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Optimum Copyright Period Decided by Math
An anonymous reader writes "So how long should a copyright be valid for? A Cambridge student has stepped into the discussion with a dispassionately calculated estimate of the optimal period a copyright should be granted. Ars' point of view: 'Neither the US nor the UK are in any danger of rethinking copyright law from scratch, but if they were looking for guidance in how to set up their systems, Pollock has it. He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).' The original paper is available (pdf) online."
My daddy had a hit song on the radio, so I deserve to never work a day in my life!
...a dispassionately calculated estimate If only all important political discusions and decisions could use techniques like this. It's refreshing to see someone take some of the "but artists are starving and may soon be forced to eat babies" out of the debate.Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Since we know that Disney (and others) will lobby against anything other than their eternal copyrights, we need to plan for that.
If you have have property that you want protected, then you should PAY for that protection after the standard protection period has expired.
99%+ of book titles won't be sold 15 years after their release. So there's no financial incentive for their authors to protect them. But with Disney and others, their "property" is worth millions of dollars. So charge them 5% of the estimated value. Every year.
If you are an author and you want to keep protecting your book, are you willing to pay 5% a year of the sales from the last year? Or should it be 1%?
Otherwise it falls into the Public Domain.
Somebody suggests something that's on middle ground and reasonable to both sides. Watch him catch flak from both sides for not seeing it Their Way and therefore Wrong.
Which of course is long enough for the entire Disney back catalog to fit, but not so long that the family of the Grimm brothers could have any claim on cinderella etc.
Because source code falls under copyright law, and they want things like the original windows code released to the public domain. If the source is never released it never falls into the public domain: you can copy the program forever, but you'll never really be able to look at it.
They're also into music and movies, and file trading, and all these things are impacted by long copyrights. Things like Google's "Scan every library in existence" scheme could be infinitely cooler if your search would bring you the full text of the actual book, and it could do that for a vast number of books if the copyrights were relaxed.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
First of all, it points out that what is optimal for one medium (writing) might not be optimal for another (photography), even if in this case it might be. Secondly, if you have an old photograph of your parents, grandparents, etc., that you want to copy, you shouldn't have to worry about tracking down copyright permissions.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The difference is that the rate of change is increasing beyond exponentially. It may be nice to be 'defining the theoretical basis for laws that will be enacted in twenty or fifty years' time. but the PC is barely 25 years old, mass internet usage is less than 10 years old and the ability to bulk copy and distribute media less than that. I'm not sure we have the time to wait 20 - 50 years to sort it out.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
hence the Ron Paul campaign.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
When it comes to "optimal," we have to consider more than just two parties, what the layman would call "the producer" and "the consumer." In an area as complex as content creation, copyright definitely harms more people than it helps. Many people will say that copyright helps "the producer," but in reality the monopoly of force that copyright provides helps the distributors more than the producer. It harms the consumer (prevents them from using their talents as they decide their time is worth), it harms other producers who also are restricted in how they can use their time most optimally as judged by themselves. It also hurts the original producer because many distribution markets are monopolized because of copyright.
Look at what Prince just did -- he disturbed the distribution monopoly's hold on music sales, and they're PO'd about it. Instead of hoping for sales for an album he knows is already online and in the hands of fans, he used the music he created as a "loss leader" to drive sales to a market he can control -- his own time. Instead of hoping to make millions on an album (which anyone can copy, using their own time, their own equipment), he can now make millions selling something unique -- HIS time in front of his fans.
Albums are quickly becoming marketing structures to get people to attend your live performances. Many new bands give away their music via MySpace and PureVolume in hopes of getting people to come to their shows -- where they make the actual dollars doing actual labor on an ongoing basis.
