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2018 Is the Last Year of America's Public Domain Drought (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Happy Public Domain Day, every-some of you! In New Zealand and Canada, published works by artists who died in 1967 -- Rene Magritte, Dorothy Parker, John Coltrane, and many others -- have entered the public domain; Kiwis and Canadians can now freely distribute, perform, and remix a wealth of painting, writing, and music. In Europe, work published by artists who died in 1947 are now public domain. In the United States, well, we get nothing for the 20th year in a row, with one more to go. Our public domain drought is nearly old enough to drink. American copyrights now stretch for 95 years. Since 1998, we've been frozen with a public domain that only applies to works from before 1923 (and government works). Jennifer Jenkins is a clinical professor of law at Duke Law School, which hosts the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. In an email she explained what changed and why nothing has entered American public domain for two decades. "Until 1978, the maximum copyright term was 56 years from the date of publication -- an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years," she wrote. "In 1998, Congress added 20 years to the copyright term, extending it to the author's lifetime plus 70 years, or 95 years after publication for corporate 'works made for hire.'"
And suddenly, legislation will appear that will extend the Public Domain timeout period by another 20 or 50 years.
Watch and see if this doesn't happen before the end of the year.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Totally random OT post, but the Public Domain Drought could easily move to any of 172 other countries in the world and start drinking legally now.
The contemporaries of the US with a drinking age of 21 are: Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, Kiribati, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nauru, Oman, Palau, Samoa and Sri Lanka.
And the only countries that technically forbid drinking alcohol are: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen
Taken from https://drinkingage.procon.org...
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
What direction are you travelling through time?
Don't worry, this congress and president will ensure nothing new falls to the public domain this or any other year.
If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors, it will remain ours in perpetuity unless sold at some point.
Did you pay a royalty for the idea of using a roof and walls, or did you steal those ?
well, then I will only be rewarded for a brief period.
No, you are supposed to be rewarded for a brief period. The US Constitution plainly states that; it's not just the article's author's opinion. The Constitution even points out that the *purpose* of depriving people of their natural rights to copy things they see for a limited period of time is to enhance the public domain.
However, with the current unconstitutional laws in effect, you are rewarded for an absurdly long period, until long after you and probably your children are dead. So you can stop your bitching and whining. You got what you wanted.
The Constitution explicitly has that copyrights exist for a limited time. Despite the term "intellectual property" it isn't property in the classical sense of the term. If I try to use your house, you can't benefit from it. But my having a copy of a book doesn't reduce the amount of gain someone else gets from the book. The point of intellectual property laws is to give an incentive for people to make new things, knowing they will have some time to benefit. But almost no one says "I was going to patent this or was going to write this book, but because my grandkids might not have 100% rights to it, I won't."
How does a painting entering public domain steal that painting from your ancestors? Last I checked they still had it just like the house. Copyright steals the free speech of the public for the profit of the individual. For the limited period it was originally created for this was a perfectly reasonable trade but it has ballooned to ridiculousness.
the flip side of the wonderful free availability is the artists either starving
Or, you know, maybe they can produce something new once every few decades to support themselves.
I think you're on to something here! My main question is: why did the Jewish-zionist-wahhabist-entertainment lobby hell bent on making sure Jews look like the master race allow people of this master race become disgraced and thus incite hatred against them from human diapers such as yourself?
If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors [sic], it will remain ours in perpetuity unless sold at some point.
And you will pay for the upkeep of the house, and pay taxes on the house (and the property below it). But more importantly, nobody is paying you or your descendants for your right to keep that house. Nor is anyone prevented from making their own house that looks like yours.
If, on the other hand, I write a tune or a book, or develop a drug, or create a painting — well, then I will only be rewarded for a brief period.
Just a note: drugs are patented, not copyrighted, and patents run out after (a maximum) of 21 years.
All the things you mention are built upon knowledge and skills of previous creators ("we stand on the shoulders of giants"). The purpose of copyright was to create a protected period during which creators could make money--so they would be encouraged to create more. It's a contract between society and creators.
Maybe Jews are just smarter than you, and smart enough to use those smarts to enrich themselves.
More power to smart people smart enough to use those smarts!!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Good, this will help spread Canada and New Zealand's culture freely around the world.
A bumper crop of metaphors.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Point is, they should not have to.
Why not ? What's so special about artists that they can make one thing, and then collect money for the rest of their life (and their children's) while other people have to repeat their work day after day ?
