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Ask Slashdot: What If Intellectual Property Expired After Five Years?
New submitter ancientt writes "As a thought experiment, what if the constitution of the U.S. was amended so that no idea (with exceptions only for government use, like currency) could be protected from copy or use beyond January 1, 2035 for more than a five-year period. After a five-year span, any patent, software license, copyright, software NDA or other intellectual property agreement would expire. (This is not an entirely new idea, but would have had significant recent ramifications if it had been enacted in the past.) Specific terms are up for debate, but in this experiment businesses must have time to try to adjust to sell services and make the services good enough to compete with other businesses offering the same basic products. Microsoft can sell a five-year-old variant of OSX, Apple can sell Windows 2030. Cars, computers and phones would, or at least could, still be made, but manufacturers would be free to use any technology more than five years old or license new technology for a five-year competitive edge. Movie, TV and book budgets would have to adjust to the potential five-year profit span, although staggered episode or chapter releases would be legal. Play 'What if' with me. What would be the downsides? What would be the upsides?"
Pharmaceuticals would still be in clinical trials when their patents would expire. How about we just focus on getting rid of bad patents that don't bring knowledge or insight to society?
Five-year-plan, eh? Why not? Might make progress come even quicker.
yep, copyright would work as intended.
you'd have more money for whatever.
you'd have less business as a media mogul just selling the same old crap again and again.
you could cover beatles songs for free.
you'd have much more easier time creating new music, new interpretations.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What happens is that the US is found to be massively in breach of international law and its treaty obligations.
Technology and media companies would quickly wither away and, consequently, science and art will die.
On patents:
All but the richest biggest incumbents would benefit
On copyright:
Large publishers and the copyright dinosaur industries would have to change for the better, society would benefit.
Some small companies and individuals would benefit massively from more freely being able to build upon the work of others.
Some small companies and individuals would suffer as large corporations would find new ways of screwing them over.
On trademarks:
It makes no sense to expire trademarks after 5 years. Society as a whole would suffer.
Whether this is a downside or an upside is up to you.....
I don't think 5 years is a long enough period for film development and recovery of costs. I do think 15-20 years, perhaps with a 10 year extension on payment of a fee would do it though.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Not very likely, since copyright on logos and trademarks would also expire, for example the Windows or Apple logo. Imagine that everyone would be able to create a 100% clone of any given product after 5 years! They should create categories instead. 10 years seems to be so much more reasonable.
Hope this five-year expiration includes anything GPL'd.
I think the time of the patent, software license, copyright, software NDA or other intellectual property should relate to it's "impact".
eg. Swipe to unlock. Length: About 10 secs. Hoverboard. Length: 10 years.
I would have suggested relating it to the cost of discovery, but there's some things that would not have cost much, but the impact would be huge. I'm sick of these "obvious" patents being awarded to companies, but make them last only a short period might reduce the companies from submitting silly patents.
like M$ sold windows xp for more than 5 years. should other companies also be allowed to sell the same os at the same time? doesn't seem right to me. perhaps if the current tech is no longer supported/updated. this also opens a large loophole for companies who will release a patch to whatever once a year just to say their updating it. personally, i don't believe in any intellectual rights and think patents are way way too long. none of its there to help or be nice to the people, like the stories we get from big govt. like for instance, music. if its good, people will buy it. if it isn't, they wont. you don't need some extra protection on it. if it sucks, it sucks and only 13 year olds will buy it. tho if it is good, people will buy it and for a long time. pink floyd, the beatles and greatful dead are all still making profits for the company.
sounds like a race to the bottom
You would have been able to use Windows legally without paying while it was still the "current" OS from Redmond.
As the sole owner of 3 patents, I do not mind if all my patents expire tomorrow
At that time I filed my patent for self-protection - not for profiting from the patents
You see, the world we live today is so fucked up, that if you invent something really brand new and you do not patent it, you just _might_ get sued !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The interesting thing about your thought experiment wouldn't be selling an existing product, but being able to implement some features into our own products without being afraid of stepping on just another patent.
But don't limit this move to a single nation or continent; try to make it global: the advancements in all areas would be great, and the majority of people would take great benefit. No holding back or artificial price inflation for much-needed medication, faster development cycles at less cost (less legal battles), musicians would be incentivized to keep coming up with new stuff (and performing live), and tech companies would concentrate on delivering solid products with great service.
The enterprises that are benefitting from the current system could adapt or take a nosedive, but I would like to think that over time a fair number of smaller companies will take their place.
But I'm afraid I getting carried away by my idealism.
Why 2035? Let's do it right now!
Trademarks are different/not limited in time in the same manner as copyright and patents, so the last point is irrelevant.
Indeed. Fully agree. It would not be without affect however I believe the affect is one that is more in lines with the wishes of the majority of the people. i.e. it would spread the overall opportunity across the width of the population instead of restricting it to only those that have the money to hit others over the head with law suites. This is the way things should be, the situation where we are now is only truely for the benefit of a society the coverts oliarchs. Unfortunately, whether this worked or not in the past the Internet has changed things so that the reach and efficiency of the oligarchs in terms of grabbing assetts to the detriment of the greater population has improved dramatically. Unless we do change along the lines of this suggestion we will simply reach a situation where the vast majority of the population will be much poorer than they've ever been before and a really smaller number of players will have massive wealth.
As would patent trolls...
But one could argue good riddance in both cases.
Publishers and other IP holders would flee the US in droves. Hollywood and Silicon Valley would cease to exist as world centres of filmmaking and software development, respectively. Without the obscenely long protection period afforded by current copyright and other IP laws, major publishers would no longer consider it profitable to arrange for their works to be produced in the US. They would instead move their operations to countries with IP laws favourable to their monopolies. Perhaps a better thought experiment would be if most or all countries cut their copyright and other IP terms simultaneously. If just one of them does it all that will do is hurt their competitiveness in the international IP market.
What if Spartacus had had a Piper Cub?
Caveat Utilitor
On patents:
All but the richest biggest incumbents would benefit
Are you sure about that? Small inventors license ideas to large companies all the time. In most industries, 5 years isn't that long of a time. The large companies could instead just wait until after the patent expires to implement the idea. Anyone licensing the idea would have a pretty short lead time over their competitors, and thus they'd be willing to pay much less for the license.
For some categories of intellectual property it makes sense, for others it would be a disaster. Trademarks and logos need to last at least as long as the product itself to protect consumers against counterfeits. Pharmaceutical patents probably need to remain at 20 years. As things stand, after a 7-year FDA approval the drug companies have only 13 years to recoup the 9-figure development costs. But for software copyright/patents it makes sense. In any case, most software is protected by keeping the source code secret.
Whether you live in USA or Europe or Asia or Timbuktu, them fuckers will sue you if they think they can get $$$ from you
Look at how many patent-related lawsuits that are filed in Japan, Korea, Europe, Singapore, if you do not trust me
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
IIRC, there was a study done which concluded that 14 years was the more or less optimum time period for most intellectual property as a protected monopoly and such. Assuming this is true, I would move the number to 10 years and place the property on a yearly auction/property tax. After which, the owner must declare a sale price, and pays a small proportional property tax for every year it is not sold. If it the property is crap it will be put in public domain forthwith by declaring $0 in value for year 11 (this is the default value at this year), which is obviously not taxed either. If the Intellectual property is $hiny the owner will declare a high value and hope noone buys the property, AND hope the guessed right so they can afford the yearly property tax. Refusing a valid would-be purchaser invokes serious penalties...use imagination here. Or Something like this. Which was derived from the sci-fi novel Leo Frankowski's A Boy And His Tank. http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671578502/0671578502.htm
...have had their intellectual property expire in less time than that, now they are just AI.
Okay, let's be a nasty person and game the system.
I've just had a new author come to me with pretty good kids book. Let's call her K L Moss. Her first book is well received but nothing special. A year later she comes back with book 2. That does significantly better. The first print run sells out immediately(I intentionally did a small one to minimise my risks). I then start a year long publicity campaign on books 1 & 2. Book 1 is now 3 years old.
By the time book 3 is ready I decide that it will first have a good year of publicity and excerpts published in small chunks to build up anticipation. Now I'm selling books as fast as I can print them.
By the time book 4 is ready copyright has expired on book 1. It's not really worth anyone else printing book 1 as its available on e-readers for free. No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4. I can negotiate Ms Moss down to almost nothing. I can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing.
Under such a short copyright term I can only see ways to screw over authors it sems to me that they will suffer more than the publishers. Also IMO you want profitable publishers so that they can afford to take a risk on new authors. If they become more risk averse that will be bad for authors and the public domain.
A much simpler first step would just to be to say that companies cannot own copyright only people. That copyright then expires on their death. Copyright is not transferable(although the royalties could be). That would then prevent the CEO/founder of the company owning all the copyright.
I say all this in the knowledge that my job is to produce copyrighted/secret code. Under the current system the company owns this code and will forever because they employed me to write it. However that code has a halflife of about 2 years because technology marches on and others innovate along with us. So producing something once will almost certainly not make you set for life. It's worth groking why Ms Moss effectively gets more protection in that regard than I do.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
And the studios all make huge blockbusters with $100M marketing budgets that require equally expensive CGI like The Avengers in attempts to recoup their costs quickly and prevent the fanboi film students from being able to create something comparable.
Good scripts -- written words -- plummet in value, because they are easily and inexpensively claimable in an anti-copyright climate.
No parent will ever send his child to school to study software development or any once-copyrightable craft, as the career return-on-investment for such courses of study also plummets. Development becomes a hobbyist's pursuit, liking novel-writing and animation.
And so the dumbing down of society accelerates under the guise of "freedom from copyright." Everybody is a "writer," everybody is an "artist," because the financial impetus for the genuinely talented writers and artists to pursue their craft, at great cost and sacrifice, is removed.
Nice Work, Unimaginative Under-Achievers! You Win!
They would be forced to adjust their business model to acheive their ROCI and any other measure they needed within their monopoly period.
Thus a trip to the moving would be $50/per seat rather than $10.
Windows 2030 would be $1K a pop.
(Not including inflation)
They would also put measures in place to make sure that the software stopped working completly at the end of their monopoly period.
Well.. it also means that after 5 years your photos are not your anymore. So please now image photos you made 5 years ago, they could be used in the anti-diarrhea commercial! Isn't this cool?
There is no question in anyone's mind that the way things are and the way they are expanding has created monstrously big "IP" industries. Monsanto, **AAs, Microsoft, Oracle, Big Pharma and on and on. And in each of these big cases, it is easily observed that these monsters harm the industries they are in at the expense of their competition and the public at large. And what enables this to happen and to grow are intellectual property laws.
Were there such a drastic change would these goliaths wither up and die? No. They would be weakened. The competition could more easily rise up and force the goliaths to compete rather than dominate. And in order for them to compete, they would actually have to spend more money on research and development in order to keep on top. It would, of course result in more employment for intellectual workers, something which has been in terrible decline in the US. But it would also mean the C-level would have to accept that these operational factors will eat into their bottom lines.
Oh, poor obesely-rich people... what ever shall they do with a less obscene amount of money?!
No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4.
Assuming for the moment that this is correct (which is doubtful), how is this different from the existing system? Once a publisher has the rights to a book, they are under no obligation to give them back if later books are more successful.
... and therefore free to use for any purpose without having to distribute the source.
Companies would work on obfuscation and security so that they could maintain a monopoly on their ideas for longer. Corporate espionage and counter-espionage would become far more important. More companies would compete to build the cheapest knockoff of the latest successful idea, instead of developing their own new ideas.
Fixed term across all industries is unreasonable. Instead I would suggest having patents awarded with industry specific time limits, but very short ones. Also, if you apply for a patent in a specific industry, the patent only protects you from commercial efforts in that industry sector. Add to this a ramp up cost. The first term is free. The second term costs $X, where X is industry specific. The third term costs 2x$X, and it keeps doubling from there. You can extend a patent as long as you want to, but the cost keeps doubling. If you have a product really worth protecting, it will be commercially viable to protect it for a few extra terms. If you've patented some bullshit idea even you can't profit from, then you won't pay the extension costs, and others can use it soon enough. Third scenario: you have something that's giving you a small edge, but it's not mind blowing (e.g. magnetic power ports on apple macs); the extension costs would become onerous very quickly...
12 years copyright protection with an option to extend to 24 by paying for the privelege should be plenty.
I saw the title and was already afraid of how the post was going to be worded. Within reading the first 2 sentences of this article, I was cringing.
If you can't express yourself properly, nobody will take you seriously, and you won't win any intellectual argument.
Let's reword the title: What if Exclusive Intellectual Property Control Expired After 5 Years?
See the change? Intellectual property (or IP as everyone calls it) has existed, exists, and will exist forever. The exclusive control (with a few exceptions) over reproduction, distribution, etc is a limited monopoly granted by copyright and patent law, where the exclusive control lasts for a finite time. The authority to do any of this is in the US Constitution, but only in the simplest of terms. In order to change it, for all intents and purposes, one needs only to get (or buy) legislation--not amending the constitution itself--to change the rules of the game.
And, even this monopoly is a modern creation. Historically, most of all the worlds best music, paintings, etc were produced under patronage, where a wealthy person would pay the creator (which might include letting the person live on his estate, etc) to make a work for him. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts
Now, on to the real reason of your article: What if this exclusive control period was reduced to 5 years.
I have looked at this for a long time, and I have come to some conclusions myself. Let me share my conclusions.
My personal opinion: Patents have never had their duration period expanded. They are still 20 years. Why? Patents benefit companies/corporations for the short term for the original purpose -- to prevent a competitor from 'stealing' the idea and mass-producing it, reducing your rewards -- in the short term, but it is in their interest to get access to the IP in the long term. So, it's "naturally" limited in that sense. If one company got all patents lengthened to 100 years, they wouldn't be able to use a competitor's ideas either for 100 years.
But copyright is another matter. In this case, it's publishers (today) against the consumer. There is no "natural" limitation in the sense that to a publisher, the consumer is just another lowest common denominator revenue target, and not a competitor (that they want to 'limit') nor a high-value content producer that they can exploit. Once you see this, you see how they try to get copyrights extended to 'one day short of forever' (can't remember which liberal congressman said that recently, but one did) so they can abuse/extend their monopoly against 'us' if you will, with the content they already control.
For copyrights, there is no 'natural' competition to keep the game honest. So, will your 5-year period ever happen? Not without a revolution.
Now, as to your 5-year period. It's too short. It takes 3-6 years to get a product, like a new car model or a new CPU architecture, or a new DRAM standard, etc into production and into the market. With a 5-year exclusive period, it could be over before a company can make any money on their 'creativity' and a competitor could steal their thunder quite easily. For copyright as well, it could take 2-5 years to produce a movie, and they lose control of it in the same time as it took to make it? That makes it too short, as it could dissuade creative people from even trying to write/produce content.
But, the current 120-150 years is a joke. The US founding fathers struck a good balance: An initial 14-year copyright term, with an optional 14 years if the author is still alive and deemed it 'worth it' to pay the fees to extend it once more for another 14 years.
