Title.
Nah. I’d prefer a hard and fast 50 year limit.
Or even as a compromise, between 50 years and the current deadline standard, have it released to the creative commons non commercial.
Would have made all of Disney and Universal’s IP buy-ups over the last decade+ a lot more interesting.
Bigtech would hire hitmen to go after PhD students
It should return to the original design: 14 years from creation, and then 14 more years if requested and paid for.
It should be held by government and every company that makes money out of copyrighted material should pay it in taxes and authors should get money from government as long as they live. It can be steam % so 70% author 30% government. When author dies government gets 50% children gets 50% after that grand children 30% and then back to 0%.
This way each country would benefit from their brightest minds now it’s just foreign corporations benefit from everything.
Honestly we need to make inheritance an obsolete custom. Keep personal items, but wealth should not be transferred
I don’t know what is your understanding of wealth but money is not wealth and never should be treated as one. Wealth are material things. Profit sharing is not wealth transfer it’s just paycheck.
Wealth are audio records, movie records, books. Those are now inherited and monetized by corporations. What is benefit for you by living in country that had many famous musicians ? If you live in country that have oil you benefit from it.
Hmm. Interesting idea.
It’s not idea, it’s how art worked since ancient times. Artists were always sponsored by kings and noble people and this art is now in museums, somehow along the way we put art in hands of corporations, and money in hands of idiots and leave countries with nothing. We have countries with ministry of culture that posses no culture. We pay taxes and get nothing back.
We pay taxes and get nothing back.
Tbf, this has been the rule, not the exception, for most of recorded history.
Limit copyright to 5 years.
Abolish patents entirely.
Greed and selfishness are unacceptable foundations for any society.
Why the difference? Why should an artist who creates a popular character get 5 years of monopoly to profit off of their creativity, while an inventor who creates a better mousetrap not reap these benefits?
Rich bastards would still fuck it up.
The guy who invented insulin made it free for all rather then patenting it because it’s literally a life saving medication.
How’s that going in the US?
Those insulin are still available at $25 a vial, no prescription, no insursnce. But those are not the newer fast-acting ones and (I’m not an expert on this) are supposedly less effective than the more modern insulin.
Well, we need to figure out how to kill companies first. They own the copyright in the situations you would care about.
So, it kind of already works that way. If the company dies, no one is gonna come after you. Unless it was sold of to another company, that is.
It is always sold to another company. If a company is “destroyed” - eg, they must declare bankruptcy - then their assets will be sold off to pay back their debts. IP counts as an asset, so it would be sold to another company. It would not simply enter the public domain.
Meanwhile, you probably don’t want to kill all companies. Your friendly neighborhood taco truck is, after all, a company.
That’s how it used to be. It only became a problem when it stopped being an individual who owned rhe copyright and instead was owned by a corporation.
Now corporations are treated as people, so this change would only make it worse for the little guys.
Could be incentive to murder content creators.
You should separate the art from the artist.
I cannot do it when the artist is using the money to hurt people.
Just give me a moment
Breaking news, popular book series enter public domain as the author was Luigied last night.
Separate the art from the artist with extreme prejudice
Should be X years after publication, lifespan should not matter.
A person at age 200 (I mean in the future when they find anti-aging tech) should not be able to gatekeep the stuff they wrote when they were 25.
A person publishing a book at age 30 then dies next day in a car accident should not lose the right to pass on profits made from the book to his/her children.
Copyright should be fixed-length, fuck lifelong copyright, fuck “corporate personhood”.
They shouldn’t need to inherit anything wealth from their parents. We are playing wackamole instead of just building a better system than the current obviously flawed models that we all… Inherited. Ironic
Also this length should be at most 25 years and 10-15 years is better. These 75+ year copyrights are total BS.
10-15 sounds pretty short tbh. It can take years to write a book, and then 10 years later a company can just make a movie out of it and doesn’t have to pay you shit for it?
Interesting point. I don’t really know what would be fair.
On the one hand you are right, if someone puts in a lot of time and effort to create a book. And it becomes a hit and gets a movie deal, I do believe they should be rewarded for that.
On the other hand, out of the tens of thousands of books written each year how many get turned into a movie? 1 or 2 maybe on average? And how much of the book is in the movie? I’ve both read Mickey7 and seen Mickey17. And while they both have some things in common, they are basically completely different stories. Should we really compromise the rules for everyone because of this very rare exception?
And I also feel like movies are caught in a slump the past years, with very few original stories being made. All remakes, reboots and super hero crap. If more stories were available for free use, how much would that influence new story creation? Very hard to say really.
As with all art, nothing is made in a vacuum. Everything builds on each other, everything is influenced by other things. I can’t help but thing about what the community did with 3D printing once the patents expired. Having stuff available to use can only be a good thing right?
