, obvious reasons.
Luckily, we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Right but if you kill someone and stay living your heirs are not criminals either.
If you create the next billion dollar game and survive your heirs (or those you specify in your will) will surely be enriched, perhaps it should be 70 years alive or dead that copyright persists for.
Nope. They get 70 years from your death. Since 1976, copyright ticks from the date the work was created, not the date it was published. That's also why it changed from a fixed period (X years after publication) to life + so many years (X years after death of the author).
It would be 70 years after the author died. Here, read this:
> Often when and how a copyright owner registers a copyrighted work will depend on whether that work is published or unpublished because the requirements for registration differ slightly depending on whether the work is considered to be published or unpublished under the law. The “under the law” phrase is important here because what the normal person might consider to be published does not necessarily correspond to the Copyright Office’s definition of the term. Moreover, sometimes even knowing these definitions doesn’t help because there is some ambiguity in the term and how it applies to new digital environments. So this is one area to proceed with caution.
> The Copyright Office’s definition of published includes: the distribution of copies of a work to “the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending” or offering to distribute copies … “to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication.” A public performance or display of a work does not by itself constitute publication.
> In the online environment this gets confusing. For example, a blog post or a photo posted on a website might be considered to be a “distribution of copies,” which would mean it’s a published work under the definition or it could be a “public display,” which would mean it’s unpublished.
It's there to incentivize. If you acknowledge that copyright exists to incentivize a 20-year old with possible monetary gains, then what incentivizes a 60 or 70 year old to create? Why should they be incentivized less?
When you're 60+, you either still need to make money (life is expensive) or you're creating because you want to. Creating so that your grandchildren can keep making money 50 years from now doesn't seem like a strong motivation.
Legacy and providing for your offspring is a huge motivation for many people. It's interwoven through all aspects of our society. Why should it be ignored here? To say it's not a "strong" motivation for older people misses the mark, IMHO. It may not be a motivation for you (at this point in your life, or forever), but that doesn't mean it's not a significant factor.
Again, you're essentially saying that older people don't need as much incentive as younger people to create, which I don't necessarily agree with.
Plenty of economists have negative views about inherited wealth, and the negative sociological and economic effects of inheritance inequality that result. Copyright goes beyond wealth -- it is a defacto monopoly on creative work that the public cannot benefit from without paying someone for the privilege of usage.
Although you are taking the "family" viewpoint, the reality is that copyright more atypically tends to be shuffled around and bought up by large rent-seekers corporations. Many times, the original artist's descendants don't even make a penny. Example: Before invalidated in 2015, who benefited from the strange copyright on "Happy Birthday"? Was it the ancestors of the originators (Mildred J. Hill at the most direct, but probably with several other hands involved before it morphed into its familiar form)? No, it was Warner/Chappell Music.
To me, it would be very hard to argue that the benefits of extended copyright at this point. It's a form of rent-seeking, an activity many economists have problems with. (It was actually pretty easy to find an economist -- a Nobel winner -- blasting rent-seeking. Nobel winner Angus Daton did so here for instance around the 30 minute mark -- https://www.c-span.org/video/?424924-5/national-association-.... It was more in the context of our broken health care system, but similar issues apply with government-sanctioned monopolies of creative works.)
Then people should save money they made from their works and pass it to their children. I've never heard of someone continuing to work after their death to provide for their children, which is what the current copyright system basically amounts to.
The argument against copyright sounds too simplistic to me.
A lot of things that are subject to copyright are not as simple as scratching out a poem on a rainy afternoon.
If I was to spend my resources to design and build a building, most reasonable people would not argue that my estate should be forced to give up its rights to the building when I die. There may be an estate tax, but the estate can choose to keep the building and its income, decide to sell it, or whatever. Seems logical. In fact, the very reason I may have deployed my resources into a building was because it would outlast me and provide economic benefits to those I love after I die.
Are not many (if not most) works subject to copyright just another type of developed asset, like a building? Sure, there are no sticks and bricks, but valuable time, resources and money went into developing the asset. Is that irrelevant because the developed asset is intellectual rather than tangible? Should my estate be denied of benefits based on the type of asset I spent my time and resources creating?
As a society, we have decided to limit the scope in which certain works are protected, for the greater good. I support this. But to abolish copyright or to truncate benefits based on death of the creator doesn’t seem to make economic sense to me.
> Is that irrelevant because the developed asset is intellectual rather than tangible?
Copyright has a sort of enthalpy (an appreciation) that grows into new forms of protections with socio-techno changes increasing the value, as opposed to a depreciation. The value is also appreciated by how much it's already been used to make! (e.g. Star Wars) Without physical entropy, like a building, you have a very different economic mechanism. The benefit to the originator's estate is not the single determining factor. Copyright is bad, in the current form. A simple depreciation factor would be far superior to the copyright expiry.
"I was gonna write a world changing poem, and thank goodness I'm young and will make $ off of it for decades"
That's a perfectly fine motivation, from my point of view, but I'm contrasting it against yours, because why are we expecting older people to have more altruistic motivations than young people?
(poetry is a poor example because it's not very lucrative in general)
They're still being incentivized less, since they'll live fewer years and copyright is tied to their life. You'd need a fixed term - like the US had originally - to incentivize both equally.
I'd agree with guelo. Kids, maybe OK. But grand kids? And especially 70 years after the death? At that point in most common scenarios we're talking about the 3rd or 4th generation of descendants.
My grand-grand children should just get off their lazy bums and go work :p