I'm an artist, and I produce some musical acts myself. I've convinced most, if not all, to tell their crowds to go and copy the album they buy at the show for friends, so that the band has a bigger pull the next time they're in town. My own brother's band, Maps & Atlases, is now doing that to great acclaim (MTV2, college radio, and a large tour pending) with hopes of making their money on beer cuts, T-shirt sales, etc. Copyright is useless to them. They won't sign a contract to the various labels chasing them unless they are allowed to distribute their music in any way they want (including Torrent, free MP3 on their sites, etc).
What is optimal is a market that a producer and a consumer can both dictate what terms they want for a transaction. If an item has the chance to be infinitely available, the cost drops to zero. CDs can theoretically be nearly-infinitely available today. The cost should be close to zero. The time an artists can serve their fans is not infinitely zero (at least not in a live performance, face to face). This is where money can, and should, be made. That is optimal for all.
We shouldn't simply assume that just because the author used math, (and we like his conclusion, ) that his conclusions are accurate.
1. The author built a mathematical model of the world.
2. Then he performed (presumably) valid math within that model.
3. But generally, all models simplify, often over-simplify, the thing they describe.
4. So even if all his math is valid, his results may be inaccurate.
We also can't simply ignore the fact that the objective function he was trying to maximize embodies a particular notion of what "good" is. But we know that the idea of "good" varies from person to person, even amongst Slashdot'ers, in major ways. So just because we like the fact that he used math, and we like his advocacy of shorter copyright, we maybe should seriously disagree with his conclusion of "about 14 years" being optimal.
Two completely facetious and irrelevant statements:
Wealth was generated for the companies involved in making, distributing, and showing the movies. Dismissing it as simply redistributed is silly. That's like complaining when someone says, "I made a chair," telling them, "No you didn't, you simply rearranged some wood, nails, and lacquer into the shape of a chair."
Technically, society would be just fine without all movies, books, music, and other forms of art, but it certainly wouldn't be better off. That's a baseless opinion that has absolutely no relevance at all. Unless you're arguing that copyright terms should be based on how good or bad a movie or other copyrighted work is, in which case, since the vast majority of the country happens to disagree with your assessment of these movies, I suppose the copyright for them should last pretty much indefinitely.
What was the point you were trying to make, anyway? I'm just curious.
Yeah, I know this was a joke, but I still need to point something out. This is talking about expiration of copyright, not trademark. So the animation "Steam boat Willy" would fall into the public domain, but the character "Mickey Mouse" would still be a Disney trademark, so nobody else could create new content with "Mickey Mouse" in it, or even a character that could easily be confused with Mickey Mouse. Therefore Walt's characters would still make be making money, as long as Disney keeps making new content, since that gets a new copyright protection.
http://www.mhall119.com
Actually, I have a proposal of my own that doesn't involve setting any numbers in stone.
Before I start, let me define the assumptions and problem, the way I see it. My problem isn't money. I'm perfectly OK with the creators receiving adequate compensation for their work. My problem is the fact that copyright is (intentionally or accidentally) used to bury some books or movies alive. Someone can buy the copyright to something just to stop more copies from being made, or in Disney's case to prevent some embarassing old cartoons from being seen. I'm sorry, but that was not the spirit of copyright law.
In other words, my purpose is to make sure that a work remains available to everyone, and doesn't effectively exit the culture. It shouldn't be possible to "unpublish" a work, and certainly not possible to use copyright law to that effect.
So my own idea of a "fair" proposal is to basically let everyone decide how long they want to keep selling it, for no more than the original price modified by inflation.
I'm not even putting any restrictions on the choice of medium, other than that it must be usable by the average person at the time. So a book could be on paper, or PDF, or scanned, or whatever they choose, as long as you can still buy it from the copyright holder. Music, well, it better not come on phonograph cylinders: digitize it to CD, or make an MP3 out of it, or whatever. Anything that a modern computer or home entertainment centre can play, really. Movies, ditto: if it only exists on some cinema reels, well, then it either should still be possible to buy cinema tickets to see it, or digitize it to MPEG/DVD/whatever. Etc.
