The major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first couple of years, and yet we extend copyright 70 years past the author's death! If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
"
Since 1990, The Walt Disney Company had lobbied for copyright extension. The legislation delayed the entry into the public domain of the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, leading detractors to the nickname "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act".
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.
It wouldn't have mattered how long copyright is if it wasn't expanded beyond the immediate economic desincentives that it is supposed to address for the most insidious problems it causes. It should be been limited exclusively to the combined right to reproduction and distribution. Yes, that means that I could reproduce the protected work without limit, so long as don't distribute it. Also means that I could distribute the protected work so long as I do only the copies I acquired.
I, like you, through for a while that length was the problem, now I've poked around enough and known about enough actual examples where shorter length wouldn't have prevented the problems that happens with copyright. The content Sony had repeatedly removed from people's libraries was well within copyright term, shorter copyright wouldn't have saved it. What would have saved it is copyright scope that never extended to controlling access to copies already sold
Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
Issue of pharma development is not that you need a protection from copycats. You need to pass a mountain of regulations and bureaucracy. Most of the medications are easily copyable but would take years to be able to get to the market.
> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
> China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen.
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
> It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
> And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
So someone who has suffered incurable harm and damage at the hands of health insurers is a "hate monger" while the health insurance executive prioritising their company profits over human health is just a normal person doing their normal job?
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Very much this. And another problem is that the US forced most of the world to adopt similar laws through various cartels, oh, sorry, trade agreements. I distinctly remember when suddenly it was no longer okay to openly sell pirated software in Russia "because we're joining WTO". I still have no idea why we joined it.
> If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
Who's going to pay you to work for five years for a book that has a two-year commercial window, and even for that many people won't buy it until another company that just does printing sells it for half price two years from the first published date?
Well, if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit, it would make sense to pay you a reasonable salary for the five years it takes you to write it. It's not completely implausible that people would pay for something that could be had for cheaper soon, considering that there are grifters selling "new editions" (with a publication date in the future, to game recency-biased search algorithms) of out-of-copyright works that are available for free elsewhere.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
One should pay a exponential "upholding" fee doubling every year of copyright. People would be very careful with clinging to rights- when they have a yearly break even.
The creator is not the only person to consider here. We don't grant copyrights just to give creators a funny kind of royalty-pension they can pass to their heirs. We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public. Copyright ultimately must be judged on how well it serves the public benefit, not on how much power or wealth it gives to authors directly (at the expense of others).
Did you ever publish anything? First year or two it is mostlu pushing marketing/pr, and the long tail of trickle of money is where the true earnings lie. Also, for many works of art it takes more than 2 years to produce a next piece, and even if it was less, it’s not sure if it will actually sell.
Anything below 5-10 years and you have literal starving authors. Anything less than 5 and you may as well abolish it altogether.
we have literal "starving authors" - they pretty much all need second jobs to survive.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
I'd rather give it to individuals than corporations at least. It's useful as a lever to protect the weak from the powerful. Perhaps it should simply not be transferable? Another alternative would be for its power to weaken over time in some way.
We live in a world where there is an absolute abundance of art, music, novels. You can find it everywhere, huge amounts of it either free or very cheaply.
In what way is the system as it exists currently failing to encourage the creation of new works?
It encourages creation of new works just fine, but at the expense of creating billions of tiny monopolies that last for generations, which get aggregated into huge monopolies, ultimately making ordinary people into criminals for wanting to preserve or modify the works that make up their culture.
My point is that it doesn't need to do that. Copyright could still encourage creation of new works with a much shorter duration, without the downside of locking our culture up in monopolies for life + 70.
Most of that art is being created irrespective of copyright, though. Much of it uses exceptions to copyright and some is straight up in violation (most "fan art"/fanfiction). It's either not monetised or monetised through things like Patreon.
I wouldn't say we have more "traditional" art that an author spends time creating with the vision of selling copies for years to come, than we did when copyright terms were shorter.
I don't have any numbers on fan art vs original works floating around the web, but even those original works aren't being monetised via copyright. They would be created even if copyright was abolished or significantly weakened.
What you are describing is the view of copyright set down in the US Constitution, but it doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world. In many countries, copyright is strongly bound up with the author's moral rights.
Mandating that creators lose control and the ability to profit from their work almost immediately will absolutely not encourage the production of new works.
> We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public
Which includes giving creators royalty rights that can be passed on to their heirs, so the elder author can finish their manuscript on their deathbed as a gift to their family.
Congress has currently chosen a duration of life + 70, but my point is that it's absurdly far beyond anything necessary to encourage the production of new works. When you consider the costs of copyright monopolies to the public, it's clearly out of whack. As I said, the majority of revenue from copyrighted works happens in the first couple of years of release.
I completely agree that life+70 is absolutely obscene, as my response to your parent post clarifies. I moved on from that since I thought my stance was clear (14 + 14 or 28 total), and moved on to “we should still honor the copyright even if they die, because heirs matter.”
Has this ever happened, or is it a scenario you made up in your mind?
I know a few great works were published posthumously, but most of these were because somebody thought it was really important to share, not because it was a golden goose they wanted to start... milking.
I don’t have a specific example; but I don’t like the idea of an author, photographer, painter, songwriter, etc’s familt losing their copyright because their plane crashed the day after they recorded a record.
And again, to be clear, since apparently people think I’m defending life+70. I am abso-fucking-lutely not.
I want 14+14 or raw 28 back.
Edit: oh apparently I do, thanks Kagi Assistant.
Otis Redding Died in a plane crash literally 3 days after recording a famous track and his family earned a LOT after his passing.
> We don't grant copyrights to give authors a kind of royalty-based pension for their old age and their heirs.
"We" is doing a lot of work here. I realize that it's basically impossible for an entire population to have coherent motivations, but I support copyright because I think artists have the right to control what happens with their work and to sell it if they can. I believe that this right extends, like all rights, until the end of the author's life. I don't really care one bit about encouraging the production of new works.
which is too long, and also too short - what about authors who wrote finished their book on their deathbed? Then their rights are shorter than someone young - an unfair discrimination.
That's why age should be irrelevant. Copyright is useful, and should be granted. However, current copyright grants last far too long - age plus some years beyond. Not to mention corporations lobbying to increase the length right as some copyrights for some works are about to enter public domain.
Therefore, copyright should be granted for a single period and end - like patents. 20 years seems to be a good middle ground, but i could hear arguments for slightly longer or shorter.
Same exact duration for all authors: as long as they’re around and capable of caring. It’s not the same when duration is expressed numerically, sure. But consider: no life is the same in this way (until immortality is discovered), yet all should be valued equally (or so I hope and believe). Timing life makes them unavoidably unequal - and thus differences in lifetime shouldn’t be a criteria to use for comparing rights. That’d be actual age discrimination.
I suggest to rather look at it under the angle whether estates should be able to inherit author’s identity (or some of it), to continue the will.
How about "We the people", as stated in the Constitution? The Constitution itself defines the purpose of copyright, and it is not the purpose you state.
Nothing is going to protect moneyless creator against multi-billion transnational greed-driven corporations equipped with lawyer armies if the law actually encourage these corporations to actually thrive and further harden the rules in their own interests.
Abolishing the copyright or not is not that important if nothing is done in front of that to guarantee that every single human are granted unconditional access to decent life conditions.
You're free to release your own work with Creative Commons License (or any other license that shorten the copyright).
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
> It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
inheritance has nothing to do with copyright. Financial assets are not monopolies. Copyright is only a valuable asset because of the granted monopoly on copying/distribution.
Therefore, to reduce the value copyright has (as it currently does seem to have too much), reducing the granted terms should be sufficient. Like patents, a good 20 years seems like a sufficiently long time to recover cost of production, while letting people who are currently alive to produce derivatives of it afterwards.
Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? I think copyright should be as long as ownership of any other asset.
If I spend $20m on building a house or creating a computer game, why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not? I would have a monopoly on this specific building and on this specific creative work, but anyone is free to build/create anything else.
If J. Rowling created Harry Potter universe, why her family can't own it indefinitely? We somehow accept this notion for other assets, but treat copyright differently.
p.s. creative work is more valuable as it has something that money can't buy (authenticity, taste, sincerity, etc)
> why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not
Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright.
If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.
Public doesn't pay a creative tax. You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. This is different with other assets though, you have to pay someone indefinitely to rent a place to live, even though building (or land) was built hundreds years ago and just gets inherited by new generation of landlords every 75 years.
> You're free to buy or not buy any creative work.
You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers.
Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.
>Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets?
The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.
Owning the copyright to a work grants the exclusive right to profit off that work, but so does owning a house grant the exclusive right to profit off that house. House ownership is not a monopoly because there are other houses, and you can build a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. Similarly, copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works, and you can make a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost.
The negative economic effects of monopolies stem from a lack of competition leading to insufficient supply, but there's no lack of competition or insufficient supply of copyrighted works. Even if copyright were indefinite like other property rights, it wouldn't stymie the supply of new works, but rather expand investment due to raising the future expected profit.
> copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works
they are not fungible, unlike houses.
Also, if you could copy a house like you could copy digital goods (i would download a car), i am also going to claim that the "monopoly" on the house must also be shortened.
Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.
I mean the actual workers. I do not get royalty checks for the building I helped on during one summer. Homeowners don't send monthly money to workers that build their house or renovated it.
It's the same in creative work creation, no? Filming crew / game devs don't own any copyright and property rights. They explicitly give it up under contract/hiring terms.
Her family can own their copies of Harry Potter forever.
But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore?
For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.
It would make sense to make it possible, but increasingly expensive to extend the copyright. It's fine for Disney to keep their successful creations, it just makes no sense to drag all other copyrighted works in existence along for the ride.
I'm not sure what your point is. Harry Potter is in the top ten highest grossing media franchises ever. Sure, top 10 franchises make a lot of money, but they're outliers. Is it in the public interest to grant every author in the country a copyright monopoly for life + 70 so that we can ensure JK Rowling's grandchildren continue to make billions from Harry Potter? Clearly not!
Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).
>Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
Copyright does no such thing. The copyright owner is free to alter or change their material at any time, or to discard it and force it to remain unused until it deteriorates and is destroyed (e.g. video game preservation is mostly done by copyright violators).
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984: because the copyright was enforced to ensure the work was not altered. This is ++good.
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to originator/owner agency. I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this in this day and age ... information does want to be free, after all.
A public fingerprinting/attestation service would separate the two functions we care about: 1) letting creators monetise and control commercial exploitation for a limited time, and 2) giving everyone a reliable way to verify that a given copy matches a claimed original.
The second does not require a multi-generational monopoly, and I am not advocating for that. I do however believe that some social mechanism for ensuring the materials I care about land on my desk un-altered, is quite important.
> Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs.
The root problem is inequality. Copyright makes sense to allow authors to profit from their work. But it was warped to give more power to big corporations that own now works for more than a century. Everybody that was alive when some works were produced will be dead by the time that they are free.
LLMs shows what happens when you remove copyright. Websites are starving for visitors as LLMs copy/paste their contents and charge for it without giving anything back.
Split monopolies, improve working class conditions, and get politicians that work for - the now powerful - working class. Copyright can be fixed, but not until power is removed from the few and given back to the many.
I've published and sold my own software. I'm a writer (unpublished as yet, but I hope to use CC4 like Cory Doctorow - ethical copyright.) I've seen my software pirated; I've benefited financially from selling it. I know authors and their struggles with income.
And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.
Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.
Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.
Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
Changing copyright durations without touching patent law is useless. In your example we would also need to shorten software patents to e.g. 3 years. Otherwise the big fish will just create a patent maze.
Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, trying to convince you that copyright is bad so they can avoid copyright lawsuits and use everyone's data without paying licensing fees. Without copyright, they can use your data for free.
You know who also wants to avoid a copyright lawsuit? Me! I remixed some music and would like to show it to the other people. Too bad that if they like it, I will never ever be able to monetize it or will even have to delete it.
While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game.
While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts.
While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents.
Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour?
I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
> So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
Honestly I wouldn't mind that, don't even really see a downside really, Hasbro can make one and the old members of the ZA/UM cultural association can make one, and I'll play whichever one is best! (Who knows, maybe Hasbro has something hidden deep inside it wants to utter out into the world!)
Agreed. While copyright timescales are currently over-extended, copyright was introduced for a very practical reason: "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"[1].
Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.
If that was the reason, it should be completely abolished as the exact opposite was achieved.
See for example this article [1]
> unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.
> it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
>Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright.
> To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument.
The correct response to that is to fix the asymmetry, not blow the rights up entirely.
Quoth the OP:
> It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies.
Post Citizens United, you could say the same thing about free speech. Does the OP want to abolish that, too?
The fact that the wealthy (corporations and individuals), with massive teams of lawyers and propagandists, can often better take advantage of the rights I also enjoy is not a compelling reason for abolishing my rights.
Partially agree but on the free speech side, if you are common people you are also "protected" by being a small fish. It's very very rare that somebody sues you because you posted some hot take on X and you have to defend your free speech right (it happens sometimes yes, but it's - for now - statistically irrelevant). See what happens if a Big Corp posts some shit on their social media account.
The copyright law is instead in spirit - at least in its current form - heavily skewed towards Big Corps, because they are the only ones that have all the right machinery to exploit over and over IP from 70 years ago. A mildly successful writer (equivalent of a "mum&pop shop") will not generate enough royalties in the future for their grandson to never work.
I'm not a fan of AI if that's what you're talking about, I still want copyright dead or drastically shortened. I'd say most people with an interest in free (as in freedom) software or computers in general should want similar.
So this means that the law is only enforced partially and only benefits big corporations which van ignore it. So yet another reason to abolish copyright.
I love how almost everyone in here seems to confuse the DMCA with copyright itself and that there seems to be such a wide spread opinion that copyright does more harm than good.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Many people don't like the GPL for exactly that reason. Free software (i.e. copyleft) benefits from copyright at the expense of the wider open source community.
Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
I want it gone for decades already, but no one listens to me. It has always been my hope that AI can finally make it happen by incentivizing people with bottomless pits full of money to solve the problem.
Ah yes, the big tech propaganda that undermines their entire business model. Without copyright, you would be free to modify or alter any data collection capabilities of tech you purchase.
The real propaganda is pretending people weren't complaining about copyright for decades and crying "Pirating isn't stealing!!" when it came to them getting GTA for free.
Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
It is bullshit also because it hasn’t protected anyone. Copyright only protects massive corporations.
It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us.
They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you.
At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, yet people still buy books. We could assume that it's not because they fear breaking the law, but because they want to support the author and have an "authentic" copy.
There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
> As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular,
That's an argument for no laws at all.
There are murders so why make it illegal.....
The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space for a workable business model by limiting piracy.
I take your point there are other models - such as subscription - however not everyone is Charles Dickens and can turn out chapter by chapter on demand, and it those don't work for every genre.
> is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
Is is? Does it really matter I can't copy Disney films or books? Are we so lacking in creativity that it's not possible to create novel stories or characters?
I think too often IP and copyright are confused. If somebody had the rights to the wheel in perpetuity that's bad for innovation, but somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
The downsides of murder clearly outweigh the upsides. The fact that we're debating here shows that's not the case for copyright.
> ...somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
People want to adapt that mouse into their own works, as they have done with stories since stories started being told. They do so even if they know they're breaking the law. That alone should be reason to reconsider copyright.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and reusing facets of modern stories isn't somehow less creative than reusing old stories or reusing lived experiences. You can take the general story beats of a popular work, strip out all copyrightable elements, and end up with something wholly derivative. You can also build on a known work and end up with something that's fresh, creative, maybe something that engages readers/watchers/listeners of the base work in a way that nothing fully original could. Take Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; it clearly reuses another work's characters and setting, but it would be worse off without it.
I think the thinking is that in current system as solo creator you are somewhat protected by copyright but your work still gets mainly bought by your audience even if it can be pirated.
On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
> What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
What's stopping people from doing that now? The moment you sell something of any interest, you can be sure to find a copy of it free on the internet somewhere.
The fact that it's illegal limits large scale commercial exploitation, leaving enough room for legitimate distribution that pays the author.
With no copyright whatsoever, there would be a well-organized company with a better marketing department selling their version of your work, taking all the profit, and making it impossible to actually sell it yourself.
> With no copyright whatsoever, there would be a well-organized company with a better marketing department selling their version of your work, taking all the profit, and making it impossible to actually sell it yourself.
That's exactly what the AI companies are doing right now. Except they're not even selling your work in any kind of recognisable form.
It already happens. Instead of a book look at TikTok for example. Come up with a cool product, if it sells at all, it will be immediately counterfeited.
The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations.
Did copyright helped against AI? Nope.
If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience.
Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
The fact that the laws of the land are more accessible to people/entities with deep pockets is true across the board - it's not specifically a copyright issue.
That's an argument for scrapping all laws because the mechanics of administrating them are unequal.
I'd prefer there to focus on making access to the law more equitable rather than simply scrapping legal protections.
>It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
The real problem is that misuse is not followed by ruinously high penalty. False claims should result in statutory damages of tens thousands per claim. That is the way to prevent misuse.
A lot of the problem with DMCA is how its been implemented by companies. There is a provision in the original law making it a crime to make false claims, but organisations like Youtube don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law. Everyone seems to have forgotten it was even part of it, I have never seen it enforced.
> don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law
It's not their responsibility. For that part of the law, you need to get your lawyer involved. And your lawyer will probably tell you not to waste your money, because the way the DMCA was written makes it practically impossible to find enough proof to actually win.
I don't think the "internet is a series of pipes" politicians could've foreseen Youtube or TikTok, but had I believed that the authors of early internet legislation had that foresight, I would've accused the law of being intentionally written to lead to these implementations.
My personal website: https://purpleidea.com/ has been DMCA'ed by some scammer and I still haven't gotten it back out. Google ignores the counter notices, and who knows where else the scammer (masquerading as a legitimate takedown company) has sent notices. Bing and DDG (same basically) have all delisted it.
While initially a perpetual right to copying for some publishers, copyright was made into what it is today to "promote creation". Funnily enough it's used in the exactly opposite way. Culture is basically frozen, same movie and same music released every week.
The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind.
