[ghufran_syed]

Any reason to think being creative in general is somehow easier for people than before? Whatever solution you offer should also apply to the base case which is writing a story or a song, both of which are “cheap” in terms of required tools and yet extremely difficult for most people to do well. So maybe we don’t want to discourage the creators just yet?

[readbeard]

In 1790, copyright term in the US was 14 years (if registered) plus 14 more years (if renewed), for a maximum total of 28 years. As of 1998, the copyright term is 95 years after publication (or 75 years after the author's death). So if creativity is equally as difficult now as it was in the past, I would ask why copyright terms have been so substantially expanded.

It's also worth pointing out that, since the vast majority of works generate almost all their profits within the first few years of publication, such a lengthy copyright term primarily benefits rights holders of the extremely elite set of works that remain popular after decades of publication. In practice, this mostly winds up being companies like Disney, Sony, Universal, and so on. Meanwhile, the group that is most directly harmed is not the public in general, but everyday artists—who are less free than they were in the past to build on previous works, remix them, or use them as supporting elements in a larger project.

Consider that, whereas consumers wanting to enjoy an older (let's say WWII-era) work usually face a choice between paying a small fee and getting an unauthorized copy somehow, creators face a choice between enduring a difficult and extremely costly licensing ordeal or opening themselves up to substantial legal risk. Creators often lose heart when faced with this dilemma—and many projects, at least a few of which would probably have been great, will never be made because of this.

[aidenn0]

Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) could not have been made until 1986[1] if the current rules were in effect (The ballet it was based on was from 1890, and copyright is 95 years).

That's my go-to example for why this entire "creators vs consumers" narrative is so bogus. Copyright today is no less of a lottery ticket than getting noticed by the Medici family was 100s of years ago.

1: In theory they could have licensed it, but I suspect a theoretical person in charge of maintaining the dignity of Tchaikovsky's works might have balked at giving Disney free reign to make a cartoon version and add lyrics for children to the instrumental music. Also, I don't think a ballet writer would feel particularly incentivized to know that someone would pay their estate to make a cartoon movie 60 years after they die.

[TheDong]

Do you think open source code is worse off for the fact that copyright has been removed (via the various licenses, all of which reduce copyright's restrictions)?

In my mind, open source code has been an excellent experiment showing that eschewing copyright doesn't mean people are less creative. Certainly, I've seen more creative open source code than I've seen creative proprietary code.

Similarly, there are huge swathes of fanfiction out there which are incredible pieces of creative writing which are not charged for, are not created for commercial interest, and while technically copyrighted, the author may not even realize that.

There are masses of people producing tiktok videos and spotify music for an audience, with no explicit expectation of copyright protection.

People clearly want attribution, not control to the point where they can say that their work cannot be remixed into a new tiktok video (a common thing), or used as fuel for a new creative endeavor.

On the other hand, copyright is largely used to stop such remixing, to prevent making creative derivative use of a work. If it were used just for "you must attribute me" (what open source licenses reduce it to), I would have no complaints.

[paulmd]

> Do you think open source code is worse off for the fact that copyright has been removed (via the various licenses, all of which reduce copyright's restrictions)?

Open-source code doesn't mean it's not copyrighted, and in fact copyleft licenses are explicitly designed to use this copyright as a coercive/protective mechanism the same as any other copyright.

But as a general statement, everything anyone produces is copyrighted from the moment they produce it. Your "hello world" that you write in a demo project and never open again is copyrighted. Your phone snap of your dog is copyrighted. MIT/BSD licensed code is copyrighted.

A license providing grant of permissions is not the same thing as not having a copyright. Open-source code still has an author, and that owner can also offer other licenses if they want.

[caconym_]

+1

People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight: just as quickly, their work will be published and distributed by for-profit entities who can still turn a profit on it but don't have to give them a dime. Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author, except as an employee of a corporation that also controls distribution (e.g. your Disneys, your HBOs, and so on).

I don't want to live in a world where the importance of storytelling [in media] is marginalized even further than it already is. A lot of people seem to have a "how hard could it be?" attitude toward it; the answer is, really fucking hard.

[zozbot234]

> People don't seem to consider what it would be like for authors (and similar) if copyright disappeared overnight

We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se.

> Congratulations, you've made it impossible to make a living---or even part of one---as an author

The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed. Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

[caconym_]

> We know very well what things were like pre-copyright. People still came up with compelling stories. Creativity flourished. Of course we've seen an increase since then, but that's the effect of industrialization and overall prosperity not copyright per se.

