[dublinben]

This is exactly the same way that It’s A Wonderful Life became a much-revered Christmas classic. If the copyright hadn’t expired allowing monthlong TV marathons, it would have faded into obscurity. How many people remember The Best Years of Our Lives, which beat it out for multiple Oscars in 1947?

[glimshe]

What is the middle ground? Everybody knows that "free" has a huge appeal. But so does low cost, which arguably vastly reduced piracy for older movies and music. It seems that content providers found ways to unlock content by paying creators fractions of a cent. It would be cool if there was a standard way to acquire license for older content for very little without dealing with the copyright headaches.

[rwmj]

Copyrighted and then falls into the public domain after 14 years. Plenty of time to monetize, then benefits the public after a relatively short people of time.

[conception]

Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.

[idle_zealot]

This makes sense from a purely economic perspective (if you scale the fee exponentially). It does not make sense from a "promote the arts" standpoint. Derivative works are a huge portion of human expression, and allowing the most valuable/influential ideas to be kept from the public would continue (albeit to a lesser degree) the creative harm of the current copyright regime.

[Andrex]

Giving large companies, but not the average Joe, the ability to retain copyright defeats the purpose of copyright being for artists.

[DrillShopper]

Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for a long time.

[JadeNB]

> Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for a long time.

That doesn't mean that we should lean into it.

[ndriscoll]

It shouldn't be completely free for the initial period. Require a nominal fee (and registration) to pay for escrow/archive storage so it can be properly released into the public domain when copyright expires.

[ghaff]

Registration basically benefits large corporations. There are good reasons why a lot of individual authors oppose orphan works legislation. Disney isn't going to forget or screw up copyright registration. You or your kids might.

Totally in favor of shorter copyright terms though even where there are edge cases where longer terms seemingly have made sense. (In terms of promoting progress of the arts, etc. or whatever the language is, I'm not sure that usually fairly small inheritances qualify.)

[ndriscoll]

Registration benefits the general public, who are the meant to be the beneficiaries of the whole scheme in the first place. The entire purpose is to generate a larger wealth of public domain material. Registration and escrow ensures this happens.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing.

14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generations, not about incentivizing creativity. It undermines the public domain.

[Retric]

18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly.

5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17

Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now.

But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care.

>I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a

Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling.

>5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value

You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.

[Retric]

> Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience.

Ethics

> You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit.

The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.

After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.

[bluGill]

It takes more than 18 months for many good works to get through all the editing processes. You can tell when publishers skip on that time as the quality is worse.

[rakoo]

elevates*

Language has meaning, and the puplic domain is a better situation for society. It is more interesting to say it ascended

[rakoo]

Piracy is only bad if you want to earn money for each eye watching a minute of a movie. What we're doing right now is piracy, no one pays anyone anything for content

The question shouldn't be about how much it costs but why do things cost anything in the beginning, and if they have to what is the amount a specific piece should be retributed for its contribution to society minus how the non-zero cost impacts society.

AIs are being let off the hook with their massive copyright infringement but when a movie being open directly benefits everyone suddenly that's a problem.

[entropicdrifter]

>Piracy is only bad if you want to earn money for each eye watching a minute of a movie. What we're doing right now is piracy, no one pays anyone anything for content

This is utterly nonsensical. You've invented a new definition of piracy to try to claim that streaming services are piracy.

Specifically at this point:

>no one pays anyone anything for content

This is literally factually incorrect. Netflix pays billions per year to copyright holders. Just because it's indirect payment in the form of a subscription doesn't mean you're not paying for the right to view content.

[rakoo]

I was talking about comments on a discussion board.

[graemep]

The middle ground could be a lot of different things. One might be a reformed copyright system.

The economist I know of who calculated a socially optimal copyright duration, Rufus Pollock, came up with an estimate of 20 something years.

This makes sense from the point of view of finance because the NPV of extra years beyond this is very low. To put it in qualitative terms, no one is thinking about their grandchildren's pensions when they decide to create a work.

Personally I would also have different durations and rules for different types of work: a book, a video, and a piece of software are very different works and need diffferent incentives

[Finnucane]

I've seen The Best Years of Our Lives several times; it plays regularly on TCM.

[stuart78]

The Best Years of Our Lives is a genuine classic. Complex narrative, brilliant cinematography and performances. It is a much more difficult film than It's A Wonderful Life, and absolutely worth watching.

[drewcoo]

/me raises hook hand . . . Myrna Loy . . .