It's not merely the wish of the author of the article. In the US, there is, in fact, a difference between physical property and intellectual property, as provided by the Constitution in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. It's a limited time monopoly. If you don't like it, make your contributions in another arena. Or seek to amend the Constitution. Or join the corporations that continue to buy the extensions piecemeal as other commenters have predicted will happen.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Two things are missing from the original story (which did not allow comments). One is that the original original copyright law (designed by the Founders) provided copyright protection for 14 years, with a possible extension of 14 more. Their intent was to place copyrighted material in the public domain fairly quickly, after allowing the creator to profit. The Founders would be disgusted by the bloated copyrght law of today. The second issue is how todayâ(TM)s copyright law became so bloated - which is Mickey Mouse. It is not a coincidence that today any IP created after the mid-1920s is protected by copyright, and that Mickey Mouse was created in the mid-1920s. The Disney corporation (copyright fiends) has twice bought Congressmen (including Sonny Bono) and arranged to have copyright extended just before Mickey was to go into publc domain. Today US copyright law exists not for the benefit of the public, but to protect the profits of Disney. Iâ(TM)m surprised the author ignored this...
What in the hell is that?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors, it will remain ours in perpetuity unless sold at some point.
If you own a business, you can also pass it to your children, and great, great, great, grandchildren. Here are some veerrrryy old businesses:
Baker's Chocolate (1765)
Cigna Insurance (1792)
JP Morgan Chase (1799)
DuPont (1802)
Colgate (1806)
Citigroup (1812)
Remington (1816)
HarperCollins (1817)
https://www.businessnewsdaily....
How can these businesses be allowed to make money for over 200 years and yet copyright owners are forced to "donate" their work to the public after 100 years? Inventors have to give their work away after just 20 years... cha-ching for manufacturers who pay nothing for the expired patent for hundreds of years. Programmers don't get a royalty... their hiring companies profit from the product for decades and the programmers get some peanut salary and get kicked out when they turn 40 or 50. Scientists and mathematicians have it the worst... they get paid with just a job (and they get some paltry sum in a Nobel Prize).
This is systematic abuse of the intellectual class by the ruling class (government and big business). Anything short of perpetual right to the creators of these works is abuse and exploitation.
When is the government going to make these old businesses "public domain?"
If I write a song, and release it to the public domain right now, I can still use it in perpetuity.
Copyright is not property. It's artificial property-like rights to encourage creators. This rationale is explicitly stated in the US constitution, and for the first British copyright act in 1710.
If you haven't made a substantial return from a work after 5 years, you never will.
Came here to say this, though disagree with the hefty fee for renewal. The fee should not be high, the renewal should exist so that authors must express active interest in extending the copyright term for it to be extended, allowing authors not sufficiently concerned with doing so to drop their work into the public domain after 10 years by default. 20 years maximum, full stop. It's already 20 years for patents, I don't see any reason for copyrights to be different.
I expect the last copy-right holder of those works to actually make those works available. So if it was a movie or recording the recording must be published in a currently supported format. If it is a book a digital scan or other copy of the work. We, the people of Canada, granted the copy-right holder a limited monopoly on profiting on that work and now we want it available to all Canadians.
We should be able to sue any copy right holder of any significant cultural work that becomes lost. As a geek, I do think things like the lost early Dr. Who episodes are a loss to our society and the BBC, because they didn't make the works available sooner, should be held financially responsible. I guess we just need to figure out who is allowed to sue on behalf of us.
We'll be sure to get that handled before the year's up.
Yours forever,
Disney
The constitution was obviously written by intellectuals. It's a relic of a era long gone, but properly amended, it can be used to protect and shore up our corporate society. Using intellectual property law to encourage new ideas is part of that old way of thinking. The tendency for most Americans is to work for massive corporations that already own these properties anyway, nothing they produce belongs to them.
The days of big ideas coming from little people is long gone, and an amendment granting perpetual copyrights can help keep it that way.
- C. Stooge, MBA
If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors, it will remain ours in perpetuity unless sold at some point.
Not if someone else builds a similar house elsewhere. Then your house will vanish in a puff of logic.
This is why there ought to be a law to stop thieves from duplicating houses.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
I don't support collectivization either but you're comparing apples and oranges.
A home has natural scarcity and is easily quantized. Expression is not. Ideas are not. This is why copyright infringement is not the same as theft. Copyright provides temporary scarcity at society's expense so that you can profit from your work. However, at some point, ideas become part of the society's culture/general knowledgebase, and allowing the creator to remain the bridge troll indefinitely deters progress. This is especially true in science and technology where the IP stack becomes very expensive very quickly.
Want another house? Build one. Want more scarcity? Come up with a new idea. It was not meant to protect one trick ponies forever. 14+14 was quite generous (~half a lifetime). Later revisions were even more so. Today it's egregious.
For those who don't get the Disney reference, the implication is that the 1998 Copyright Extension Act (sponsored by Hollywood-owned Congressman Sono Bono), was really the brainchild of Disney, as part of an ongoing effort to keep their earliest cartoon and cartoon characters (most notably Mickey Mouse) from ever entering the public domain. Disney was also suspected by many to be behind the Copyright Act of 1976, which had extended the term previously. Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse, was created in 1928 and, with each of these new laws, always stays just outside of ever entering into public domain.
