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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?
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.
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.
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 !
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
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
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" -
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?
Countries are allowed to leave treaty agreements. Once we've finally convinced the political world that tightening the ratchet on IP law is a vote loser, and serving up the next alphabet soup variant of SOPA PIPA ACTA etc. won't work, the next logical step is rolling back some of the worst and most outdated treaties, and the world won't fall apart when we do this.
The US stayed outside the Berne Convention for over 100 years, and there are lots of countries that haven't signed. Once jobs, data and investment start flowing towards lax IP regimes, we'll see countries either go back to a minimal enforcement approach (one of the factors responsible for China's economic success) or for the ones where law enforcement isn't selective, we'll see them leaving Berne.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
... and therefore free to use for any purpose without having to distribute the source.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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