What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
Games are another big area where distance to copyright seems to be where the innovation is occurring. So many of the big genres of games and ultimately the "game" that started the genre begun as a mod of another game. Counterstrike from half life, the myriad of factory games from modded minecraft, Arma and DayZ spawned the survival genre and further Arma mods formed the idea of PubG as well. In sim racing mods to Assetto Corsa have influenced the successor title of Competizone which chose GT3 cars since they were the most popular online. Then the modders on AC made long journey driving modifications and this has now influenced the upcoming Evo. There are probably many more examples from Skyrim or other FPS games of ideas born first by modders.
A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.
Don't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
> people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it
Just because you choose copyleft (even weak copyleft like MPLv2) doesn't mean your project will succeed or be more popular. A lot of people (and especially a lot of companies) do prefer permissive over copyleft, and that's because they can built something proprietary on top, without being forced to give back. That's why they're ultra billionaire rich, and in comparison you're poor.
Software often wins because it's better. Copyleft favours the collective good, permissive favours the individual greed. In any case, all of these things require copyright law.
I like how you so easily dismiss my opinion by saying "it's probably because you suck" :-).
For my library, people explicitly complained about copyleft, saying "it comes with strings attached". They were pushing for permissive because it meant they could fork it for their proprietary startups.
For the other example that you conveniently ignored (Ardupilot vs PX4), it's also very clear that many companies choose PX4 because of the licence. I have heard a lot of "if you go for Ardupilot it's risky because GPLv3", and believe it or not, it has an impact on people's decision long before they can say whether PX4 or Ardupilot is better (spoiler: they are roughly equivalent).
What’s the issue? They didn’t like your licence terms, and rewrote the library under a permissive licence? You don’t have a right to users or an audience.
I don't agree. Free software would still be free even if copyright were to be abolished, if anything it would flourish further. That is because even proprietary software could be better integrated.
You're conflating what "Free Software" means and what Copyleft means. In any case, they both need protection from people like you who want to take it and benefit for free, without having to give anything back. Copyleft was designed specifically to prevent against people with your mindset. Permissively licensed software needs copyright to protect authorship rules, although the requirements are lessened.
Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.
The industry can just push and promote people it picked itself and then bind them some other way. How would this work with open software, which is not public domain and often sees the original creator step away down the line?
You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
It's not only Hollywood, these ML tankies that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation. (This is where people's brains will turn off)
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the ML government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
> these anarcho-capitalists that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
Hollywood was created by ignoring (Edison) patents, not copyright.
On the other hand, Disney's success is largely owed to public domain adaptations, and for a century, it did its best to shrink the public domain and expand copyright.
Your argument is non-sequitur and nihilist. America was created by colonizing Native land, so should we somehow evict hundreds of millions of people in the name of justice? (/rhetorical)
Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.
I don't see an argument for removing copyright being a good thing other than people wanting other's work for free, not just free to use but free to sell as their own.
Was it is a good thing and it was created by ignoring copyrights and therefore we shouldn't protect copyrights as an absolute because other good things can be created out of it, or is it a bad thing and is using that copyright to restrict others.
You can't have it both ways. My point was just that defense of Hollywood is a terrible example.
From the perspective of "The general purpose computing device I own should be able to run any instructions written by anyone without legal issues" then copyright sucks. Massively abused by corporations to unproductively charge rent by squatting on obvious implementations.
From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)
I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.
I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
(1) As I understand, the first modern copyright law was in 1700's Britain, which broke a printer monopoly and shifted control of works from publisher to author. It also meant that an author and their family would not starve while their work was still generating revenue for the publisher (who would have outright purchased and owned the work).
(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.
(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.
(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.
If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.
Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.
For decades we've suffered the crushing hand of Big Copyright. As the little guys, we could do nothing.
I'd never expected to see commercial entities with a lot of money and political/military connections depending on the weakening of copyright for survival.
Not quite. If you abolish copyright, then some place like Google or Amazon will be the only one who will make money. Authors will get zero, relatively. The second you publish your book, Amazon will instantly republish it and collect 100% of sales.
Instead, shorten the length to 25 years or so. We simply need copyright to not be extreme. And zero years is still extreme.
You don't need to abolish copyright, you just have to limit the scope to the economic mechanism that actually matter for authors: reproduction and distribution of the reproduced works. Removing all of copyright except that combined right will still give authors the ability to license under the terms they find reasonable and viable, without harming any of the consumer abilities that we've come to expect.
Funny how copyright used to be held to such extreme value before that many governments agreed to implement the "empty cassette laws" which then got conveniently also applied to empty cd-s, even though there's no guarantee that every single empty cd would be used to burn copyrighted material. And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing.
I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
I know this is a popular take on HN, but it's very much one that collapses the moment you think about it. Abolishing copyright would only enable the large corporations further.
Copyright shouldn't be abolished, it should be reformed however.
It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.
It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
Because Disney paying ever-increasing fees to keep Snow White is not particularly harmful. Vs. if we allowed ever-extending patents on essential medicines and foundational technologies? How much could the heirs of the Wright Brothers add to the price of every plane ticket?
Many comments here are throwing arbitrary numbers. These are driven just by some internal feelings instead of a data driven policy. The best solution would be to abolish it completely. It's a practice that wouldn't exist without the violent backing of the state. It's a monopolistic practice abused by wealthy. (I do realize the implications for R&D heavy businesses)
Copyright needs to be shorter, but also it should be non-transferable and unable to held by anybody except the individual it originates from. Corporations shouldn't have rights to start with, only restrictions, and they certainly shouldn't have rights over thoughts or ideas.
How would that work for things like films or music when it genuinely is a group of people making something? I agree that copyright is way, way too long and should be a fixed length, but there's definitely a use in corporations being able to hold it.
After a short/zero copyright it would be a "free for all". But that sounds lovely! It would be a different business model, not ripping someone off. I don't recognize copyright as some kind of "natural law". Taking someone's physical property, that's theft. Singing a song that you have heard, that shouldn't be theft.
It has issues but I would rather see reform of patents first. Given the greater pace of developments now, effectively they now represent a proportionately longer period now than in the past. And they are too broad, along with various abuses (especially around novelty)
All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.
Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.
So they silently also did the same thing.
With that, copyright in training went to shit.
Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
Neither for the people arguing the original point who want protection for what they are doing but don't want protection for the big players who just make big bucks and "shut everybody down whom they don't like".
Nor from a philosophical big picture POV. The little innovator needs protections. The big capitalist less so. It's why labor laws are more strict with bigger corps than small shops. And why higher incomes pay more taxes. (Well that's the idea. That they find ways to circumvent the idea is a different story.)
"Copyright" covers a lot of areas, from films to books to software etc. So blanket statements about it are not helpful.
From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.
And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?
For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.
Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.
Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL are doing the best they can in the current world. Abolishing copyright would not harm the free software movement.
I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere.
Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.
Copyright should be commoditized. A possible first step could be giving copyright owners a single obligation: you have to sell what you own. That thing you have must be available on the market.
This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.
This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
What happens if I wrote a book - sent around to a few publishers and then personally had a change of heart - perhap it has content which I now disavow.
Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication?
Or because I refuse to publish, but the publishers have a copy - I should lose the right to control my own work and the copyright falls and the publisher can just publish freely?
> It seems the consensus in this thread [if I'm skimming correctly] is most want copyright completely removed.
I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it.
For example if I buy a physical book, I own it. I'm free to sell it or give it away. Things like the DMCA and the switch from an ownership model to a rental model are more the problem.
ie does getting rid of copyright enable right to repair? Does getting rid of copyright suddenly stop a games company pulling software from your library that you 'bought'?
Wouldn't these companies just put all the restrictions directly into the purchase agreement?
You could establish contracts with publishers outside of copyright, which is how NDAs work today. It's probably a reasonable thing to do anyway, otherwise there's nothing stopping a publisher from telling everyone the plot summary of your newest novel.
By the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement.
Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?
But what does “available on the market” mean? Let’s say I own the copyright to something of cultural significance. I make it “available on the market” but at a very high price. Or are you saying that the price would be enforced?
As a Linux user of over 20 years, I really don't like thinking of myself as some Aborigine barely holding on to a scrap of ancestral land. My tech preferences have become so ubiquitous that nearly the entire Internet runs them.
In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.
I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
I don't think I have ever seen someone outside of tech saying this. It's always people working with the data-copying machines, never the people creating the data protected by the law, that want said laws gone.
The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.
Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.
Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
I agree, copyright is a just yet another monopolistic tool and it isn't making the market any favor.
Copyright could be gradually be reduced to a few years, the market will adapt, for example collecting money before producing the content (like a movie or an album), collecting more money from concert rather than music directly (which is going to happen anyway since it's competing against generated content), etc...
Having a weak copyright or having it replaced with a far lighter framework is not science fiction and i honestly believe it would improve the quality of life for the vast majority.
> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,
If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
"The ceiling blocks my view of the sky, and the roof doesn't let me see my TV from outside; we don't need framework or anything to keep the weather out, it's sunny!"
Copyright is good and should be enforced. I say this as a person who doesn't hold any copyrighted materials. Anyone pro abolishing it is deluded by the "free market" myth, which is not possible in any form.