Since most books only have a single printing, the first term is long enough to motivate people to 'produce', while it's short enough that if it doesn't work out as the author intended, then the public can extend the idea on their own. It's the porridge is too cold/hot problem. There has to be a bal
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The US-based companies can still enforce the copyright law of the rest of the world, in the rest of the world. And the rest of the world cannot enforce their copyright in the US.
No, not the waiting in line model. I mean that copyrights should be extendable in perpetuity as long as they are renewed by application every ten years or so by payment of a small fee. That way Disney can keep Mickey without locking up hundreds of thousands of other properties which should go into the public domain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Tech investors would not invest in new ventures because they couldn't defend the new IPR for a significant amount of time.
Tech investment takes a long time. There might be a year and more between investment rounds. By the time youve got through seed, first and second round funding there is usually very little to be realised by an entrepreneur. The "significant" paydays are third round funding, commercialisation and of course IPO. This is the carrot that gets most of us tech innovators out of bed in the morning. Remove the 17 year patent window and you essentially remove most of the carrot.
The problems isnt the duration of patents, its the the fact that they are being applied for and granted en masse with virtually no due diligence by the PTOs to big companies with large legal budgets and then being used as anticompetitive weapons in the marketplace.
Music is the one thing, I think could be best protected by not calling it I.P. at all.
Music and intangibles should have NO protection and should be shared by the world to prevent parasitic business models from becoming a disease to them.
For instance.musicians could actually make a living playing live and promoting themselves by givng away their music. Talented musicians who weren't writers would make money just playing anyones tunes. The shift towards rewarding talent rather than ownership would have the effect of allowing the cream to rise.
Bad music would go nowhere due to lack of interest, people gravitate towards good music. The current industry only markets music made by the malleable, cooperative, willing to lose everything for fame. A poor filter by any standard. It explains a lot about quality of mainstream music vs. what's available.
I'd don't know about other media, but music deserves no protection for the best outcome universally.
Perhaps there are other intangibles that should be purposefully unprotected. I suspect so. Ideas?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
What if laws were vetted as if a theory or hypothesis via the scientific method?
What if, instead of blindly applying a blanket of legal rules, hoping for the best while ignoring the possibility of failure, we tested laws such as these on smaller samples of the country to prove the hypothetical benefits?
What if the country were segmented into regions whereby people could examine these different legal statuses and vote with their feet?
Why, we could call the regions having differing states of law: "States"
What if, instead of relying on only law making bodies and ultimately upon pompous pontifications of the elite "supreme" ruling clas--er... court, we also had a law unmaking body which could call for re-testing of the theories to adjust to changing socio-economic realities via examination of real world evidence?
What if basic proven scientific methods were applied rationally to government?
I know, I know... rational thought and government, oil and water... yes... but WHAT IF?!
I mean, its not as if the human society of the World isn't already doing such an experiment using countries as the legal boundary regions. Letting states enforce their own civil laws would only accelerate the process of legal evolution. What if, instead of trying to force a single unproven set of rules upon the entire world, we let each country compete on socially beneficial rules and let the best laws win?
What if, indeed.
As long as the fee doubles at each renewal period and the renewal period is no more than five years, that sounds fine.
I think that it is essential to protect R&D investments, having said that, the huge amount of useless patents registered (specially in software) is polluting the whole system.
In my opinion, to make anybody decide if a patent is useful or not would create more trouble than good, but I think that there is a solution. This is my proposal.
After the 5th year, in order to extend a patent for one more year, an amount of money per year has to be paid. This amount should double each year but it should be small at the beginning. The growth is exponential so it imposes a time limit which can be regulated with the initial fee and maybe with the exponent (maybe instead of double each year just 1.9 or 2.1 times).
This would make companies with thousands of useless patents, to stop paying for them after 5 years but, if the expected return is high, it would allow the owner (e.g. to pharmaceutical companies) to hold on to the profitable patents for 10 more years. This should be fine tuned but when a company cannot make enough profit of a patent it should let it go, and maybe, some other company can use it in a way useful to society.
Companies can't own copyright, only people?
That would certainly be interesting. You would inevitably concentrate things like highly valuable corporate IP to a single person - and give all of that company's competitors serious motive to eliminate that person.
Imagine if Steve Jobs held copyright on all the crucial elements of iOS or OS X or whatever. Or if Larry Page was the copyright holder for all of Google's IP. Do you think Microsoft may have had him killed by now?
A blanket expiration of IP after five years would have a problem dealing with trade secrets. Do you give everyone the right to stroll into Coke and KFC's corporate HQs and demand their secret recipies? If so, how do you deal with them replying 'nope, we changed it 4 years ago' without making a lot of lawyers very, very rich?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
By the time book 4 is ready copyright has expired on book 1. It's not really worth anyone else printing book 1 as its available on e-readers for free. No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4. I can negotiate Ms Moss down to almost nothing. I can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing.
Except you are just making some illogical jump and base your entire argument on it. It makes absolutely no sense that no one would pay Ms Moss more than "almost nothing" for a pretty sure moneymaker.
The problem with copyright term, as I see it, is that it is being rigged not to benefit corporeal beings (authors) but rather their estates, heirs, assignees and other non-persons. 5 years is too short for a person, but it might be a reasonable term for a corporation. 75+ years is just.... insane.
Untransferrable copyrights look like a great idea at first glance, but unless you allow authors to grant some kind of exclusivity to a publisher, then publishers can't do any useful kind of deal with authors. If you do allow this, then authors and publishers will draw up an agreement to hand over all the functional bits of copyright that acts in every practical way like a copyright transfer.
As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Computer software products have a 5 year limit after it is released. If it's made public before release (outside the company employees) they have 2 years to release it and then 5 years of regular protection. In order to get the protection you must submit all source code and materials to make the product and after the 5 year period it's available for download from the Library of Congress or something. Full new versions of software products can be submitted for another 5 years protection but not patches and service packs..
People will have to innovate then in order to beat out the competition and keep raking in the cash instead of sitting on things forever and ever.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
For those pieces of intellectual property that are inherently hidden, you could expect that trade secrets would rise sharply. For example, the secret formula for Coke.
For IP like software, where you can see the code, I would also expect that companies would try to use technical means to lock you in, such as dongles. There may even be a rise in the need to buy signed software to run on a particular computer, a la xBox. Perhaps Apple or MS would require that you have an active Internet conenction had have continuous permission granted by a central server. Said permission being contingent on upon payment of a fee.
Even so, it may not be a bad idea.
No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4.
Except that happens all the time. TV shows switch channels, movie franchises switch studios, bands switch labels. The new guys don't get the back catalogues, but they seem to do pretty well out of it anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just so you know: ifs publisher lets a book go out of print, the copyright reverts to the author (usually).
Congratulations, you've just nominated someone, pretty much at random, to be the heir to the Shakespeare copyrights, and therefore owner of most of the planet's wealth.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Patents and copyrights are designed to encourage innovation. This is the key aspect of the patent and copyright laws that must not be forgotten. The inventor spends time and resources developing a product or idea. There are three phases of a patent or copyright that needs to be looked at separately; the development phase, the production phase, and opportunity for profits phase. Each of these would need to be protected separately depending on the duration of each phase, yet each phase has an effect on the others. An example would be pharmaceuticals. The development of the pharmaceutical may take tens of years to perfect, the time for production would be variable, and the opportunity for profit would depend on the number of patients (5+ years, variable, and variable). Software development would be years, non-existent, variable. Studio photography would be minutes, minutes, extremely limited while scenic photography would be days, minutes, and wide. Automobiles would be rated at years, years, and years.
What about copyrights that are profitable for decades (think the Mickey Mouse copyright)? How about copyrights that are profitable for short periods of time (think of the song I'm Too Sexy [or better yet do not think about it]). By voiding copyrights too soon entire businesses would be lost; yet holding on to them too long innovation is lost.
A solution could be an option to extend a patent or copyright with some incentive to not extend. One type of incentive would be to raise the extension fees (such doubling) or a mandatory licensing to a competitor.
Does public safety and health take precedence over patents and copyrights? If a new automobile design dramatically improves safety should its use be limited to the whim of the inventor? How about a pharmaceutical drug that could save millions of lives a year? Should it be restricted to only those who can pay?
Restricting or denying profits will have a negative effect on research and development; innovation stagnates. We are starting to see innovation stagnating with our current system. A balance needs to be formed.
Really? A lot of innovation comes from small and dynamic enterprises. I expect that big industry would just wait out the hardship of R&D and then reproduce finished produces after a five-year wait (relatively short in the scheme of many novel products), at a fraction of the cost and with the ability to distribute and mass market.
In some fields, it takes far longer for a product to make it to market, and for others, there should be a longer limit based on how copyright/patents apply. For example, copyright should last far longer than patent protections, because when you copy what others make almost exactly and for profit, the author of the original work SHOULD be entitled to a fair(to be discussed) percentage of the profits.
We really have two situations that make this whole area complicated. The first is copyright, where the cost to make the original, in terms of effort to write, then implement the original work will be far higher than the cost of duplication. For movies and books, getting the story right, flow of the story, character development, and then getting that story produced, either into printed form in books, or then casting and actually making of a movie is expensive in terms of time and manpower, not to mention money for research and other costs. Music will tend to be cheaper than movies, but the idea is the same, if you make something ORIGINAL, then it takes more effort to get it right than those who copy it. This is why the AUTHORS of original works should ALWAYS be entitled to some share of the profits of any derived works. I am not saying the so-called copyright holders/publishers here should automatically get a cut, I am saying the people who really earned it.
Then you have patents. Now, it can take a long time in some industries for an invention to make it from concept to finished product that is ready to sell. For the auto industry, it isn't uncommon for something to take five years just to make it out of initial testing phases into the original test vehicles due to testing issues(liability makes extra testing REQUIRED). Software patents in general are a rather silly idea, simply because so little is an original concept, and it is only a matter of time for people to just come up with the same idea themselves. A duplication of an existing idea but extended to another platform should be automatically be denied patent protection so we don't see "A jet engine that is used in a car would be different from one used in a plane" type of stupid patents. Or other things, like something you do with a mouse now being applied to a touch screen should be disallowed due to being obvious extensions of the same idea.
So, how long should a new "invention" be protected? It all depends on how long the invention would normally take to bring a product to market, and then multiply that by 3. If a book can take five years to bring to market(not everyone can write a full novel in only six months, for many, it takes years for their first book to be ready). For the auto industry, figure 7 years from invention to the product hitting a car that is for sale, so 21 years should apply there. For software PATENTS, if something is really original and new conceptually, give it 3 years from the time the product gets sold, or at most, 7 years.
Things like file systems, computer interfaces, and connection types should get only two years protection before they become open for use by others. None of this nonsense where FAT32 can't be used by others without a license for ages. Copyright is NOT the same as patents, and if a new ORIGINAL piece of code works with these things, that should be allowed quickly, but to copy the exact code should follow copyright.
Duplication vs. invention is the other side that so many people don't seem to grasp as the big problem here. It costs very very little to DUPLICATE the inventions of others. Copy a file or CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, and the cost is minimal. Now, what about taking a script for a movie, then hire new actors, get new music produced for the new movie, production costs, making the movie itself on whatever format....or even perform a song done by another artist or group. On some levels, the original writer/artist should get SOME compensation, but since you are doing your own production, the costs should be much less. For those who feel that music sh
The Berne Convention has over 160 members, so there really aren't that many countries that haven't ratified it. Plus, if you look at the countries that haven't (in gray), you'll notice that they're not exactly countries where we probably expect that jobs, data, and investment will flow. You know, places like Somalia, Western Sahara, Iran, and Afghanistan.
I think you're partially right that in the future, Berne members with less restrictive IP enforcement might benefit somewhat compared to us, but even for a place like China, those benefits are going to have to be greater than quite a lot of other downsides from the perspective of many Westerners. Leaving Berne has very negative consquences for countries - it's not only a WTO violation, meaning they can be sued by other WTO members and have trade sanctions applied against them, but it also means losing copyright protection for all your own authors' works abroad, etc. And it's extremely difficult to amend Berne.
Finally, while the US wasn't in Berne until 1989, there were specific reasons for this. In the meantime, we established our own copyright treaties, like the Universal Copyright Convention.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
When book 1 becomes free, anyone on the planet can read the author, before that only those willing to buy/pirate her works. Now the machine runs its self and more and more people find the authors works worth purchasing.
Look at Cory Doctorow
Intellectual property protects the creators of content/technology. Reducing the protection for and/or eliminating intellectual property shifts the balance of power from those that create content/technology to those that copy content/technology.
As any businessman will tell you, good business decisions are based upon getting a reasonable return on investment (ROI). If you cannot make a reasonable ROI for a particular activity, then you don't do it. Reducing the profitable life of content/technology means that less content/technology will be produced. Also, given the slow adoption of technology (i.e., it can take years from the germination of an idea to the actual wide-spread use of the technology embodying the idea), a 5 year term for patents would pretty much mean that R&D and new product development becomes an exercise in charity. You spend all the money and the Chinese (i.e., the best copiers in the world) get to profit from your charitable contribution.
I am amazed that many people on this blog seem to forget that most content/technology is created for the purpose of MAKING MONEY. Sure, there is always your altruistic few that do thing because they love to do it. If seen so many thoughts expressed on slashdot on how to reform the patent/copyright system. However, almost all of them are from the perspective of people wanting earlier access to the content/technology and very few of them are from the perspective of people who look to make money from content/technology.
Authors can, and do, change publishers midstream in a series.
In your example, publisher A decides to short change Ms. Moss on book 5. Ms. Moss moves to publisher B. Publisher B can print book 5 and beyond, and book 1. They get Ms. Moss to modify book 1 slight to make an "updated" version. They also add a "World of PooperLand" appendix which describes never before revealed details about the setting of the story. Finally, for a couple grand they hire an artist to make a set of illustrations for the book. They re-brand the entire thing and push it out the door 1 month before publishing book 5. Then, every year, on the dot, they publish updated versions of books 2-4 with the new illustrations and further insights into PooperLand. By the time they get to book 4, book 7 (the last of the series) is just about to be released and they make yet a new boxed set that includes an exclusive 1-month early version of book 7, for only $500.
Meanwhile publisher A is sitting on books 2-4 and can try to blackmail Ms. Moss by refusing to sell them, hoping the scare her back to the fold. But this just creates a demand for these books that publisher B can exploit every year. So instead, they simply sell as many as they can and when the copyright ends, try to flood the market with free stuff. But they can't hope to compete against publisher B because every true PooperFan (AKA "Brown Pants") knows that publisher A is in league with the devil.
No problem.
Disney can keep Mickey as a Trademark indefinitely now ..they are just stopping Mickey mouse cartoons going into public domain
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I'm glad you mention the back catalogues, from what i can gather they generally pay very very poorly:
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17408
And this is a guy who created, wrote, executive produced and owned the production company of a commercially successful show. I fear the average actor/author/writer would do much worse (than nothing).
