[Retric]

People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.

What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

[AnthonyMouse]

> People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.

It is once you make it to the other side of the marginal utility of a dollar.

Suppose you write a popular work in your 20s. You make plenty from it, and then people keep buying it. As long as they do, why spend your time creating new works when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? As long as the copyright doesn't expire, you have all the money you need and thereby value having more time over having more money. When it doesn't expire for 70 years after your death, so do your kids.

Whereas if it would expire after 14 years and you want to provide for your kids (never mind that they should maybe make a contribution of their own) then to do it you would have to keep making new works.

[ralferoo]

Reworking that a bit, suppose you work hard in your 20s and have a skill that many others don't have and can command a good wage for your work. You can make plenty from it, so why spend your time in your 40s and 50s doing more work when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach?

Why can e.g. programmers profit from their specialism and then have early retirement, but e.g. popular singers or authors not do the same if they wanted? Why shouldn't they be allowed to continue to make money from the original work they've created that nobody else could / did? Why should a programmer be allowed to leave a huge legacy to their children in the form of vested stocks, but artists not be allowed to in the form of continuing royalties?

Creating works of art that people want is as much of a specialised skill as e.g. programming, but the payoff doesn't come as a large monthly paycheque, but as a small amount on each copy sold that you hope to recoup by selling more volume over time.

[Retric]

Shorter copyright terms don’t prevent someone from retiring after making it big. To do that you’d need to cap how much they could make in total not the number of years their work was protected. Instead you’re essentially talking about hypothetical people rather than anything approaching a meaningful number of artists.

Further lotteries attract suckers based on potential payouts. Just as the NFL or NBA convinces young kids to work hard, successful artists are a major part of pipeline of young kids practicing their craft.

[ralferoo]

Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever. At that point, you're effectively saying copyright is only sensible for things produced by a single unaided person.

Sadly, copyright term is the only sensible (and easily enforceable) metric, although whilst I'd agree that the term is currently too long, reducing it to shorter than the creator's lifetime can lead to other weird situations.

For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it. Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable.

Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work (e.g. a book where page 200 contained a spelling correction), etc. How would you decide the copyright term then? Would pages 1-199 and 201-end be out of copyright and only page 200 copyrighted?

And assuming we think lifetime of the creator makes sense, then we would need a different rule for companies, because companies can last forever. What we have right now, seems approximately the optimal solution in most cases.

About the only thing I'd change is when nobody knows who the copyright holder is, which is particularly an issue with old software. There really should be some way of legally distributing abandonware if nobody can prove that they own the copyright.

[basilikum]

> For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it.

Copyright should last ten years, at the very maximum 15 years, after publication. This is an entirely solved problem. The solution is just not implemented because in reality copyright is not about incentivizing authors at all.

> Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable.

Sucks for them. No reason to grant indefinite copyright.

> Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work

No, you couldn't. Why would a derivative work prolong the copyright term of the original? The derivative work would have copyright on its own if it had significant additional creative input (so not just spelling corrections). The original is entirely unaffected by this. Derivative works are already a settled concept in copyright. Nothing about them is new or special.

[ralferoo]

As for the last point, I was contrasting "a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life" and "from the date something was made available to the public" - i.e. does copyright start when something was first created or when it was first made publicly available?

In that case, whilst it might be a derivative work, the original would be unavailable to be copied so it would effectively reset the copyright clock. This is effectively a parallel to the case in UK copyright law where an unreleased recording is covered by copyright for 50 years, and if released at any point in those 50 years gets covered for 70 years from the date of release.

> Copyright should last ten years, at the very maximum 15 years, after publication. This is an entirely solved problem.

It is the complete opposite to an entirely solved problem, because not everybody agrees how long copyright should last, or even if it should exist at all. You might think your solution would make it a solved problem, many others would disagree. Governments similarly believe that the copyright term lengths they have enacted into law are correct, and that the lengths enacted by other countries are wrong, and maybe people (including yourself) disagree with them.