Entirely reasonable restriction, I should think, since the purported purpose of copyright law is to encourage creating works for the use of the general public. If the general public can't use that work, then we're already outside that intended scope and effect.
But the keyword is: keep selling it. The moment something becomes unavailable for more than, say, 1 year, then it should immediately and irrevocably become public domain.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, it does:
Now, this is a different kettle of fish entirely:
What you're arguing in effect precludes any notion of objective truth, since every assertion is either an assumption or based on other things that are. And every person who argues anything at all has some personal biases. However this doesn't make his arguments empty or imply they must be biased by his personal preferences. This is a familiar position to me from arguing with my postmodernist friends. I'm not against postmodernism, Like Milton, I think any idea is healthy food for a strong and healthy mind. Yet I find that people exclusively educated in that style lack a certain respect for the value of data. And how we handle data is very important to whether we are being dispassionate or not.
This is one of the big problems with the modern media: it cannot distinguish balancing facts from balancing opinions. If they feature a evolutionary biologist, they "balance" that by presenting a creationist, as if their views were equally valid alternatives. In part this is driven by economics: weighing facts is much harder and slower than trotting out somebody who simply disagrees. We're talking about the difference between building something with legos and building them with raw stock and a machine shop.
The problem with strong emotions is that they narrow our ability to process information. In the grip of passions, we unconsciously filter out data which would alter our emotional state. When we're angry, we ignore data that would calm us and focus on data that makes us angrier. When we're fearful, we focus on data that scares us and disregard data that would make us feel safe.
So a dispassionate argument is not one that has no viewpoint; it is one that is impartial with the facts. It may discount certain facts and place greater significance on others, but it does so consciously with an identifiable justification. It is therefore negatable by negating its justifications and altering its selection of facts.
For that matter non-biased doesn't mean right either. It is quite possible to disagree with the conclusions of a dispassionate and unbiased argument, provided that you (a) have facts available to you that the person arguing does not or (b) disagree with explicit assumptions the person is working with.
Example: people who believe in intellectual property as a fundamental but alienable right (like most people consider the right to personal property) might well agree with every fact in this paper. But if they disagree with the assumption that copyright is about maximizing utility, the argument while valid, is wrong. It wouldn't matter if he showed that copyright terms of any age were automatically harmful to the public good because their assumptions is that the public good does not take precedence over individual property rights in any situation.
Now we all engage in wishful thinking, in which we can have our cake and eat it too. We can believe that rights are paramount, but that pursing individual rights always maximizes public utility. Or vice versa. But this is biased, passionate thinking. We have a powerful, unjustifiable and implicit axiom at work, which is that our preferred approach can give us everything we wish for. That is when we should be called out for bias.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> This Rufus Pollock has some good stuff on his site. I've only had about
:-), but I likewise expect that zero-length copyrights do not do much for the non-singer/songwriters (who did and do produce good work that might be worth some compensation beyond that day's wage).
> ten minutes to read over a few of these papers and I'm pretty impressed.
> Not only is it well written but it aligns heavily with the Slashdot
> community's interests.
I started to read the thesis, and found that he reasons from a vast set of hypotheses, all of which can only support his conclusions, and had no attempt at real-world testing. I was frankly expecting that he would have the arguments badly rebutted with "But surely, Socrates, it cannot be that [insert strawman argument here]" like Plato did, but he didn't even bother with that.
For a start, he assumes that the value of a copyright decreases as it becomes cheaper to copy. By this theory, song writers should receive NO copyright on any song that is simple enough that sheet music is not NECESSARY to learn it, or at least not beyond the point that the first person hums it after having heard it. You may agree - this was certainly the situation before the early 20th century, when non-classical music was usually learned by imitating others, ala Professor Henry Hill's Think Method, and lots of songs were created during that period - but I expect that the proposition is at least arguable.