Now when you negotiate the contract for your second project you'll probably do better, but the fact remains with very short copyright terms it is in the interest of the publisher to screw the author around. Perhaps then they will move on elsewhere, but with short copyright publicity and reputation gets all the more powerful. These things play into the hands of the big boys not the small guys.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Imagine all the lobbyists desending upon Congress to lobby that their industry should have "X" term and should pay "Y" amount.
Imagine all the lawyers fighting in court saying ... so my invention is not in software (which has Z term) but in mobile phones (which has Z+10 years).
What a cluster fcuk that would be.
Copyrights often involve works of pure creativity. Locking them up has no real negative effect on society, as no one else would really independently discover them, nor is industry/society dependent on them.
So I have no problem with "life of the author" copyrights. Or 50 years in case of the author death, so the heirs can have some benefit. But not life +50 or any other outrageous schemes. So Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit should have expired by now, but they would have provided more than ample opportunities for Tolkien to benefit throughout his entire life and his heirs some benefit afterwards.
Patents on the other hand, to often describe common sense solutions to industry problems, that could easily and independently arrived at. Blocking/locking down common solutions to common problems, drags down productivity of industry and society.
Lacking any real merit system, patents should be shortened because of this negative effect.
Best would be if patents were awarded on merit. No easy general/common sense application awarded at all. But that isn't going to happen.
An alternative approach is to limit the number of patents that the PTO can grant to something like 500 per month. Right now they are granting around 100,000 per month. Do we really have 100,000 new concepts a month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't think so. But those 100K patents a month generate huge income streams for the legal profession.
Limiting the number of patents granted makes them much more valuable and enforceable. They will also be of much high quality since they will be forced to find their way to the top of the application pile. If someone invents wormholes it will obviously receive a patent and gain full protection. For less novel ideas all of those patent lawyers can surround the PTO and fight to be one of the 500.
Now a company can choose. Submit a patent and join the giant fight to get it issued. Or ignore the whole mess and just respect the much smaller pool of patents being issued. Maybe ten of those 500 patents will be software patents. That is a manageable number of patents to read and respect. Sure the giant companies are going to end up with all of these patents. Fine, let them. They would get these patents in the current system too. It is a small price to pay for getting rid of 10M junk patents and the trolls associated with them.
I tried to partially cover that point: let's suppose all your companies IP was in the hands of one person, he is likely an older gent(CEO/founder), what happens when he dies? You'd lose much of the companies assets so you'd have to spread the IP around so that should he get hit by a bus then the entire company does not go with him.
Knowing it was such a high risk strategy they would not be able to do it for precisely the reasons you describe.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
It makes no sense for trademarks to expire at all. It would be like forcing corporations to change name after five years, in many cases brands (trademarks) are much better known and valuable than the actual names of the corporations behind them.
Start with the downside:
Inventors and corporations would have to work a lot harder to find that next new idea to get consumers to shell out their cash.
Corporations would still have a leg up on the individual idea hobbyist.
The economy would undergo a massive "adjustment" as corporations burn through their capital, and folks realized what that stock was really worth.
Copyrighted material would not be available to individual artists to fund their retirement, nor to pass on to next of kin.
Pharmaceuticals would be available in generic form much quicker.
Prolific artists (Remember Stephen King and all his pen names?) would hold back some of their work to release in a more steady stream rather than flooding the market (which may also be seen as an upside).
Now the upside:
Inventors and corporations would work a lot harder to find that next new idea to get consumers to shell out their cash.
Consumer cash would buy a lot more goods and entertainment that it currently does.
New ideas and advances would come along much more quickly, after everyone realized they'd been caught flat-footed.
Copyrighted material would experience it's comeback while people still remembered what it was - artists would live to see their own revivals.
Individual inventors would still have an uphill battle with heavy hitting corporations, but they'd at least stand a fighting chance.
Massive drop in patent lawsuits. Why spend billions fighting for something you'll only lose in a few more years anyway?
"Golden Parachutes" would pretty much disappear, as corporate boards realized their economy of scale just got fitted to a much smaller scale.
That's just my speculation. I'm not an economist, lawyer, or inventor, nor am I a patent holder.
Sorry, I have learned on slashdot to be brief, I should explain:
For a start off the publisher when they sign the deal for the first book would write in to the contract the rights to the rest of the series of those characters.
No problem, says the author on Book 4, I'll not call it book 4 of the adventures of Bert the Hypnotist. I'll call it a new series George the Sorcerer. However if she did this she would be sued for infringement of the original property.
So the only way she can move to a different publisher is to either get out of her original contract with the rights to carry on using the characters or to find herself a new audience and create a new world. All they have to do is not let her out of that contract under terms she likes and she finds herself in the situation where she is better making some money off the first publisher than moving on.
It's worth pointing out in this situation I'm alluding to here is the story of J. K Rowling and one of the many reasons Harry Potter was so successful. From what I have gathered the contract she originally signed was under far better terms than most first time authors manage. Not because she was successful at the time, just that she was patient, confident and to some extent lucky. This meant in subsequent books and negotiations she did even better still. Another author would almost certainly have been under much greater control from their publishers and the books and films would have suffered for this.
One of the reasons the HP films are arguably better than similar book to film translations (Eragon springs to mind, but there are many many other books that had excellent books and average at best films) is that the author retained creative control during the film making process. Without a strong negotiating position it's easy to image the HP films being much much worse; likewise her strong position meant books 4 onwards could be such massive volumes where an editor would have demanded more cutting for mood and pacing.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
How about you put some effort in yourself and create your own intellectual property instead of bitching and moaning about having to pay others for their efforts.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Selection Bias.
You are asking a group with a majority population which i against intellectual property. I think we all know what people are going to say.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Plus over the ensuing years the widely available (and dirt cheap) copies of book 1 (and later 2-4) will swell the # of people eager for book 5+. Meanwhile the author can hold book 5 hostage while writing other works in the meantime, or self publish.
This is more or less the Pirate party policy. Limit the time copyright can apply.
When it comes to books, movies, songs, and software; practically all sales occure in the first year. Five years out, sales are practically zero.
But the MAFFIAA wants the copyrights to last so they sue people.
What if I got home and Felicia Day was just finishing up tying Alyson Hannigan to my bed? What if that? What if? Play with me!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You want the government to be able to interfere with and nullify private contracts, too?
Liberty in your lifetime
As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!
Oh, I don't know. It would go a long way towards finally ridding the world of rap.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
there should be some kind of abandonware rule so stuff does not end up lost.
Here is the clause in the constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
yep, copyright would work as intended.
you'd have more money for whatever.
you'd have less business as a media mogul just selling the same old crap again and again.
you could cover beatles songs for free.
you'd have much more easier time creating new music, new interpretations.
Laffo. There's nothing holding anyone back under the current system for creating new music.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
That's too much, why don't we end it right now and finish all this nightmare?
One downside I could see is that authors wouldn't be able to get movie deals for their book series. Let's take Harry Potter as an example. The first book was released on June 30, 1997. This means that JK Rowling would have had until June 30, 2002 to get the first film made. The first film was actually released in 2001, which means that the deal to make it was likely struck in 1999. If the movie studios had the opportunity to just make Harry Potter without having to pay JK Rowling anything, they likely would have waited the three extra years. Perhaps there would be some incentive to sign with her to be the first one out, but then any studio would be able to release their own version a few years later.
Of course, I'm not a fan of the 90+ year copyrights we currently have. I actually think that the system we had at the founding of our country was just fine with one small tweak. You get 14 years of copyright protection for your works automatically (that's the small tweak, no initial registration required). Then, after 14 years, you get to renew it for another 14 years for a reasonable price. (A movie company would have been unlikely to tell JK Rowling that they'd rather wait until 2025 to make the first Harry Potter movie.)
This would generate revenue, allow works to pass into the public domain (thus spurring creative endeavors based off of those works), and allow orphaned works or non-revenue generating works to pass into the public domain quicker.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years? You can own land properties indefinitely. A writer authors a book -- why can't he control its rights indefinitely? Why does the law force creative/intellectual property into the public domain after a certain number of years?
I agree that patents should expire after 20 years, otherwise they will halt progress of other innovations that depend on them, but copyrights are different. Having infinite copyright won't impede progress of competitors.
I have a fair idea what would happen with respect to patents.
1. Corporate research would be crushed. There would be no financial reason to develop a new product in many fields because the average time to commercialize a new invention is 5-7 years in US industry.
2. Commercially funded medical R&D would be DONE because the regulatory lead time is more than 5 years.
3. Nobody would patent anything. The fundamental contract behind patenting is the exchange of disclosure of a new invention for a limited term monopoly. With a term of 5 years there is no practical incentive to reveal your invention. Instead it will be kept secret as long as possible.
4. Consumers would be deluged with all sorts of contractual requirements when purchasing technology. You think software licensing is bad? Be prepared for a license on EVERYTHING you purchase. Even a loaf of bread.
Lets reduce patent life to 20 years fixed with no extensions. When the inevitable happens via either a challenge or enforcement lawsuit ... make the results all or nothing. By that, if ANY of the claims of the patent are found to be invalid, then the entire patent is immediately terminated. On a challenge, each side would pay their own legal bills, while on an enforcement loser pays the bills.
Let's name the community worth issues, government should protect:
1) Inventor's investments into invention (plus RATIONAL success fee) should be protected against "stealing" by simple copying of the published results.
2) Any third person's right to benefit from the already invented knowledges for RATIONAL price should be protected.
3) Protective over-pricing intended to counteract ad 2) above should be suppressed.
4) The parallel development expenses should be protected for both companies, provided they act independently on each other, however such a parallelism should be minimised wherever possible (except of necessary scientific confirmations, studies validations etc,)
As such, any invention registrant (formerly patent applicant) should provide: the list of publications, what re-use should be covered by this protection model AND the expenses declaration for the given development. In each subsequent year he must declare incomes generated by the given invention. The extent covered should be the reuse of the published information, not the "roof-like I-do-patent-any-invention-itself"; newly the simple arrangement model SHOULD be protected (like publishing "use application A's output to feed application B and the device C can be remotely controled then" even if A, B and C are already invented or commercially available parts).
Now (let's say on each year start) we can calculate simple value: <invention's worth> = <initial investment> * <government declared coefficient (e.g. subject to same political decisions and different branch categories as taxes do)> - sum_of(<declared incomes from the given invention for all previous years and from all persons, even from usage (formerly patent fee)>). Then ANYBODY should be LEGALLY ALLOWED to use any registered invention, provided, he pays fee computed as proportional part of business, so <fee> = <this person's yearly incomes related to the invention> / <inventor's yearly incomes related to the invention> * <invention's worth>/ 5 (This 5 here stands for 5 years for invention expenses payout. We can put any rational number here in final version, IMHO anything between 5-20 will do.)
The last thing we have to deal with are free services, which obviously would declare zero incomes, but still reduce the inventor's market. Here I would set some "minimal obligatory income" for this declaration, based on the produced items/copies/etc. count, where each unit should be bottom-limited by the <minimal price publicly offered by the inventor in the last year> * <another government declared coefficient>. This last government set coefficient could even easily be set fixed in the law, IMHO anything between 0.5-0.75 would do. This last free services protection should be limited to no more than 10 years, 5 years preferably. If there is no inventor's offering or the offered units were not sold at all ( we could refine this limit above exact none sold, to some rational minimal sales proving no-nonsens price, in the final version) this limitation is lifted completely for the next year.
In this case, no explicit time-limitation needs to be set while still we have fully transparent, non-subjective (i.e. non-bribeable) processes and inventions will become public as fast as their development get covered.
Final note: This model does not cover ad 4) above which was included in the list in the sake of completeness. Other than copyright/patent mechanisms are already enacted to cover this in various countries and I thing proper care and evidence from the government side and clear rules settings would work.
"Interesting times to you..." (One of the most feared black magic curses.)
In the USA there already is the concept of personal fair use, which is distinctively different from fair use for educational purposes (aka what a bona fide instructor can share with their students to illustrate a point in the curriculum), which is furthermore very different from legitimate public fair use as applied to excerpts from copyrighted works such as in a movie review or scholarly articles about themes in copyrighted works, and all that is still very different from parody.
The assumption being made with fair use is that items which have a long period of copyright protection will have ways for the general public to be able to use the content in various ways in spite of the copyright protection. It is the trade-off that copyright holders get for their protection,. If anything, a much shorter copyright term would invalidate many of the issues with fair use as there would be a notion to wait until the copyright expired before you can manipulate, remix, or do anything with the copyrighted material. A longer copyright term in fact encourages more concepts like fair use and more grey areas of "copyright infringement".
At the moment, and contrary to what people like the MPAA, RIAA, ASCAP, and other similar groups would have you think, you are permitted in America and countries with similar systems of fair use/fair dealing to be able to copy and duplicate copyrighted works for your own personal use... usually to make a "backup copy" or to transfer content from one medium to another (from a DVD to your laptop or MP3 player). When I see places like Wal-Mart advertising they will provide a digital transfer service to do this ... for a fee it makes my stomach flip as it is something you shouldn't need to do for any fee at all. You can't make a copy and give it to a friend (that is distribution of the copyrighted content), but as long as it stays with you personally it isn't a problem at all. Sharing that content with a roommate, spouse, or close immediate family member is debatable but generally isn't seen as a public performance (such as watching a DVD in your house) or other violation of personal fair use.
A similar kind of notion also applies to patents BTW, where you are permitted to perform "research experiments" on patented ideas and even try to implement concepts based upon the information in the patent application. You can't sell or distribute those items based upon those patented concepts but you certainly check out how they work, study the concepts in detail, and even write up a study or publish an article about what you discovered with the device or show off the device to a classroom full of students.
Bringing up the issues of fair use is a valid point to make though and in the large discussion of limited "intellectual property" terms I think it is justifiable to discuss what role fair use applies in shorter or longer terms. In a copyright term that is effectively forever, fair use becomes extremely strong to the point that I would dare argue that copyright even becomes meaningless.
Basically I agree except 5 years is too short for someone to make a profit from their idea. I think about 25 years would be best. The current situation about copyright is a scandal. However trademarks are not an idea, they are an identity that can be developed and should only expire due to no longer being defended by the trademark holder - and I'd include things like Harry Potter as being a trademark. So after 25 years a Harry potter book would lose copyright, but other people could still not automatically write new Harry Potter books and one could even sell use of the name.
thou discernest my thoughts from afar
Eliminating exclusivity after 5 years* would be better than the current system.
However, royalties should still be paid on something like the current schedule - about "1 generation" for patents and about "1 lifetime" for copyrights.
The royalty system should work on some kind of "mandatory licensing" system similar to how some music royalties work, where the fee is based on the type of the protected product (e.g. specialized screw) and the use of the infringing product (e.g. fastener in a consumer device), not the strength of the lawyers of the company that control the patent.
I would keep trademarks and trade secrets like they are now: Perpetual protection as long as certain requirements are made.
