For every Stephen King that has a massive following and would easily earn enough in those 10 years, there's 100 mid-tier and lower-tier creators that need any income they can get from works still earning in some fashion.

Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."

Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.

Yes, it's more complicated than that, but... an arbitrary 10 year limit wouldn't fix things or make the world substantially better and might make things worse.

Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.

We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

Put a limit of 10 years if the work is not available for purchase by the general public, so any work that goes out of print becomes public domain 10 years after the last copy was sold.

But... Only for works owned by _corporations_. For works still owned by the original artists, works would enter public domain on the artists death or if the artist had under-age children at the moment of their passing, when the youngest completes 18.

I think this is the best way to ensure that corpos can't sit on works for eternity while allowing artists to have an income for life, with some protection for their children in case of untimely death.

In any case, any law that implements such limitations should mandate a complete removal of any DRM involved, or at least publication of the private keys needed to decrypt any work, once they become public.

It's 100% fine if disney wants to wait a decade to make a movie about something. After that 10 years so can everybody else! There's no amount of time disney couldn't hold out for anyway. What matters is that artistic works get into the hands of the public faster, not how much money an author might lose out on in licensing deals. Copyright doesn't exist to protect possible film deals for authors. It exists to promote the creation of new works. If disney waits 10 years and makes their film then without a license fee, mission accomplished. That's a new creative work. They can then compete with every one else making new works based on that property.

See, infant mortality was shit back then which accounted for a big bias in that lifetime '37'. If you survived childhood then you did pretty well.

https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...

Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely.

Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.

Playing songs live != repackaging recordings. Not even in the same ballpark. Venues of size pay licenses to ASCAP, etc. for the rights to let cover bands do this -- but it's also a usage that requires a lot more factors than just copying the song. At least in the U.S. these uses are pretty much automated vs. negotiating rights to reproduce a full album or even a single.

(Tribute bands are another animal entirely - I'm not sure how or if the various Pink Floyd tribute bands, for instance, negotiate deals with the original bands since they're not just covering the songs - they also get into likeness rights and trademark, etc.)

Live performances are a different act than recording and selling albums. Live performances are always (?) allowed, but IIRC, the songwriter/composer is due a royalty.

How often that happens in real life is a question, but live performances (currently) have a different set of rules.

It depends on how much was invested up front.

Spend a couple hours recording a joke song on your phone that happens to become a viral hit? Ten years of monopolizing it seems more than fair.

Spend millions of dollars hiring a research team and running gene sequencers for years to develop a state of the art drug? Maybe 10 years isn't enough.

They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).

It cuts both ways.

> Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.

There is no legal distinction here, and there can't be. Even individuals will spin up an LLC which has ownership of that stuff, for tax/bankruptcy/whatever reasons. Do they lose copyright because they were business savvy?

> We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.

I'd go the other direction. 18 months, no renewals, and no criminal charges for infringement without proof of infringement for commercial sales, and most of all any works with DRM left out in the cold and can never get copyright protection (not even if they later release a version without DRM).

What does copyright length matter to people who wouldn't respect any of it?

The story is that most bands don't make anything on residuals and so have to tour to make money.

But, in any case, one can already get the work for free, people choose not to.

I have an idea on Origin Marks [1] that works here, only one source will be the lead singer, only one source will be the songwriter, buy from them _if_you_want_to_.

[1] the reverse of Trademarks, kinda, they would show not the seller per se, as Trademarks do, but the physical origins - and all historic details would attach to the mark. Change the factory, OM shows it, sell your Trademark, OM shows if it's still made in the same place or not; buying an article, OM shows which of your options are made in the same place. OM would show not just so sold it to you, not where they got it from -- cut out middlemen and optimise supply chains, that's capitalism, right?

In this case, you buy a download, who did they get the TM rights from, ego did they get the cover art rights from, who did they buy the license for the music track from? Seller would be obliged to tell you, and there sellers too ... no money going to the band, don't use that supplier, go elsewhere.

If we're going to use terms like "deserve", then why are you deserving of someone else's work? It doesn't sound like you're even arguing that you could build upon that work, you just don't want to have to pay for it. Having some third party selling other people's art work without licensing them isn't exactly the proliferation of the arts typically argued for with lowering the copyright duration.

