Lifetime for human copyright, 20 years for corporate copyright. That’s the golden zone.
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Assuming you agree with the idea of inheritance, which is another topic, then it is unfair to deny inheritance of intellectual property. For example if your father has built a house, it will be yours when he dies, it won't become a public house. So why would a book your father wrote just before he died become public domain the moment he dies. It is unfair to those doing who are doing intellectual work, especially older people.
If you want short copyright, is would make more sense to make it 20 years, human or corporate, like patents.
If an artist produces a work they should have the rights to that work. If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
Comparing intellectual property to real or physical property makes no sense. Intellectual property is different because it is non exclusive. If you are living in your father’s house, no one else can be living there. If I am reading your fathers book, that has nothing to do with whether anyone else can read the book.
And that's not even touching the spurious lawsuits about musical similarity. That's what musicians call a genre...
It makes some sense for a very short term literal right to reproduction of a singular work, but any time the concept of derivative works comes into play, it's just a bizarrely dystopian suppression of art, under the supposition that art is commercial activity rather than an innate part of humanity.
I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire.
That, to me, sucks.
That would indeed be nice, but as the article says, that's usually not the case. The rights holder and the author are almost never the same entity in commercial artistic endeavors. I know I'm not the rights holder for my erroneously-considered-art work (software).
> If I self-publish a novel and then penguin decides that novel is really good and they want to publish it, without copyright they'd just do that, totally swamping me with their clout and punishing my ever putting the work out. That's a bad thing.
Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
There's definitely problems with corporatization of ownership of these things, I won't disagree.
> Why? You created influential art and its influence was spread. Is that not the point of (good) art?
Why do we expect artists to be selfless? Do you think Stephen King is still writing only because he loves the art? You don't simply make software because you love it, right? Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
Consider how many books exist on how to care for trees. Each one of them has similar ideas, but the way those ideas are expressed differ. Copyright protects the content of the book; it doesn’t protect the ideas of how to care for trees.
The thing that'd set apart these companies are the services + quality of their work.
In our current society, that means they need some sort of means to make money from their work. Copyright, at least in theory, exists to incentivize the creation of art by protecting an artists ability to monetize it.
If you abolish copyright today, under our current economic framework, what will happen is that people create less art because it goes from a (semi-)viable career to just being completely worthless to pursue. It's simply not a feasible option unless you fundamentally restructure society (which is a different argument entirely.)
Copyright is about control. If you know a song and you sing it to yourself, somebody overhears it and starts humming it, they have not deprived you of the ability to still know and sing that song. You can make economic arguments, of deprived profit and financial incentives, and that's fine; I'm not arguing against copyright here (I am not a fan of copyright, it's just not my point at the moment), I'm just saying that inheritance does not naturally apply to copyright, because data and ideas are not scarce, finite goods. They are goods that feasibly everybody in the world can inherit rapidly without lessening the amount that any individual person gets.
If real goods could be freely and easily copied the way data can, we might be having some very interesting debates about the logic and morality of inheriting your parents' house and depriving other people of having a copy.
There are two reasons why it's a problem. The first reason is that any such abstraction is leaky, and those leaks are ripe for abuse. For example, in case of copyright on information, we made it behave like physical property for the consumers, but not for the producers (who still only need to expend resources to create a single work from scratch, and then duplicate it for free while still selling each copy for $$$). This means that selling information is much more lucrative than selling physical things, which is a big reason why our economy is so distorted towards the former now - just look at what the most profitable corporations on the market do.
The second reason is that it artificially entrenches capitalism by enmeshing large parts of the economy into those mechanics, even if they aren't naturally a good fit. This then gets used as an argument to prop up the whole arrangement - "we can't change this, it would break too much!".
I understand what you're saying but the way you're framing it isn't what I really have a problem with. I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books, identical word for word. I think people can choose to buy the physical books from the original publisher because they want to support them or like the idea that it's the "true" physical copy. And I'm going to push back on that a million times less than the concept of things like Moana comic books. But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone. And that's ridiculous.