Frankly, I doubt that "Forever minus one day" copyrights make sense (except for some "music" where I would also raise the license fees to billions per performance, to drive them from human memory; I expect we all have our own selections here
BTW, I suppose that if we can prove that someone really COULD memorize a copyrighted book and teach it to someone else orally, as in Fahrenheit 451, that he could claim zero worth for book copyrights, as well.
> Also interesting is that he conjectures that the burden of proof of ownership
> in intellectual property should be placed on those attempting to acquire the
> IP, not anyone else.
Conjectures. This has already been disposed with by the concept of Intellectual Property. I could conjecture that the burden of proof of ownership in material property (say, pieces of coin or currency) should be placed on the victims of my cunning burglaries, as well, but I doubt that anyone, either the police or even Rufus Pollock (if his home or apartment was burgled), would agree.
> He has a paper detailing a model where innovation occurs without intellectual
> property in an attempt to show that the assumption regarding IP's relationship
> to innovation is false.
And Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin had models that proposed that same things, and generalized the argument to all types of property, as well. This is why Western Europe fell before the vast onslaught of consumer goods produced by the superior Soviet and Warsaw Pact economies.
Perhaps this is true - the question which occurs to me is "how well does this chime with models from other economists?". If it was way out of wack with optimal predictions from other economists eminent in the field, then I'd say your supposition was right. If, on the other hand, the figures are of the same order (+/- 10 years) then I'd say your criticism isn't borne out by the facts, unless similar selection bias is evident in all economists considering copyright.
The papers that I've read on this subject (and Pollock's paper will take a bit of analysis on my part - not had time to do that yet) don't seem too far out of kilter. The consensus seems to be in the order of 7-40 years for copyright; which is way shorter than the life+{70,90} which most countries have in place. Some outriders have suggested getting rid of it, others that perpetual copyright is the only valid one. Those seem like extreme positions.
Certainly when the (UK Treasury commissioned) Gowers review concluded, (which, to be fair, concentrated on sound recordings, rather than copyright in general), the experts came up with the statement that the current 50 years should not be extended, and Gowers himself indicated that a good, evidence based, case could be made for reducing the copyright term.
So, in order to confirm or reject your hypothesis of predetermined result, I'd need to review both this paper and compare it with other papers in the subject. At first blush, I don't think your criticism is merited; but I concede I haven't looked at the paper in enough detail to say that definitively
--Ng
Okay, you suggest that the author of this work is massaging the equations and numbers to obtain the result he wants. You also point out some ways in which the paper is flawed: e.g. assuming single values for inputs rather than discussing the range of possibilities and error bars.
I agree with your criticisms, though not with your implication that he is massaging the numbers to get the results he wants. Regardless, I would like to point out something that, I think, is crucial about the approach he has taken: Because he expresses his logic and results in rigorous, mathematical form, it is possible for us to analyze and improve on them rationally.
Most debates in public policy are just rhetoric: trying to convince people by appeals to emotion and "common sense" (or contorted logic). There is no way to improve upon the debate other than to throw your own rhetoric into the mix. Here, we have a mathematical analysis. If you think there are flaws in the math, you can easily point them out. If you think he should have done an error analysis, you can do this error analysis. If you think graphing the range of possibilities is more fair, you can go ahead and do that. His work can be built upon, objectively criticized, and improved. This is less like rhetoric and now more like science.
So, far from being the "final word" on the optimal length on copyright, I view this as a step towards logical analysis (finally!). I hope that others pick upon on this work and come up with more reliable input numbers. That's how progress is made.
Yes, statistics can be contorted to "prove" alot of things. But the more rigorously and mathematically you frame your argument, the easier it is to point out mistakes and fallacies. I think this is a step in the right direction for this debate.
Having said all that, I will have to read it a few more times to determine whether I agree with the logic and math. However I think it would be premature to dismiss this without due consideration.
whey the feck is the public paying for it?