All owned by you and copyrighted by you, sublicensed to Y Combinator.
Your employer may have agreements in place where you assign copyright to them for any notes or code or other works you produce while at work. But if you draw a stick-figure picture in a notebook, that's your copyright.
Yeah. I extremely simplified my message to the point of some minor factual mistakes, as you have correctly noticed.
The reason was to emphasize that I don't directly profiting from some work and may be considered biased (which is also wrong, but I'm simplifying again).
Copyright is not for some faceless megacorpos, though they do profit from it. Copyright is for us, regular tiny humansies, to defend against megacorpos.
To all naysayers - just do a mental experiment and imagine a world with any copyright whatsoever. Do you think Disney would be harmed elen a little bit then? Lol, they will simply enforce their own big daddy "threat of lawsuit" (yes, they will find a reason, there people whose profession is doing just that). But will a regular writer or programmer or painter have any defence then? Course no.
Copyright is good. It's the justice system letting money buy it's way out of enforcement that is bad.
If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.
Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.
Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
Let’s face it, justice system uses money as proxy for how important things are for society not for single citizens.
As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute.
I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
Yes, there should be some limit on the amount of IP that can be accumulated. I don't know how one would do it in a way that couldn't be perverted/abused though.
We can't abolish it. That would be theft. A lot of people worked very hard based on the assumption that their work would be theirs and that they could monetize it.
It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery.
If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.
Firstly, for the Americans, yours is not the only country and so while it is true that you made laws regarding copyright for a particular purpose it is not the same reason that copyright exists in much of the rest of the world, in most of the EU it exists because it is supposed that the creator has rights to what they made and that's it, whether it benefits society or not.
It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.
The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.
While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.
When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...
Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.
Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.
Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.
Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.
Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.
I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.
However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.
Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.
Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!
> for the Americans, yours is not the only country
Indeed! There are nations and cultures such as China and India, where copying the work of your hero or mentor is an act of homage and honor, whether or not you give them credit!
This thread shows so much evidence of ignorance. If people do not know what copyright is, or how it works, perhaps it is rash to agree with any changes to it. And, changes to copyright are a matter of international treaties and conventions, so the world is more likely to capitulate to Greta Thunberg's demands, than agree at the U.N. to "Abolish Copyright".
And fuck graphene, which is making a major move to pretend to social responsiblity, but is a honey pot waste of time where the corporate head is distinctly missing.
This is a completely pointless debate, because even if it's true the people who currently be benefit from copyright have far more money, power and influence than any rational argument against it.
This is a even more pointless debate, because the largest-scale trampling of copyright in human history has produced several of today's hottest tech companies.
The major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first couple of years, and yet we extend copyright 70 years past the author's death! If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
" Since 1990, The Walt Disney Company had lobbied for copyright extension. The legislation delayed the entry into the public domain of the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, leading detractors to the nickname "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act".
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
It wouldn't have mattered how long copyright is if it wasn't expanded beyond the immediate economic desincentives that it is supposed to address for the most insidious problems it causes. It should be been limited exclusively to the combined right to reproduction and distribution. Yes, that means that I could reproduce the protected work without limit, so long as don't distribute it. Also means that I could distribute the protected work so long as I do only the copies I acquired.
I, like you, through for a while that length was the problem, now I've poked around enough and known about enough actual examples where shorter length wouldn't have prevented the problems that happens with copyright. The content Sony had repeatedly removed from people's libraries was well within copyright term, shorter copyright wouldn't have saved it. What would have saved it is copyright scope that never extended to controlling access to copies already sold
Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
But it's much more important that a cancer drug become cheap and readily available than any "youth adult" novel slop
> Drug patents are much more short-lived
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
Issue of pharma development is not that you need a protection from copycats. You need to pass a mountain of regulations and bureaucracy. Most of the medications are easily copyable but would take years to be able to get to the market.
See insulin prices difference in europe vs US
> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
> China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen.
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
[1] https://www.swissmedic.ch/swissmedic/de/home/humanarzneimitt...
> It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
I think this is an inversion of cause and effect.
I know someone in pharma.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
> And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
Pay attention to "might". The difference between health insurance and pharma is academic when hate-mongers are asserting authority.
That can be applied to anything, including tech. I don't think bringing in extremes, improves the conversation.
I seem to remember a guy living in a cabin, writing manifestos, and mailing bombs to tech people and academics.
So someone who has suffered incurable harm and damage at the hands of health insurers is a "hate monger" while the health insurance executive prioritising their company profits over human health is just a normal person doing their normal job?
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Copyright isn’t just fiction novels. Copyright drives investment in books, media, software etc.
And still would all the same with a 20 year term instead of what we have now…
It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.
Not for e. g. 70 years.
I think most people are in support of some financial incentives via protection, but 70 years is just insane.
Very much this. And another problem is that the US forced most of the world to adopt similar laws through various cartels, oh, sorry, trade agreements. I distinctly remember when suddenly it was no longer okay to openly sell pirated software in Russia "because we're joining WTO". I still have no idea why we joined it.
reminds me of the DMCA which was essentially forced to be approved
https://youtu.be/O0-j89LJysY
Original copyright was 14 years + 14 years - then it was changed to 28.
I'd love to see it brought back down to that again.
> If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
Lack of protections didn't stop Homer and a "few" others.
Unless you were paid during those five years
Who's going to pay you to work for five years for a book that has a two-year commercial window, and even for that many people won't buy it until another company that just does printing sells it for half price two years from the first published date?
Well, if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit, it would make sense to pay you a reasonable salary for the five years it takes you to write it. It's not completely implausible that people would pay for something that could be had for cheaper soon, considering that there are grifters selling "new editions" (with a publication date in the future, to game recency-biased search algorithms) of out-of-copyright works that are available for free elsewhere.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
I’m pretty sure they meant the “post death” copyright, considering the context.
One should pay a exponential "upholding" fee doubling every year of copyright. People would be very careful with clinging to rights- when they have a yearly break even.
Just make it 20 years, like patents.
Two years is too short because it won't protect from commercial exploition against a creators wishes.
The creator is not the only person to consider here. We don't grant copyrights just to give creators a funny kind of royalty-pension they can pass to their heirs. We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public. Copyright ultimately must be judged on how well it serves the public benefit, not on how much power or wealth it gives to authors directly (at the expense of others).
Did you ever publish anything? First year or two it is mostlu pushing marketing/pr, and the long tail of trickle of money is where the true earnings lie. Also, for many works of art it takes more than 2 years to produce a next piece, and even if it was less, it’s not sure if it will actually sell.
Anything below 5-10 years and you have literal starving authors. Anything less than 5 and you may as well abolish it altogether.
we have literal "starving authors" - they pretty much all need second jobs to survive.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
I'd rather give it to individuals than corporations at least. It's useful as a lever to protect the weak from the powerful. Perhaps it should simply not be transferable? Another alternative would be for its power to weaken over time in some way.
Then you will prevent corporations from paying authors to create work altogether.
You don't think they would still pay them for the right to publish, if not ownership of the copyright itself?
They can still sell the stuff for 10-20 years and make a huge profit. They just can't use it for multi-generational runaway growth.
We live in a world where there is an absolute abundance of art, music, novels. You can find it everywhere, huge amounts of it either free or very cheaply.
In what way is the system as it exists currently failing to encourage the creation of new works?
It encourages creation of new works just fine, but at the expense of creating billions of tiny monopolies that last for generations, which get aggregated into huge monopolies, ultimately making ordinary people into criminals for wanting to preserve or modify the works that make up their culture.
My point is that it doesn't need to do that. Copyright could still encourage creation of new works with a much shorter duration, without the downside of locking our culture up in monopolies for life + 70.
None of that contravenes the purpose of copyright in encouraging the creation and sharing of new works.
You could equally solve the issue by providing provisions for archival. Or a provision that requires a work to be freely available for sale.
The creator having a monopoly on the work seems to me to encourage the creation and sharing of work as intended.
Most of that art is being created irrespective of copyright, though. Much of it uses exceptions to copyright and some is straight up in violation (most "fan art"/fanfiction). It's either not monetised or monetised through things like Patreon.
I wouldn't say we have more "traditional" art that an author spends time creating with the vision of selling copies for years to come, than we did when copyright terms were shorter.
I doubt that's true.
Is there a lot of fan art, yes, there's also massive amounts of original works as well. There is no lack of either.
I don't have any numbers on fan art vs original works floating around the web, but even those original works aren't being monetised via copyright. They would be created even if copyright was abolished or significantly weakened.
What you are describing is the view of copyright set down in the US Constitution, but it doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world. In many countries, copyright is strongly bound up with the author's moral rights.
Mandating that creators lose control and the ability to profit from their work almost immediately will absolutely not encourage the production of new works.
> We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public
Which includes giving creators royalty rights that can be passed on to their heirs, so the elder author can finish their manuscript on their deathbed as a gift to their family.
Congress has currently chosen a duration of life + 70, but my point is that it's absurdly far beyond anything necessary to encourage the production of new works. When you consider the costs of copyright monopolies to the public, it's clearly out of whack. As I said, the majority of revenue from copyrighted works happens in the first couple of years of release.