Do you think differences in how stories were copied and distributed "then" vs. today might have some bearing on the question of whether the absence of copyright "then" implies that authors don't benefit from it today?

For instance, in the year 1400 AD, the cost of reproducing a written work of any significant length for mass distribution was beyond exorbitant. Today, it is essentially zero.

> The success of distributed patronage platforms like Kickstarter is a very real challenge to this assumption. People are in fact making a living by producing content that can be freely copied and distributed.

If copyright is done away with, making money on works before they're released to the public might indeed be the only way for independent authors to make money. Right now it's an alternative to self-pub that's really only available to authors who already have a large established following, e.g. Brandon Sanderson; if people can just wait for you to finish and get the work for free, I doubt they're going to put money up front before you've even finished it unless they're already big fans of your work.

So---in short---no, I don't think the Kickstarter model will protect most independent authors from the effects of a dissolution of copyright law. But I welcome any challenges to the above reasoning.

> Meanwhile, the average self-proclaimed author sees their content languishing in utter obscurity. This can hardly be called a "benefit" of copyright.

What's the relevance of this bitter little nugget? Somebody who has written something is perfectly free to release it to the public domain if they like, and indeed many authors do just that. They are not bound to hold onto exclusive rights to their work just because copyright grants those rights by default.

[somenameforme]

Twitch is a reasonable argument to the contrary. You can watch Twitch completely for free with 0 impairment whatsoever to your experience (so long as at least have an ad-blocker), yet there are vast numbers of people making a living streaming, with a small chunk even becoming millionaires from it all, largely from people donating a few bucks at a time. Like you're saying there's always a big get bigger type phenomena, but that's an issue everybody has to deal with regardless of the system. And examples like Richard Bachman [1] would suggest its deterministically surmountable.

There are also countless other examples of things like DRM free products selling just fine in spite of the fact you can get a byte identical copy for free in about 2 seconds with a torrent. The point I make with this is that people are willing to part with more than enough money for people to make a living off of, even when they are not coerced into doing so.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

[caconym_]

> Twitch [...]

People donate to/tip streamers because they perceive that it will strengthen their parasocial relationship with the streamer in question, and more generally because they're watching a performance where tipping the performer(s) is directly encouraged and culturally normalized. It follows that for e.g. a writer to make money from this model, they have to either a) turn the act of writing itself into a performance compelling enough to extract donations/tips from an audience, or b) perform on stream when they aren't writing.

---

Given how competitive streaming already is (most streamers seem to report working long hours just to maintain their audience, however large or small, and burnout is common), I don't think it's unfair to equate streaming with more or less a full time job. If you aren't writing on stream, then, you've got your day job (presumably, for 99% of writers and early-career streamers), plus your streaming^[1], plus actually writing. It feels untenable to me, and it's also wandering further from "making money as a writer" as an abstract concept---at what point are you making money as a streamer/performer instead, and how important does your writing end up being to whatever success you find?

So I think we can say option b) is not a good replacement for making money off your writing directly, by selling published written works to people who want to read them. It introduces many extra steps, requires a skillset many writers simply don't have and shouldn't be expected to have (performance), and finding meaningful success will likely marginalize your actual writing practice.

As seems to be the case with many "variety streamers", you'll probably just end up playing video games in a crop top and cat ears.^[2]

---

Option a), actually writing on stream, will not be an option for most writers who haven't allowed the nature of that performance to erode the quality, complexity, and/or volume of their work. Writing is a full brain thing that requires you to hold a thread of complex context in your mind (a bit like programming, actually), and it's not visual, which is going to make an audiovisual performance centered around it that much more difficult to execute well.

Seriously, imagine pair programming except it's a thousand people looking over your shoulder and your livelihood depends on making each one of them believe you're their friend.

I know writing streamers do exist. Right now on Twitch the viewer counts are very small, but I'll check them out later because I'm curious. However, the fact that some of them exist doesn't change any of the above; the vast majority of writers aren't doing it.

---

> Richard Bachman

From the linked Wiki page:

> King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the "talent versus luck" question, as he felt he was outed as Bachman too early to know. The Bachman book Thinner (1984) sold 28,000 copies during its initial run—and then ten times as many when it was revealed that Bachman was, in fact, King.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what point you're getting at by invoking Bachman. Writing is a talent and a skill, and King is supremely talented and skilled at it. From a 'determinism' angle, it makes complete sense that he could write a book under a pseudonym, get it published, and see some amount of success on the market. The average debut author starting at his level could expect the same.