Look, art only has value because the public are willing to pay for it. That is all.
Now, copyrights are one method by which this payment can be assured. Not the only one.
However, copyrights are not only the method to ensure the public pays but also require the payment of the public to ensure it works (enfocement). Now if that isn't a small enough charge that everyone doesn't mind the charge, that's OK. But if it ISN'T to the benefit of the public, why doesn't the copyright owner pay for it? They can hire goons to protect their revenue stream and leave the police and courts for the important things that benefit the public instead. If it's done for MY benefit, then I will pay for the court time/police work/etc for copyright enforcement.
So you're wrong: if it isn't for the public benefit, then the private individuals should be paying for it. This isn't some sort of communist welfare state!
That's the problem with Slashdotters: they're more interested in attacking corporations than defeating bad ideas. Disney's not the problem: the law is.
Disney bribed Congress to alter the law multiple times, so Disney *is* the problem. The law is *also* the problem, but Disney is a large part of the cause of the bad law.
Ironically, longer copyright protection is arguably more valuable to the Free Software movement than it is to commercial software developers who publish their works in binary form. With a 14-year copyright length, for example, Windows NT 3.1 would soon enter the public domain, but since only binaries were published, free access to it would be of little value. In contrast, all of the GNU software from the same period was published in source form, and with the expiry of its copyright, would become free for commercial developers to use in closed source software.
I agree, an algorithm would be a superior tool to determine these things. However whenever money is involved, over enough time people find ways to corrupt the original intent to suit their needs. Even if the founders had specified the best way of determining copyright length, over the last 200 years copyright holders (having the most to gain and therefor putting in the most effort) would have found loopholes one way or another. Just like code you can start with a clear philosophy but if you let enough time pass the original logic just gets lost (see Microsoft for details). Sometimes you just have to start from scratch not because the old philosophy was wrong, but just because too many little changes have been made to it for it to resemble anything but a patchwork of solutions. That is copyright in the world today, a couple hundred years of little patches that have totally overtaken the original intent of copyright. Time to call the current system the old system and get to work on the new system.
"A plurality system inexorably pushes politicians towards the center, rather than the fringes."
Incorrect. A plurality system pushes politicians towards each other. If one party shifts right and is popular, the other party will shift right to catch up, which is what happens in the USA. Your Democrat party, in other countries, would be considered a fairly far right wing party.
The founding fathers also had the benefit of being the intellectual inheritors of the Enlightenment, as passed to them via a classical (i.e. well grounded in the liberal arts) education. They understood that Rhetoric was the art of speaking well, not like the dross that our 24/7/365 media spews out unceasingly today.
Which, by the way, is in line with the length of the lifetime granted to patents, an alternate form of intellectually property.
I have been saying for years that intellectual properties are similar enough that they should be treated equally. The lifetime of patents and copyrights should be equal. The extendability and transferability should also enjoy the same rules.
I am sick to death of seeing the technical works of scientists and engineers forced into the public domain only a decade after their invention while "artists" enjoy protection long after they're dead. The lifetime of a patent is often not sufficient to secure a profit for the inventor since often the invention is created long before its time. By the time other technologies have caught up to it so that it can be used effectively of cost-efficiently or before somebody has found the best purpose for the invention the patent has expired. Therefore the profit for the inventor is lost.
The only rationale I can see for the current system is that the technological properties are required for survival, or at least highly useful at improving quality of life, while the artistic properties typically improve the enjoyment of life. As a result the public mass demands, by vote, immediate access to the required intellectual properties and is less inclined to demand such access of the artistic items since they can live without them. That, or the artists/distributors are in the sweet spot where they make enough money to successfully fight for better protections while not presenting a product that the public unanimously demands and cannot survive with out, which would overwhelm any amount of money spent trying to legislate protection for it.
It's stupid the way science and its achievements are back-burnered and taken of advantage of in favor of artists, sports and celebrities.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.