Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.