[observationist]

0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain.

Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing.

No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.

Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this.

Until it changes, pirate everything.

[goku12]

Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).

[kube-system]

The first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and 21 years for works already in production.

The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.

[pordzio]

Let's be frank here: there's a reason pretty much every single copyright act is at some point called the "The Mouse Law"

[observationist]

This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically.

Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.

This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.

It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.

No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.

Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.

No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.

The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.

[Angostura]

The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted

[observationist]

Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth.

A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.

[kube-system]

> Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied

That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.

If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.

It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.

In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.

[rcxdude]

How easy reverse engineering something is varies a lot. Something where the production process is the secret can be almost impossible to reverse engineer, for example.

[ndriscoll]

Stop legally protecting trade secrets then. Why would we have a system that simultaneously grants a limited benefit for sharing information while granting unlimited protection for not sharing? This obviously creates an incentive to only patent things you expect others will soon figure out anyway, which means the patent only harms society.

Make the incentive "if I don't share my information in exchange for a patent, any of my engineers could leave for a competitor and share all of my information tomorrow anyway." You take the offer society gives, or you get nothing.

[jcranmer]

So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years after the first book was published.

[danaris]

First of all, your timeline is off: A Game of Thrones was published in 1996, and the Game of Thrones series premiered in 2011.

Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).

So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?

[jimmydddd]

Even if the timeline in the question is off, do you agree with the premise? If Stephen King puts out a novel in 2026, when should I be able to sell photocopies of the novel without paying royalties. 2027?

[ElevenLathe]

According to the regime this thread is discussing (in observationist's post upthread), 2037. This seems more than fair to me.

[jimbooonooo]

Of course it seems fair to you, it's not your IP that's being stolen before you were able to extract all it's worth from.

[onionisafruit]

It’s not being stolen because he would have published it knowing the copyright laws. Also even with copyright laws as they are, selling unlicensed copies isn’t theft. It’s illegal but no stealing is involved.

[saghm]

I'd argue that the question is pretty much what should constitute "stealing" and what doesn't. You're certainly entitled to the opinion that it is, but that's a bit circular in terms of justifying a length of copyright. Not everyone will agree with you on whether it would make sense to consider it "stealing" after a certain length of time.

Looking past that specific word choice, there's an implication here that only the author would have an unbiased opinion on it. I'd argue that they're just as likely to have a bias that would cause them to argue for a policy that is unnecessarily onerous because by the same logic, they're not the ones who would be missing or on anything from it.

[AlotOfReading]

You've completely misunderstood the social contract inherent in copyright. There's no theft in adaptation. Copyright is an intentional trade-off by society to incentivise the creation of new works for society's benefit by giving authors a temporary monopoly. Perpetual copyright would obviously maximize the incentives for authors, but harm society by precluding the creation of new works based on the original. Instead, society chooses a limited period where authors can get most of the benefit while trying to keep the period short enough that works remain relevant.

Saying it's all theft entirely misses the point.

[danaris]

I think it would be very reasonable for copyright to return to its original terms: 14 years, with an optional renewal for another 14.

The vast majority of works make the vast majority of their money during that time frame. Indeed, for some works (like software), it's still probably much too long!

Citing a few wildly extreme outliers as evidence that we should stick with anything remotely resembling the current scheme a) is either disingenuous or betrays a deep misunderstanding of statistics, and b) can only work based on an appeal to emotion derived from growing up under the current scheme and seeing a creator's work as indelibly theirs forever, rather than something that should, once they have been allowed to make a living from it for a reasonable time, become the collective property of all humanity.

[iso1631]

Maybe it would have encouraged him to write the last books and thus have an ending

[reedciccio]

Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.

[alsetmusic]

> Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.

I find it highly probable that the negotiation for the rights to adapt for the screen included contractual agreements for him to do so to prevent them from hiring someone cheaper who would screw with his intended vision. He had leverage to ensure this outcome. They didn’t pay him a great deal more than they could have paid some unknown name because they are nice and friendly.

[Cider9986]

Anyone looking to start pirating check out fmhy.net (free media heck yeah)

[specialist]

I'm totally fine with your proposal.

I especially like no-permission-needed for commercial use with predetermined royalties. Throw in patents and I'll be your best friend for life.

Another reform notion I heard (IIRC): Require formal renewal of copyrights. $10 fee per year to cover expenses. Allows Disney to keep their Tug Boat Willie and Mickey Mouse for as long as they like, without borking the rest of society.

My own reform idea: Royalty also paid to the government. For all IP, for all time. To enjoy our govt's subsidies, protection (tort), and adjudication (contracts), you gotta pay.

The aircraft carrier groups, diplomats, intelligence services, and lawyers needed to keep our markets open don't just pay for themselves.

[tptacek]

The system of copyright enshrined at the time of the founders is drastically more restrictive than this, which undercuts your "sick joke designed to enrich lawyers" line.