Here is an interesting article on the subject.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
He built the Time Tombs, obviously.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The tax plan was not Trump's, it was the Republican Congress's.
I think that there would be far more public awareness of a new copyright extension, and a lot of determined resistance. People weren't using the Internet to organize in 1998, at least not to the degree that we've seen with e.g. the Net Neutrality campaigns. The 1998 extension was unpopular, but I don't recall it ever being front-page news. I suspect that public pressure, probably as coordinated by our benevolent billion-dollar tech overl^Wcompanies, would be sufficient to convince Democrats to see the issue as an opportunity to slam Republicans rather than an opportunity to appease their big-media donors.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's because you aren't also claiming the right to keep me from saying 'nice house' and building one just like it for myself.
If you want to write your great novel and lock it in a vault, passing it to your descendants, you're free to do so. Nobody will legally cut the vault open and abscond with your only copy.
If you choose, you may accept copyright which means that for a limited time (which exceeds your lifetime), society will grant you the exclusive right to make copies. Your descendant doesn't lose the right to make copies after the copyright expires, it's just that the government will no longer prevent others from doing so as well.
Why should your children profit off something they didn't make?
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.
tl;dr Ideas are not property, and the idea that you own something you don't have immediate physical control over is also a social agreement. Copyright exists as a social convenience, and humanity got along fine without it for thousands of years. The Internet being effectively copyright-free has revived older means of supporting artists, namely patronage and serially released works.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Personally, I blame a large rat.
Have gnu, will travel.
American copyrights now stretch for 95 years.
Wait, I thought it was life of author + 70 years, or 120 years after creation/95 years after publication for work-for-hire works, which means, that the copyright duration could actually be much longer than 95 years.
For example, strictly hypothetical, if some teen at 15 makes a spectacular song, and then lived to be 100, that would mean that the non-work-for-hire work would be under copyright for 85 + 70, or 155 years.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Because my children (not even grandkids) will not derive any income from my writing, I'll have to shelve my idea of this book and go do "real work". That's the line of thinking I was alluding to. The creator — or his wife — would certainly think/say such a thing.
Utter nonsense. Copyrights are extremely long, there's no way that children won't benefit from the same copyrights. This is just silly. Moreover, do you have any evidence that any author has ever said so?
But I do not wish to argue, which way is more effective. Even if my way was less conducive to development of art, it is still the only right way. Creators ought to be able to control their creations — they must be able to sell, rent, give away, or even destroy them however they see fit. It is not yours, it is not mine, it is theirs.
So at the end of the day, what you are trying to do is make a moral claim about the nature of intellectual property. I explicitly addressed that claim earlier. The moral reason we have a notion of basic property rights is that physical property is by nature restrictive, as I tried explaining earlier. If we somehow existed in a universe where objects could be used by any number of people without diminishing their value or usability, property rights wouldn't be a sensible thing. But that's precisely the situation with things like copyrighted works- one person reading it doesn't make someone else have less value. This isn't that complicated. And it is simple even before one gets to the incredible amount of wasted resources if copyrights were indefinite (imagine for a moment what our world would look like if Shakespeare was still copyrighted or if every 19th and early 20th century patent was still active). Your approach is both morally incoherent and simply a pragmatically bad idea.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, A.C.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Except we are not talking about creators and their creations. Creators, at least if you count organizations, have control over their creations.
Copyright is not about the creation, but subsequent imitations, usually identical given most copyrighted works are designed to be produceable at large quantities.
Copyright is about the inventor controlling who gets to be a creator, in order to ensure profits are funneled back to the inventor.
The article is about copyright, but let's take patents.
Under your system, patents would never expire or come into the public domain. You'd still be paying Mr Fire (or his estate) for every fire made into perpetuity. And Mr Window. And Mr Garden Spade. Literally the cost of EVERYTHING you touch would increase overnight to pay patent royalties to someone who invented something 100 years ago, is dead and/or hasn't done a day's work since. This is apparently the bit you hate.
The same still applies for copyrights... on music, movies, characters, comics, sketches, poems, books, etc. You'd still be paying Mr Shakespeare 500 years later for the use of his material. Thus the price of everything you touch goes up. You literally can't do anything without some lawyer poking their head out of the woodwork and demanding their 1%. Said lawyer works for large faceless corporation that bought up family assets a hundred years ago and does nothing but ask people for money for using them into perpetuity.
What you're in fact suggesting is that people get a monopoly on everything they ever did, long after they are dead and gone. Schools would still be paying Chaucer's estate for the use of his works, there wouldn't be a play you could perform without paying money, there wouldn't be a book you could read, a painting you could see (have you SEEN the fuss over even postcards of things like the Mona Lisa, etc.?), a landmark you could look at (Eiffel Tower night displays are "copyright").