But I don’t really know, you make a very good point. In a world where all kinds of art gets devalued all the time, I feel like we should celebrate artists and the art they make. I like to fuck around with creating my own art in my free time and have made stuff for friend and family. Even sold series of hundreds of units in the past. But it’s not my day job and I consider myself an absolute amateur. Maybe if UBI was a thing, it would be the thing I put most of my time into.
I hate our world revolves around money and capitalism. It leads to difficult situations like this one, where copyright holds us back and mostly benefits large mega corps. But on the other hand, we must support artists for everything they do.
Bad. Copyright needs to be reformed, but this would be more likely to put money into the hands of rich people and corporations.
Imagine that I’ve just released a book series that’s more popular than Harry Potter and LOTR combined, and I get hit by a bus. What’s then stopping Disney or Warner Brothers etc from producing a set of movies with all the associated merch, and making a shit load of money, with not a penny going to my family? Not even giving them the opportunity to make enough to live on, never mind getting rich?
In that situation, depending on the contract, the publisher could even pulp the existing books and release identical copies without paying me or my family.
Plot: a rival publisher hires a killer to murder a successful author over the copyright.
I was just thinking about that. If the copyright is tied to the author being alive, that’s essentially putting a huge target on your back. People have mysteriously died for much less than that.
I’m all in favor of shortening copyright length, but it shouldn’t be tied to a creator’s lifespan. It’s too variable, and it doesn’t make sense for anything that more than one person worked on.
I think a reasonable compromise would be 20 years default, after which point you could apply for a 5 year extension twice. Extensions will only be granted if the work is still being made accessible, either new physical copies are being printed or digital distribution is available.
But I would also include a clause that if a work is no longer accessible, such as being pulled from streaming services, an online game being shut down, software not updated to be compatible with modern platforms, etc, copyright is considered to be in a weaker state where end users are permitted to pirate it for noncommercial purposes.
I would shorten the initial term to 15 years instead but keep everything else the same, if the author can’t be bothered to even file for an extension then they probably aren’t earning money from the thing anyway. See below for why 15.
That’s fine, the exact number isn’t really important. I kind of went for an intentional highball to pitch this as a closer compromise to how long copyright currently lasts.
Bad idea unless it gets forced under public domain with no derivative patents possible
Define “death”.
For a book? There is very much an argument that the listed author would make sense. But… good authors tend to have ten or twenty solid pages of thanking their editors and beta readers and researchers and partners and so forth for very good reason. And while they tend to not get royalties (outside of the partner), those associated with the publisher sort of do in the sense of getting a continued paycheck in part because of their demonstrated “value”.
But let’s bump that up to a movie. Is the screenwriter the creator? What about a case where there were multiple “script doctors” brought in to punch up a premise? The director? The lead actor? The ridiculously good performance by the supporting actress that held every scene together? The people in the editing bay who turned “I want this scene to pop more” into actionable edits? The VFX team who did the entirety of every action sequence and half the dialogue because the costumes weren’t finalized until a week before it hit theatres?
And so forth. The time where works tended to have a singular creator was… closer to millennia ago than not. Even a lot of the “Willy Shakespeare was a fraud” is rooted in a misunderstanding of what editing and collaboration is.
I don’t know what a good model is. I like the concept of a fixed period with the idea that if you are continuing to use an IP then people will pay for the new stuff. Then I look at all the cash-in horror slop because Winnie the Pooh became public domain and… does that help ANYBODY?
My mind keeps coming back to the end of Sebastien de Castell’s Spellslinger series. He left a LOT of loose ends (in part because of the themes of the story he was telling which would be spoilers to elaborate on) but did a quick epilogue sequence of two characters reuniting. And then he wrote an afterward where he talked about how (paraphrasing) that is just one possible ending and that it doesn’t actually matter what he wrote because, after the years we all spent reading about Kellen and Reichis and Ferius and Nephenia and Shalla… they aren’t just his characters. They are OUR characters too. And what he can see as a potential future isn’t necessarily what we see. I forget if he explicitly said writing fanfiction was a good idea but… that is kind of the reality of it.
And in that sense? I increasingly come down on: Let the companies and creators keep their IPs. Only they get to profit. But also heavily strengthen fair use so long as there is no direct profit (we do need to understand the idea of ad revenue for a youtube channel or a website or something). Fill up AO3 with ALL the good slop but keep it out of theatres unless they are gonna file the mormon off and Fifty Shades of Grey it. Beyond that? Whatever.
And just for those wondering what those themes were:
Spellslinger series spoilers
A huge part of the series, and de Castell’s writing in general, is the idea that the viewpoint character isn’t the main character. Yeah, Kellen Argos is a really cool con-man with limited casting capability who does heroic stuff. But there is little he can do against the horrors of the world other than to inspire, and force the hand of, those who can. And, in turn, he is inspired by those he loves. Kellen isn’t Frodo or Aragorn. He is Eowyn and Faramir.