I can't speak for Stephen but I absolutely do. I program for fun all the time.
> Should people not be able to make money off their effort?
Is anyone arguing otherwise?
There is fair use, but fair is an affirmative defense to infringing copyright. By claiming fair use you are simultaneously admitting infringement. The idea that you have to defend your own private expression of ideas based on other ideas is still wrong in my view.
> If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs.
It's interesting how much parallel there is here to the idea that company owners reap the rewards of their employee's labor when doing no additional work themselves. The fruits of labors should go to the individuals who labor, I 100% agree.
If you consider it right to get value from the work of your family, and you consider that intellectual work (such as writing a book) to be valuable, then as an inheritor, you should get value from it. And since the way we give value to intellectual work is though copyright, then inheritors should inherit copyright.
If you think that copyright should not exceed lifetime, then the logical consequences would be one of:
- inheritance should be abolished
- intellectual work is less valuable than other forms of work
- intellectual property / copyright is not how intellectual work should be rewarded
There are arguments for abolishing inheritance, it is after all one of the greatest sources of inequality. Essentially, it means 100% inheritance tax in addition to all the work going into the public domain. Problematic in practice.
For the value of intellectual work, well, hard to argue against it on Hacker News without being a massive hypocrite.
And there are alternatives to copyright (i.e. artificial scarcity) for compensating intellectual work like there are alternatives to capitalism. Unfortunately, it often turns out poorly in practice. One suggestion is to have some kind of tax that is fairly distributed between authors in exchange for having their work in the public domain. Problem is: define "fairly".
Note that I am not saying that copyright should last long, you can make copyright 20 years, humans or corporate, inheritable. Simple, gets in the public domain sooner, fairer to older authors, already works for patents. Why insist on "lifetime"?
This is exactly wrong. You can copy all of Harry Potter into your journal as many times as you want legally (creating copies) so long as you do not distribute it.
The current illegality of the piracy website prevents them from offering a service as nice as Steam. It has to be a sketchy torrent hub that changes URLs every few months. If it was as easy as changing the url to freesteampowered.com or installing an extension inside the steam launcher, the whole "piracy is a service issue" argument loses all relevance. The industry would become unsustainable without DRM (which would be technically legal to crack, but also more incentivized to make harder to crack).
People would just delete the malware (DRM) out of the source code that is no longer restricted by copyright.
If your argument is that copyright is good because it discourages DRM, I think you have a very evidently weak argument.
Maybe selling books? Maybe other jobs? The same way that they made money for thousands of years before copyright, really. Books and other arts did exist before copyright!
> and why would someone pay them, if their work is free to be copied at will?
I don't think it's really a matter of if people will pay them. If their art is good, of course people will pay them. People feel good about paying for an original piece of art.
The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
We didn't have modern novelists a thousand years ago. We didn't have mass production until ~500 years ago, and copyright came in in the 1700's. We didn't have mass produced pulp fiction like we do today until the 20th century. There is little copyright-less historical precedent to refer to here, even if we carve out the few hundred years between the printing press and copyright, it's not as though everyone was mass consuming novels, the literacy rate was abysmal. I wonder what artist yearns for the 1650s.
> If their art is good, of course people will pay them.
You say this as if it were a fact, but that's not axiomatic. Once the first copy is in the wild it's fair game for anyone to copy it as they will. Who is paying them? Should the artists return to the days of needing a wealthy patron? Is patreon the answer to all of our problems?
> Maybe selling books?
But how? To who? A publishing house isn't going to pick them up, knowing that any other publishing house can start selling the same book the minute it shows to be popular, and if you're self publishing and you're starting to make good numbers then the publishing houses can eat you alive.
> The question is really more about if people will be able to get obscenely rich over being the original creator of some piece of art, to which the answer is it would indeed be less likely.