And the money would all be going to the lawyers-of-sons-of-sons-of-sons-of someone who once wrote a joke, for doing NOTHING. This is the kind of freeloading you appear to be against, no? People demanding money for something they never had any part in whatsoever? Isn't that worse than someone who wants to read a book written by a guy who died so long ago nobody even remembers who owns the rights?
Public domain is an inherent part of everyone's history. From music to books, movies to encyclopaedia - everything you do has been done, said and written about a thousand times before. And we don't want to get to a point where we have to pay EVERY person along the way, into perpetuity, for their tiniest of contributions.
What are the most expensive movies to buy? Disney. Why? Because they were made in the 1930's, and now just about anyone who has ever had a part in their making is long-dead. But the lawyers still want their cut of something that even their grandfather wouldn't have seen first time round, necessarily.
What you suggest basically results in creating a new type of mega-corporation that you have to pay for everything you do, and who do nothing to earn that. Literally, the pattern of your floorboards, the colour of your carpet, the shape of your biscuit tin. All these things are "uncopyrightable" / "unpatentable" / "untrademarkable" because they're obvious or already in the public domain. Going forward, removing that public domain part makes everything licensable, and therefore requiring a fee.
However, with the current unconstitutional laws in effect, you are rewarded for an absurdly long period, until long after you and probably your children are dead.
Part of the problem here is that copyrights are transferable and can be owned by corporations. The original copyright holder quickly loses his rights, if he even held them in the first place, and people with no affiliation whatsoever to the works or the artist gets to reap the benefits.
Make copyrights non-transferable from the actual creator(s), and only licensable for no longer than 5 years at a time.
If a corporation wants to continue using a creation, they need to continue to compensate the creator, until the work falls into public domain.
If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors, it will remain ours in perpetuity unless sold at some point.
If you own a business, you can also pass it to your children, and great, great, great, grandchildren. Here are some veerrrryy old businesses:
Baker's Chocolate (1765)
Cigna Insurance (1792)
JP Morgan Chase (1799)
DuPont (1802)
Colgate (1806)
Citigroup (1812)
Remington (1816)
HarperCollins (1817)
https://www.businessnewsdaily....
How can these businesses be allowed to make money for over 200 years and yet copyright owners are forced to "donate" their work to the public after 100 years? Inventors have to give their work away after just 20 years... cha-ching for manufacturers who pay nothing for the expired patent for hundreds of years. Programmers don't get a royalty... their hiring companies profit from the product for decades and the programmers get some peanut salary and get kicked out when they turn 40 or 50. Scientists and mathematicians have it the worst... they get paid with just a job (and they get some paltry sum in a Nobel Prize).
This is systematic abuse of the intellectual class by the ruling class (government and big business). Anything short of perpetual right to the creators of these works is abuse and exploitation.
When is the government going to make these old businesses "public domain?"
Don't be daft, all those businesses have had to keep producing new stuff to stay in business. Do you really think that Bakers Chocolate made one very good piece of chocolate and is still being paid for it? Artists can do exactly the same thing, keep producing new stuff to continue to generate money. And just like anyone is free to make chocolate that looks and tastes just like Bakers Chocolate, any one should be free to copy an artists work.
Don't want your chocolate or work of art copied, keep it secret and pass it on to your descendants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
> Creators ought to be able to control their creations
No creator creates things entirely by themselves. Writers draw on the public domain for the language they use, and many of the plot themes for fiction. They have past inventors to thank for their tools, whether it be pencil and paper or laptops and text editors. It is only fair that if they draw from the goods society hands them to work with, they eventually give back to society so the next generation can build on their work.
If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors.
That would be true were it not for the fact that the Government will seize it if you don't pay property tax. That essentially means that you're just renting it.
And suddenly, legislation will appear that will extend the Public Domain timeout period by another 20 or 50 years.
Watch and see if this doesn't happen before the end of the year.
There's a way to both extend copyright on some works and still let most things enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable, why on earth is the US government extending them for free? That's insane. Here's a system that would let the very few people willing to extend their copyrights do so and yet make money for the government and let most stuff enter the public domain.
1) Current copyright law (so-called Bono Act) is retained.
2) Copyrights are not automatically extended beyond the Bono act terms. Owners must apply for an extension before the expiration. If they miss the application for any reason at all - too bad, so sad. The work goes into the public domain. This will eliminate the 2nd biggest problem with the Bono Act (the biggest problem is doing renewals for free) - not making people be responsible for their copyrights when a very small number of major failures (ie. It's A Wonderful Life) led to much crying and wailing by Hollywood.
3) Those who apply for an extension get one for 10 years. We could make it 5 if you like. The cost - $1 million per work. If you don't apply and pay the money, it goes into the public domain.
4) Every subsequent renewal costs 10 times what the previous one did. The 2nd renewal will cost $10 million. The 3rd will cost $100 million. The 4th will cost $1 billion. And so on. At some point even Disney will have to say "Enough is enough" on extending copyrights on things from the 1920s.