I completely agree that life+70 is absolutely obscene, as my response to your parent post clarifies. I moved on from that since I thought my stance was clear (14 + 14 or 28 total), and moved on to “we should still honor the copyright even if they die, because heirs matter.”
NEVER have I argued for life+70 and I never will.
Has this ever happened, or is it a scenario you made up in your mind?
I know a few great works were published posthumously, but most of these were because somebody thought it was really important to share, not because it was a golden goose they wanted to start... milking.
I don’t have a specific example; but I don’t like the idea of an author, photographer, painter, songwriter, etc’s familt losing their copyright because their plane crashed the day after they recorded a record.
And again, to be clear, since apparently people think I’m defending life+70. I am abso-fucking-lutely not.
I want 14+14 or raw 28 back.
Edit: oh apparently I do, thanks Kagi Assistant.
Otis Redding Died in a plane crash literally 3 days after recording a famous track and his family earned a LOT after his passing.
He was arguing against two years. A lifetime is fine.
> We don't grant copyrights to give authors a kind of royalty-based pension for their old age and their heirs.
"We" is doing a lot of work here. I realize that it's basically impossible for an entire population to have coherent motivations, but I support copyright because I think artists have the right to control what happens with their work and to sell it if they can. I believe that this right extends, like all rights, until the end of the author's life. I don't really care one bit about encouraging the production of new works.
> until the end of the author's life.
which is too long, and also too short - what about authors who wrote finished their book on their deathbed? Then their rights are shorter than someone young - an unfair discrimination.
That's why age should be irrelevant. Copyright is useful, and should be granted. However, current copyright grants last far too long - age plus some years beyond. Not to mention corporations lobbying to increase the length right as some copyrights for some works are about to enter public domain.
Therefore, copyright should be granted for a single period and end - like patents. 20 years seems to be a good middle ground, but i could hear arguments for slightly longer or shorter.
Same exact duration for all authors: as long as they’re around and capable of caring. It’s not the same when duration is expressed numerically, sure. But consider: no life is the same in this way (until immortality is discovered), yet all should be valued equally (or so I hope and believe). Timing life makes them unavoidably unequal - and thus differences in lifetime shouldn’t be a criteria to use for comparing rights. That’d be actual age discrimination.
I suggest to rather look at it under the angle whether estates should be able to inherit author’s identity (or some of it), to continue the will.
How about "We the people", as stated in the Constitution? The Constitution itself defines the purpose of copyright, and it is not the purpose you state.
Nothing is going to protect moneyless creator against multi-billion transnational greed-driven corporations equipped with lawyer armies if the law actually encourage these corporations to actually thrive and further harden the rules in their own interests.
Abolishing the copyright or not is not that important if nothing is done in front of that to guarantee that every single human are granted unconditional access to decent life conditions.
You're free to release your own work with Creative Commons License (or any other license that shorten the copyright).
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
> It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
inheritance has nothing to do with copyright. Financial assets are not monopolies. Copyright is only a valuable asset because of the granted monopoly on copying/distribution.
Therefore, to reduce the value copyright has (as it currently does seem to have too much), reducing the granted terms should be sufficient. Like patents, a good 20 years seems like a sufficiently long time to recover cost of production, while letting people who are currently alive to produce derivatives of it afterwards.
Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? I think copyright should be as long as ownership of any other asset.
If I spend $20m on building a house or creating a computer game, why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not? I would have a monopoly on this specific building and on this specific creative work, but anyone is free to build/create anything else.
If J. Rowling created Harry Potter universe, why her family can't own it indefinitely? We somehow accept this notion for other assets, but treat copyright differently.
p.s. creative work is more valuable as it has something that money can't buy (authenticity, taste, sincerity, etc)
> why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not
Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright.
If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.
Public doesn't pay a creative tax. You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. This is different with other assets though, you have to pay someone indefinitely to rent a place to live, even though building (or land) was built hundreds years ago and just gets inherited by new generation of landlords every 75 years.
> You're free to buy or not buy any creative work.
You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers.
Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.
>Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets?
The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.
Owning the copyright to a work grants the exclusive right to profit off that work, but so does owning a house grant the exclusive right to profit off that house. House ownership is not a monopoly because there are other houses, and you can build a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. Similarly, copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works, and you can make a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost.
The negative economic effects of monopolies stem from a lack of competition leading to insufficient supply, but there's no lack of competition or insufficient supply of copyrighted works. Even if copyright were indefinite like other property rights, it wouldn't stymie the supply of new works, but rather expand investment due to raising the future expected profit.
> copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works
they are not fungible, unlike houses.
Also, if you could copy a house like you could copy digital goods (i would download a car), i am also going to claim that the "monopoly" on the house must also be shortened.
>If I spend $20m on building
Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.
> Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house
They do, some build to rent indefinitely or sell to other who rent out the property.
I mean the actual workers. I do not get royalty checks for the building I helped on during one summer. Homeowners don't send monthly money to workers that build their house or renovated it.
It's the same in creative work creation, no? Filming crew / game devs don't own any copyright and property rights. They explicitly give it up under contract/hiring terms.
Her family can own their copies of Harry Potter forever.
But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore?
For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.
Harry Potter copyright is still being heavily utilized (milked?) 30 years after the first book's release.
Now you are using the legislators' rationale that money is being made so we need to protect that, forgetting to weigh the cost for the community.
That's an outlier. Most works don't see so much public interest after such a long time.
But why should this be allowed? Fairy tales are still popular, but they don't have copyright either.
It would make sense to make it possible, but increasingly expensive to extend the copyright. It's fine for Disney to keep their successful creations, it just makes no sense to drag all other copyrighted works in existence along for the ride.
You want to tip the balance even more in favour of the richest corporations? Really?
We're there already, considering the cost of actually enforcing your rights, but it would be bizarre to codify that into law.
I'm not sure what your point is. Harry Potter is in the top ten highest grossing media franchises ever. Sure, top 10 franchises make a lot of money, but they're outliers. Is it in the public interest to grant every author in the country a copyright monopoly for life + 70 so that we can ensure JK Rowling's grandchildren continue to make billions from Harry Potter? Clearly not!
Also the issue is that it’s time capped only instead instead of having also a profit capped threshold.
Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).
I'm still waiting to get my first revenue from copyright content I created 10 years ago. Not everyone gets instant recognition.
> and yet we extend copyright 70
That's an americocentric view. Copyrights are shorter around the world. In fact, iirc, US has some of the longest ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_by_...
Might want to check your facts mate.
>Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
Copyright does no such thing. The copyright owner is free to alter or change their material at any time, or to discard it and force it to remain unused until it deteriorates and is destroyed (e.g. video game preservation is mostly done by copyright violators).
Of course it does, don't be myopic.
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984: because the copyright was enforced to ensure the work was not altered. This is ++good.
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to originator/owner agency. I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this in this day and age ... information does want to be free, after all.
A public fingerprinting/attestation service would separate the two functions we care about: 1) letting creators monetise and control commercial exploitation for a limited time, and 2) giving everyone a reliable way to verify that a given copy matches a claimed original.
The second does not require a multi-generational monopoly, and I am not advocating for that. I do however believe that some social mechanism for ensuring the materials I care about land on my desk un-altered, is quite important.
> Large corporations getting special exceptions from it didn't start with LLMs.
The root problem is inequality. Copyright makes sense to allow authors to profit from their work. But it was warped to give more power to big corporations that own now works for more than a century. Everybody that was alive when some works were produced will be dead by the time that they are free.
LLMs shows what happens when you remove copyright. Websites are starving for visitors as LLMs copy/paste their contents and charge for it without giving anything back.
Split monopolies, improve working class conditions, and get politicians that work for - the now powerful - working class. Copyright can be fixed, but not until power is removed from the few and given back to the many.
I've published and sold my own software. I'm a writer (unpublished as yet, but I hope to use CC4 like Cory Doctorow - ethical copyright.) I've seen my software pirated; I've benefited financially from selling it. I know authors and their struggles with income.
And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.
Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.
Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.
Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
Changing copyright durations without touching patent law is useless. In your example we would also need to shorten software patents to e.g. 3 years. Otherwise the big fish will just create a patent maze.
Yes. You are right.
Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, trying to convince you that copyright is bad so they can avoid copyright lawsuits and use everyone's data without paying licensing fees. Without copyright, they can use your data for free.
You know who also wants to avoid a copyright lawsuit? Me! I remixed some music and would like to show it to the other people. Too bad that if they like it, I will never ever be able to monetize it or will even have to delete it.
While we are at it, I’d also like Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere to make another Disco Elysium game.
While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science and many scientists would agree - you can just look up how many papers thank Alexandra Elbakyan and her efforts.
While we are at it, I’d love if companies could use each other’s discoveries to speed up tech advancements rather than hoarding patents.
Have you heard about patent trolling? Is that a good system that encourages good and moral behaviour?
I could go on. You paint such a black and white picture - copyright is good because tech giants bad - I can only assume that you are driven by blind ideology and not what’s actually good for us as peers. Ask yourself what’s better for common good
So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
But to SELL it you’d need the permission of the songwriters and record labels, and probably agree some sort of split on the royalties. But is that actually so unreasonable, given it is their work you’re using? Have you sent them your remixes and asked if you can release them?
> So actually, your remixed music you could play live, as a DJ.