No, the question is if ordinary people could make a living off their novels without copyright. It's very hard today, but not impossible. Without copyright it wouldn't be.
"copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly"
"The owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to do and authorize others to do the following: To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;To prepare derivative works based upon the work;"
"Commonly, this involves someone creating or distributing"
https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/
"U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights: Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. Prepare derivative works based upon the work."
https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/students/intellectu...
"Copyright infringement occurs when a work is reproduced, distributed, displayed, performed or altered without the creator’s permission."
There are endless legitimate sources for this. Copyright protects many things, not just distribution. It very clearly disallows the creation and production of copyrighted works.
I feel like you're shoving all information under the same label. The most profitable corporations are trading in information that isn't subject to copyright, and it's facts - how you drive, what you eat, where you live. It's newly generated ideas. Maybe it is in how the data is sorted, but they aren't copyrighting that either.
If we're going to overthrow artificial entrenchments of capitalism, I feel like there's better places to start than a lot of copyright. Does it need changes? Absolutely, there's certainly exploitation, but I still don't see "get rid of copyright entirely" as being a good approach. Weirdly, it's one of the places that people are arguing for that. Sometimes the criminal justice system convicts the wrong person, and there should be reform. It's also often criticized as a measure of control for capitalistic oligarchs. Should step one be getting rid of the legal system entirely?
Moana and Moana 2 are both animated movies that have already been made. They're not just figures of one's imagination.
> If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright
It might be, or it might not. Copyright protects the creation of derivative works (17 USC 101, 17 USC 103, 17 USC 106), but it's the copyright holder's burden to persuade the court that the allegedly infringing work with the character Moana in it is derivative of their protected work.
Ask yourself the question: what is the value of Moana to you in this hypothetical? What if you used a different name for the character and the character had a different backstory and personality?
> I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books
You might think differently if you had sunk thousands of hours into creating a new novel and creative work was your primary form of income.
> But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone.
It seems unlikely that Disney is would go after you for that. Kids do it all the time.
It’s very unlikely that she would (or even could) have devoted herself to writing fiction in her free time as a passion project without hope of monetary reward and without any way to live from her writing for the ten years it took to finish the Potter series.
And even if she had somehow managed, you’d never hear about it, because without publishers to act as gatekeepers it’d have been lost in the mountains of fanfic and whatever other slop amateur writers upload to the internet.
The second one is the "just solve capitalism and we can abolish copyright entirely" argument which is... a total non-starter. Yes, in an idealized utopia, we don't need capitalism or copyright and people can do things just because they want to and society provides for the artist just because humans all value art just that much. It's a fun utopic ideal, but there's many steps between the current state of the world and "you can abolish the idea of copyright", and we aren't even close to that state yet.
Steam is the classic example of how this is effective. You compete with pirates by offering what they can't: a reliable, convenient service. DRM becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit in this situation.
Allowing pirates to offer reliable convenient pirate websites that are "so easy a normie can do it" would be a disaster for all the creative industries. You would need to radically change the rest of society to prevent a total collapse of people making money off art.
> its popularity is indicative of its quality, even if it doesn't match the standards of a literature PhD for "good writing"
This is a false dichotomy. Literature PhDs are not the only people out there who enjoy high-quality literature more than light entertainment, and anyway, you seem to be admitting that there's a type of fiction that doesn't exist unpaid, so isn't this just proving my point correct?
All that said, even if I accept for the sake of argument that the existence of popular free genre fiction would be enough to prove your point (because, in fairness to you, we were originally talking about Harry Potter, which is as genre as it gets)... I went looking, and there are at most a few sporadic examples. A few minutes of research suggest that some books by Cory Doctorow are among the most popular ones. Also, The Martian by Andy Weir used to be freely available, but isn't anymore as far as I can find.
Sorry, but Cory Doctorow and (formerly) Andy Weir represent a pretty small body of work compared to the entire canon of paid novels, so I'm going to have to call BS on your claim unless you provide some examples of your own.