As a consumer, I'd prefer copyright terms to be shorter in general, but as someone who's spent around half their career working in games development, and on the kind of games that need a team of 100+ and so need heavy investment and protection in order to recoup that investment, I also support the idea of copyright in general. While my specific area probably doesn't need copyright terms longer than a decade, I can also see that in other areas these lengths are justified - I still listen to older bands, and see it as entirely fair that e.g. Pink Floyd should still receive money if I want to buy an album they made 60 years ago. Similarly, if I want to watch Wizard of Oz, it's absolutely fair that MGM should still get a chunk of royalties from a streaming platform. That money is going to fund the films of the future.

[pydry]

>Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever.

I'm not sure we'd be any worse off as a society if, say, Disney wasnt incentivized to make 34 marvel movies.

There are things where we desperately need large scale investment (e.g. manufacturing, green energy) but big budget artistic productions is probably one area of the economy where we could easily live without it.

[ralferoo]

Would be be worse off as a society without Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Jungle Book, Mary Poppins, the Herbie series, and any of the many more recent films?

If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them.

Sure, film companies often make a quick buck from sequels, but it's interesting that copyright on characters is distinct from copyright on works.

If anything it's surprising that you're arguing something other than the usual issue that's brought up around Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.

[basilikum]

> If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them.

The people who get most of the money from these movies are the shareholders of huge media conglomerates, which is the only reason why these works still have copyright. Authors and their families are purely a pretense for this.

The point of people deserving a monopoly over aspects of culture long after they created a work and deserving to censor the works of others who do not pay royalties to their monopoly – this is what copyright means – is weird. It sounds good as long as you read it as a feel good story without thinking about it, but it is ultimately moot. No, they do not. The argument is bizarre. We do not grant this privilege to anyone else. Everyone else gets paid for their work when they do it. They can even invest the money like everyone else. When you've hit it big with a creative work you are set for life. But when I build a house for you, I get paid once. I cannot get back to you 20 years later and demand payment once again because you are still living in it and benefiting from my work. It would be absurd. Obviously in creative works there is usually uncertainty. Most works are not created in exchange to a previously agreed commission by one party, but are created as an advance investment and then offered to the general public. We have to grant copyright to these works for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work. There is no reason to extent this copyright beyond this limited time period and to grant authors such a special privilege. On the contrary there is all the reason not to do this as copyright is ultimately censorship and must be limited to the utmost minimal necessity.

> Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.

That is perfectly fine. No one in their right mind would argue against that. The evil of disney is not creating derivative works of works in the public domain, but after the fact lobbying to retroactively extend copyright forever so that no work will ever fall into the public domain again; so that no one will be able to do the same as them – creating derivatives to decades old works that ought to be in the public domain; so that they can effectively own culture.

[gs17]

> But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.

The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.

[gblargg]

That ballpoint pen wasn't going to write itself.

[semiquaver]

  > People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations

Society created the concept of copyright and intellectual property for a reason and it is emphatically not the protection of income streams after you are dead. Whether a person exists who cares about a thing is not a reason to preserve it.

[Retric]

That reason was to generate more works.

Before the conception of copyright artists would create physical works to be sold after they died to support their families in part because such works would be more valuable after they died.

Indirect effects matter both for society and as a legal question. To this day many elderly / sick artists are working not for their own personal interests but for other people.

Thus copyright not expiring as soon as people die is supporting the original goal of copyright. The total length of copyright is a different question.

[eikenberry]

I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.

[bryanrasmussen]

Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money.

There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!

And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?

Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?

Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?

Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.

Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"

on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.

There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.

Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!

[tolciho]

The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel.

  “And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.

  “What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
  he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
  give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
  from doing so than by any thought of praise.”

  Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
  It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
  with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
  never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.

[bryanrasmussen]

Definitely a sterling example of the benefits of not paying people, given that he died in poverty and spent his life working odd jobs despite writing what was a best seller in debtor's prison.