No, you can't. You have to procure a license to DJ publicly. A Public Performance License is offered by most of the major music conglomerates, or you have to find a venue that has or will pay for such a license. Profiting off infringement worsens your situation legally, but any copying and distribution by any means of copyrighted material is illegal without a license.
> While we are at it, I think Sci Hub is the greatest invention of the modern science
Maybe a while ago it was. It no longer accepts new papers since 2020 and there are much better alternatives available are this point (STC Nexus)
but at the same time, I bet, you don't want a new disco elysium game to be made by Hasbro.
Actually, I do.
I want dozens of them. And then I can play the one with the best reviews.
Of course, without copyright meaning that people have to pay for the games, the chances of those games being made is pretty slim.
Honestly I wouldn't mind that, don't even really see a downside really, Hasbro can make one and the old members of the ZA/UM cultural association can make one, and I'll play whichever one is best! (Who knows, maybe Hasbro has something hidden deep inside it wants to utter out into the world!)
Agreed. While copyright timescales are currently over-extended, copyright was introduced for a very practical reason: "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"[1].
Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
If that was the reason, it should be completely abolished as the exact opposite was achieved.
See for example this article [1]
> unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.
> it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
>Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
For a more contemporary view look at what became of China by ignoring copyright.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
Paying license?
What small scale author receives license payments for anything they have authored from bug tech?
To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument.
> To me it appears that individuals and large companies benefit from copyright asymmetrically, which is the core of the argument.
The correct response to that is to fix the asymmetry, not blow the rights up entirely.
Quoth the OP:
> It doesn't protect the livelihood of individuals and small businesses in practice. Instead, it's a weapon wielded by large corporations to protect their monopolies.
Post Citizens United, you could say the same thing about free speech. Does the OP want to abolish that, too?
The fact that the wealthy (corporations and individuals), with massive teams of lawyers and propagandists, can often better take advantage of the rights I also enjoy is not a compelling reason for abolishing my rights.
Partially agree but on the free speech side, if you are common people you are also "protected" by being a small fish. It's very very rare that somebody sues you because you posted some hot take on X and you have to defend your free speech right (it happens sometimes yes, but it's - for now - statistically irrelevant). See what happens if a Big Corp posts some shit on their social media account. The copyright law is instead in spirit - at least in its current form - heavily skewed towards Big Corps, because they are the only ones that have all the right machinery to exploit over and over IP from 70 years ago. A mildly successful writer (equivalent of a "mum&pop shop") will not generate enough royalties in the future for their grandson to never work.
This is true, but is it unique to copyright? Don't large companies benefit asymmetrically from most things?
I'm not a fan of AI if that's what you're talking about, I still want copyright dead or drastically shortened. I'd say most people with an interest in free (as in freedom) software or computers in general should want similar.
My data is a privacy concern, not a copyright concern. I have no way to stop them from using my data on a copyright basis. This makes no sense to me.
That said let's cut copyright back to 28 years.
I agree with you, but unfortunately it seems big tech can already scrape people's data without permission and without paying license fees.
"can" is different from "do" - they do scrape our data without permission, but it doesn't mean they can (are morally correct in doing so)
So this means that the law is only enforced partially and only benefits big corporations which van ignore it. So yet another reason to abolish copyright.
“do” imply “can”, but “can” do not imply “do”.
I love how almost everyone in here seems to confuse the DMCA with copyright itself and that there seems to be such a wide spread opinion that copyright does more harm than good.
As if an online community of mostly software developers had never heard of such obscure writings like the GPL, AGPL, LGPL, and so on.
I get it, the person running GrapheneOS happens to be ... special, but there could hardly be any community that has benefited more off copyright than the free software one.
Many people don't like the GPL for exactly that reason. Free software (i.e. copyleft) benefits from copyright at the expense of the wider open source community.
Were it not for copyright then BSDs could take code from Linux and perhaps there'd be less of a monoculture, for example.
You are confusing privacy with copyright.
Are pro-copyright articles also big tech propaganda? Oracle would hate it if copyright was abolished
Oracle is Old-Tech ;-)
The AI companies are the ones that want copyright gone.
I want it gone for decades already, but no one listens to me. It has always been my hope that AI can finally make it happen by incentivizing people with bottomless pits full of money to solve the problem.
probably still better than You won’t download a car propaganda
Ah yes, the big tech propaganda that undermines their entire business model. Without copyright, you would be free to modify or alter any data collection capabilities of tech you purchase.
The real propaganda is pretending people weren't complaining about copyright for decades and crying "Pirating isn't stealing!!" when it came to them getting GTA for free.
Suddenly, you really seem to care about copyright laws though.
this is bullshit, your data is protected by privacy laws and not copyright laws.
It is bullshit also because it hasn’t protected anyone. Copyright only protects massive corporations.
It gives the false sense to individuals that they are protected but they steal from individuals all the time and have the resources to define themselves from us.
They can stall in court for years to bankrupt you.
At least without copyright it puts us on equal footing
Ad hominem?
Also it's big tech (MS, Amazon) that is against this more than anyone.
Sometimes ad hominem is a totally valid argument
In a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers.
What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular, yet people still buy books. We could assume that it's not because they fear breaking the law, but because they want to support the author and have an "authentic" copy.
There are also other models than creating a work without any income, then recouping that cost by a state-granted monopoly. You can release preview chapters and then solicit donations from interested readers. You can build on your reputation and then promise to finish the book later for some up-front payment. These might not work for everyone, but they are in wide use today. One could argue that removing options for those authors that depend on copyright today is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
> As others have pointed out, piracy is already easy for anything remotely popular,
That's an argument for no laws at all.
There are murders so why make it illegal.....
The point is that having laws is sufficient to create the space for a workable business model by limiting piracy.
I take your point there are other models - such as subscription - however not everyone is Charles Dickens and can turn out chapter by chapter on demand, and it those don't work for every genre.
> is still a reasonable price to pay for removing all the abuses of copyright.
Is is? Does it really matter I can't copy Disney films or books? Are we so lacking in creativity that it's not possible to create novel stories or characters?
I think too often IP and copyright are confused. If somebody had the rights to the wheel in perpetuity that's bad for innovation, but somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
> There are murders so why make it illegal.....
The downsides of murder clearly outweigh the upsides. The fact that we're debating here shows that's not the case for copyright.
> ...somebody having the rights to a cartoon mouse in perpetuity isn't actually holding society back is it?
People want to adapt that mouse into their own works, as they have done with stories since stories started being told. They do so even if they know they're breaking the law. That alone should be reason to reconsider copyright.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and reusing facets of modern stories isn't somehow less creative than reusing old stories or reusing lived experiences. You can take the general story beats of a popular work, strip out all copyrightable elements, and end up with something wholly derivative. You can also build on a known work and end up with something that's fresh, creative, maybe something that engages readers/watchers/listeners of the base work in a way that nothing fully original could. Take Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; it clearly reuses another work's characters and setting, but it would be worse off without it.
Don’t worry, either way, in two years everyone will just ask chatgpt to write the book they want to read.
I think the thinking is that in current system as solo creator you are somewhat protected by copyright but your work still gets mainly bought by your audience even if it can be pirated.
On the other hand copyright has been absolutely abused by big corporations to give them immense powers. Many creators were forced to sign away their rights and don't even make money on their work. You jailbreak your phone or your TV because of it. Generally it blocks so much of the competition. And with LLMs seems to have decided that copyright doesn't matter anyway.
> What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?
What's stopping people from doing that now? The moment you sell something of any interest, you can be sure to find a copy of it free on the internet somewhere.
> free
That's the key difference.
The fact that it's illegal limits large scale commercial exploitation, leaving enough room for legitimate distribution that pays the author.
With no copyright whatsoever, there would be a well-organized company with a better marketing department selling their version of your work, taking all the profit, and making it impossible to actually sell it yourself.
> With no copyright whatsoever, there would be a well-organized company with a better marketing department selling their version of your work, taking all the profit, and making it impossible to actually sell it yourself.
That's exactly what the AI companies are doing right now. Except they're not even selling your work in any kind of recognisable form.
Good for them. They can sell not-your-work, and you can sell your work.
It already happens. Instead of a book look at TikTok for example. Come up with a cool product, if it sells at all, it will be immediately counterfeited.
The issue is that copyright is only protecting massive corporations.
Did copyright helped against AI? Nope.
If copyright was eliminated, say you are a great up-and-coming filmmaker, you could go make your own marvel movie. You might break into the industry because of that. You make some one off superhero movie is far less likely to hit with an audience.
Copyright doesn’t help small individuals, it only helps corporations protect themselves against us.
The fact that the laws of the land are more accessible to people/entities with deep pockets is true across the board - it's not specifically a copyright issue.
That's an argument for scrapping all laws because the mechanics of administrating them are unequal.
I'd prefer there to focus on making access to the law more equitable rather than simply scrapping legal protections.
>It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyright
That's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
The real problem is that misuse is not followed by ruinously high penalty. False claims should result in statutory damages of tens thousands per claim. That is the way to prevent misuse.
A lot of the problem with DMCA is how its been implemented by companies. There is a provision in the original law making it a crime to make false claims, but organisations like Youtube don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law. Everyone seems to have forgotten it was even part of it, I have never seen it enforced.