I would allow certain exceptions to allow limited-edition physical artwork to exist, such as not allowing reproductions that were so confusingly similar to the original that a buyer would think he was buying the original painting, or so confusingly similar to a limited edition print that a buyer thought he was buying a print of that edition. But after 5 years, electronic editions, prints on other materials, prints on other sizes other than those of the limited editions, and other copies could be made without the artist being able to stop it. The artist or his assignee would collect royalties of course.
I would also allow for exceptions when a copyright owner is willing to surrender all future profits in exchange for exclusivity for the remainder of the copyright or patent term. I call this the "Song of the South" exemption, because it's likely that Disney would gladly surrender any future profits on this film to maintain control of it so it could only be shown in educational settings and not used by racists to promote racism.
But as for Disney's habit of re-releasing classic films once every "child generation" - about every 7 years - sorry, that practice would come to an end.
*As stated in the original article, "Specific terms are up for debate." 5 years seems way too short for most entertainment and artwork, and even for long-market-life patents and copyrights that protect utilitarian items like technical manuals, software, blueprints, and the like. I would favor something like 5 years of the product not being on the market AND 1 full year of no serious attempts to bring it back to the market and keep it on the market, or 20 years, whichever came later, before mandatory licensing kicked in.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... Would not make as much money. That includes me, a small-time indie game developer. I draw all of my own sprites with a $75 drawing tablet and Photoshop, write my own code, make my own music with Reason and a small 2-octave-big USB keyboard, and record/make my own sound effects.
And I make a little money to supplement my day job income.
Your proposal would make all of the content that I spend my weekends and vacation days creating absolutely worthless to myself after 5 years.
That is the obvious answer to your question. I suppose my attitude makes me selfish. And I would see no point in creating anymore content under your system. And I'm sure many content creators would feel the same.
The supreme court has made it clear that we went from "one man, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". I do not see that changing any time soon either.
While it is tempting to imagine being able to make such changes, since it would never ever EVER pass, what is the point of the exercise?
There are too many things that we *could* possibly fix with a focused effort, why waste time and energy with something that simply will not happen?
Consumers would simply wait five years so they can get the work for free. A tiny portion of the public with disposable income would pay for the new work within the five year period. The market for copyrighted works would collapse because creators and publishers would not be able to pay their bills anymore. The authors would start compensating for the reduced profit by reducing the time and quality of their works.
In other words, the copyright system would be destroyed, the creators, publishers and consumers of the copyrighted works would suffer.
We don't want that, thank you. Many are tired of crappy art derived from the original source.
I think what people are struggling to understand is: What the hell this has to do with the 5yr copyright idea? You wrote your comment as if the situation would only exist under the new (short) copyright regime. The situation you are describing, having rights suborned by an exclusive contract that goes beyond copyright, exists now. It has nothing to do with the topic.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!
It would mean less rappers -- I'm not seeing a downside here.
If you agree with that, then you wouldn't mind if your car and house became public property after 12 years of ownership protection.
There's a strawman argument if I ever saw one - cars and houses, unlike copyrights, are tangible assets that cannot be copied or redistributed. You're comparing apples to staplers here - the two have no relation whatsoever.
You can own land properties indefinitely.
No, you can't - someday, you'll die.
Of course, in the US at least, you never actually own "your" land. If you don't believe me, try not paying your property taxes for a few years and see what happens.
Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years?
Probably because of the obvious fact that no person will live an infinite life, so giving something a copyright life that's longer than that of its creator just seems kind of silly.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So under this plan, as soon as any of those releases hit 5 years old, they are free? How will I ever continue to sell new product to fund development? If the five year old version is "good enough" no one will see any reason to buy the latest version. So innovation stops. My motivation to invest in new products stops. My motivation to scrape every last dollar out of you for the five year period goes through the roof.
What's more, assuming I can stay in business with my drastically reduced cash flow, is I am now motivated to slowly roll out features. Instead of releasing a version that fixes 10 bugs or adds 10 features, I should roll out 2 this year, 2 next year, etc. in order to maximize the longevity of my IP.
My motivation for quality is gone too. Why should I worry about shipping bug free software? It's clearly better to release shitty software and then roll out updates.
If you like getting mass produced, high quality software this is a bad bad idea.
There was once a "can't loose, this time its different, the world has changed" event called the Holland Bulb bubble.
It ended poorly for them, patents and copyrights will end poorly for the world.
In the final analysis to criminalize thinking destablizes or distorts perceptions of reality.
Only two outcomes from attempting to distort reality:
A. Rude awakening, you find yourself in a world in which the fiction is someday ignored, or .. well historically there have been no alternatives.
B.
Probability is the majority of the world already ignores patents, and the internet and the documentation will distribute and drive a subculture of innovation. They have become a "right to sue" federal grant and have nothing to do with their original intended purpose in a small out of the way country isolated from the rest of the world at the end of the 18th Century. They are a kind of proxy for a world government when they cross license and attempt to set up similar federal grants in foreign countries.. they become the Universal Euro. They are the ultimate credit swap derivative. And I think we have a lot of recent experience with those.
I think it is unlikely anyone will unwind this credit default swap, the odds are stacked against it. Civilization will get on with the business of business and life. Investors in companies that inflate their values with patent and copyright portfolios will experience rapid deflation or uncertainty then lose a lot of real money.
Probably sooner than later.
What if you made copyright expire every year, and made it renewable for a dollar? Say what you will about ICANN, but the domain naming system that's in place works remarkably well. Why not apply the same general principle to copyright? You could have companies become accredited copyright registrars, and sell value added services like POD publishing, or legal services. The government would make a lot more money because they're not charging anywhere near a dollar per year for copyrights right now, and if you could renew your copyright indefinitely... Mickey Mouse could live forever. And that's really what the whole copyright system is about, isn't it? Mickey Mouse and Superman? I say, let them have it. It's not worth tying up the whole culture for a couple of key commercial works.
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Since Americans are in a global market, all countries would have to pass the same amendment to their constitutions. Otherwise, protectionist countries would have a free ride incorporating American technology.
Other consequences: corporations would scramble to come up with patent and copyright revisions every 5 years. You would see a proliferation of versions of products.
The USPTO right now has tons of people knocking at their door trying to get in to become examiners.... Go read on various IP blogs and you will find all sorts of stories about it, though at the moment the office is giving preference to those with IP experience.
The pay is pretty good actually, people start at 50-80k with 1-2 years out of school (and are eligble for up to two promotions within their first year up to gs-11), and make 100k before bonuses and overtime within 3-5 years depending on what paygrade they were hired at. You get paid overtime (up to 50 hours every two weeks if authorized, up to a max of 155k a year) , flextime etc. Its pretty easy to go on several month long vacations each year if you want by simply working hours in advance. You get 13 days of vacation to start, 20 after 3 years and 26 after 15 years. The flexible work schedules enable you to basically set your own hours, you could work one week straight for 12 hours a day and not need to show up the next week. You could do the same thing the next biweek and work all your hours the secondweek, congrats now you have a 2 week vacation!
Plus after two years you can work from home anywhere in the continental 48 states. There is a new office opening in detroit in july and potentially other regional offices as well. So you can make a DC wage and live somewhere cheap if you really want.
If you had waited another year or two, you would have been eligible for the 10k a year for 4 year signing bonuses that they were offering.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
in 2003 there was telecommuting (they started in 1997), it was just for trademark examiners and a small patent examiner pilot.
As of 2012 more than half of the examiners are either telecomutting 1 day a week or working from home full time (about 1/3rd or more of all examiners hotel). There are examiners working from home in hawaii, cali, texas, etc.
You need to be a gs-12 patent examiner with 2 years in the office to work form home fulltime. Telework might be less time, but im not sure.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
"Society" as a whole would "suffer" because Bayer doesn't get sole use of the word aspirin in a drug context? Are you kidding? Where the heck did that come from?
Of the three, trademarks are the most obvious sop to big corporations. There's no way they are really expected to support and reward innovation, and they don't help the little guy as copyrights help the individual author.
why can't copyright be infinite years? You can own land properties indefinitely.
Because IP is not land. You don't have less of it if you share. Land ownership was introduced to mitigate "the tragedy of the commons" - i.e. for common good. Land was not inherently private, and in some countries most of the land is still public: you can go for a walk in the forest - any forest - without "trespassing". With IP we have the opposite phenomenon - making it public IS the common good.
Because then books will be more like proprietary software -- once it is no longer profitable to the owner it gets ditched, so NOBODY can have it.
Infinite copyright would be culturally robbing the nation and the world. "Want to be literate - go work the salt mines to buy yourself a few books to read." Now compare this to the situation in Russia or China (probably the only places safe from US copyright dictatorship), where there is no IP rights and anyone who desires to learn has all the doors open. Suddenly, most our intellectual jobs flow overseas, or taken by work visa holders, while more and more Americans shifted to grocery checkouts and security guards. (Yes, there are other factors involved, but the pattern is present.)
Unfortunately, infinite copyright is what we have today in the USA. As soon as Micki Mouse approaches expiration it gets extended by another 20 years.
Any consumer who cares so little about it that he is willing to wait five years to get something for free is just as likely to download it illegally before that.
Publishers can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. Once they get put in their rightful place and stop demanding your kingdom and first-born, creators will actually be able to keep their heads above water.
So copyright exists to discourage derived works? That is news to me. And what was your sacred "original source" derived from? There is nothing new under the sun. True, there are good derivations and bad derivations, but to claim that good art only happens when you put someone in a box to come up with something totally new makes you look like an idiot.
There would be no incentive to invest effort into writing books, making movies, or inventing technologies because the period of the copyright or patent would be too short to recover costs.
Going to a life + 20 for copyright of books, films, sound recordings, music, essays, poems, and the like, a 17 year patent on most mechanical devices, drugs, and other material improvments, but a 5-year patent on software and business processes, THAT might make sense. What might make more sense would be to limit software and business process patents - and indeed all patents - to truly innovative, non-obvious inventions, or to eliminate software and business patents altogether because the industries move too fast for anything but submarine patents. But the assumption that because 5 years is plenty of time to recover costs and make a tiny profit out of a software "patent," it is enough time for a copyright is wishful thinking by the libertardian freetard set who want to get their free music, movies and TV shows and don't care about the economic damage that such a broad-based "reform" would cause.
Now that book 1 is free, it provides great free publicity for book 5. If you try to negotiate her down to nothing, the author can self-publish book 5 on ereaders and make a killing. Sure, you can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing, but you're spending the cost to print the book, and then unless you're giving the printed book away for free, trying to sell something that is easily available for free.
I disagree, although I can see why you think that. I am trying to come up with ways in which this change would worsen the situation that currently exists. It's not about absolute as such. But take it to a further extreme if copyright was 20 minutes then the only way to make money would be through distribution channels. The Amazon's and iTunes of this would would be the ones to profit and Authors would see nothing. That is the limit of the scenario I have been trying to propose.
Getting back to the original point I was trying, (clearly unsuccessfully), to make. Reducing copyright to a strong degree such as suggested would for me weaken authors rights to the point where the individual author would have next to zero power whereas the publishing company would have all the power. If you like we can ignore book deal contracts focus on the basic relationship. I am starting from the assumption that the publishing company will screw over the authors as best they can. Let's take the scenario where we have an author who is becoming gradually more successful but never really hits the big time. So less of a J K Rowling, more of a Harry Turtledove; Jean Auel, Michael Swanwick etc. In today's world it often takes several books before an author can become successful enough to spend their full time writing. With such short copyright terms their income will have already started to dry up from the first books by the time they sit down to write subsequent ones and negotiate the new contract with the new publisher. They will be more desperate to get a _slightly_ better deal than if they had at least some income from their previous work. With a copyright term that was closer to their writing career then the publisher would be less inclined to play games with holding back distribution to mean they got more of the money. Given that now the life of a writer is not a glamorous one, (I know for a fact even fairly famous writers like Jonathan Stroud earn less than an average engineer like myself), this is not a time to be weakening authors' rights.
I am also assuming that there is a bell curve of quality of author and one of the main jobs of a publisher is to market and grade the books on that curve for me.
A publisher however adds many things to the creative process. They will provide feedback on style, typography, pacing, themes and actually help many new writers produce a decent piece of work and find their style. It's understated how the editorial input they provide often helps. They also provide the publicity and distribution chain which is not to be underestimated.
Now you say once an Author has fame they have all the power in the deal. I'm a fan of Ian Banks so the next book he writes I'll just get from Amazon and whoever he publishes under he'll still get my money regardless. True, once I have my preferred authors I'm laughing, but there's maybe 1/2 dozen of them, but (slashdot brevity here) everything else I read is determined by recommendations from others which are very easy to skew with correct marketing. Whether you get your recommendations from friends or internet forums or hanging around in a bookshop it's the actions of the publisher, not the author (more brevity) that have a direct effect on your choice of whether to buy that book.
When the power to make a book popular or not rests with the publisher then they already have too much power in the money equation and changes to copyright law need to target that, not the author themselves.
Now a lot of this argument rests on the information I have come across that your average author is not a billionaire but at best an averagely well off person. Your average TV celebrity certainly seems to be orders of magnitude richer (which I think is very wrong) so until I find out otherwise I will argue against anything that reduces authors rights during their working lifetime. (actually that said I'd be happy with 25 year copyright, but this is one of those shades of grey things).
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
The intention of IP is to encourage NEW works to be created, not to enable people to get cheap stuff. If the 'intention' was to allow cheap stuff and derivative works there would not be IP laws, because the default state absent those laws is cheap stuff and derivatives.
If you have IP laws preventing you from simply using someone else's stuff you must create your own new stuff. That is the purpose of them.
"Having infinite copyright won't impede progress of competitors."
HA! Even without infinite copyright, the MPAA and RIAA were able to impede progress of competitors for quite some time. Heck, that only changed when the distribution methods customers desired changed - when people started wanting to use the internet to watch and listen to things rather than movie theaters, the radio, stores, etc. The MPAA and RIAA still reign over those and try their damnedest to control the internet as well.
I always thought that copyright law should be changed so it expires after a small number of years - like it did originally when our country was young: i.e. 14 years. However, copyright holders should be able to renew their copyright for an indefinite number of times at an exponentially increasing renewal fee.
So the 1st time that a copyright has to be renewed, the fee is pretty small: i.e. $1000. But after each time the copyright needs to get renewed, the fee is exponentially increased. (Maybe it increases by 20X) So at some point, it is too expensive for an individual/company to renew the copyright and the copyright goes into public domain. But while the copyright is being renewed, the US government is making money which helps to reduce how much tax needs to be collected from the rest of us.
Any existing copyright (i.e. Mickey Mouse) would have a renewal fee based on the year it was originally created, so the fee would start out larger than the 1st renewal fee.
As the original submitter suggested, there should be a transition period so copyright holders can transition to this new system.
You couldn't be more wrong if you think a car and a book have no similarities:
The main difference between a car and a book is the car requires more tangible raw materials and higher manufacturing cost than a book. So, except for the last manufacturing stage, both books and cars are kinda similar. When 3D printers evolve to the next level, you will be able to print your own car.