However, the average debut author is not at his level. King has (famously) done a lot of writing, and it shows. One has to wonder how that would have gone if the only way for him to find success as an author was to run a successful Twitch channel at the same time.

---

tl;dr: Streaming is not writing, and they go together like oil and water. Other media might integrate better with audiovisual performance, e.g. drawing. Either way, losing rights to their work will strip independent creators of important avenues to profiting from it.

---

> There are also countless other examples of things like DRM free products selling just fine in spite of the fact you can get a byte identical copy for free in about 2 seconds with a torrent. The point I make with this is that people are willing to part with more than enough money for people to make a living off of, even when they are not coerced into doing so.

It's naive to think torrenting is an accessible option for the average person. It would probably take me hours spread across multiple days to get my wife set up for it, for instance.

"DRM Free" content, unless I'm mistaken, still allows the original creator(s) to maintain the copyright. This prevents big distribution channels that are accessible to normal consumers (e.g. Kindle) from selling the work without giving the creator(s) a cut. If I publish a novel "DRM Free" in some indie-ish context, I can still sell it through other channels, and I have some recourse if somebody rips it off. Not so, if copyright is dissolved.

> coerced

This word choice is totally absurd. Nobody is being coerced, with a few notable exceptions (students who need certain overpriced textbooks to graduate, etc.). Is it coercion if I list an old lawnmower on Craigslist for $100, and when somebody shows up to buy it I expect them to pay?

---

^[1] Obviously, hypothetically, you expect streaming to pay your bills. Bootstrapping an audience big enough for that is the problem; if you already have a following big enough to make a living on, maybe you will have the time and creative energy to write on the side to do a little writing, but this goes back to the Kickstarter problem: you have to build your platform first.

^[2] Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it isn't writing.

[hakfoo]

I suspect we'd see a shift towards "give the first one away free". If you're a new author, you're going to have to release some compelling teaser to get people to subscribe to the second installment.

It sort of reminds me of how anime series tend to trail behind their source material, or cut off after a few dozen chapters-- there's a real expectation it's a teaser for buying the serialized books and magazine releases.

[TheDong]

Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

Red Hat certainly does package up a large collection of open source work and sell support for it, but that has not caused authors of open source software to despair and quit writing code. It is not common for a commercial entity to republish open source software, and Red Hat is an exception.

Sure, there are a vast number of open source developers who do it on the side, or are not compensated... but that is also true of professions where copyright remains. Most authors, most artists, they write or draw on the side, post their work to substack or twitter or deviant art or such, and never see a dime.

I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make, people are still creative, and a tiny fraction of people manage to make a profit off their passion projects.

[ssalazar]

Copyleft / GPL licenses require copyright law to have any threat of enforcement. Otherwise anyone could just ignore the terms of a copyleft license and use open source under any terms they wish.

[caconym_]

> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

[...]

> I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make [...]

I think this is a quite a stretch given the prominence of copyright in popular open source licenses, including (for example) the extremely popular and permissive MIT license. You can copy it, modify it, distribute it, etc., but I still own the copyright, and you still have to give me credit for the initial development. I can choose whatever license I want, which may or may not impose restrictions on who can use my code in derivative works, etc., and how.

In a very real sense, I do own the FOSS software I've released to the world. If legal codification of that ownership isn't important to open source developers, why are so many pixels spent discussing it?

[TheDong]

Public domain / UNLICENSE style licenses are less popular, but still have the same qualities I mentioned of people feeling ownership, even though there is zero copyright in that specific case and their is no legal codification of ownership.

I understand that MIT etc are copyright licenses, but they remove the majority of copyright's requirements. They only require attribution, and are a statement that the other parts of copyright, the restrictions on distribution and modification, explicitly do not apply.

They remove the part of copyright that people typically think of when someone says copyright.

[caconym_]

Sure, some developers are cool with public domain; the same is true with writers and other creatives working in pretty much any medium you can name.

The fact remains, copyright is very much relevant to the open source community today. It's absurd to say otherwise, given the amount of discussion the topic generates. On that basis I categorically reject your statement that "free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code."

> They remove the part of copyright that people typically think of when someone says copyright.

"People" don't know the first thing about copyright, because (besides the obvious lack of technical knowledge) it's invisible to them when it's working in their favor and highly visible when it isn't.