> don't bother to make it even possible to counter claim in that way and trigger that side of the law
It's not their responsibility. For that part of the law, you need to get your lawyer involved. And your lawyer will probably tell you not to waste your money, because the way the DMCA was written makes it practically impossible to find enough proof to actually win.
I don't think the "internet is a series of pipes" politicians could've foreseen Youtube or TikTok, but had I believed that the authors of early internet legislation had that foresight, I would've accused the law of being intentionally written to lead to these implementations.
Then it is a bad law if you can just implement half or it & still be compliant. It should have penalties for doing that.
My personal website: https://purpleidea.com/ has been DMCA'ed by some scammer and I still haven't gotten it back out. Google ignores the counter notices, and who knows where else the scammer (masquerading as a legitimate takedown company) has sent notices. Bing and DDG (same basically) have all delisted it.
While initially a perpetual right to copying for some publishers, copyright was made into what it is today to "promote creation". Funnily enough it's used in the exactly opposite way. Culture is basically frozen, same movie and same music released every week.
The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind.
What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
Games are another big area where distance to copyright seems to be where the innovation is occurring. So many of the big genres of games and ultimately the "game" that started the genre begun as a mod of another game. Counterstrike from half life, the myriad of factory games from modded minecraft, Arma and DayZ spawned the survival genre and further Arma mods formed the idea of PubG as well. In sim racing mods to Assetto Corsa have influenced the successor title of Competizone which chose GT3 cars since they were the most popular online. Then the modders on AC made long journey driving modifications and this has now influenced the upcoming Evo. There are probably many more examples from Skyrim or other FPS games of ideas born first by modders.
A lot of these mods break copyright of original material but with it they create an entire genre of games far outweighing the value of the initial piece of copyright.
Don't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
> but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.
Can you elaborate on that? I have done a lot of open source (professionally and in my free time), and I don't see it.
I have exactly one example where I see that copyleft is useful, and that's Linux: it is nice to be able to get the downstream kernel. I genuinely don't have another example.
For smaller projects (even not that small actually), my feeling is that a Copyleft licence is just an opportunity for a competing project to come with a permissive licence. It happened to me in a library I built: people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it.
An example of a not-so-small project I have is Ardupilot: as a user I love that GPLv3 should make it possible for me to access (and reflash!) it, but it seems to me that the GPLv3 was clearly an opportunity for PX4 to gain traction (Ardupilot even got evicted from Dronecode).
So yeah, I totally understand the appeal of copyleft in theory, but in practice I'm a bit more skeptical. And I say that as someone who actually licences my projects as copyleft.
> people complained about my choice of MPLv2, eventually someone started a competing library with a permissive licence and everybody jumped on it
Just because you choose copyleft (even weak copyleft like MPLv2) doesn't mean your project will succeed or be more popular. A lot of people (and especially a lot of companies) do prefer permissive over copyleft, and that's because they can built something proprietary on top, without being forced to give back. That's why they're ultra billionaire rich, and in comparison you're poor.
Software often wins because it's better. Copyleft favours the collective good, permissive favours the individual greed. In any case, all of these things require copyright law.
> Software often wins because it's better
I like how you so easily dismiss my opinion by saying "it's probably because you suck" :-).
For my library, people explicitly complained about copyleft, saying "it comes with strings attached". They were pushing for permissive because it meant they could fork it for their proprietary startups.
For the other example that you conveniently ignored (Ardupilot vs PX4), it's also very clear that many companies choose PX4 because of the licence. I have heard a lot of "if you go for Ardupilot it's risky because GPLv3", and believe it or not, it has an impact on people's decision long before they can say whether PX4 or Ardupilot is better (spoiler: they are roughly equivalent).
What’s the issue? They didn’t like your licence terms, and rewrote the library under a permissive licence? You don’t have a right to users or an audience.
I don't agree. Free software would still be free even if copyright were to be abolished, if anything it would flourish further. That is because even proprietary software could be better integrated.
You're conflating what "Free Software" means and what Copyleft means. In any case, they both need protection from people like you who want to take it and benefit for free, without having to give anything back. Copyleft was designed specifically to prevent against people with your mindset. Permissively licensed software needs copyright to protect authorship rules, although the requirements are lessened.
Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.
The industry can just push and promote people it picked itself and then bind them some other way. How would this work with open software, which is not public domain and often sees the original creator step away down the line?
You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.
Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
> You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight
Any downsides?
> You'll throw Hollywood and most of ...
Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII, that sounds very minor.
Yes, I understand that Hollywood & publishing carry much higher social status than mere manufacturing, for the "right" people to object at them being tossed.
No, I'm not disagreeing with your "reform not abolish" ideal.
"Compared to the economic and human disruptions of shipping most of America's manufacturing jobs overseas since WWII"
That didn't happen overnight and was not done out of an immediate law change.
It's not only Hollywood, these ML tankies that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation. (This is where people's brains will turn off)
Why would a firm invest in research improving Super-Rare-Disease therapies if I don't get exclusive rights to the monetary benefit?
And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the ML government with state research firms ever direct public resources to improving Super-Rare-Disease? Something that affects 1-in-10000 people doesn't deserve public resources like common diseases.
s/ancap/marxist leninist/
Those good hearted pharma companies always going for the rare diseases and saving little kids, bless their hearts.
>And to the inevitable room temperature IQ DSA crowd, why would the AnCap government
>AnCap govenment
what?
> these anarcho-capitalists that want to abolish private ownership will destroy pharmaceutical innovation
> why would the AnCap government
Do you know what an anarcho-capitalist is? There is no way an ancap would want to destroy private ownership. They also are also anti-government everything.
Hollywood was created by ignoring copyrights.
Hollywood was created by ignoring (Edison) patents, not copyright.
On the other hand, Disney's success is largely owed to public domain adaptations, and for a century, it did its best to shrink the public domain and expand copyright.
Hollywood was created by ignoring copyrights.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-histor...
They may have ignored patents too, but they build their work on copyright infringement.
Well whole USA education system was jump started by ignoring copyright on English books and reprinting pirated copies en masse for extremely cheap.
Your argument is non-sequitur and nihilist. America was created by colonizing Native land, so should we somehow evict hundreds of millions of people in the name of justice? (/rhetorical)
Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.
I don't see an argument for removing copyright being a good thing other than people wanting other's work for free, not just free to use but free to sell as their own.
So, is Hollywood a good or bad thing?
Was it is a good thing and it was created by ignoring copyrights and therefore we shouldn't protect copyrights as an absolute because other good things can be created out of it, or is it a bad thing and is using that copyright to restrict others.
You can't have it both ways. My point was just that defense of Hollywood is a terrible example.
From the perspective of "The general purpose computing device I own should be able to run any instructions written by anyone without legal issues" then copyright sucks. Massively abused by corporations to unproductively charge rent by squatting on obvious implementations.
From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)
I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.
I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
(1) As I understand, the first modern copyright law was in 1700's Britain, which broke a printer monopoly and shifted control of works from publisher to author. It also meant that an author and their family would not starve while their work was still generating revenue for the publisher (who would have outright purchased and owned the work).
(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.
(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.
(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.
If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.
Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.
For decades we've suffered the crushing hand of Big Copyright. As the little guys, we could do nothing.
I'd never expected to see commercial entities with a lot of money and political/military connections depending on the weakening of copyright for survival.
For now, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Not quite. If you abolish copyright, then some place like Google or Amazon will be the only one who will make money. Authors will get zero, relatively. The second you publish your book, Amazon will instantly republish it and collect 100% of sales.
Instead, shorten the length to 25 years or so. We simply need copyright to not be extreme. And zero years is still extreme.
You don't need to abolish copyright, you just have to limit the scope to the economic mechanism that actually matter for authors: reproduction and distribution of the reproduced works. Removing all of copyright except that combined right will still give authors the ability to license under the terms they find reasonable and viable, without harming any of the consumer abilities that we've come to expect.
Funny how copyright used to be held to such extreme value before that many governments agreed to implement the "empty cassette laws" which then got conveniently also applied to empty cd-s, even though there's no guarantee that every single empty cd would be used to burn copyrighted material. And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing.
I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
> And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing.
My observation is the opposite. Copyright was never as popular as it is now in the public discourse I have seen.
Now that the unpopular companies are against copyright, it is useful and more popular. (at least as long as the context is those companies)
I know this is a popular take on HN, but it's very much one that collapses the moment you think about it. Abolishing copyright would only enable the large corporations further.
Copyright shouldn't be abolished, it should be reformed however.
It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.
It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
I don't see any reason it should be longer than patents (20 years).
Why should authors be granted vastly larger IP protections than inventors?
Because Disney paying ever-increasing fees to keep Snow White is not particularly harmful. Vs. if we allowed ever-extending patents on essential medicines and foundational technologies? How much could the heirs of the Wright Brothers add to the price of every plane ticket?
How many years of monopoly is enough? And why not ought works be explicitly registered for such protections?