You're also severely downplaying just how hard it is to earn money from a creation. Bootstrapping a business is a lot of work. It can be years before you earn even a paltry sum. A good chunk of that 10 years is spent earning nothing. Maybe an established player like Disney can turn on a spigot and cash comes out, but that's not how it works for most people. I also don't see how investing in the creation of something that others find valuable is "rent-seeking". You're completely free to ignore that body of work. Nothing is restricting you from creating your own.

You see the free exchange of art without remuneration in this hypothetical future as a way to drive down costs. I see artists saying "why bother?" and an inevitable stifling of art. Most of us aren't independently wealthy or magnanimous enough to work for free.

Let's be honest, copyright is unnatural. Without copyright if I hear a story, what right has anyone else got to tell me I can't tell my version of that story as I remember it to someone else? If I hear a melody, what right does anyone have to tell me that I can't sing it?

That's literally how society and art has worked for as long as humanity has existed. Hearing and retelling. Seeing and replicating. Re-interrupting and re-envisioning.

The idea that certain ideas are forbidden, or that certain notes are owned is ridiculous. It's not normal. It's an invented legal restriction we put on ourselves. Copyright is an imposition on some very basic freedoms, we just all agree that some amount of imposition is worth it to support artists and their art. Art is so valuable to us that we censor ourselves for it.

What I'm seeing with our current copyright system is that it's hurting a lot more than it's helping. Artists are routinely getting screwed over by large corporations, while other artists are silenced entirely. Amazing creative works are prevented from being brought into the world, and have been prevented from even being preserved. We need to strike a better balance between our freedoms to share and use our own culture and supporting artists and supporting art because our current copyright system is doing a terrible job at all of it.

I'm not saying copyright is perfect. DMCA takedowns for songs playing in the background of live newsworthy events or video game play throughs aren't helping the author/creator. Legal battles over songs that coincidentally sound the same are silly to me as well.

I'm less sold on the value of remixing art. It can be done well, but often feels like a lazy attempt at capitalizing on the original creation.

We don't have to agree on any of that. The person I was replying to seemed to be making the argument that copyright terms were bad because he/she/they wanted to buy a copy of whatever on the open market where hypothetically everything is public domain. I can't comprehend the level of entitlement that leads to someone saying they should have free access to another person's work and then claims without evidence that this will spur innovation or creativity. To me, it seems clear the lack of copyright would just rapidly accelerate the decline of the humanities. Artists struggle enough. The patron model of the Renaissance is gone. The modern day minstrel can't afford rent and food. Copyright is central to how they earn a living and about the only protection they have against parasites that add nothing from taking everything.

I'm all for revisiting and revising modern copyright law. I just think tossing it all together is going to hurt society. Whatever new duration we choose should reflect the reality of just how long it can take to build a business/following/audience. Ten years seems way too short; I see artists deciding the risk:reward ratio makes it not worthwhile.

Maybe that means only the "true" artists will persist, but my experience with open source software suggests otherwise. There's some remarkable open source software out there given away freely by volunteers, but there's also a whole body of software that benefits society that only gets written because the rights holder can afford to make an investment that volunteers can't or won't. That works because there's a potential to earn something when all finished.

The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.

Girl Genius has been publishing a page of their comic three times a week for twenty years, and the story is not yet done. I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.

"No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. When there's demand for something, people will take what's offered. I would be fine with some sort of easy licensing scheme that would allow others to write stories, etc., in someone else's universe / with their characters... but they should see a taste. Especially when we're talking about mid-tier or lower-tier creators who are probably depending heavily on that large body of work to keep the lights on.

That's not true. It might make it harder to make as much money, but there's nothing that says the author can't still profit from selling something after it's in the public domain. I've paid for works in the public domain multiple times, sometimes directly to the author of the work.

Creators have a massive advantage when selling their own stuff. They can include things like signed copies and extras that no one else ever could. Fans want to support the creators of the things they love because they want more of it.