Because my children (not even grandkids) will not derive any income from my writing, I'll have to shelve my idea of this book and go do "real work". That's the line of thinking I was alluding to. The creator — or his wife — would certainly think/say such a thing.
And this right here is why no art, no music, no movies and no books were created before the 95 year copyright rule.
Right?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
If you write a creative work, you can keep it forever, just like the house you built. You can pass it forward, and nothing will stop you from doing that. You have the right to sell your house, and then you lose ownership of it. You can also sell your work and lose ownership of it.
However, with a creative work you get an extra right, and that right is to control the copying of it. As long as you own the copyright, you are the only one who can make copies, or give the right to make them, and this allows you to make money by making them.
If you own a house, someone else can build an identical house, and it will be theirs. If you own a creative work, nobody else is allowed to create the same work. (It's also possible to patent the design of objects, and that's another intellectual right that's somewhat similar to copyright, but again, it's an expansion of ownership rights.)
As you can hopefully understand now, this right gives the owner of a work a lot of power that isn't inherent in owning an object. You can only sell an object you make once, transferring the ownership, but you can sell a creative work as long as you keep the copyright, and nobody else is allowed to do that.
Which is why this is supposed to be a limited right. Copyright is meant to encourage creators to create, by allowing them to make money off a work. When copyright is limited, it encourages the creator to continue creating, instead of living off old hits from tens of years ago. There is no natural right to continually make money off a work, and certainly no right for descendants to make money off it. That totally goes against the intention. If someone makes money off the work of their ancestors, that in no way encourages further creation.
Why are we so keen to provide people like your grandmother with unearned income forever ? We may as well crown them.
Nullius in verba
Besides government works and works whose copyrights are challenged in court ("Happy Birthday to You" etc.), works not "for hire" published after 1923 and whose only author died 70 years ago have entered into the public domain when the 70th anniversary arrives, if they weren't already in the public domain.
In almost all cases, they would have already entered due to non-renewal or other reasons.
It's not much, I know. I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head.
This is important though in that it removes any UNCERTAINTY about a work's copyright status. For example, if a book was published in 1924-1947 and the author died in 1947 and there isn't some reason the (c) last longer than "70 years after the death of the author," we know it's now in the public domain. A week ago, unless we did a diligent search for renewals, we did not know.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
These (and almost all) businesses usually have to continue to innovate to stay alive, by and large they put in their work each day.
Nullius in verba
from job creators
The day after you finished producing that masterpiece, you ceased to be a job creator and became a rent seeker. You no longer do anything useful and should not expect society to hand you stuff in perpetuity.
But if tomorrow, anyone can copy your work, what motivated you to produce it in the first place? A reasonable monopoly on profits from it would be OK. But only for the time required for you to produce your next work.
Have gnu, will travel.
The major problem (IMO) isn't the incentive issue, but that works get lost to the public. A good example for this is old computer games. The companies, which held the copyright, have often closed, and the copyrights have reverted to the individual creators, which means that there's not just one person controlling them, and these people are not only hard to track down, but often have little interest in making the games available. In other cases it's not clear who owns the copyright, after mergers and acquisitions.
The end result is that games get lost to the public. Even when companies try to buy the rights in order to make the games available again, they often fail. Some games are made available as abandonware, but that's not legal, because they're still protected by copyright. So in effect the only way to make these games available is to go against the law.
In practice, your proposal wouldn't make that much of a difference. People are already uploading copyrighted materials; as long as the copyright holder doesn't file a DMCA take-down notice, the material is available for free, even if it is technically not PD.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
It makes a massive difference. I can't create the vast majority of forms of derivative works without begging the rightsholder(s) for permission and paying them whatever they want to obtain a license to do so. Selling or even giving away a mixtape is a violation of the distribution rights of several copyright holders, for example. Using a well-known song from the 1960s to help anchor a scene in a film or even just as a stinger in a short YouTube video is not possible without buying the rights and the original creator may very well be dead by now, or they or their estate may not even give you the time of day. Making a shirt with Mickey Mouse on it is a violation too. Works of art are how we shape and record our culture and having them under copyright protection effectively puts our cultural history behind a million little paywalls.
10 year terms with a single 10 year extension that the rightsholder must actively apply for. That's all that needs to exist. That has been good enough for patents, so why shouldn't it be good enough for copyrights? They're both limited monopolies granted to allow a creator to benefit from their work and dropping those works into the public domain after term expiration. A healthy public domain enriches the entire society. There is no excuse for copyright terms being longer than patent terms. At some point information must be freed from the millions of little walking paywalls that copyright creates. Copyright extending beyond the life of the creator should be eliminated outright. Once you're dead, your work should be owned by the public. Look no further for the toxicity of copyright than Martin Luther King Jr's family: they are the nastiest kind of copyright rent-seekers imaginable, holding the work of MLK's life and an extremely important part of the Civil Rights Era hostage behind financial demands. They are a shining example of the worst that perpetual copyright has to offer.