Many comments here are throwing arbitrary numbers. These are driven just by some internal feelings instead of a data driven policy. The best solution would be to abolish it completely. It's a practice that wouldn't exist without the violent backing of the state. It's a monopolistic practice abused by wealthy. (I do realize the implications for R&D heavy businesses)
The irony in your post ... "driven just by some internal feelings" and "violent backing of the state. It's a monopolistic practice abused by wealthy."
Copyright needs to be shorter, but also it should be non-transferable and unable to held by anybody except the individual it originates from. Corporations shouldn't have rights to start with, only restrictions, and they certainly shouldn't have rights over thoughts or ideas.
How would that work for things like films or music when it genuinely is a group of people making something? I agree that copyright is way, way too long and should be a fixed length, but there's definitely a use in corporations being able to hold it.
Same way it works for everything else. They sell their performance and then they make something else.
After a short/zero copyright it would be a "free for all". But that sounds lovely! It would be a different business model, not ripping someone off. I don't recognize copyright as some kind of "natural law". Taking someone's physical property, that's theft. Singing a song that you have heard, that shouldn't be theft.
It has issues but I would rather see reform of patents first. Given the greater pace of developments now, effectively they now represent a proportionately longer period now than in the past. And they are too broad, along with various abuses (especially around novelty)
Did google circa 2012 write this?
All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.
Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.
So they silently also did the same thing.
With that, copyright in training went to shit.
Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
Funny how people writing such things are also at the forefront of accusing LLM companies of stealing big time. Because of copyright violations.
So, which one is it?
Both, it should be brought down, but it should be the same rule for everyone.
Big Tech doesn't get to ignore copyright law just because they have deeper pockets.
> it should be the same rule for everyone
I don't think that's going to suffice.
Neither for the people arguing the original point who want protection for what they are doing but don't want protection for the big players who just make big bucks and "shut everybody down whom they don't like".
Nor from a philosophical big picture POV. The little innovator needs protections. The big capitalist less so. It's why labor laws are more strict with bigger corps than small shops. And why higher incomes pay more taxes. (Well that's the idea. That they find ways to circumvent the idea is a different story.)
You keep making up strwamen and positions that don't exist.
Maybe mock something people have actually said.
"Copyright" covers a lot of areas, from films to books to software etc. So blanket statements about it are not helpful.
From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.
And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?
For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.
Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.
Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL are doing the best they can in the current world. Abolishing copyright would not harm the free software movement.
I wouldn't bother to treat music and art separately from software either. It's a shame when a game is free software but not free culture and a distro has to package it in a non-working state and ask you to separately provide some files from elsewhere.
Re-releases of proprietary games often run into issues with music licensing as well and end up removing some of the old iconic music and upsetting the players.
What's the most generous, charitable definition of an alternative?
Every week GrapheneOS seems to come out with a good take. Monero, Authoritarianism, AI, now copyright.
Very well aligned with my beliefs not to mention it's one of if not the most private OS.
Copyright should be commoditized. A possible first step could be giving copyright owners a single obligation: you have to sell what you own. That thing you have must be available on the market.
This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.
This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
What happens if I wrote a book - sent around to a few publishers and then personally had a change of heart - perhap it has content which I now disavow.
Shouldn't it be within my right to withhold publication?
Or because I refuse to publish, but the publishers have a copy - I should lose the right to control my own work and the copyright falls and the publisher can just publish freely?
It seems the consensus in this thread [if I'm skimming correctly] is most want copyright completely removed.
So in your hypothetical: you write the book and have a change of heart, I'll just copy it verbatim, slap my name on it and now I'm the author.
> It seems the consensus in this thread [if I'm skimming correctly] is most want copyright completely removed.
I think there is confusion between copyright and other things around it.
For example if I buy a physical book, I own it. I'm free to sell it or give it away. Things like the DMCA and the switch from an ownership model to a rental model are more the problem.
ie does getting rid of copyright enable right to repair? Does getting rid of copyright suddenly stop a games company pulling software from your library that you 'bought'?
Wouldn't these companies just put all the restrictions directly into the purchase agreement?
You could establish contracts with publishers outside of copyright, which is how NDAs work today. It's probably a reasonable thing to do anyway, otherwise there's nothing stopping a publisher from telling everyone the plot summary of your newest novel.
By the same argument, wouldn't all the things you don't like about copyright - like restrictions with what you can do with the thing you have bought - just be put directly into the purchase agreement.
Isn't the way to focus on creating consumer protection rights, rather than just leaving it to people with the best legal department and deepest pockets to control the rules?
But what does “available on the market” mean? Let’s say I own the copyright to something of cultural significance. I make it “available on the market” but at a very high price. Or are you saying that the price would be enforced?
> A possible first step could be giving copyright owners a single obligation: you have to sell what you own
This would be wildly unreasonable and totally unethical. Every picture taken by a photographer has to be available on the market immediately?
Think through the ethical implications of that.
As a Linux user of over 20 years, I really don't like thinking of myself as some Aborigine barely holding on to a scrap of ancestral land. My tech preferences have become so ubiquitous that nearly the entire Internet runs them.
In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.
I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
It already de facto has been. Have you seen LLMs?
Copyright is just formalized greed.
I don't think I have ever seen someone outside of tech saying this. It's always people working with the data-copying machines, never the people creating the data protected by the law, that want said laws gone.
The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.
Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.
Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
> Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense
That's a question I have: if you abolish copyright, does that mean that anyone is free to do what they please with leaked code?
I agree, copyright is a just yet another monopolistic tool and it isn't making the market any favor. Copyright could be gradually be reduced to a few years, the market will adapt, for example collecting money before producing the content (like a movie or an album), collecting more money from concert rather than music directly (which is going to happen anyway since it's competing against generated content), etc... Having a weak copyright or having it replaced with a far lighter framework is not science fiction and i honestly believe it would improve the quality of life for the vast majority.
> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,
If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
"The ceiling blocks my view of the sky, and the roof doesn't let me see my TV from outside; we don't need framework or anything to keep the weather out, it's sunny!"
Copyright is good and should be enforced. I say this as a person who doesn't hold any copyrighted materials. Anyone pro abolishing it is deluded by the "free market" myth, which is not possible in any form.
You actually do hold copyright on everything you've written. For example, your comments here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Yizahi
All owned by you and copyrighted by you, sublicensed to Y Combinator.
Your employer may have agreements in place where you assign copyright to them for any notes or code or other works you produce while at work. But if you draw a stick-figure picture in a notebook, that's your copyright.
Yeah. I extremely simplified my message to the point of some minor factual mistakes, as you have correctly noticed.
The reason was to emphasize that I don't directly profiting from some work and may be considered biased (which is also wrong, but I'm simplifying again).
Copyright is not for some faceless megacorpos, though they do profit from it. Copyright is for us, regular tiny humansies, to defend against megacorpos.
To all naysayers - just do a mental experiment and imagine a world with any copyright whatsoever. Do you think Disney would be harmed elen a little bit then? Lol, they will simply enforce their own big daddy "threat of lawsuit" (yes, they will find a reason, there people whose profession is doing just that). But will a regular writer or programmer or painter have any defence then? Course no.
Interesting to read this while the US gov doesn't give a fuck at all and use Pikachu and Tetris to make racist hateful games...
Copyright is good. It's the justice system letting money buy it's way out of enforcement that is bad.
If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.
Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.
Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
Let’s face it, justice system uses money as proxy for how important things are for society not for single citizens.
As a society we don’t have enough resources to tend to every dispute.
I don’t think there is a solution to that. Even if ideally we want to help everyone who needs disputes solved - waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.
Not disagreeing with the post- wouldn’t this come under the category of “everything is bad for users when the corporations become too big”?
Yes, there should be some limit on the amount of IP that can be accumulated. I don't know how one would do it in a way that couldn't be perverted/abused though.
yes
We can't abolish it. That would be theft. A lot of people worked very hard based on the assumption that their work would be theirs and that they could monetize it.
It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery.
If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.
Copyright isn't, patents in their current form are though.
Firstly, for the Americans, yours is not the only country and so while it is true that you made laws regarding copyright for a particular purpose it is not the same reason that copyright exists in much of the rest of the world, in most of the EU it exists because it is supposed that the creator has rights to what they made and that's it, whether it benefits society or not.
It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.
The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.
While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.
When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...
Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.
Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.
Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.
Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.
Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.
I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.
However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.
Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.
Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!
> for the Americans, yours is not the only country
Indeed! There are nations and cultures such as China and India, where copying the work of your hero or mentor is an act of homage and honor, whether or not you give them credit!
This thread shows so much evidence of ignorance. If people do not know what copyright is, or how it works, perhaps it is rash to agree with any changes to it. And, changes to copyright are a matter of international treaties and conventions, so the world is more likely to capitulate to Greta Thunberg's demands, than agree at the U.N. to "Abolish Copyright".
And fuck graphene, which is making a major move to pretend to social responsiblity, but is a honey pot waste of time where the corporate head is distinctly missing.
It could be shortened to 20 years like patents, or copyright could end with the creator's life.
Also, there could be an excemption for LLM training purposes.
This is a completely pointless debate, because even if it's true the people who currently be benefit from copyright have far more money, power and influence than any rational argument against it.
This is a even more pointless debate, because the largest-scale trampling of copyright in human history has produced several of today's hottest tech companies.
And now the money scale has tipped towards the people who are inconvenienced by copyright.