[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.

[dredmorbius]

Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.

Published for profit.

There are numerous other incentives to produce books.

Schopenhauer has something to say about publication for profit:

<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Literature/On_Auth...>

[Retric]

Hogwash.

Producing books without a profit motive requires some other means to support the vast time investment. Thus robbing the world of great works from those lesser creatures who still need to work for a living.

The only loss is competition drowning out the works of well off but talentless people. We’ll get vanity projects either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.

[dredmorbius]

Profit motive's not doing much for great works of literature:

"The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024)

Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>

I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out).

I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest.

I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view.

There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.

[quesera]

> The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable

There are a lot of profits in the industry, but as I think you're alluding to, not a great proportion of those profits go to the creators.

I want a model where I can compensate artists and creators (up to and including producers) equally to (or better than) the distribution and marketing arms. This can be cobbled together in some cases, but not simply.

[Retric]

> not a great proportion of those profits go to the creators

That’s often stated but misses the underlying reality is that the money is mostly spent on things which increase revenue. An unadvertised movie means less people pay for tickets, remove it and there’s less to go to everyone else.

> equally to (or better than) the distribution and marketing arms.

Obviously there’s fat to be cut from these industries but being a self published author isn’t some shortcut to success and would become even harder with very short copyright terms.

Some authors are finding success on Patreon etc, but it further limits the talent pool by requiring more than just being a good writer.

[quesera]

You're right. Marketing is expensive. Distribution is cheap these days, but often the two functions are colocated.

I would even posit that many popular creative works are commercially worthless, absent the expensive marketing. And in some cases, the marketing comes first and the creative work is basically an effort to fulfill the marketing spec. Implicitly or explicitly.

But like venture capital, the entertainment industry is sustained by the huge successes, and they are motivated to overspend on every attempt. This works in VC (for founders at least) but it doesn't work well for artists.

I don't have a solution, but I wish for something that would bypass the go-big-or-go-home model while fostering organic success. (And I'm thinking of the music industry primarily. Movies and books occupy different spots on the continuum, though some of the same issues do apply.)

[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.