Please explain this fabulous plan to native Hawaiians. I believe they've been getting taxed out of their homes for quite some time.
Existing works should've continued to be subject to their original copyright term. The new copyright duration should've only applied to new works - things created after the copyright extension act was passed. Kinda the inverse of grandfathering and ex post facto laws. This prevents an immediate beneficiary of the change to the law from unduly influencing the process of changing the law. Everyone takes a step back and considers the entire ramifications of the change to the law, instead of considering only the tiny immediate effect of the change.
The rationale for this is that the whole point of copyright is to encourage the creation of artistic works. Since the pre-existing work has already been made, copyright has already has served its function and encouraged its creation. So there is nothing to be gained by extending the duration of pre-existing copyrighted works. You can't encourage a pre-existing work to be created over again.
What most people don't know is, Sonny Bono actually had some sort of music career before he became a corrupt politician. Did you know that? I knew that. Most people don't know that. Because everyone just knows him as the guy who came up with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. But he was actually a singer. He died skiing when he hit a tree; once the tree has seventy more rings I'll check out his albums.
If you want your wife/kids/whoever to continue to reap benefits, just have them "co-author" the work.
and software copyrights 5-10 years base with renews. To fix abandonware issues. and right to repair issues to fix issues with suing web sites that hold roms / manuals / restore disks form people trying to fix there owned hardware.
there are people with rare games that don't dump them and pull that copyright BS when asked even when the The companies that made them have closed or have sold off IP and when thought a lot of mergers that is very hard to fine what companies owns it now. Also there some IP trolls that hold the rights and change big bucks for rom files and manuals.
well, then I will only be rewarded for a brief period.
No, you are supposed to be rewarded for a brief period. The US Constitution plainly states that; it's not just the article's author's opinion. The Constitution even points out that the *purpose* of depriving people of their natural rights to copy things they see for a limited period of time is to enhance the public domain.
However, with the current unconstitutional laws in effect, you are rewarded for an absurdly long period, until long after you and probably your children are dead. So you can stop your bitching and whining. You got what you wanted.
The *public* is suppose to be rewarded; the Constitution does not guarantee the owner of the copyright would ever be rewarded for their creations.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
However, with the current unconstitutional laws in effect, you are rewarded for an absurdly long period, until long after you and probably your children are dead.
Part of the problem here is that copyrights are transferable and can be owned by corporations. The original copyright holder quickly loses his rights, if he even held them in the first place, and people with no affiliation whatsoever to the works or the artist gets to reap the benefits.
Make copyrights non-transferable from the actual creator(s), and only licensable for no longer than 5 years at a time. If a corporation wants to continue using a creation, they need to continue to compensate the creator, until the work falls into public domain.
That wouldn't solve anything. Patents are already non-transferable; instead it's all bought and signed via payments and contracts. Inventors sign away everything to corporations and patent trolls.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Do you really think that Bakers Chocolate made one very good piece of chocolate and is still being paid for it?
In essence, yes. They created the recipe for the chocolate. But they were smart and did not release the recipe to the public like the foolish inventors, software devs, authors, musicians etc. No, they kept the recipe a secret and produced millions of chocolate bars (a simple process once you know the recipe) for hundreds of years. Trade secret protection is the best protection of IP and this example proves it.
Yes, they rely on Trade Secrets laws to keep the recipe safe. However, you can be sure they have many other products. One recipe wouldn't be enough to keep paying all their employees over all that time.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
That idea doesn't handle works with multiple creators. Anything from a 'music and lyrics' collaboration to a film produced by a staff of hundreds.
When the UK last extended our copyright duration for music - from fifty years, up to seventy - the change was not made entirely retroactive. Like the US it imposed a 'freeze' on new works entering the public domain, but unlike the US it did not re-copyright works which had already expired. This situation only refers to what the law calls 'sound recordings,' so it's quite possible for a specific recording of a song to now be public domain but the music and lyrics both still under copyright.
Thus, the Open Music Archive has been compiling all the pre-1963 music they can get their hands on and hosting it in the UK.
http://www.openmusicarchive.or...
There's also a UK-hosted music archive to be found on IPFS, under key QmPEiNptxQ6LepGWSnfseLsYxDDBhXc6hiGqYP6a7sSpuH.
In the early days of copyright, copyright needed to be actively requested - depending on country by either registering it with a central office, or by putting in an intentional 'copyright blah year, all rights reserved' notice somewhere. So trivial things were not copyrighted - under that system this post, for example would be instantly public domain.
