Has anyone done a study on when copyrighted works make their money? I'm guessing that the vast majority of the income is made in the first decade after creation. Timeless classics are by far the exception. And for those, does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels? The creation that copyright was supposed to incentivize already happened. At that point society benefits when works go into the public domain so derivatives can flourish.
> does it really benefit society for their fortunate authors to sit back and get rich resting on their laurels?
In my opinion, it doesn't. In creative and entertainment industries, the idea of practically indefinite royalties has been normalized, but no other industries has this*. For example, it would be strange to continue paying a construction company after your home has been built.
*As far as I can remember. I'm open to correction here.
I don't understand the analogy. We don't continue to pay authors after we buy their book. We do pay construction companies again if we want a second house - even if the design is the same.
Probably floorplans would be a closer comparison - and I believe they are licensed IP?
Dépends. If the 2nd house location requires review by an architect because of ground issues or regulation. If contractual provisions require an architect fee. If small adjustments that may have structural impacts are needed. You won’t pay the same amount, but still something.
Imagine that you've paid the construction company after it finished building your house. You then go and live in it. One year later you get an invoice because you're living in the house they built.
That's what doesn't happen and what (I think) GP means with indefinite royalties: the person who owns the house has to keep paying the company which built the house.
The problem with that analogy is of course that royalties are based off profits, but there are ways to consider a home to have its own sense of profit (like the Belgian legal term 'cadastral income':
> Cadastral income is not an actual income. It is a notional value that we determine for an immovable property (building or land). This corresponds to the average annual net rental income you would receive in 1975 for your leased out property.
A rich author can retire, and not write any more books. From an encouraging creativity POV, copyright length should be set at about the amount of time it takes to create a followup.
But, as open source software, and most authors and musicians demonstrate. People will create without any financial incentive.
So ultimately copyright is there to allow an industry that can actually find and distribute these works.
For the record, I'm not suggesting that creators should be decently rewarded for their works.
To start, royalties have nothing to do with copyright. They are simply an agreement between an author and a publisher. I give you the exclusive right to publish my book, and I get a cut of every sale.
Royalties extend far beyond creative fields. Any deal where someone gets a percentage share of the sale of a product or service on an ongoing basis is a "royalty". E.g. in manufacturing or even software.
In the case of Adobe, you're paying for continuous updates and their added cloud services (or other functionality which requires their servers). Also Adobe's subscription pricing (per-month) is significantly less than the retail cost for a one-time purchase of their software without future updates.
Meanwhile one does not pay for continuous updates to a particular novel or a movie. Even if they do pay for new installments in a series, they do so separately.
> Also Adobe's subscription pricing (per-month) is significantly less than the retail cost for a one-time purchase of their software without future updates.
Adobe presumably also fixes bugs, so hopefully you are getting something better over time. I've in the past wore out a favorite book and since it was in print bought a new copy - and found the same typos that were in the previous copy.
Some people would say that the fortunate authors have already benefitted society, and that the potential of winning this lottery ticket was part of their incentive to do so. We could equally ask "does it benefit society to enrich tech founders with billion-dollar acquisitions?"
That said, I believe the security of UBI to be a stronger enabler for creativity than gambling you'll write the next great American novel in-between shifts at the fish cannery.
My guess is that authors have relatively long-term returns on their books, while movies are known to generally make almost all their money in the first year.
Generally yes, significant revenue (for books but also movies and music) may happen several years after the first release/publication. Because… reasons you don’t always control.
Ok, but the goal is not to make sure that artists can derive every possible revenue but only to make sure that they get enough to for the creation to be worth it.
Given the nature of the cultural market (authors/original creation often gets a very small share of what the end consumer pays, unless they are also their own editors, producers and distributors), it’s hard to make it worth it without extending in time (and part of the idea is that some of the value you didn’t get while you’re living will get to your legacy, which is a deep motivation too).
Streaming revenue has no public attribution of fees to specific content, as far as I can tell. It is very much possible that a large fraction of that revenue is driven by (and attributed to) new content, the same way DVD sales were.
Yes, that is the question to which neither of us has an answer. Streaming deals happen as bundles, and my understanding is the opposite of yours: the old stuff gets thrown in as a piece of the bundle to help make the catalog bigger, while new content actually sells subscriptions. In other words, the back catalog has some marginal value to the streaming service (and the studio), but it's the new releases that actually sell subscriptions.
Releases of "The Mandalorian" got people subscribing to Disney+, and new seasons of "Game of Thrones" had the same effect for HBO, for example.
In other words, a bundle of 100 movies for $10 million could be attributed as "$100k per movie," but that's almost certainly wrong. More likely, that bundle is a combination of something like $5 million for one movie, $1 million for a few others, $100k for a bigger set, and all the way down to $1000 or less for the remainder of the catalog.
I would bet it’s a bathtub curve for a lot of things. You make a chunk initially, then your cultural relevance / popularity wanes. Then roughly 20-30 years later you see a revival as all the younger generation that were fans of your work become old enough to both spend disposable income on more of it and have their nostalgia kick in. I there’s a number of older 80’s and early 90’s properties that are getting / have gotten renewed interest because the original fans are old enough to renew that interest. Think things like Cyberpunk (1980s TTRPG -> 2020s CRPG).
I wonder if you could have a system that captures that sort of thing. Something like 10 years exclusive + if you register the copyright you can get 10 more years of a standard royalty + limited right of refusal and another 10 years of just standard royalties. That way you could benefit from the nostalgia bump but also society can benefit from easier access to build on your IP.
What length of time does a film studio, or book publisher look at for payback?
If everyones calculating their return on the first 12 months, setting copyright to 12 months obviously isn't going to impact any industry investment decisions.
