[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.

[ralferoo]

> 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.

This is fine for transactional work, where it's very clear - you do/make something and sell it, perhaps a carpenter selling a table or whatever.

It completely fails if, for example, an author spends 4 years unpaid writing their latest book, and after the first copy is sold anybody is free to duplicate the words from that book without giving the author a penny for that work. One of the specific reasons for copyright is to ensure that the author is granted exclusivity over sale of the works, such that they can earn a fair wage to compensate for the 4 years of their life without any income at all. How us it unfair that if that author lives another 50 years and people are happy paying for the book for the next 50 years, the author should continue receiving money for it, rather than just some unrelated party whose only skill is being able to scan and reprint the book for basically the cost of the paper?

It's also fair to allow copyright after the author's death, because their children also should be allowed to benefit from their parent's work too. In most families, the parents want to pass on a legacy to their children. Why should an author be any different? Or are you saying if someone owned property that provided a monthly rental income, on their death the children shouldn't be allowed to inherit that property or the income stream?

If you say that the parent needs to earn all the income from the novel themselves and only that can be passed to the children, what if someone has spent 4 years writing a novel, and is killed in a traffic accident a day after launch day? Should their children not be allowed to profit from their parent's work just because they died before the income stream was realised? What about the 4 years of hardship the entire family endured?

Corporations just extend this thinking, because legally a corporation is considered to be a legal person. If you're making a film that requires lots of capital and many participants, there's a lot of investment in that production. In this case, it makes sense that the individual artists sign over their rights to the work they do for a salary to the company (if they don't like a paid job, they can always go and create their own works or set up their own company, etc) and equally, the investors need some time to recoup the investment they made. If we didn't permit this, then simply put, the vast majority of films would never have existed. Society would be far worse off.