Well, what I mean is, the land won't become public property upon death of the owner. It will be transferred to the owner's children, grand children, great grand children and so on, until it is finally sold for a nice profit. Whereas, with creative property, the govt and the public seize it after a few decades.
Make it 10 or 20, and I can't see much legitimate reason for arguing against it. That's long enough to get decent compensation from an investment, but not long enough that you can sit on your butt for a lifetime and not bother to innovate. It's also short enough at the 10-year mark that you can still say to a troll "Fine, we'll wait it out until expiry", and use that threat as a tool to get a fairer deal for licensing.
Everyone seems to be concerned with copyrights expiring too quickly, but the US is bound by the Berne Convention to respect the copyrights of other signatories from that convention (i.e. 164 other countries). As such, even if we shortened the length of our own copyrights, there's nothing stopping someone from filing a copyright in the U.K., Japan, Germany, or elsewhere and having it last for essentially as long as it lasts currently. And since we'd have to respect it still, nothing would really change. If most of the developed world switched to this five-year model, you can bet that some smaller nation would become a copyright registration haven for the world.
As for trademarks, they don't currently expire after a time, and with good reason. They expire if they are not defended adequately, which is how they should be. We don't need knock-off products using the actual logos of real companies becoming legitimized.
Patents...a blanket five years is too short for some classes of ideas, just as the current term is too long. As has been pointed out, in medicine, you'd still be in clinical trials at the end of five years, so it doesn't work there. If someone came up with a new engine for a car, five years is short enough that the auto manufacturers could easily just wait the person out and then take the new engine once the patent expires. In the digital age, you'd be giving the little guy five years to raise funding, create a company to market the idea, and execute on it before the big players came in and stomped him, which is a tall order.
NDAs and software licenses are not a form of intellectual property as the summary suggests, but are private contracts and should have terms set within, rather than being government regulated. For instance, I had to sign an NDA to work at my current employer since we do a lot of custom software and have access to sensitive systems, as well as have information regarding unannounced products and the like. If "software NDAs" (whatever those are) expired after five years, the NDA that I signed when I first started at the company would be in force for five years on the project I initially started on, but might only be in force for a week or two if I start on a project at the end of the five year term. That's rather arbitrary and nonsensical. You'd just be forcing people to re-sign NDAs on a regular basis to keep them from talking about things. And why would you only be doing this for "software NDAs" rather than for all NDAs? Similarly, if you're going down this road, why stop at software licenses? Why not just expire all forms of license after five years? It makes about as much sense and wouldn't be as arbitrary.
The current system is too complex. You drop IP in the US, and all companies will scatter like rats leaving a sinking ship, off to other countries where their hard work will be protected.
If you approached it carefully, you could phase in something similar, over time, if you include other reforms like a lower corp. tax rate, less regulation, etc.
Even so, 5 years is too short. Some development cycles are longer than that. Profits need to be realized on inventions, and 5 years isn't long enough for ROI... Maybe start by saying all IP will be expire in 40 years. After 40 years, the time will be shortened to 30 years. After 30 years the time will be shortened to 20 years. And after that 20 years is up, the time will be shortened to 10 years, and will never go below 10 years. So, in 100 years, you will have a new system where the IP holder retains all rights for 10 years *after* the product is placed on the market. Thereafter, the IP expires and becomes public domain.
Of course, the devil is in the details.
You miss the point others have. My own fault for trying to be (relatively) brief.
In the world painted above, publishers would either lock authors into an abusive contract or the only thing that would matter is publicity.
Now in printed books (which I hope will never go away) short term copyright encourages publishers to sit on the rights and control the whole supply chain. All the money handed over at the counter goes to the publisher in that situation not the author. You may get 1/2 a dozen or so big names (Tom Clancy and the like) that make money this way and a thousand one hit wonders, but it would discourage career authors who write dozens of books that are kind of successful. Anne McCaffrey springs to mind as someone with a long successful career but was never a millionaire(that I'm aware of from my limited investigations into this). With short copyrights would she have been able to afford to write like she did?
In e-books it's a weird situation. Novel writing becomes like blogging except that to read a blog post is a small investment, to read a novel is a big one. Again publicity and public opinion matter.
If it is possible to make such a mint from self publishing why aren't we saying more authors first gain fame through e-books rather than through normal channels?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
The biggest needed fix in the copyright world is for abandoned works, which are under copyright, but the copyright holder no longer exists or has morphed into some new form. It's illegal, technically, to trade copies of Borland's Turbo C 1.0 or Turbo Pascal 4.0 from 1987 - essentially making historical research illegal. Borland sort of still exists, but has morphed into a new company that doesn't know their former software even existed. Also the same is true of WordPerfect, where it's illegal to share 4.0/4.1 or 5.1. There's still some entity that owns WP, but these historical versions are impossible to get. Many music recordings are under copyright, like b-sides, but will never be released again.
There needs to be some sort of registration database of copyright holders. If no response is made to inquiries about the copyrighted work, it reverts to the public domain. If anyone wants the copyright, and it has any value, they can respond to the inquiries with how to purchase or otherwise get the copyrighted work.
Once an artist's work passes into the public domain, the publishing company has no hold on the artist. There is no reason why the publisher would magically have more hold over the starving artist at book 5 than they had at book 1. The artist, OTOH, has 4 previous books under their belt, with a track record of growing sales figures to show rival publishers.
Again, I fail to see how shortening the term of copyright makes this situation worse. All you've shown is that the current copyright industry, in every form it takes, is completely fucking evil. That's not an argument for protecting that industry.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Their patents don't START until their trials are over. Dipshit.
PS how many different tunes on a theme of viagra do we need?
It would still be wrong to claim you can own a person. In the same way, 5 minutes, or 5 centuries, IP is an illegitimate legal fiction created by the state and enforced by violence. Wrong idea, but I'd be retarded not to support it. More freedom is more freedom.
What would be the downside? You are kidding, right? How about total collapse of the United States? See, we've sold off all of our manufacturing -- our ability to actually make things -- to countries like China. We do nothing now but produce IP and consume. The only reason IP has any value at all is because our laws say it does. The moment those laws are cleared, or the rest of the world decides not to respect them anymore, we're fucked.
what if the constitution of the U.S. was amended so that no idea (with exceptions only for government use, like currency)
Copying currency doesn't violate copyright laws; it violates counterfeit laws. IP laws have nothing to do with it. Further, the government shouldn't have an exception on IP. In fact, anything the government develops with should be in the public domain by definition.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"what if the constitution of the U.S. was amended so that no idea (with exceptions only for government use, like currency) could be protected from copy or use beyond January 1, 2035 for more than a five-year period."
R&D would dry up and we would have to resort to stealing from other countries.
You seem to accept the notion that pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to patent any medicine they develop. I don't.
It is morally conflictory to make a profit, solely off of the improvement of someone elses health. Charge fair market price for development, production, delivery, business overhead, and 5% extra for continued growth. That would be fair to all parties involved. The fact that the Insurance industry has any say in what we pay for drugs at the counter, is why I'm flat out against giving the pharmaceutical industry any kind of leeway when it comes to how they should run their business. They should be as far from a free market system, as any in existence.
The problem with eliminating exclusive copyright rights is always pretty much the same - it might affect consumers positively in a very slight manner but it would affect the distribution of "stuff" in a huge way. All of a sudden, the biggest distributor - the one with the most cash and fattest pipeline to the consumer - wins because they can distribute EVERYTHING. They no longer need to compensate anyone else so all the money is theirs. Also, it ceases to matter if they are paying for the creation of stuff or not - they get to distribute it.
Now, delaying this boon to WalMart or Sony by five years might seem to be significant, but it isn't really. Simply what happens is the big distributor (because it would sort out quickly to be just one) is promoting five-year-old stuff. Anything new gets short shrift because the revenue picture is so distorted - 100% to the distributor for old stuff, 50% (or less) to the distributor for new stuff. The effect would be that you would have to hunt far and wide for "new" stuff but the old stuff being far more valuable would be right there in front of you.
Think about Amazon not having to pay anyone for five-year-old books but having to pay 70-90% of their revenue out for new stuff. What do you think would happen?
If the idea is to make WalMart, Sony or maybe Amazon rich, this is a great idea. If the idea is to free consumers from restrictions on redistribution, this isn't so great.
See also all the money made by celebrities endorsing products.
If it is possible to make such a mint from self publishing why aren't we saying more authors first gain fame through e-books rather than through normal channels?
Well, part of the reason is that authors that are making a mint through self publishing are just sticking to self-publishing - which includes both ebooks and printed books, btw, as It's quite easy to self-publish a printed book too. If publishers are approaching them and saying "hey, we know you're making quite a bit of money and are quite popular, so do you want to sign a contract with us that means you will get less from each book than you are currently getting?" there's little incentive to say yes. Why mess with success? All signing with a publisher does is get you into brick-and-mortar stores, which are dying. So then, those high-selling authors aren't mentioned in the New York Times, on TV, don't get a big display at bookstores etc. so if those are your only methods of seeing authors, you don't see them.
Another part of it is that a lot of the bestselling authors are career authors that already gained a huge following through their publisher (either before self-publishing was a viable option, or because a publisher happened to find them early in their career) and either see no reason to switch (why mess with success) or are against self-publishing for whatever reason (in their minds their way is the only right way, usually).
But we are seeing SOME bestsellers that first gained fame through ebooks or other e-writing, and I expect that amount will grow as time goes on - self-publishing being a way to gain fame is quite new.
In e-books it's a weird situation. Novel writing becomes like blogging
No, it does not. It's always quite different than blogging, no matter if you print it out when you're done, send it to someone else to print, or never print it at all.
What if all patents fell under FRAND or RAND-Z type rules? Yes you can patent, yes you can charge a nominal fee, but everyone can license. You get your cut, but don't hold back innovation, in fact it should inspire people to use existing ideas and improve them without fear of being sued.
Commercially speaking, it is very much like land. Both have a high net value attached to it. Both can be rented out or leased for a profit. Except IP and other copyrighted material can only be rented out for a limited period.
Common good is all good as long as it does not encroach on the good of the individual. Thanks to land ownership, people live separately in their own houses with their family, isolated and insulated from unfriendly common people.
You bet it's good for the consumers -- they pay less or nothing. The creators of the IP get shafted off their rightly earned profits. This discourages creators from investing more time and money into creating more goods.
Yeah, because spending 10-50 dollars a month on books or other copyrighted media is too much a burden for the common man and will send him to the poor house.
You can take BSD code into a propriatory product without releasing the source too! You can also take it into a GPL product without releasing the BSD source!
The artist, OTOH, has 4 previous books under their belt, with a track record of growing sales figures to show rival publishers.
Agreed but since I don't seem to be communicating very well let me try a different tack and try a different scenario:
2 authors come to a publisher with equally good books. One has 5 years of copyright, one has 10 years. Which one over the next decade do you think will make the most money?
Now given two assumptions/beliefs on my part:
1) most authors are comfortable but not well off.*
2) There is a severe shortage of good writing. (good authors are hard to find and if we go into the world of TV/film then they are gold dust - how many people's complaints about most modern films come down to problems with the script for example)
With those two givens then I would say that at the moment your average writer is underpaid.
Would you at least agree that shorter copyright terms would make this situation worse and make more authors underpaid and therefore reduce the amount of quality work that our civilisation produces?
* I think this is evidenced by the fact that it is actors, directors and TV presenters that we see with the flash cars, lavish parties and drug binges not the authors. When was the last time you heard a story about Terry Pratchett being locked up for his anti-social behaviour?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
By the time book 4 is ready copyright has expired on book 1. It's not really worth anyone else printing book 1 as its available on e-readers for free. No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4. I can negotiate Ms Moss down to almost nothing. I can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing.
First, I am not sure that Ms Moss could not find a decent deal for her next book. She has shown a track record of bringing in money. Surely some publishers could find a way to make money off a successful author's next book.
Second, the publishing industry is changing, and this sounds like it may hasten that change. More self-publishing opportunities will emerge. Advertising will be much more social - people will get book ideas from trusted review and recommendation sites rather than expensive glossy advertising in magazine and on TV (note: I don't actually know if that advertising exists still since I don't read magazines or watch TV :-) )
Third, the short copyright period makes Ms. Moss need to create more fantastic works to keep her royalty checks coming in, thus enriching the culture with her memorizing stories, inspiring new authors to pursue writing stories of their own. Granted - this will result in a glut of crap flooding into the market but that will result in more opportunities for people to create curated lists of recommended books (see point #2 above).
Looks like a nice future to me.
How would the 5 years effect source code? Would this allow people to just use Linux 2.4 or what ever is 5+ years old and sell things without having to show their new source? I would foresee a forking of code coming if ip expired after 5 years.
Authors usually transfer the entire copyright for their work to the publisher in return for a (usually very small) fee for each book sold, so I don't think your thought experiment shows what it is supposed show. Yes, there are exceptions but the norm is that you have to give away your copyright entirely in order to get a decent publisher who does some marketing.
But in the world painted, why on earth would authors enter into an abusive contract?
The same reasons many bands enter into an abusive contracts with large record companies.
It's quite easy to self-publish a printed book too
not if the publisher had editorial input into the original book.
No, it does not. It's always quite different than blogging
I was meaning economically and socially. Okay I self publish a novel. How do I get word out? Same way as I get word of a blog out. Spread it amongst my friends. Try and link to it in relevant forums. Rely on the website I published it through to publicise it however they do that. You're trying to spread mostly through word of mouth and through making a good first impression probably in the first 30 seconds or so of someone reading it.
Economically what I'm seeing from self publishing is many either following the amazon style self publish route (which I see as little different to the big publisher route in this context) or trying to get publicity through giving away extracts and then getting them to pay for the whole thing. I don't see that as too different to the blog route where you're all about ad hits and possibly merchandise. Which is all about producing something that stands out and is micro attention-span based, as opposed to most novels which rely on building a world and building characters which takes time and a different level of commitment.
Now if you can get self publish to work without publicity or catering to short attention span then I'm fascinated how, but I stand by you either need to get people invested in it up front (which means publicity) which is the dead tree publisher method or you need to grab people's attention fast and for free then build from there which is the blogging method.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Commercially speaking, it is very much like land. Both have a high net value attached to it. Both can be rented out or leased for a profit. Except IP and other copyrighted material can only be rented out for a limited period.
IP "can only be rented out for a limited period"? On what planet? Everything you said is an MPAA's wet dream, fortunately we are not quite there yet.
Thanks to land ownership, people live separately in their own houses
House not equals land. If the land is common, I can have MY house on common land, and even have MY backyard. People lived in houses before land ownership laws existed. The argument behind "tragedy of the commons" has nothing to do with houses or personal security, look it up.
This discourages creators from investing more time and money into creating more goods.
True, but if the creations are perpetually locked up from humanity (as you suggest) then we can get by without "creators" as well.
10-50 dollars a month on books... is too much a burden for the common man...