I'm not saying that you should be able to claim yourself to be walt disney, but you should be able to sell a hand made mickey mouse plushie, or a mickey mouse comic (under your name). That's different.

We've already been robbed of all the amazing creative works that might have been but never were because of excessive copyright restrictions. It's hurting artists and it's hurting our culture.

We want copyright to give authors a chance to profit for a limited time, but it we need it to be much less excessive and restrictive so that new works and new artists can thrive.

I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years.

Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.

Of course, they're called _unions_, which prevent companies from hiring or contracting anyone who isn't part of their cabal -- I mean union.

Disney and Comcast and WB/Discovery are _competitors_ who would cut each other's throats for a nickel. Would they collude for profit? Sure, but they treat this as a zero-sum game, so they don't want to help their competition too much.

If publishers and studios refuse to ever publish anything for 10 years artists will be free to publish things for themselves and you can bet that they will. I seriously doubt there'll never be a studio or publisher smart enough to pay for a script or book and bring it to the market first though.

Once a property is out there and has a fanbase they'd be total idiots to wait until every last person on earth can churn out media involving that property because for anything remotely popular the moment the 10 years are up the market will be saturated with new versions and remixes of it. They don't want that kind of competition, especially from people outside of the industry. Copyright has been corrupted into the restrictive vice on our culture that it is today in part because of that fear.

If you are a studio or publisher it'd be far better to pay the licensing fee and rake in the massive profits within the 10 year period before everyone is tired of seeing a billion versions of something on offer everywhere and avoid having to spend the kind of money and effort it would take to differentiate your work and pull attention from everything else springing up.

I believe the "natural" state of the society where we can build on each others work, but copyrights make that practically impossible.

It lowers the quality of art significantly (I do believe that most art pieces could be significantly improved, but we can't do that).

It lowers the quality of cars, electronics, and other products, also their reparability from 100% to 0% or so, as they constantly discontinue past products, and make them shittier, and they prohibit 3rd party to make replacement parts, and we can do nothing against it.

And it allows rent-seeking behaviour, for example we gave Intel a hundred of billions of dollars or so, because the prevented other companies to produce x86 compatible chips, and they could get away with ridiculous profits. This would be illegal if Intel was a 'monopoly', but the same rent-seeking and abusing the market is not illegal since Intel is not a monopoly. Or countless other examples.

The article states that we almost developed a sane society where we could build and sell whatever we wanted, and use whatever we found (even if it was made by an other person), but the exact opposite happened. The article does not mention the reasons.

Yes. The worst part is our current effectively-infinite copyright length is a very recent invention, but it's already taken root as the-way-things-are. Imagine a world where copyright lasts 28 years max. How different would our culture be? All of our early computing history would be 100% freely available, no questions asked. Windows XP would be nearing the end of its copyright term. This is the way things were for centuries, right up until 1978 when things started going off the rails.

I could certainly imagine an alternate future that if CC got enough donations to back a big enough budget they could help pay for lawyers to full time help creators claw back IPs from major corporations with the hopes to CC or CC0 license the rights that they win back. I also imagine that would cost a lot of money and that hypothetical arm of CC would need a huge budget to win the legal fights it would want to take on.

Google for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, ... ;-)

But on the other hand if that was done on a large scale it might set an expectation that old things are bought out, or even that anyone ought to be paid to release anything free at all, and that sounds very bad.

You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends.

Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls.

Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off.

[0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks".

[1] Repair Preservation Group

[2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business

[3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.

It is especially true when they fail to give license terms. People using it as if it were public domain don't have a license, or any proof of having a license, and if the author dies tomorrow, his or her heirs inherit the copyright (which will still last for another 75 or 95 years, I forget which). They now own it, and can go after those who use it for copyright infringement, with all the penalties that go with that. If the heirs were particularly powerful or have political influence, they might even manage to get the DOJ to pursue the matter as criminal.

Thought I've never watched the show, doesn't one of the characters in The Office start talking about how he's "declaring bankruptcy" by saying those words emphatically, where the other characters try to explain how it doesn't work that way? He then goes on to say "I'm not just saying it, but declaring bankruptcy" as if this is somehow a legally important distinction?

That's what this guy is doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_t...

What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?