This was long ago changed by international agreement to make copyright automatic for anything and everything, though. For practical reasons, mostly - lots of ugly arguments in court relating to drafts and leaked documents which didn't have the vital notice on, or things accidentally going public domain because someone just neglected to put the tag on (It's A Wonderful Life, for example, lapsed copyright because the holder neglected to file a renewal notice on what was then a worthless and obscure film - though they later managed to re-copyright it on a technicality). So now every work is automatically copyrighted upon creation, including this post. I'm sure if you scour the Slashdot sign up agreement you'll find the paragraph where I agreed to let them publish my comments so you can read this.
It solved one problem, but created another. Now we have 'orphan works' - potentially useful material which is legally unusable because the author didn't sign it, thinking it too trivial to bother, and now no-one has any way to figure out who the author was. You might be happy to re-post some meme that's been passed around the image boards for a year, but no company will touch such material for fear that exposure will lead to the original artist crawling out the woodwork and hiring a lawyer.
Because my children (not even grandkids) will not derive any income from my writing, I'll have to shelve my idea of this book and go do "real work".
Or you could apply the same principle as every other profession and realise that income doesn't get continuously derived from things you create. If you want your children to inherit something, save it for them or invest it for them.
To compare it to every other property, note that your children won't "derive" income from it. What they do have is something physical with a value based on its current state, nothing more. I built a house recently. If in 95 years I gift it to my children without anything further done to it what they will inherit is a property worth $100000 and a condemned falling apart piece of shit that will likely cost them a small fortune to raze and remove.
Fuck the idea that anything you create is worth perpetual income.
Solution is here... stop acting like are tards.
For real. Disney puts out crap. How are they so big?
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If I build a house, I can will it to my ancestors, it will remain ours in perpetuity unless sold at some point.
If, on the other hand, I write a tune or a book, or develop a drug, or create a painting — well, then I will only be rewarded for a brief period.
If you want to talk about things that are completely different then sure, but what you can't do is make sure no one else builds a house like it. Random Joe might not be able to move in but he can build his own.
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Wait, so how are your kids going to derive income from your 'real work'? They're not so why bother? Oh, so you can make money and pass it on, like you can with writing a book/music/etc. How many people do you think are going to want to read your book in a hundred years and why do you think people who had nothing to do with it deserve to derive income from it when their only connection to it is you got lucky a couple of times?
You seem to have some weird ideas.
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Point is, they should not have to.
Why not ? What's so special about artists that they can make one thing, and then collect money for the rest of their life (and their children's) while other people have to repeat their work day after day ?
This assumes that everyone is going to want his solitary masterpiece in enough numbers and for enough time that his grandkids grandkids are still rolling in it, otherwise, why bother?
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Do you really think that Bakers Chocolate made one very good piece of chocolate and is still being paid for it?
In essence, yes. They created the recipe for the chocolate. But they were smart and did not release the recipe to the public like the foolish inventors, software devs, authors, musicians etc. No, they kept the recipe a secret and produced millions of chocolate bars (a simple process once you know the recipe) for hundreds of years. Trade secret protection is the best protection of IP and this example proves it.
If its a trade secret you can bet your ass it isn't under copyright which forces you disclose what that secret is.
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If you own a business, you can also pass it to your children, and great, great, great, grandchildren. Here are some veerrrryy old businesses: Baker's Chocolate (1765)
"Baker's Chocolate is a brand name for the line of baking chocolates[1] owned by the Kraft Heinz Company (formerly Kraft Foods)"
Tell me more about how this has been passed generation to generation and isn't just a name that has persisted.
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K e y
M o u s E
Eh?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You've apparently just pointed out that houses are tangible things whereas the right to copy and profit from a work is abstract.
Everybody else already fucking knew that mate. Your point is asinine and your example only works if you're incapable of nuanced thought.
But then, I always know it's going to be complete bollocks when I see your name up there.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Oh Jesus. The sig explains it. Safe to ignore this chump.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I largely agree but would suggest that copyrights be transferable exactly once (idea stolen from another /. poster a long time ago). If I create something but cannot fully realize it for financial reasons, I could at least sell the copyright to a large organization that could fully realize it while I still profit from the invention. It couldn't be sold time after time but I am sure trolls would pop up and ruin that idea. Still, it would be good for a little while and I like it significantly more than what we have now.
The big problem is that the constitution doesn't state the exact time limit of copyrights.
Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “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.”
It would have been helpful if the copyright term limits were specifically spelled out in the constitution. Since it only states "for limited times" as long as the law has a definitive time period for copyrights it doesn't violate the constitution. The US Supreme Court upheld this view in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Now if copyrights are extended again it may be arguable that the effect copyright has become effectively indefinite but that would take another court challenge.
That's easy. The owner of the home REALLY owns the house.
Now if you fail to never pay those taxes your house may be seized to pay off the debt of those back taxes but up to this point the owner still owns the house. This can also happen if you fail to pay other debts. Your assets can be seized to pay off those debts.
2018 Is the Last Year of America's Public Domain Drought until Disney extends it another 20 years.
I was not attempting to imply that the public got a fair deal, only refuting a claim that "the public got nothing". Consideration, an analogous concept in contract law, doesn't require that the exchange of value be proportionate.