And this is my point exactly. Who is this "common man" you are speaking about? Son of upper-middle class parents, like yourself? A dude who works in the salt mines? Well, I DID NOT have 10-50$ a month until I turned 19, and I doubt my parents could provide that, yet I am more educated than an average American. You effectively want to shut off children from poor families from knowledge, where they already have the biggest disadvantage. Meanwhile, some very famous people came from poverty, and even YOUR children (the rich dude who pretends to be a common man) will greatly benefit from access to knowledge when not restricted by "10-50$ a month" or whatever it is your are willing to spend on them, because in the information age, the knowledge is dirt cheap when not restricted by US laws: "oh but it is just like land ownership only better because I can make bazillion copies and get rich."
You don't get it: when I purchase a copyrighted book, I still own the copy that I purchased, and am free to do with it as I wish, save for making more copies of the book and selling them for profit; see First Sale doctrine. A car or house is the same: it doesn't matter whether the design and implementation processes can be copyrighted, I still own the car and house by virute of paying for them, and am allowed to do what I wish with them short of making copies.
To avoid a lengthy session of screaming at a wall - I don't think that word means what you think it means.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The smaller companies would pay the author, publish the works, the larger ones would wait them out for 5 years, and then re-publish the works as a "delux" edition.
On trademarks:
It makes no sense to expire trademarks after 5 years. Society as a whole would suffer.
I know I would suffer if I couldn't be sure I was eating a genuine McDonald's hamburger or not.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
What you are missing is once a publisher has the manuscript, why publish the book immediately? Copyright on the manuscript runs out in a few years and they can then publish the book without paying the author anything at all.
It would create a situation where old stuff is vastly more valuable to distributors than new stuff. Anything old they get 100% of the revenue on whereas with anything less than 5 years old they have to split it - even considering the cut authors get is pretty small.
The same reasons many bands enter into an abusive contracts with large record companies.
Well music is a bit different, because of the radio. With music, the radio is a big place to find out about new music, people usually only buy music after hearing and liking it, and you pretty much can't get on the radio without signing with a large record company. With books the big places are Amazon and barnesandnobile.com; and with those, a self-published book can be right along side a book by a big publisher, and there's equal chance for a potential customer to discover them.
With music there's also the RIAA's mafia-esque and monopoly-esque tactics, but those are failing, and would fail much faster if copyright only lasted 5 years. You're combining the real world with the imagined world, though.
I was meaning economically and socially. Okay I self publish a novel. How do I get word out? Same way as I get word of a blog out. Spread it amongst my friends. Try and link to it in relevant forums. Rely on the website I published it through to publicise it however they do that.
So what you meant to say is that novel marketing becomes like blog marketing, not writing. But even then. you're totally wrong. That's not really how you do it with a novel, and if you're talking about professional/career (i.e. money-making) blogging, then that's not even the correct way to do it with blogging. That's how you would spread around a personal blog, but you're not going to make much - if any - money that way.
Now if you can get self publish to work without publicity or catering to short attention span
I'm not saying there is none of this involved, but what counts as publicity and how to take advantage of the short attention span are a little different than traditional publishers do these, and that's not all there is to it.
or you need to grab people's attention fast and for free then build from there which is the blogging method.
You sound like you have been reading those "get rich blogging" bs type of things... that isn't quite the blogging method, and no, that's not what self-publishers rely on either.
Ok, let's forget that last time I was in a bookstore there were two entire shelfs only for public domain works. No, you'll never find Plato's Republic or Iliad for sale.
Let me see. You have an author with 3 books that everybody already loved, that everybody and their dog have already read at least one of this books (since it is available for free on any e-reader) offering you a new book... And you'll refuse it?!? I bet you won't stay for long on business.
That's the idea. You and anybody else, also don't forget that it comes for free on any e-reader. You won't make a ton of money that way (but can make some money).
Rethinking email
No, you'll never find Plato's Republic or Iliad for sale.
everybody and their dog have already read at least one of this books
You and anybody else, also don't forget that it comes for free on any e-reader.
So in other words the author makes no money. However what little money there is to be made is made by the publisher. I thought the point of copyright was to encourage the creation of artistic works by providing a limited set of protections. If the Author can't make money then the author is very unlikely to create new ones. What we want is a scheme that rewards the author but limits what the large corporations can make off it.
Look don't get me wrong I buy the argument that Star wars should be out of copyright by now, George Lucas, J K Rowling, Gene Roddenbury have been more than compensated by society for their work and it's time that society could be enriched further by the right to play with their creations that are now a part of our culture. However for all those millionaires I'm concerned about the guy who's struggling along on his 5th novel barely making a living and hoping to make it big with the next one. The harder you make it for him to survive the less chance our society has of chucking up the next JK. This is a bad thing.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Except that most new authors' first books, assuming they write them in their spare time while doing another job, takes at least a couple of years to write, and I've been working on my trilogy (which had to be written in its entirety before the first book was published because of the complex relationship between the books) since 2001. I'm not done yet.
What this means is that the average new author will spend years of his or her life writing with no possibility of making any money. I don't care how much free publicity you get from it. You still won't have an income stream, and without that income stream, you'll never be able to free yourself from your actual job in order to spend the amount of time it takes to write at a reasonable speed, unless you just get exceptionally lucky and a professional publishing house decides to take a chance on a proposal before the book is written. (They won't, though, because there will be no incentive to pay authors when there is so much recently written public domain content that they can publish, knowing that the odds of another publisher randomly picking the same work is minimal.)
Also, no author would ever get paid for his work when big movie studios decide they want to make a movie of a well-known author's book. The book would be out of copyright, so they would have no obligation to pay for the right to create a derivative work. This means that authors would have to make all of their money from book sales (difficult even with long copyrights), donations/charity, or from doing something else to make an actual living. In short, a five-year-IP model is tantamount to indentured servitude for the actual content creators because anyone with an actual job loses any real opportunity to get out from under the thumb of abusive corporate contracts.
What this model fails to consider is that there is a huge difference between the ability of an individual and a corporation to monetize a work, and an even bigger difference between the speed at which different types of media can usefully be monetized. Works that take years to create tend to take years to pay back their creators. Five years is simply absurd unless your goal is to encourage everyone to stop creating works that are more than about a page or two long. If you want to live in a world where no movies exist that are longer than YouTube videos, and no books exist because they have been replaced by blog posts, feel free to create your own pseudo-utopian copyright-free zone, but count me out.
The original 28 years from the date of first publication (as opposed to five years from its creation) was a good length for copyright. It ensured that after about a generation, material fell out of copyright so that new generations of people could create interesting derivative works. It ensured that things fell out of copyright before people forgot about them. However, it also ensured that most books that might become movies would do so long before the copyright expired (with the obvious exception of Lord of the Rings, which took twice that long, but which was made long enough after the author's death to make the issue largely moot, IMO). It ensured that people who spent years working on something could realistically break even. And so on. But five years? Way, way, way too short.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Ever heard of a will?
What about the GPL? that could make it completely useless
Think about if the Harry Potter series were the books in your example. After 3 books, would Tor have taken over publishing the remaining books even if they only had exclusive printing rights for the remaining books for the first 5 years? Heck yeah. After Rowling and her work was well known, you wouldn't need to be able to print the previous editions to make a huge profit. The hard work was all done in the first 2 books. Once she has her name, everything else she did, at least with the Potter name attached was a guaranteed success. How many Potter sets were sold before book 7 was out? How many fans that had read books 1-4 bought extra copies of those books when they bought 5, 6 & 7?
Besides, at that point, books 1-4 are the entry point in getting new readers up to speed so they can read book 5. Even if you aren't making a full $7 sale on a paperback, it's still worth it to print and sell a $4 copy to allow new readers to get up to speed so they can read book 7 when it's ready to come out.
If sales of most books drop to a few thousand a year after a few years, the publisher has no incentive to continue printing that books, and the author isn't making anything more anyway.
If you limit the book copyright, are some potential sales going to be lost? Sure, but the point of copyright is to give the author and his representative, the publisher, a premium price for a limited time to justify the effort of creating the book in the first place, and hopefully enough profit to fund and encourage the production of the next one or two. This doesn't have to be a long term permanent thing guarantee to get the job done.
The siblings have covered a lot of the issues with your suggestion. Wikipedia's page on philosophy of copyright might be informative as well. Other common arguments include the tragedy of the anticommons (having rightsholders for everything means doing anything new requires negotiating with too many different rightsholders) and the general fact that essentially all creative works build on prior creative works in some way, either direct retellings like many of Disney's movies or more indirectly like many fantasy books have elves that look a lot like those in Tolkien's Middle Earth.
There is also the complication that IP covers a lot of different things. Particularly I think there is a difference between artistic works like a novel and utilitarian works like Windows (and that there is not necessary a clear line between the two), but they are both covered by copyright under the exact same terms. Having copyright act differently for different works sounds messy and should probably be avoided in order to keep the law sensible, but both types of work have to be considered when arguing for how copyright should work.
For artistic works, the idea is that any published work is part of the collective culture and anyone should be able to build on it... with the exception that the author should have a limited monopoly on it in order to make money off of it. By having that time get too long, you get absurdities like the copyright status of the song "Happy Birthday to You" where the song has become part of American culture.
For utilitarian works, I think the argument might be closer to patents: the government wants to give some protection to new inventions in order to ensure a profit motive for developing them, but other companies should have access to old inventions in order to build on them. This doesn't quite work with software because there is no requirement tor release source code in order to get copyright on software. Of course, binaries alone can be useful and with effort can be modified to some extent if necessary.
The correct time-frame for both of those arguments is subjective and may be different, so the number that appears in copyright law should be a compromise between the two.
Centralization breaks the internet.
You're joking, right? I routinely buy movies that are way more than five years old out of the $5 movie bin. When a new movie comes out, I never buy it at $20 for the DVD or $30 for the Blu-Ray. I wait a few years for it to be below $10, then buy it. So people like me would basically no longer be contributing to the profits of those content creators because there would be no reason for the companies selling me those DVDs (e.g. Fry's) to pay them (the studios).
Similarly, a fair percentage of the books I have bought in my life have been older than five years by the time I bought them, not because I'm being cheap, but because a major publisher agreeing to publish more than a couple of books is a sign of a series that is probably good and will probably continue to produce new works. It isn't a perfect model, but it's a good first approximation.
For example, I recently bought Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series and about a year earlier, his Dresden Files series. Under a five-year copyright term, more than half of each series would have been out of copyright by the time I learned that the series existed, or about eight books out of 16. (Admittedly, this is in large part because a paperback copy of Storm Front sat on my shelves for years before I had time to read it, but that's neither here nor there.) It averages out to being about a quarter of all the books I bought in the past few months, but more than half of the books I've actually had time to read. Assuming that my experience is typical, which I suspect it is, that means that a five-year term would put a major dent in authors' ability to make a living, and it's hard enough for authors to make a living by writing even under the current system.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Except that most new authors' first books, assuming they write them in their spare time while doing another job, takes at least a couple of years to write, and I've been working on my trilogy (which had to be written in its entirety before the first book was published because of the complex relationship between the books) since 2001. I'm not done yet.
5 years from date of first publication would suffice (I would not say a book is created when you begin to write the first words, but let's just take that word out of the equation). When you finally do release book 1 you can release book 2 just after the copyright on 1 is up. Then you can release book 3 just as the copyright on 2 is up. Assuming the books are good enough to keep people coming back, you've got at least 15 years of income on that trilogy just from book selling, and an audience that wants more from you.
You're assuming that if people can get a book/story for free then the author will receive no money, and that just isn't true. If it were, public libraries would have put all authors out of business. Or book piracy would have. Or telling stories by mouth would have.
Music is the one thing, I think could be best protected by not calling it I.P. at all. Music and intangibles should have NO protection and should be shared by the world to prevent parasitic business models from becoming a disease to them. For instance.musicians could actually make a living playing live and promoting themselves by givng away their music. Talented musicians who weren't writers would make money just playing anyones tunes. The shift towards rewarding talent rather than ownership would have the effect of allowing the cream to rise. Bad music would go nowhere due to lack of interest, people gravitate towards good music. The current industry only markets music made by the malleable, cooperative, willing to lose everything for fame. A poor filter by any standard. It explains a lot about quality of mainstream music vs. what's available. I'd don't know about other media, but music deserves no protection for the best outcome universally. Perhaps there are other intangibles that should be purposefully unprotected. I suspect so. Ideas?
So you're telling me that an author should get protection, but a composer should not? Then what's my motivation, as a musician, to compose something new and different? Everything that's already been written, I can choose to play, sell tickets to a show, and make money off of it. Why on Earth is this a good idea?!
Let's spin this around. We're on /. so I'm going to say that you're some sort of technological individual. Now let's say that you design a story for a video game. You've spent nine months on and off just writing this story, coming up with plot twists and planning out how the player will get to the end. As a result, you pitch the game to a company, THQ. THQ in turn says, this is a great storyline and make a game from it. Great! Nine months of you spending most of your free time working on this storyline. You must be thrilled! Then you realize that you don't get shit from it because the company has the writing and you don't have any copyright anymore?
Would you be motivated at all to do this? I sure as hell wouldn't. So why the fuck do you think that musicians would be motivated at all to make new music? The creative process is great and all, but without some form of pay, people cannot afford to be musicians first. There's a whole slew of musicians out there that I personally know who are better at doing a song than someone else, but you wouldn't pay fifty bucks a ticket to go hear Jake and the GWANS, would you?
And don't even let me get to the comment about "Bad music would go nowhere". If you truly believe that people are smart enough to ignore "bad music" why don't we today? For that matter, why do groups that have uncomplex, generic sounds exist today? "Good music" is so subjective and so opinionated...I'm done.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Well, one way to look at it is that if there was only a short copyright exclusivity period, this would be a huge boon for Amazon, Walmart and Sony. Maybe a few others, but I think those would be the biggest beneficiaries. Why? Because nearly everything they are publishing or distributing would immediately cease to have any cost ot them - they could simply produce these works for free. For Amazon the difference might only be 10-20%, but for Walmart it would be 50-70%.
Trust me, Walmart is fully capable of churning out their own copies of DVDs and CDs. Books, too. They probably wouldn't bother with magazines - who really wants a five-year-old magazine? But for everything else it would be Walmart's own brand.
Sony would take advantage of this as well with new artists getting the back position in the catalog vs. anything five years old or older. Movies as well, with everything five to ten years old being immediately republished under a new brand that didn't have to compensate Sony Pictures - meaning all the residuals contracts would be worthless.
> Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years?
Because after a certain point in time, either the line between your copyrighted work and popular culture starts to blur as it becomes part of the background noise and cultural fabric... or your work becomes irrelevant and everyone forgets it ever existed. It's not necessarily easy to paint a bright line that illustrates with razor-sharp clarity when something makes the transition, but just to offer an easy example -- by now, just about everyone would agree that "Happy Birthday to You" has become a part of western civilization (if not global human civilization, period). I'd argue that there's a long period of time where it's legitimate for someone to have the right to financially benefit from something in the form of royalties, but absolutely immoral to claim the right to take it away entirely. Likewise, if something simply fades into irrelevance instead of becoming part of the cultural fabric, the only thing achieved by strong eternal copyright laws is the creation of a legal minefield that does nothing besides ensnare the naive and unwary.