What does copyright mean to creators, to whom it is granted? Does it mean ownership, in some vague, ill-defined sense? Guaranteed attribution wherever their work ends up? The right to ensure their work is used only for applications they consider ethical? A guarantee that nobody will be able to make money off it? A guarantee that nobody will be able to make money off it but them? A guarantee that movie studio X won't hire a hack writer-director for a cash-in sequel that ruins the original's reputation? The answer is that it means all these things, and more, to different creators.

As a creator of copyrighted works (of both FOSS and fiction, as it happens), copyright means something in particular to me. It means something else to other creators. I wouldn't speak for them, and I'm kind of astonished by how many people with (apparently) little or no skin in the game are willing to do so.

[thayne]

So it would be like a copyright system where you have to give credit to the creator, but don't have to pay royalties.

[vel0city]

Free software/ open source licenses are copyright.

[throwaway75026]

MIT/BSD licenses are essentially a copyright waiver.

[rdpintqogeogsaa]

They are not. You still have strings attached: the requirement of attribution and the disclaimer. With 3-clause and 4-clause BSD, there are even more strings attached.

You can't just take MIT-licensed code. You have to take the code and the full copyright notice and license grant with disclaimer.

[throwaway75026]

Copyright law doesn't allow you to waive those rights without falling into Public Domain, which is considered grey area in some countries.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

And some of those licenses are being rethought by companies as they realize that that Amazon/Google/Microsoft can just take their work, put it on AWS as SAAS and capture most if not all of that value.

[pabs3]

I watched a talk somewhere that argued that Amazon/Google/Microsoft selling SaaS access to software massively increases the size of the market for that software and in the process actually increases the revenue of existing businesses in that market, while still decreasing their market share. With a savvy team and a good relationship with the big SaaS vendors, you could definitely ride that wave to increased success.

[mattnewton]

We ran that experiment of dramatically shorter copyright terms, and it produced much of the culture you know and love before 1975. Copyright has been extended in 1976 and then again in 1998 mostly at the behest of rent seeking corporations who bought the culture after it’s creation and after paying the authors handsomely for it. Calling Disney’s business “marginalized” seems ridiculous to me?

[caconym_]

See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688954

I'm advocating for copyright from the perspective of independent creators, not big media conglomerates. Additionally, my comment is (explicitly, if you read closely) addressing the case of copyright being completely dissolved, which---as crazy as this seems---is an idea some people apparently support. You need look no further than this thread to prove this to yourself.

I am not necessarily against shorter copyright terms. Honestly, since the main reason I support copyright is because it protects independent creators' rights to their own work, I would be totally fine with completely striking the postmortem copyright period for non-corporate authors (certainly, 70 years is insane) and cutting the pseudonymous/corporate terms in half.

[mattnewton]

Then I think we are in violent agreement. People who say “copyright has gotten out of control” or “is the cost worth it to society” largely are complaining about the current state of copyright where it lasts generations in my experience. Nobody hates the creator of culture they love, the hate the lawyers strangling anyone’s ability to participate in that culture in any way other than as a consumer. If we turned back the clock to 1975 levels of protection, we would get a public domain again which is good for creators, and creators would still have long periods to profit off their labor. The next Disney could be born as the first Disney was, by remixing the rich public domain. Of course that wouldn’t be good for the current disney monopoly and so it’s unlikely to happen.

[landryraccoon]

I think there's middle ground between "throw away all copyright protections" and "throw copyright infringers into prison for years".

I'm more inclined toward leniency than the draconian laws we have now.

I mean, 95 years of copyright protection? Is society really going to be destroyed if Disney has to release some of their IP under creative commons after 30 years instead? I doubt it.

[caconym_]

I don't really disagree with any of this. Big business has corrupted the modern implementation of copyright law (e.g. erosion of fair use) and something should be done to turn it back in favor of independent creators.

Of course, big money runs everything, so that probably isn't going to happen.

[svachalek]

I hate to say it but I think society is pretty full up on creativity these days. If the richest 1000 musicians stopped composing, would there be no music? Would it be worse than what we have now?

[bruce511]

>> Would it be worse than what we have now?

Point of view is everything. From at least one point of view the answer is yes.

Say I'm a small unsigned singer/songwriter, grinding along looking for a break. I write one good song. Elvis hears my song, and is free to just perform it himself. No copyright, no payment to me. His release is a smash hit, making him millions.

His performance of the song contributes a lot to his success, but the song itself is valuable too.