If the people valued the public domain, the people would choose to purchase products and services from organizations that promote the public domain. But because they instead have chosen to view works of authorship published by copyright maximalists, the people on the whole have voted with their dollars for copyright maximalism.
Of course, derivative works don't have to be so expensive. Just change the character names of your Twilight fanfic and publish them as an "original" work. Cha-ching!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The perusal of copyrighted works could monitored by a tax-funded, neutral organization and
copyright holders paid fees through a money-stream from Federal taxes.
There would need to be a non-intrusive means of monitoring use of each work, to determine
how much to pay for it, of course.
An algorithm would be needed to assess the value of each work to the public to determine how
much each copyright holder would be paid for each use.
An effective design of such a system might be difficult, but it would be worth it to have
freely accessible IP for everyone.
Copyright holders would be freed of the overhead and hassle of managing sales.
An over-all win-win, I think.
I largely agree but would suggest that copyrights be transferable exactly once (idea stolen from another /. poster a long time ago). If I create something but cannot fully realize it for financial reasons, I could at least sell the copyright to a large organization that could fully realize it while I still profit from the invention
You would still profit if you licensed it to them instead of sold it. With the difference that if it really takes off, you have very good bargaining chips for a better deal when the license is up for renewal. If you sell it, you get zilch more.
We'll just route the money back to Disney in the form of tax breaks and incentives. It's why tobacco taxes haven't eliminated smoking. We subsidize tobacco growers. Same deal will happen here.
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That idea doesn't handle works with multiple creators.
It already works - there are bands that won't sell out to record companies, but retain the copyrights. A cooperative is a valid business model.
The big problem is that the constitution doesn't state the exact time limit of copyrights.
Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 - Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] "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."
It would have been helpful if the copyright term limits were specifically spelled out in the constitution. Since it only states "for limited times" as long as the law has a definitive time period for copyrights it doesn't violate the constitution. The US Supreme Court upheld this view in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Now if copyrights are extended again it may be arguable that the effect copyright has become effectively indefinite but that would take another court challenge.
It's only a big problem because the US legal profession routinely ignores legal ethics issues whenever they think they can get away with it.
The issue with copyright isn't the duration: the issue is that the copyright is subject to contract for the entire duration. This has lots of negative implications, including the creation of artificial monopoly for long periods of time - with everything that implies.
Contract related matters are fundamental to the profits of the US legal profession: as such the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to having long periods of time in which copyrights are subject to contract. This inherently creates a long window in which lawyers can expect (extremely lucrative) copyright related contract business to come their way, creating an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals and enhancing the average lifetime income of all legal professionals.
The right to ethical practice of law is an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. As such, this is a right "retained by" and "reserved to" the people and protected under the 9th and 10th Amendments. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
Hence, to be complaint with the Bill of Rights, US copyright law would have to greatly limit the amount of time in which copyright was subject to contract. Five or ten years would be reasonable, I could even go a little longer.
After that time, the material should no longer be subject to contract, in order to avoid the issue of ethical conflict of interest. That doesn't mean it has to go fully into the public domain: you could still require that any copying for gain would require compensating the creators of a work for the duration of their lives. You might, for example, require that the creators get 10%-20% of the gross for any product in which their work appears (perhaps divided evenly). This is far more than most musicians or authors or song-writers actually get, so the creative types would on the whole be pretty happy with it.
Note that this completely removes the incentive for corporations (and associations of legal professionals) to give bribes - err, I mean "campaign contributions" - to politicians to extend copyright. Also, the long duration could still be used to protect "moral rights", which is worth doing - and that's the only legitimate justification for having a long duration. The material could go into the public domain with respect to not-for-gain copying after 20-30 years, while still protecting moral rights.
Hence, you could have long durations, without negative effects for society - and this fully satisfies the exclusive use for a limited time provision.
Note that no change to the Constitution is required here: we simply need to get the lawyers to start respecting the existing text of the Bill of Rights - which is supposed to be the highest law in the land, a law that they've already sworn oaths to uphold (and are required to do so by the "good behaviour" provision).
Since US copyright law clearly isn'
This is why calls for "reasonable, moderate reform" of copyright monopoly - usually published by the semi-official propaganda organs - no longer carry any weight.
The culture monopolists too long have shamelessly abused their privilege. It is now obvious to most people of normal intelligence that copyright monopoly is immoral and harmful to society. It must be abolished.
The Constitution explicitly has that copyrights exist for a limited time.
According to the USSC, the time is only limited in the sense that breaking any encryption through brute force is limited.
But if tomorrow, anyone can copy your work, what motivated you to produce it in the first place?
There are other motivations besides money. Take your comment for example. It's a copyrighted piece of work. It took you time to create. But you're not going to make a penny off of it. So why did you write it?