I'd personally reform copyright law by making copyright automatic at the time of creation, but with an automatic term of somewhere between 2 and 5 years. To extend it beyond that term, you'd be required to explicitly file, furnish a copy of your work that can be indexed and searched to enable someone who comes across a fragment in the future to make a good-faith effort to locate the owner, and renew it periodically at fees that increase exponentially over time. Say, 25 years for an initial registration of $25, with renewal fees every 10 years thereafter that start at $100 and double each time. After 60 years (initial 5 + first 25 + 2 renewals), I'd guess that probably 80% of what gets registered for copyright would have fallen into public domain.
By prohibiting consolidation of copyrights (so each individual item copyrighted would have to remain as an individual copyrighted item forever, with its own doubling renewal fees), you'd prevent media conglomerates from indiscriminately buying old copyrights for pennies on the dollar & renewing them in perpetuity. After 100 years, even the largest copyright conglomerate would be forced to seriously cull its holdings and determine what was really worth spending $10,000 to renew for another 10 years. Eventually, even the almighty Mouse would be forced to reconsider the individual merit of every comic book and TV show published by them during the 20th Century, and triage its renewals to works that were truly the company's "crown jewels".
That is some twisty logic there. If I care so little about something I am willing to wait five years I am likely to illegally obtain it? What sense does that make? The ones likely to illegally download are not the ones who are willing to wait, it is the 'oh-my-god-I-have-to-have-this-right-now' crowd.
You nicely demonstrate the pickle the shorter copyright term proponents find themselves in: you try to claim that shorter copyright would be oh-so-much better for society because everyone has free access to these valuable works, while at the same time you claim that the works are worthless at that point anyway and nobody wants them. Well, which is it? If they are at all valuable then why shouldn't the creator benefit from that value? And if they are worthless, what is the point of shortening the copyright term?
You don't seem to understand the difference between a derivative (in the copyright sense) and 'influenced by'. Hundreds of thousands of new copyrighted works are produced every year, and very few of them are derivatives. It is entirely possible to be influenced by Romeo and Juliet while making a new work that is not a derivative. On the other hand, there are some derivatives. For instance, the number one movie right now is 'The Avengers', a derivative of comic books. What possible reason is there for saying that the creators of those comic books should not get a piece of that pie?
You are joking, right? Benefit to small companies? How? Small company S publishes a book which gets great reviews. Amazon grabs this and offers it for 50% of the price from S and offers it in a variety of formats - without consulting S about it at all. Walmart can also refuse to carry the book from S and simply print it themselves.
Sure, authors could "build upon the works of others", but anything even remotely successful gets grabbed by a few media giants and they market the heck out of it. Without having to pay anyone for the privilege.
You do understand that the only thing that keeps the publisher of the Harry Potter books from hiring out the writing of more stories in the Harry Potter world is the copyright by J. K. Rowling? I am sure the publisher would, if they could. The real interesting question would be with a successful series does the copyright on the characters continue with new books in the series or does it end with the first book's copyright period?
Only the large companies would benefit from this.
> Common good is all good as long as it does not encroach on the good of the individual.
In the US, at least, the legal function of copyright (and patents) is to promote the advancement of science and the useful arts. The USPTO has no constitutional mandate to maximize shareholder value, investor wealth, or the good of any particular individual. EUROPEAN IP law has a long tradition of treating IP as a natural right, but its pollution of American IP law is a fairly recent tragedy.
When you get down to the source legal mandate of IP law that grants it legitimacy, American IP law has more in common with Chinese IP law than it's EVER had with European IP law. People forget that a hundred years ago, Europeans were screaming about wholesale American infringement of pretty much everything, to America's general benefit and prosperity. Today, American companies are the ones screaming for stronger laws while strangling American innovation, and companies in places like China (who've studied American history well, and are doing their best to replicate the steps that made America wealthy and powerful) are the ones benefiting from advancements to the science and useful arts while American companies strangle each other in court.
I think you have that exactly backwards. It would not be a huge boon to those companies, it would kill them (and also the used market). True, Amazon could churn out their own CDs at low cost, but who would buy them? The exact same lack of protection that lets them make cheap CDs, etc lets anyone else legally file share them, etc, for free.
Your statistically-irrelevant anecdote has been duly acknowledged. You actually go to stores to buy things? You must be old. Just know that every $5 DVD you buy is likely a net loss for the store and possibly someone else up the chain. I have no basis to judge whether your situation is typical, other than that it sounds a lot like my parents. I will now respond with an anecdote of my own:
The idea of messing with clunky DVDs, watching all the ads on them, sitting through a movie which may or may not be worth it, then trying to store/dispose of the DVD afterwards is a lot more than I'm willing to put up with for $5. That's worth $1 tops, less if the adverts are annoying. Now, a downloadable file of a movie I know I will like, without any ads or hassle of physical media, and the ability to play on any of my devices, that would be worth $5 or even $10.
I am definitely inclined to wait until something shows up on Netflix streaming before watching it. I only torrent stuff if I really want to catch up with an airing season, or it's something good that's not available in this country yet. I also don't do a lot of reading, though the books I do read are usually ordered online. Mostly Terry Pratchett books (usually new ones), occasionally books I hear of on NPR (also new ones), textbooks (those get updated every few years), and translated Japanese books that I have previously read fan translations of (purchased shortly after their official release). So most of my purchases are of less-than-5 year-old material.
Your anecdote doesn't change the fact that in many fields, cinema especially, the overwhelming majority of profits are secured in the first five years, or even the first year. After that, sales trickle in, sure, but no one seriously relies on long-term sales to recoup their investment. After that, they're just sitting on it because they can.
The bigger problem that I see is not copyright itself, it is how companies are using it to abuse their customers and literally refuse to take my money in exchange for a product that I actually want. I don't WANT a million $5 DVDs lying around, but they don't have the sense to sell me digital media I can actually use. Also the fact that so many publishers, studios, and music labels do everything in their power to screw authors and artists. How do we put them back in their place? How do we make it so that publishers provide a service to authors, rather than vice versa? This is the question we really need to answer.
Microsoft can sell a five-year-old variant of OSX, Apple can sell Windows 2030.
Microsoft can sell 5 year old Apple software, and Apple can sell software that won't be available for 18 more years? The reality distortion field seems to be popping up in the strangest places lately...
Agreed but since I don't seem to be communicating very well let me try a different tack and try a different scenario:
2 authors come to a publisher with equally good books. One has 5 years of copyright, one has 10 years. Which one over the next decade do you think will make the most money?
Obvious answer: the one with the longer term.
Longer and less obvious answer: In terms of annual income, the one with the shorter term will have a higher average. The first five years are likely to cover at least 90% of the money to be made on the book, while the next five will only cover about an additional 9%. So the 10-year term (1) only makes 10% more money and (2) does it over twice as long. (Incidentally, about 37% of the money is made in the first year with the assumption I've made. Also, the 90% figure may be higher - for example, romance novels, where you'll squeeze about 99% of their value out in about six months - or lower, like in sci-fi where there are still 40-year-old books that are now in like their 60th print run. *cough*Dune*cough*)
For obvious reasons, this means there's an incentive to put out books as quickly as possible, preferably maintaining at least the same level of quality in the writing. The duration of the copyright term has very little effect on this outside of whether or not box sets are worthwhile, other than that extremely short terms are obviously going to cause problems for books in genres with longer tails (again, sci-fi is a good example here).
To be honest, I think the ideal copyright situation for books is likely to be something along the lines of "5 years per book, with extensions granted automatically upon continuing a series". So a six-book series, if published about 4 1/2 years apart, will have its first book under copyright for a total of 27 1/2 years. (Obviously this doesn't protect the reading public from crap sequels, but I'm almost certain there's nothing that will protect us from that - or crap first novels, for that matter.)
Pharmaceuticals would still be in clinical trials when their patents would expire. How about we just focus on getting rid of bad patents that don't bring knowledge or insight to society?
Just start Pharma patent terms after FDA approval. Apply the same to anything that's patented that requires regulatory approval, with the caveat that regulatory approval must be actively sought, and have a watchdog timeout to stop amendment based submarine patents (e.g. if you can't get it approved in 5 years, the patent expiration clock starts anyway). Problem solved.
-- Terry
640 K ought to be enough for everyone
No, make that 150 years
Except for, if they wait until copyright expires, all the publishers can print it. So why would the first publisher pay for the rights to the book and then not do anything with it?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
The term of a patent is 20 years. It seems absurd to claim that people require more monopoly protection to incentivise writing a song than they do to invest billions developing a new drug. I think there would be little harm done to content creators by reducing the term - people would still be prepared to pay for the latest films, music, books and software.
He made money for 5 years. I'd agree it could be longer, but by saying that the author can't make money you are now just trolling.
Rethinking email
You're going to have to explain how not offering an exact product you want under the exact terms you want is 'abuse'. Do you even have any idea what the word means? Here is another word you should look up while you are at it: entitlement.
As for the arrangement between publishers and authors: that is between them. There is absolutely no reason people can't self-publish if they choose to do so. If they choose (and it is a choice) to sign with a publisher/studio etc that is entirely up to them. Who are you to decide what that relationship is or 'should be'?
No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5
no one?
Stop playing, look at the real world we have markets where ideas can not be protected at all. The fashion industry is the most famous example, but there are quite a few.
Don't play hypothetical what-if when you have examples to guide you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
George Lucas.
(Spartacus II. The Quest for Aviation Fuel.)
Yes, that's what I'm telling you. Apples and oranges. Two different business models.
If your motivation to compose is anything other than a natural urge, we couldn't give a shit about your output anyway. Music is different that way and needs different consideration. To quote Beethoven " Do not compose (music) unless not doing so drives you to madness"
Jingle writers can still negotiate by the job, to be paid for the act of writing a custom piece. I just don't think that piece needs to be property or a trademark.
No point in holding back the musicians of the world so some bastard can drive us mad with 25 second television spots.
Your perspective of what music is, is surely badly skewed by comparing it to anything else on Earth. It won't fit neatly into any business model as evidenced by the last few centuries. The only ones who NEED to benefit from music are those performing it. Writing it comes from need to release it.
Perhaps Robert Fripps philosophy is something you can identify with. " Music exists by itself, musicians are the conduit through which it manifests itself."
The reason we don't ignore bad music today is the same reason we don't ignore bad political candidates. They come in limited supply, only two parties and no one is aware that a plethora of other choices exist. You can thank the industry that controls the tap, for that.
Bad music comes from desire to profit, good music comes from the outpouring of a musicians soul.
To quote the great Ivan Stang, " if you can't tell shit from tuna fish, don't order food in a French restaurant."
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
See, from my perspective, the opposite is true. Short of a house fire, odds are 99% of those DVDs are still going to be playable in twenty years. For digital downloads, odds are that 0% will still be playable because the DRM servers they depend on will no longer exist.
And even if you have a DRM-free digital download, that still means that (assuming comparable quality and bit rate) just to download the movie portions of the Lord of the Rings extended edition Blu-Ray discs, without the extras, I would go through an eighth of a terabyte of bandwidth—half a month's data cap on many companies' services. And with my 3 Mbps DSL (the fastest I can get without selling my soul to AT&T's capped service), it would take almost four days of continuous downloading to get it.
After that, I would have to find a place to store and back up an eighth of a terabyte worth of data just for that one movie alone. With a digital download, it becomes my responsibility to keep backups of all those terabytes of data, whereas with physical media, its value is covered by by homeowner's insurance against loss. With hard drive reliability being as bad as it is, this seems like an absolutely insane proposition to me.
Sure, I could use less bandwidth if I settled for a lower quality copy, but that isn't really a fair comparison. You're comparing a high quality piece of physical media with a low-quality download. If the download were proportionally much cheaper to make up for the loss of extras, the fact that I'm paying for the bandwidth and storage directly, etc., then downloads might make sense. Until I can buy an average digital download for under a buck, it doesn't appeal to me. At all.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No-one else will make a deal with Ms Moss under better terms for book 5 because they can't do the group deal for books 2-4. I can negotiate Ms Moss down to almost nothing. I can keep printing book 1 and pay her nothing.
Then how do you propose to get her to write book 5? After the success of books 1-4, shes going to demand alot of money, and indeed you as a publisher will make alot of money off of her established name.
If you don't pay up, she won't write. And if she doesn't write, the value of books 3 and 4, which are under copyright, will fall.
What'll likely happen is the price of book 5 will be higher than the other books. But that's OK, there's no reason all books need to be the same price.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
All this discussion about what would happen if 5 years was too short reminded me of a similar discussion several years ago.
But I had forgotten the guy's name..
In 2007 the following discussion was held on
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/07/13/1233201/optimum-copyright-period-decided-by-math
(emphasis mine)
Link to original article: Rufus Pollock, Cambridge University, "Forever minus a day? Some theory and empirics of optimal copyright.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Because the writer is smart enough to shop the script around to different publishers, as well as investigate self-publish options. The writer will take the first best deal that comes along.
As for why publish new stuff at all, that's a general problem not related to copyright. If customers want new stuff, then the publisher will have no choice but to provide. And if they want old stuff, then writers have a marketing problem.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
What about a 2 tiered copyright system?
1. A "Development" phase copyright. This could last for UP TO 5 years on its own
2. A "Production" or "Industry" phase copyright. A full 5 years once a company starts to make money on the product
Basically, If you first register a copyright for development, you can have up to 5 years to develop that. If you only spend 2 years on development, then that's it. At the point of first sale, a full 5 year copyright would begin.
The goal here is that a company who failed (on their own terms while in development), won't have a copyright on something that would screw up the market over the long term. If they had a good idea, but their company died, the idea should be passed on for others to use no?
Thoughts?
As a professional writer I would have to quit publishing my work. It's not greed it's a fact. I won't tell you my personal situation since it's personal and not at issue. I can tell you most writers would be in the same boat. Some writers only publish one or two modestly popular books in a five year period, the rest selling poorly. Since the rest make little or no money the writer is stuck making his or her living off a single paying book. Look at the numbers. Most publishers pay a $5,000 advance and pay nothing more until future printings. If there's a single printing the 5K is all they make. Let's say their "popular" book has a single printing a year and they see another $5,000 off that one so they are making $10,000 a year. Below the poverty line in a risky profession. Even doubling those numbers is dirt. Most authors survive off reprinted versions of existing books. It's what allows them to keep writing. Take away that revenue and most have to find other work. With a five year limit I'd say conservatively 90% of the books disappear. Call it alarmist but trust me I know the numbers and I say it's much worse. Which is worse for the average person, the existing system where you pay for books and movies or a system where a tiny number are released a year by the corporations that can aford to advertizing blitz them before the copyright runs out? For indy writers that self publish, I'm headed down that road, it can take a year or more to develop sales. That leaves you with 3 to 4 years to squeeze what money you can out of it. Here's a thought. Instead of wasting time and energy imagining this utopia where everything is free focus on a realistic goal of taking the power away from the corporations and giving it back to the writers. The corporations whine and complain about eBooks selling for $10 while indy authors are thrilled with $2.99 for an ebook and if the system allowed it, Amazon basically has effectively a $2.99 minimum, some would charge a $1. Instead of asking that the writers rights be taken away after a few years take away the corporations rights to demand that writers sign over ALL rights. Writers can be your friends in this fight but not if the option is ending up on the bread line.