But as you found quotes from someone arguing that writing to be paid is somehow bad

"I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'" -- Maya Angelou

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" -- Samuel Johnson.

But hey, I gotta admit, the first guy had one example of someone who wrote despite not having hopes of getting anything for their effort and now you come with one, so obviously my idea that not everyone has in the age of the world written without hope of compensation was wrong.

But let's go back to your quote, which for some reason you think is a good one against my assertion that there are people have written for money and to retain copyright.

Sancho makes the final point "It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be."

Which is a really good point for someone writing in a time when copyright did not exist and the only way to ever make money from your writing was to write quickly and to get the work into someone's hands after which they paid you, maybe, once.

I'm of course in agreement, somewhat, that works done too quickly are not done well enough, but some people can write at a speed that to others may seem in a hurry but to them are rather slow.

But I will give an example, Mark Twain, who I've already pointed out is the perfect example of someone who definitely wrote for money, except for a couple things he wrote towards the end of his life when he was old and bitter and also pretty darn rich by the standards of his time.

He took 7 years to write Huck Finn. If he wrote for money how did he afford this? Well he shelved it for a bit when he had writer's block and wrote other things for money, but also because he was in a much more financially secure situation than Cervantes expected the writer for money to be, due to his success, part of that success based on copyrighting Tom Sawyer before its publication.

But he also did do a bunch of crap, including the sequels to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and of course writing The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson too quickly to keep from bankruptcy from bad investments. I am not against the assertion that writing for money will produce things that are bad, but I do not believe that, quotes aside, it can be shown definitely that it will produce bad things.

At any rate if you read things written the last few hundred years and find them worthwhile, unless you are very particular in how you choose what you read, you probably have read lots of things that were written either partially or wholly for money.

Finally I notice neither you or other people who responded had anything to say to this part of what I wrote

"And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?

Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?

Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?"

I look forward to the quotes from great works of literature detailing how the non-writing parts of the publishing process are required for the writer to produce something great and how they should not consider money when laboring on that either.

[spudlyo]

"Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject." -- Arthur Schopenhauer

If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ

[ralferoo]

This attitude reminds me a lot of Stallman, and honestly, I fundamentally disagree with his absolutism about the ethics of being paid to write closed-source software.

Sure, there are many people who are happy to write software in their spare time, and are sufficiently well off from another income stream that they can afford to not profit from the software they produce (although I suspect that the vast majority of open-source programmers also derive their primary income from closed-source software).

But a simple fact of life is that people need to eat, find shelter, etc, and it's reasonable to expect that if you have a particular skill that others don't that you should be able to exchange the products of that skill for money from the people who recognise that skill and want the products of it (whether it be software, books, artworks, music, whatever).

Sure, there are some people who would continue producing the art/writings/music anyway in their free time because that's what motivates them in life. But what a shame it is when someone can only do that for a few hours per week because they need to work a full time job which doesn't utilise their talent just to put food on the table. Perhaps they'll choose to live a meagre life, and work for the "sake of subject" and die in poverty, but most won't. That doesn't reflect on the quality of the work, just how much hardship the creator is prepared to endure.

I'd never heard of Arthur Schopenhauer before, but reading his Wikipedia suggests that he came from a wealthy family and he never had to worry about money. Perhaps his argument just boils down to class at the end of the day, and that only authors from a well off background should be given a voice. But like I say, I don't know anything about him and he sounds like a well regarded philosopher, so I'm probably well off base.

[bryanrasmussen]

I made a response on the Cervantes quote

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363

that pertains here to some extent.

[protocolture]

>Really, all of them?

Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness?

Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.

[dgellow]

Don’t mix Kings and Rowlings, he’s at a whole other level

[protocolture]

They are both filthy rich and combined represent a large % of book sales. They also both spend their time making idiots of themselves on tweeter. Kings the better writer but they are both in the correct category here.

[ekianjo]

> People do care about income streams for their descendants

Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck