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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."
That the founders of the United States were geniuses... or lucky bastards.
The optimum copyright period is decided by Disney.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
My daddy had a hit song on the radio, so I deserve to never work a day in my life!
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When formulating policy the key variable to consider should be social value, which is the sum of commercial value and user value, rather than commercial value alone (in economist's terminology: welfare rather than national income).
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When looking at the value of knowledge goods in general, and the public domain in particular, policy makers should take account of the value generated by complementary products and services.
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Historically, innovation policy, particularly in relation to intellectual property, is characterized by extensive rent-seeking activity and significant imbalances in power. It is important that this be taken into account in policy making, for example by the provision of a clear set of principles that could safeguard groups that are poorly represented (such as the general public). The public domain while very important to society tends to lack a concentrated set of stakeholders to defend it, compared, for example, to the copyright-based industries.
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For some of the categories of works currently covered by copyright, for example music, the introduction of open access along with some form of alternative compensation system promises to deliver significant gains both to creators and to consumers.
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Access and preservation of older copyrighted works is a significant problem and should be addressed. This could be done in several, potentially complementary ways, including: introduction of a registration requirement, orphan works provisions, and a reduction in copyright term.
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In areas such as open source software and technology standards the first principle should be "do no harm". In particular, it is imperative that policy makers maintain, and strengthen, the exclusion of software and business methods from patentability.
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Make public sector information open. This is one of the most direct, and straightforward actions governments can take in promoting the public domain, and it is one that the available evidence suggests will have large benefits both to industry and to the general public.
He also attempts to show through economic theory that "that a dominant firm may engage in considerable expenditure to maintain its position and the welfare consequences of so doing may be considerable.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.
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.
Very interesting stuff, to say the least, most of it quite logical which means, of course, that it will be completely ignored by politicians and policy makers.
My work here is dung.
...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.
Most books (not talking about the superstars here) are out of print within 3 years. Most publishers, maintain the copyright on the book until it is no longer in print (or something like that). Then the copyright reverts back to the original author. However most publishers won't admit it is no long in print for years and years after it is long gone.
Most authors have no problem with making copyright much shorter. I've heard values as low as 3 years, with 5 to 10 being the usual suggestion. It's only the Disney's and other superstars of the publishing world that want copyright longer then the normal human lifespan.
42 years!
They're not deciding anything, they're just following the good old nuclear fusion approach:
It's just twenty years away
The headline is misleading, there is no mathematics in the manuscript,only economics. If submitted to a mathematics journal in its current form the paper would be most likely rejected; however it is publishable in an economics journal. The style of the manuscript is not that of a mathematician but of an economist. The asumptions are not set in an axiomatic way and no theorems are formulasted or proven. He employs elementary mathematical techniques used by economists (optimizations, etc) which are closer to accounting than to real mathematics.
Although the process is slow, policy makers do eventually catch up with new realities. Or rather, they retire and die and are replaced by younger minds that think differently.
What we're looking at, IMO, is the transition of social, economic, and finally, political power from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution. People like Rufus are today defining the theoretical basis for laws that will be enacted in twenty or fifty years' time.
What is happening, broadly is that a new society is forming around the digitalisation of culture. This society is vast and now includes perhaps half the world's population (3bn SIM cards are in use globally). The new society drives new businesses like Google and Ebay, and in a decade, this digital economy will have become more important than the industrial economy. And at some stage the digital economy will reach for political power.
This happened before, in the industrial revolution, and at that time the old upper class - landowners - tried to stop the growth of the new industrial middle class with laws like the Corn Laws. They ultimately failed, and the urban middle class finally got the vote.
My prediction is that the digital revolution will culminate in a transfer of power from the old political / industrial elite (who are the ones that made today's copyright and patent laws) to a new elite that will create new models of property that suit it much better.
It is feasible to already implement 14-year copyright today, by private contract. E.g. this could be implemented in a GPL-style license. It may be that private legal systems like the GPL become the laws of tomorrow.
Rufus has done a brilliant work in turning the "more is better" dogma of IP upside down and giving us a tool to quantify exactly what is needed.
My blog
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?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
For example, let's take "Spiderman." Spiderman has been around a lot longer than 14 years, and recently Sony has made a ton of money for Marvel and its own investors with three hit movies. If Spiderman had already fallen into the public domain, those films might not have been made, and therefore that wealth not generated.
Wealth wasn't generated. It was redistributed.
Society would have been just fine without those movies.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I'd have to agree with this. A straight percentage rate wouldn't work too well - 5% of 0 is still 0, easy to pay.
Now a Flat fee of $1k/year to keep a movie* copyright free. Studios such as MGM would have to pay millions a year to keep their products under copyright, eventually the accountants would point out that OldMovies 1-100 aren't making $1k, there's no guarantee that they'd make $1k if released on DVD, so they let the copyright expire.
I'd have the fee vary, and go up over time. For example - $10/year for a book, for the second 20 years of copyright(the first 20 are free).
Note: All numbers are approximate.
*original audiovisual production in excess of 60 minutes, (by original I mean not just a tweaked remix)
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, but uncle Bob is a great man, he has made each and every Zim a multi million/billionare.
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
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.
This is nothing new. William Landes and Richard Posner (two U Chicago Law Professors) made almost the exact same claim in 2002. See it for yourself here: Indefinitely Renewable Copyright
Does modifying a work affect its copyright date? If I update a piece of software 7 years after I release it, would the copyright on the entire work be let up 7 years later? or would version 2 be considered a seperate work and be copyrighted for another 14 years with the first version falling out of protection halfway through that term? I worded that kind of crappily but you get the idea. Under this scheme would some of the older parts of Linux no longer be protected while the newer parts are protected?
Don't any of you get it? Infinite, retroactive copyright extension is the ONLY way to enrich our cultural heritage of creative works. If the rights-holding corporations like Disney ever lose control of their money-making "intellectual properties", then some day they are likely to go bankrupt (fiscally, that is). And when that happens in our bleak dystopian future, their angry stock-holders will seize a time machine, go back to the 1920s, and convince Walt to never create his characters in the first place, since it clearly won't be a worthwhile investment of his effort.
Sheesh, why do I have to spell this stuff out for you people? It's the only logical conclusion.
Actually, it looks to me like just a variation of the popular "have a pre-conceived result you want to reach, then massage logic and numbers to reach it." In this case, outright proposing "my formula says get rid of IP completely" (which he seems to be busy arguing the rest of the time) would have looked suspicious, while "hey, the original 14 year idea was right, let's go back to that" is something that's actually very easy to swallow. So let's massage the maths to support that.
I'm sorry, I'll
A) have trouble taking someone seriously as doing dispassionate objective maths when the rest of the time they're on a crusade against copyright and copyright extensions. It's akin to trusting a Sony fanboy to give you a scientific and dispassionate estimate as to which console is the best. But more importantly,
B) the data he feeds into those formulas is based on guessed numbers. E.g., for the rate of decay, depending on who you choose to believe, in his own paper the estimates range from 2% to 10%. He chooses 5% as the number to go with, but the important thing to realize is that it's just a guess. The accuracy of that number is remarkably low.
To give you an example of how inacurate that is: for something that decays by 2% per year, after 16 years you've lost only almost 28% of the original value. At 5%, after 16 years you've lost 56% of the original value. At 10% in 16 years you've lost 81% of the value. (I'm using 16 instead of 14 just because I'm too lazy to do more than press the X^2 button in xcalc 4 times. Should be enough for example purposes.) The effects being literally exponential, such a wild inaccuracy is multiplied incredibly. You can produce a wildly different "ideal number of years" by just choosing slightly different guessed numbers to input in those formulas.
C) I see nowhere a calculation of the error margins. As a corolary of B, what's more interesting for such a calculation with wildly guessed numbers isn't just one value reached with the most likely guess, but what is the _interval_ of plausible results. If you've fed data which could be anything between 2% and 10%, then what is the result for 2% and what is the result for 10%, for a start. Don't give me the result just for 5%. And that's just one of the values there.
Basically what I'm saying is that even if you trust the formulas to be correct, the insanely large intervals of believable values means you can get almost any number you want to get there, just by picking different guessed numbers. You can use the same formula to get any number between 2-3 years (if you chose to believe everything devalues extremely fast, and everything creates incredible value in derivative works) to well over 50 years (if you choose to go by the idea that even though some crap devalues faster, the most deserving protection are the masterworks that devalue very slowly.) Pick your own pre-conceived number in that range, and there's a valid set of guessed numbers that produces it.
Anyway, it's used all the time. E.g., if you work in most large corporations, you must have seen at least one (but more likely dozens) of baffling decisions that go somewhat like this:
How it's supposed to look from the outside: some manager (A) saw that problem X exists and is really a problem, (2) analyzed which products solved that problem, (3) made a list of features and performance characteristics, put them in numbers, and assigned them weights according to their importance in the actual case at hand, (4) dispassionately calculated the weighted score for all of them, and (5) the result happens to say that, objectively, product Y from supplier Z is the perfect choice.
What really happened: was that the manager had already decided that he wants product Y or just to buy something from company Z, for entirely other reasons. Often (but not always) he even had to scratch his head to figure out a problem X that fits that solution. At any rate, from there the analyzed features and their weights are juggled and massaged until product Y ends up on top. There you go, now the cold dispassionate numbers support it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
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.
They were neither geniuses or lucky bastards - they were thieves. That figure of 14 years in the Copyright Act of 1790 was most likely copied - no, STOLEN - from England's Statute of Anne, dating to 1709. What a blatant violation of intellectual property!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
Just use the NASCAR method.
They pay 5% of whatever they claim the value is.
However, anyone can purchase the property for that claimed value amount.
(in nascar races, if it is a $45k race, then the race can buy any car that competes in it for $45k.)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I would like to see something like a monotonically increasing (progressive) renewal/filing-fee every five years, where the first five years would cost $1, the second $10, the third $100, and so forth. To get 15 years (pretty close to 14), the cumulative cost is on $111 which most will agree isn't much money. To increase that to 30 years, three more chunks would cost $111,000, which would be more than the marginal value of almost all works. Another four renewals to bring it up 50 years is going to cost $1,111,000,000, which is absolutely insane. No work would be kept out of the public domain that long.
The advantage of this system is that the copyright owner has some choice as to how long to keep it protected/monopolized. If a work is profitable, then the owner can decided to invest in it and extend the copyright for a while. Due to the ever increasing cost, sooner or later extending the copyright will be a bad investment and then it goes into the public domain.
A pet peeve of mine is non-original ownership of copyrights. I can see where Walt Disney (the individual) wanted exclusive rights for his work with Mickey Mouse, but since he is dead, any new Mickey Mouse material is made by someone else. I don't see why the Walt Disney corporation should have any more rights than anyone else. I understand that companies might own the rights, but that should be to shelter/protect the individual creator so he can milk that cow a bit longer. But once anyone else gets involved in the creativity process, is should be fair game for everyone. Too bad that isn't how the modern world works.
- doug
which is the point of the article. That is, society as a whole was better off for Spiderman being made into a movie. Sony & Marvel, of course, got money. It is fairly clear that they feel that they are better off, since not only did they make a Spiderman movie, but then they made two more.
Now, you may say "well, for every dollar Sony got, Joe Public had to spend one", and that it really just balances out. But that is a fallacy. Joe Public saw that the price of a ticket was $10, or that you could rent it for $4, or buy it for $15, or whatever. Joe Public did so. And, although some people wish they hadn't, most people feel that they got some good out of seeing it, or owning a copy. When you buy a $10 movie ticket, you admit that you think you will be better off with $10 fewer and having seen the movie. Of course, you may be dissapointed, but judging by the number of people who went and saw the second and third movies, it looks like people got a bargain.
The article talks about this in economics terms: it's called surplus. If I am willing to buy something at a certain price, that is because I think it is more valuable to me than the money. The difference between what it actually costs and what I feel it is worth is the "consumer surplus". For some people, it is low. For a product of somewhat unknown quality, it may even end up being negative. But, for the most part, the surplus is positive. The "producer surplus" is similar, although you are probably familiar with it by a more mundane word: profit. These two surpluses are the only reason why people buy or sell anything: because both sides feel that they will be better off for making the transaction.
Now, this doesn't mean that society would have been better off if the original Spiderman copyrights had expired, and the movie wasn't made. Perhaps the combined surpluses would have been larger if we'd all gotten cheap copies of the old comic books. But, given that the movie was made, it *did* leave society better off.
Although, if Spiderman was public domain, Sony still could have made a Spiderman movie; they just wouldn't have had to pay Marvel as much. All other things the same, with lower costs they likely would have done a combination of lowering prices (to increase demand) and pocketing some of it. Which would have increased the wellbeing of *both* Sony and moviegoers.
Music makes a lot more money
Some mainstream music does. This or this does not.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.