Indeed, trademarks have nothing at all to do with innovation, but they were never supposed to, and never billed as such.
Trademarks are basically for consumer protection and fairness in the marketplace.
If a can of soda bears the COCA-COLA mark, a consumer can rely on that mark to indicate that the quality of the soda in the can is consistent with the quality of the soda in all other cans also marked that way (whether the quality is good or bad isn't relevant; just that it's consistent). It would be bad for consumers if you bought such a can expecting to get Coke, but instead you got something gross like Mello Yello.
And it would be bad for competitors in the market if they could deceitfully use the reputation of another in order to sell goods or services. E.g. selling otherwise undrinkable Mello Yello to unsuspecting rubes by putting it in Coke cans.
Trademarks are actually vastly older than patents or copyrights (IIRC some wine marks were found in the ruins of Pompeii) and while there have been abuses recently -- dilution is a rotten idea, for example, as is the use of trademark law against resellers of legitimate goods -- it has traditionally worked out okay.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
For copyright, how about automatic copyright for 1 year. After that, it has to be renewed for another year. But, the first renewal is only $0.01. Each renewal after that is twice the previous year's renewal fee. So, for example:
YEAR COST
1 free!
2 $0.01
3 $0.02
4 $0.04
5 $0.08
10 $2.56
20 $2621.44
30 $2684354.56
40 $2748779069.44
Most works would revert to the public domain in less than 20 years. Works that were still profitable might remain locked up for another decade or so, but anything 40 or more years old would be public domain unless the owner was both insanely rich and insane in their spending habits.
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
The key factor on how long a patent should last is the amount of effort required to generate the knowledge/technique/etc that is being patented. Of course, that will vary drastically dependent on the target of the patent. Software _might_ be as little as 20 minutes (e.g. the 9 lines of code Oracle vs. Google are fighting over at the moment) or out to 30 years for a full process of pharmaceutical development and testing. It would be great if we could simply say that took X years/dollars of effort, thus you get Y years/dollars (revenue) of protection, but that is unlikely to work as it is impossible to compare someone working in the garage to a modern biotech lab. The comparison just doesn't work.
My suggestion would be to use an industry average. Have a government group that is responsible for defining different industrial sectors (software, electronics, movies, etc) that sets an average product life expectency for that industry. Patents must be submitted under an industry sector by the patent submitter and can be rejected on the basis that they don't match the industry group. These life expectencies can be review periodically.
In fact, this idea is unlikely to work if done by a single country (as it would lead to much patents being filed for in the duristinction that had the longest patent duration), but it it was run be a group such as the WTO, it might be workable. At very least it needs to be tied to International trieties.
The system as it currently stands creates enormous trade distortions, but is protected by very powerful and rich vested interests. To benefit the "person-on-the-street" would be a very hard political road to tread.
I'm not going to bother reading every post made here. The premise of the question is wrong and either needs to be rethought or have the wording corrected and re-posted. I'm seeing arguments here about patents. Who said IP was a patent? Could it be copyright? Maybe trademark? Do any of these seem to have anything to do with each other? No. Quit using the term Intellectual Property. If you mean copyright then refer to copyright. If you mean trademark then refer to it. Don't screw up the debate by confusing the issue from the beginning. See RMS: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
A much simpler first step would just to be to say that companies cannot own copyright only people. That copyright then expires on their death. Copyright is not transferable(although the royalties could be).
What problem does this solve? Who owns the copyright on that latest 200 million dollar movie that had 3000 people work on it?
Depends on the contract the author signed.
Your perspective of intellectual property is badly skewed by comparing it to any other business model. Musicians need to be able to afford to make music, otherwise the only musicians you will find are the same rich farts who make the music industry what it is, and the people that live on the streets of your closest large metropolitan area.
I am a musician (credited and not), don't fuck around with my fucking livelihood because you have some haughty taughty idea that any form of Art (music is and should be appreciated as art, not background noise as everyone seems to treat it these days) is not good enough unless it can't be copywritten.
I'm done with feeding the troll, I leave you with the immortal words of John Cleese, "FUCK OFF!"
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
For instance.musicians could actually make a living playing live and promoting themselves by givng away their music. Talented musicians who weren't writers would make money just playing anyones tunes. The shift towards rewarding talent rather than ownership would have the effect of allowing the cream to rise.
There is nothing to stop musicians from doing this today. Other than the fact that most musicians are not morons.
The problem with this, is the artist would play a gig. Someone would tape it and sell it. Making a bunch of money.
It solves Mickey Mouse never going out of copyright, given that no no work has entered the public domain for decades because of the ever increasing copyright terms.
The Copyright is in that case is probably best owned by either the director or executive producer.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
No I am not trolling I am trying to make my point understood and you don't get it. That is a failure of communication not someone trying to be antagonistic. But if you're going to use that as a reason to not listen to the point then so be it.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Who's he gonna sell it to? The artist already gives his music freely .
You gonna buy it? Thanks I'll just download it.
What stops the musician today is the industry in place providing unfair competition to their picks from a tiny pool.
My way the cream rises naturally, actual talent is rewarded and bad music fades into the background unless the artist shapes up.
Putting the musician in charge of his own destiny and letting the world decide while making recorded music free for all.
The only ones who lose are the industry who now have to go find real jobs and lives.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Dont fuck around with MY livelyhood just because you couldnt round up two brain cells to rub together.
First, get a damned clue, chump. http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17
Now come back and tell me about some haughty idea and when you do, you just recall all the rock, blues, jazz musicians that came before and got screwed this way and waaaaaay worse.
If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Dumbshit!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
If you let your house delapidate, you lose your house.
If you let someone squat there, then after some time you lose the ability to throw them out as squatters.
And if I copy your house, you can't tell me squat.
But, hey, you want to pretend it's like real property? Go ahead.
PS I find it INSANE that everyone argues that the public HAVE TO LOSE THEIR RIGHTS to the minority IP holders. Why?-
Obviously, you know nothing about literary contracts.
Which proves why this article is complete, ignorant bullshit.
Lots of emotion. Zero logic.
Look, I want (C) revised as well, but the socialist retard philosophy that IP is inherently bad is historically ridiculous--it was Jefferson's creation of IP that made much of American development what it is.
Is it being abused ? Yes, and it should be fixed.
Will making it go away create a universe where unicorns fart rainbows?
No.
The problem, of course, is that intellectual property is an empty concept and should be eliminated. Anything that can be copied cannot be owned. Own land, the shirt on your back, your own business, a farm implement, a library book, a work of art, or a chocolate cake if you want, but you cannot own the survey, the pattern, the business model, the mechanical design, the story, the image, or the recipe. You can own the document, the medium, the carrier if you will that the idea appears on, but not the intellectual content, current law notwithstanding.
Ok, it seems I disobeied your advice, and got you wrong. But you seem to be arguing that the author won't make money if the copyrights time is short; that isn't true. He makes some money.
Most people won't make enough to live by the copyrights on 5, 10, 50 or even on author's life + 50 years. Copyrights must last for a defined amount of time, and it won't be enough to most authors.
Rethinking email
IP includes more than patents. It also covers copyrights and more. As a writer of highly technical material, fiction, games, and educational content, I would cease working in this field if my copyrights expired after 5 years. There would be no point. If anyone can steal what you produce (as commonly happens in China and other countries), there's no point in producing things. It's hardly worth it now.
Rather than rob people of the proper rewards of creativity and hard work (and it would be robbery), why not focus more on new IP models that are simply added to what we already have? Open source is an example. There are ways to profit from open source hardware and software that directly benefit business both large and small (Android). If people want to go open source, they can. There's no need to force it on everyone. Trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all IP model is just plain stupid. We are always free to innovate in this area. We don't need government to change anything at all.
What we need is people willing to put out there IP under licenses that they themselves create, not those imposed by government. For example, there's nothing stopping me from selling a book under a license that enables others to add to my work and resell their enhanced product as long as I get my fair share. Companies like Flatworld Knowledge are doing things like this (http://flatworldknowledge.com/). They're not involving the government at all. If people and companies can come up with a more innovative approach to their IP distribution and licensing, then they should innovate. The LAST thing the tech industry needs is more government laws imposing limits, regulations, and other such stupidities.
I want to free my copyright and trademark protected intellectual property. Advice on what legal formalities need to be considered? Stifle creativity = bad ethics. Free currently IP-protected creativity = creative gift! But, how?
5 years is too short for some copyright. I think creators life plus 90 years is too long. (For over 100 years it was ceators life plus 50 years). Some music doesn't make any money till over 5 years after it is released. For instance, 'Everybody's talkin' was released in 1965 by the writer Fred Neils, it was rerecorded by Harry Nilsson in 1968, but it wasn't until it was used in 'Midnight Cowboy', 1969, that it made money. That would have only just made the 5 year copyright for the creator. But, many other artists create similar tunes and it isn't until a significant act records one of their tunes that they are able to make any money.
You'd probably also have a problem, if a song is hardly heard of and a company has paid for the recording and after spending millions to market it. 9 out of 10 songs fail, and when a record company spends millions on marketing each of those songs and makes back money on only one of them, a 5 year copyright will reduce this significantly. They'd probably be making less money from the one money maker they have, and you'd probalbly find they'd need much deeper pockets as it'd be 49 songs out of 50 that wont' make them enough money in that time spand. This will effectively destroy the smaller labels who don't have the deep pockets of the big labels and make it almost impossible for start ups with small funds (and destroy self releases etc).
I've often wondered if a copyright could just be based on what was spent to create and market it plus a reasonable sum. So, if a new single comes out and it costs $100,000 to record, $1 mil to market, then maybe make it so that once the single has earned, say $2.1 mil, then it falls into public domain.
Only allowing natural persons to own copyright is problematic for any capital-intensive work that requires multiple creative inputs. A movie, for example. The plot/concept developer, the scriptwriter, the director, the producer, the costumer designer, the author of the score, the musicians, would all have a partial claim on the copyright. Photography and cinematography are protected art forms, as is sculpture and (non-functional) painting; so the cameraman and the set decorators may well have claims as well. The production of a stage play is usually protected against audiovisual capture (without consent), so the actors probably have a claim.
IMHO copyright is too monolithic. Differentiating the rights and the term of each right according to the nature of the work would help. For example the duplication or translation of a book may be protected for 50 years, which the exclusive right to a derivative work may last only 5 years. Adaptations and derivative adaptions would require relatively long terms of protection. Art (painting & sculpture) requires minimal copyright protection - the value lies in the original, so the appropriate IP regime is trademarks and protection against counterfeiting.
Non-transferable copyright is a greedy response from people who think copyright should be a permanent meal-ticket for them. Case in point: in most countries in the world if you hire a photographer to take pictures of your wedding (i.e. pay them a pre-negotiated, large fee to appear and take photos), the photographer - NOT YOU - owns the copyright. Ever time you want to send a picture to your grandma, or post a .jpg on your blog, you have to pay a fee to the photography (who you paid in the first place to do a job, and to whom you have given a right of access to a private event in order to perform said job). Now I have yet to find anyone other than a photographer who thinks that this is in any way fair or sane.
The person who takes the monetary risk in undertaking the development of a (protectable) work should be the owner. If I pay you a salary and tell you to write a program that does X and Y, then I own the resulting work. If I pay you to take photographs of a specific event, and pay for or permit your access to the event, then I own the resulting work. If I commission a painting or a statue, then I own the resulting work. If on the other hand you - having received no payment or instructions from me - paint a painting, chisel a statue, write a program or take a photograph, then you own it, and can dispose of it in any manner you please.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
What about talented writers who aren't musicians (or prefer to spend their time composing to playing live)? What about sound engineers (who are really essential to a quality recording) and producers?
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Custom work for commission. Writing is just playing slow. Your audience is your benefactor. Who is your music valuable to? If you spend your time just composing, I doubt you intended it heard. If you wanted it heard you would play it for as many as could hear. Your shortsighted question has no horizon. ,get paid ,get out. .From editing your video, well you get it. The industry has hampered musicians from making a living and stolen from the ones it promotes. There is no longer a need for the parasite. Time to look to a brighter future.
Honestly musicians should get paid more because they actually work. Composers just kind of wank if they aren't working musicians or write jingles for the needy well-heeled.Hourly seems fitting, like studio musicians, get in, write/play it
Sound engineers still get paid by the hour at any t.v. or radio station, studio or live. In this age of home recording many have shifted focus from the studio.
If there is a need for a service , it will be met and paid. In this age of digital enablement , many jobs are less necessary.That's just the facts. On the other hand
we don't need an industry for anything , really, From the ground up it can be done at home by a band and some friends with some moxie. From booking gigs by email, to recording,mixing,mastering. From posting songs to promoting your act.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
It's bad form , but I might append that; the internet is a level playing field for all and without an industry, the cream will rise and the crap will fall.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
> Writing is just playing slow. Your shortsighted question has no horizon.
Deep meaningful bullshit you speak, hmm?
> If you spend your time just composing, I doubt you intended it heard. If you wanted it heard you would play it for as many as could hear. Honestly musicians should get paid more because they actually work. Composers just kind of wank if they aren't working musicians or write jingles for the needy well-heeled.
So a concert violinist should be paid more than the composer of the symphony ... the composer of course being unable to perform the symphony because it requires 100 instruments.
> On the other hand we don't need an industry for anything , really, From the ground up it can be done at home by a band and some friends with some moxie. From booking gigs by email, to recording,mixing,mastering.
Ah, now I understand. You are unable to tell the difference between a garage band recording done in the garage, and the studio recording of a great song performed by consumate professionals and properly engineered, produced and mastered by other professionals.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
I think a composer can negotiate his original price for work done. Eventually a violinist would make more than he was paid were he to bother to play it often enough.
Like it or not the distinctions between who has been a professional technician adept at mastering ( squeezin it back to 20/20) engineering( but the janitor can fill in if he's sick) produced( yes obviously someone representing the contract will be on hand to put a brake on the checkbook at some point, guys in accounting put a suit on the janitor for a laugh) and the next guy down the block who has Pro -Tools and his own experiences. Even many albums now get done in small studios, remote locations, bedrooms by the same old "professionals" you speak of. Computer/ interface/ nice mics/ direct box. What a great tool for recording consummate professionals. The studio is not dead, never said it was. Not as necessary as it used to be. Not as much to be made there.
Only so many big studio jobs to go round. Well, I guess they'll market themselves for other skills like blacksmiths did. But then there's only so many blacksmith jobs around too.
No actually you don't understand. We actually don't need a music industry, union, parasite, social disease or ass clowns satisfied with the reaming we all get as musicians and related professionals who will actually prosper without corporate vampires inserting themselves and contributing nothing while taking everything. Go die.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!