Of course elvis is signed by a record label, who pays him. The other record label buys one CD, and copies it (as they are entitled to do - no copyright remember.) they make millions selling it cheap (no need to spend on artists or marketing.) In fact they have a chain of stores where you can by any CD ever at half price.

So the real winner here is the person who sells to the customer, and pays not a penny upstream.

Musicians and song writers and audience builders upstream all work in construction doing their day job, and the cream of that crop can't afford to spend much time on creating. Their secret sauce is lost, and we are all poorer because of that.

Which personally, for me, sounds like a much worse system.

[mauvehaus]

On the basis of what's on the radio these days, I'd say that if the richest 1000 musicians quit composing, it might be a huge win.

[kelnos]

I think for smaller creators, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. While writing a song or story doesn't require much equipment cost, it does take a lot of time and effort, and that's time and effort that would be impossible to justify if the returns don't at least pay for food and housing.

But for big business media, it feels like the usual justification that rightsholders use for aggressive enforcement is that if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore. Which is technically true, but I don't think we've ever seen infringement on a level that would make these sorts of creations financially infeasible to make.

Actually, going back to small creators: it's not like current copyright terms are reasonable, anyway. I mean, let's say it takes you a year of full-time work to write a novel and get it published. So you could say that's a year of "lost" wages. Maybe copyright terms should be floating. As soon as the author recoups the "lost wages" plus some percent for creation-related expenses and profit, then it goes into the public domain. Why should creators (and often their descendants) get to milk their work for decades? I get that something like this would be a nightmare to handle legally, so maybe it makes sense to set a shorter copyright term based on some sort of average time to break even (or perhaps say 30th percentile or whatever, to make it more inclusive of some works that take longer). That's still difficult; I imagine you'd have to have different terms for different types of work. But it might be a lot more fair to the public commons.

Regardless, current terms for copyright are ridiculous: 95 years after publication, or 75 years after the death of the creator. I mean... what? That's nuts. Before Disney and Sonny Bono got greedy about all this, max term was less than 30 years, which sounds a lot more reasonable... though IMO still high! If the cost to create has gone down over time -- which for many types of creations I believe it has -- then copyright terms should be adjusted downward, not upward!

[hypertele-Xii]

> if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore

At current budgets. To make a movie all you need is a camera, and we pretty much all got one in our pockets at this point.

Someone will make movies sans copyright. It just won't be a massive, entrenched studio on a billion budget.

[kelnos]

Sure. To be clear, I'm not saying I buy the movie studios' rationale here; I'm merely pointing out what they often say.

I think a question we should also ask, though, is: is there artistic and entertainment value in massive-budget blockbuster films? I think yes, there is. I mean, I certainly enjoy plenty of them. But is that worth our current copyright regime? I would say no. But, like anything else, I expect the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. I don't think I would advocate for no copyright at all, but I would want it to be much more limited than it is now (even more limited than in the 90s, with 14+14-year terms, I'd say).

[_carbyau_]

Honestly? I do think that video and song writers are overrated for different reasons.

Movies. It isn't that they aren't worth what people pay to watch. But after ... say three to five years at most, it HAS entered Public Domain in a practical sense - just not legally... A more fun way to measure it, once you can stop using [spoiler alert] in a public forum about a movie, it is in the Public Domain.

Why a shorter period of time now? Availability. In the 1930's seeing a movie was tricky business compared to streaming on every device any time. Nowadays, after three years, anyone who really wants to see your movie has had sufficient time to do so.

Song Writers. Have you seen some of the lyrics they come up with? Teen Spirit for example. These are not literary masterpieces. But the performance is key. Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" did ok with her own performances, but blasted out of the park when Whitney Houston covered it. Yet Dolly made money for a song that had been out for 20 years? Damn, that's a good racquet if you have the connections - because song writing talent is only 5% of this equation. The performance, publicity around the movie etc etc made that happen.

As for - "but it will make it hard for creators to make money"

Yes, the future will be different. Not all people will be able to make money from art. But a large chunk of this of down to democratisation of tools. Just because you too have an Apple laptop and Garageband doesn't mean you should be able to make money.

Ultimately, all the people wanting to make big $ out of music are looking at the 60's-2000's time of music where corporations milked the scale of selling copies of music rather than performances. Now that bubble has popped.

Will your song be a masterpiece in a gallery earning you a lifetime of riches? Likely not. But that is the same for most painters in history.